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March 09 2012
Phasing Out the 30Boxes Plugin (June 30, 2012)
30Boxes was one of the first plugins we added to PBworks back when the service was still called PBwiki. This simple calendaring application let our users add a shared calendar to any workspace, and to have that calendar show up on multiple pages. And while 30Boxes has never been used by most of our users, it has a loyal following.
Unfortunately, 30Boxes has become an “orphan” product. Its creators have moved on to other projects, and last week, the entire service suffered a 1-day outage. While service has since been restored, it seems clear that without future investment of resources, it is likely 30Boxes will become less viable.
While we could simply keep 30Boxes as a plugin and simply offer it on an “as is” basis, we don’t feel that this is good for our user experience. Therefore, we have decided to phase out the 30Boxes plugin.
The first step, which we have already undertaken, is to disable new insertions of the 30Boxes plugin. We cannot in good conscience allow people to add a service we fear will not be reliable in the future.
The next step, which will take place on June 30, will be the disabling of the 30Boxes plugin. After that, existing insertions will stop working as well.
We’ve chosen a date more than 90 days in the future to give our users plenty of time to seek alternatives. This may involve using our HTML/JavaScript plugin to insert the calendaring service of their choice, or using other features within PBworks as an alternative.
For Business users, here is the relevant HTML/JavaScript documentation. And here is the equivalent HTML/JavaScript documentation for our Personal and Education users.
March 07 2012
New and Improved Tagging
After we redesigned the PBworks business products, we realized that tagging didn’t really fit well with the other page or file actions (rename, move, control access). All of the other actions were links that led to the appropriate dialogue box; in contrast, the tagging interface displayed a list of tabs, and allowed you to edit them. Both these differences (tags are displayed as page or file properties, tags are editable on the page itself) made tagging an inconsistent part of the user interface.
Therefore, we’ve improved the tagging interface by making it both more consistent and easier to use. Tags now appear between the content and the comments:
This placement puts the tags next to their closest relatives, the comments. We’ve also improved the tagging interface. Now, rather than relying on commas to delineate your tags, you can add them (and remove them) one by one.
For more details on how to work with the new tagging interface, visit our user manual.
January 18 2012
Introducing Improved File Preview (and better Sharing)
One of the key aspects of PBworks is the ability to work with files. We’ve made files collaborative–you can upload them, set per-file access controls, share them, track their revision history, comment on them, tag them, and link to them.
Some types of files, like web-viewable images like GIFs, JPEGs, and PNGs, we display as part of PBworks, and provide thumbnail images you can mouse over while you’re browsing your folders. We also display the first page of PDFs, for example.
Yet for many types of files, like Microsoft Office documents, you’ve had to download files simply to look at them, even if you didn’t want to make any changes. This is a problem, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes you don’t want to download a massive 50MB file simply so you can take a look inside and identify it. Other times, you may not have the required software to view a file of a particular document type–Photoshop files (PSDs) are a great example. But the most important problem is simply the inconvenience. Our statistics show that viewing is about 10 times as popular as editing for PBworks users; that means 90% of the time, when someone downloads a file, they’re simply trying to take a look.
That’s why we just introduced our new File Preview feature.
The new File Preview lets you to view nearly all the most common types of files, within PBworks, and without downloading. This includes Microsoft Office documents, like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as compatible file formats like CSV, WPD, and RTF, and the ever-popular PDF. File Preview also works for common image formats like Photoshop (PSD), Illustrator (AI), PostScript (EPS), BMP, and TIFF.
In cases where the document contains multiple pages, you can page back and forth without ever leaving PBworks.
There are some limitations on this first version of File Preview. File Preview will not work for iWork documents like Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, nor will it work for page layout formats like InDesign or Quark. And because the File Preview page relies on Flash, iOS users (e.g. iPhone, iPad, iPod) will not be able to page back and forth; if you want to see more than the first page of a multi-page document, you will need to download it.
File Preview is available to all users of our business products (Business Edition, Legal Hub, Agency Hub, and New Business Hub).
P.S. We also some major improvements to our “Share” functionality. While “Share” was very useful for sharing wiki pages, files, folders, and tasks with existing users, it was difficult to share content with anyone who wasn’t already a PBworks user. You would have to cancel the “Share,” add the users you wanted to share with, and only then go back and share. This latest revision allows Workspace and Network Administrators (who have the power to add users) to add new users as part of the sharing dialogue. This makes sharing with outsiders easier (while maintaining the current policy of only allowing administrators to add new users).
P.P.S. If you haven’t done so already, try out our new Personal Workspace functionality. And because you’re always the administrator of your own Personal Workspace, you can easily share content on that workspace with others using the new and improved “Share” feature.
January 12 2012
Introducing Personal Workspaces
Yesterday, PBworks celebrated the new year by introducing our first major feature of 2012: Personal Workspaces.
A number of our customers told us that they wanted to use PBworks as a place where their employees could store their stuff–files, documents, brainstorms, etc. One customer even went so far as to dedicate a member of their team to creating a “personal dropbox” for every one of their employees.
To meet this need, we’re introducing Personal Workspaces.
Every business user now has their own Personal Workspace. While each Personal Workspace includes all the key features of a regular workspace, like wiki pages, folders, and files, they also include special adaptations for their specific purpose.
1) Personal Workspaces are accessible from any screen.
Just go to the Account drop-down menu, and your Personal Workspace will be the first link shown.
2) Personal Workspaces are personal.
While you can access your Personal Workspace from any screen, no one else will even see it. Network Administrators can join a Personal Workspace, but doing so will alert the owner of the Personal Workspace to the intrusion.
3) You can move items from your Personal Workspace to other workspaces.
Thanks to Move Between Workspaces, you can move a page or file from your Personal Workspace to another workspace. This lets you use your Personal Workspace for rough drafts or private work, then move the finished product to a more public location.
To learn more about Personal Workspaces, visit our User Manual.
December 28 2011
Introducing Multi-value User Profile Fields
Thought we were done for the holidays? Think again. We’re still working away here at PBworks HQ. Today’s new feature is the addition of multi-value user profile fields.
Our user profiles are an important part of PBworks; Network Administrators can add any fields necessary to allow the members of their organization to share their skills and find one another. One drawback, however, has been that each profile field could only accept a single value. If you created an “Office” profile field, each person had to choose whether they belonged to New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, even if they split time between more than one.
Today, we’re enabling multi-value user profile fields. Now users can add multiple values to a single profile field, and this information will show up in search results.
Don’t worry; we’ll still support regular single-value profile fields; Network Administrators can choose whether or not to enable multi-value profile fields, and how they’re configured.
In the words of the classic advertising slogan, now you can select both “Tastes Great” and “Less Filling”!
Multi-value User Profile Fields are available on all business products, including Business Edition, Agency Hub, New Business Hub, and Legal Hub.
December 16 2011
Introducing Multi-file Zip Download
One of the convenient features that PBworks customers use a lot is the ability to upload multiple files at once. This is a great time-saver when uploading files like photos, images, or related documents.
Unfortunately, web browser security settings prevent you from downloading more than one file at a time. It’s not a PBworks restriction; it’s a web-wide restriction.
Fortunately, we’ve just released a feature that allows you to getaround this restriction and download multiple files, and even multiple folders.
The new Zip Download feature lets you compress multiple files into a single .zip file, which you can then download. You can include multiple files from a single folder, or even multiple folders and subfolders. When you extract the files from the .zip archive, all the folder and sub-folder relationships will be preserved.
While it was possible to download an entire workspace as a .zip file before, this was restricted to administrators, and seemed like overkill when you just want to download a subset of the workspace’s files. The new Zip Download feature is accessible to all users.
And even if you’re downloading a ton of files, we’ve made it easy. If you don’t want to wait for all the files to be processed for download, just click a link, and we’ll email you when the .zip file is ready for you.
Zip Download is now available at no extra cost to all our Business customers (including Agency Hub, New Business Hub, and Legal Hub).
For step-by-step instructions, visit our user manual.
December 13 2011
Introducing Network Folder Settings
Products, like living things, evolve in response to their environment. They build on what currently exists to add new functionality, or refine how things already work.
Take our latest feature, Network Folder Settings, for example.
PBworks began by allowing you to set up a single workspace for collaborating with your team.
We built on this by allowing you to bring together all your workspaces in a single network.
As the number of workspaces in networks proliferated, we allowed you to create network folders and subfolders to organize them.
Now we’re taking the next logical step by allowing you to edit your Network Folder Settings. For some time, you’ve been able to write descriptions and upload a logo for each workspace. Network Folders, on the other hand, were limited to a simple name.
Now, you can do the same with Network Folders.
If you’re using your network folders to organize the projects you’re executing for a key client, you can now upload that client’s logo and add a description.
If you choose not to many any changes, PBworks will continue to work for you just as it did before.
December 06 2011
Introducing Move Between Workspaces
One of the great strengths of PBworks is that it’s easy to get started. Just create a wiki page, upload a file, or email a workspace, and you’re off and running. This openness helps encourage participation, and lets your team build on each others’ efforts.
But this openness has its downsides. It’s hard to determine an exact structure in advance, because in many cases, you’re on uncharted ground. This is the first time that much of this information has been organized anywhere other than on private hard drives or email inboxes. It’s also the case that as your team grows, you may find the need to reorganize.
While PBworks made it easy to move wiki pages, files, and even entire folders around within individual workspaces, moving content between workspaces was a pain. You had to manually cut-and-paste wiki pages, or download and re-upload files, and even then, this tedious manual process didn’t carry over key information like comments or revision history.
That’s why we’re delighted to announce that we’ve added “Move Between Workspaces.” Now you can move a wiki page, file, or folder, between workspaces in your PBworks network, and the moved item will retain all the relevant information, including comments, revision history, and tags. We’ll even remember which users had starred a particular item, and move that association as well!
The only things that aren’t moved are custom security settings (because the user rosters often differ between workspaces, it wouldn’t make any sense to carry these settings over) and changelist items (because if you edited a wiki page X before you moved it from Workspace Y to Workspace Z, that changelist item ought to appear on Workspace Y where it actually occurred).
If you’ve been holding off on reorganizing your network, now’s the perfect time to get started.
Move Between Workspaces is available on all network editions (Business Edition, Legal Edition, Agency Hub, and New Business Hub), immediately, and at no charge. For more details, visit our user manual.
November 04 2011
New: “Sticky Notifications”
Notifications are a great way to stay on top of your work. It’s great to find out when others have made changes to the content you care about. But that’s the rub–how can PBworks know what content you care about?
Originally, PBworks simply notified you about every change on every workspace you belonged to. But as our customers grew in size and activity levels, this became overwhelming.
Then, we shifted to our current digest-style notification emails. But these emails didn’t account for the things you considered really, really important. So we upgraded our starring system so that you could star both pages and files, and so that you received immediate notifications about changes to starred content.
But it’s tough to remember to star everything you find interesting. A good product gives you the ability to get what you want. A great product gives you what you want without your asking.
That’s the principle behind what we’ve called “sticky notifications.” What this means is that whenever you upload a file, edit a page, or comment on a page or file, we know that you consider it important, even if you didn’t remember to manually star it. We’re now tracking the items you touch, and automatically sending you notifications when other people make changes after you. This is similar to the way you get notifications when people update a Facebook thread you’ve commented on.
If for some reason you don’t like them, don’t worry. Each individual user gets to choose whether or not to receive them
For more details, visit our user manual.
September 15 2011
Coming Soon: Improved LiveBar
Ever since we launched our real-time collaboration features, our business products have featured the LiveBar in the lower-right corner of your screen. This nifty little tool let you chat with colleagues, trigger conference calls, and see the latest activity notifications, all without ever leaving your current screen.
The LiveBar has been so successful that we’ve decided to expand it.
Starting on Monday, the LiveBar will include three new features: Starred Items, Tasks, and Add an Item.
These new features will make PBworks even easier and more powerful.
Starred Items:
Starred items have always been a useful feature for marking what’s important to you, but they had the disadvantage of requiring you to either A) navigate to the workspace containing the starred item, or B) access the starred items list from your Dashboard. Either way, it took many extra clicks to get to the item you needed.
Enter Starred Items on the LiveBar. From any screen, you can now click on the yellow star in the LiveBar to see a list of your most recent starred items, and it takes just one more click to view a complete list on your Dashboard.
Tasks:
Tasks are also an integral part of the product. But until now, if you wanted to see your full task list (across all your workspaces), you needed to return to the Dashboard view. With the new LiveBar, all you have to do is click on the Tasks symbol (the checkbox) and you’ll see a list of your upcoming tasks. As with Starred Items, you can click through to the Dashboard for a complete list.
Add an Item:
Finally, one of the most important things about collaboration is being able to add information quickly. The new Add Items feature lets you add new wiki pages or upload files from any screen. Just click the add symbol and select your desired action. If you’re on a particular workspace, we’ll default to uploading to that workspace, but we’ll give you the chance to select any workspace and any folder as the location of the new page or uploaded file.
The improved LiveBar will be rolling out on the night of Monday, September 19. Check it out, and leave comments on this post with your reactions!
May 24 2011
Now Available: PBworks (the next generation)
The following is a message from our founder, David Weekly, regarding the launch of PBworks’ next generation business product.
After having grown the product for a number of years beyond its workspace roots (and renaming the company two years ago), towards the end of last year we took stock of what we had accomplished and decided we needed to take what we had grown into organically and make it one cohesive whole.
I hired our Creative Director Dann Ledwick – who had been CEO of a technology and design company – to work with me to offer a modern and consistent look across the product. We went back and forth with dozens of ideas and mockups, trying to find an overall layout that would clearly showcase users’ content, show them where they were in a potentially vast sea of information, and give them clear visual affordances for browsing and modifying people, workspaces, files, and pages.
A lot of the problems of visual scale we’re trying to solve are pretty excitingly vast: making readily available millions of permissioned objects to corporate deployments potentially spanning hundreds of thousands of employees and keeping it all sane for the end user. We referenced operating system file navigators, the visual information hierarchies of modern websites like Facebook, the excellent work of Edward Tufte in minimizing cognitive distraction, and thought hard about the ways we could really make the user’s content shine and make the interface just get out of your way.
This work ends up being reflected in lots of small touches – like a little gear icon that shows up when you hover over a folder: if you click on the gear you get a menu that allows you to manipulate the folder, renaming it, deleting it, changing its permissions, etc.
We’ve tried to make the common actions really in-your-face easy (the file browsing interface now has a HUGE button that says ‘Upload’) and the more complex action clearly discoverable but not distracting. So when you need to do something more obscure, like modify a folder’s permissions, you know how to find it, but it’s not in front of you until you need it.
While we’ve left no pixel untouched in this visual refresh, what you’ll see in this first revision is just the beginning of a process of refinement to explore how people can work together joyfully and effectively. Stay tuned!
Sincerely,
David Weekly, Founder and Chief Product Officer
P.S. If you’d like to get a demonstration of the new PBworks, attend one of our webinars.
May 12 2011
Pages & Files: Now 50% More Efficient
We’ve just rolled out a major improvement to all our users, both paid and free.
One of the important elements of PBworks is the ability to organize wiki pages, files, and folders in our Pages & Files manager. This screen includes a lot of neat capabilities, like being able to drag and drop items between folders, and to upload files simply by dragging them from your desktop to the desired folder.
Today, we made it even better.
The new Pages & Files manager presents a cleaner, uncluttered interface AND provides more information on individual pages and files. The secret to this seeming paradox is our “More” button, which allows you to see detailed information for the page or file you specify:
Now, rather than seeing a bunch of repetitive links that appear for each item (e.g. Edit, Rename, Delete, Move), you get a cleaner view with the ability to quickly drill down for the details.
As a by-product of this streamlining, we’re able to fit even more pages and files onto a single screen. A typical user on a 1368 x 768 screen will be able to see 15 pages/files per screen, versus 10 files per screen on our previous interface. That’s a 50% improvement.
For more details on using the Pages & Files manager, visit our user manual.
March 09 2011
PBworks launches New Business Hub
Don Draper, meet PBworks.
This morning, we launched New Business Hub, a new product from PBworks that helps new business development professionals at ad agencies like the fictional Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce win more pitches.
Even the glamorous likes of Don Draper and Roger Sterling can benefit from PBworks collaboration, as New Business Hub makes it easy for them to respond to RFPs (requests for proposal), find appropriate examples of past advertisements, and coordinate the pitch process.
If you’re a Mad Man (or woman) and you’d like to learn more about this new product, visit the New Business Hub landing page and register for a demo.
For a quick look at New Business Hub, you can watch a 5 minute video walkthrough.
January 28 2011
View Tasks And Milestones By Month
Ever since we introduced Tasks and Milestones, one of the most popular requests has been a calendar view of those tasks and milestones.
Sure, we allowed you to view by date, and even to integrate tasks and milestones into your Outlook calendar, but there’s simply something appealing about being able to see tasks and milestones laid out in the traditional weekly view.
That’s why the latest release of our business products includes the ability to group tasks by month:
As with the other task and milestone views, you can filter based on to whom the tasks are assigned, and you can also choose to hide completed tasks.
The new monthly view is available immediately to all our business customers.
January 14 2011
Announcing Amazon S3 Export
Amazon S3 Export lets you export your PBworks content to your own Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) account. You can use S3 Export as an easy way to back up your PBworks network. You can even set up scheduled backups on a daily basis, and we’ll only export incremental changes.
PBworks already backs up all your data, both within our data center and via offsite backup, but if you like having your own separate backup, Amazon S3 Export is the easiest way to go.
Amazon S3 Export is free for all customers using Business Edition and above, but you will need to pay for your own S3 account. You can read up on the details in our user manual.
January 10 2011
Introducing Image Cropping
One popular feature in PBworks is the ability to embed images on wiki pages. But what happens if you you only want to show part of an image? This is pretty common, and most people don’t feel comfortable using tools like Photoshop to modify their images.
That’s why we’ve added the ability to “crop” images to PBworks. Once you’ve uploaded your image, you can use PBworks to trim away the portions of the image you consider unnecessary.
Here’s how it works:
Once you add an image to a wiki page in “Edit” mode, right click and select “Crop Image”
This should bring up a special cropping window where you can drag the cropping selection until you’ve highlighted the part of the image you want to save:
When you click “Crop and Save,” PBworks will crop the image and save the trimmed down image as a new version and return you to the standard Edit window:
You can always access the old version by visiting the File History for that file:
Image cropping is available to all PBworks users of all product editions, paid and free.
December 29 2010
Publish PBworks Pages As Printable PDFs
One of the most popular feature requests we’ve received over the years is the ability to convert a PBworks wiki page into a PDF.
One of the most common complaints we’ve received over the years is that the printable version of a PBworks wiki page doesn’t look that much like the on-screen version.
Today, we killed two birds with one stone by releasing the ability to convert any PBworks wiki page into a printable PDF. This replaces the old “Printable version” with a more attractive PDF, which you can either print or download and share.
The “PDF version” is available at the bottom of every page, and to every PBworks user, paid or free.
Thanks for your suggestions, and helping us make PBworks an even better service!
December 01 2010
New: Edit Summaries
PBworks has been around since 2005, and during that time one of questions that keeps coming up is “Why don’t you have wiki edit summaries like Wikipedia?”
Partly, it was a matter of friction. We wanted to keep the interface simple, and asking people to enter an edit summary each time they hit save would introduce a lot of friction.
Partly, it was a matter of use case. Most of the original wikis back when we were PBwiki were relatively small, and so edit summaries weren’t as crucial as for Wikipedia.
But as we’ve grown (as have our users), the second argument became less relevant. And as for the first, we realized that we could simply make the edit summaries optional, so that folks who didn’t like them didn’t even have to see the option.
That’s why today we rolled out edit summaries to all our users. Whenever you edit a wiki page, just click “Describe your changes” to enter your short (<2,000 characters) summary. Your description will appear (along with all the other edit revision information) in the page history for that page.
Don’t like the “Describe your changes” box taking up room on your screen? Just click “hide this” and the box will go away until you click the “Describe your changes link.
For more details, you can read our User Manual.
November 15 2010
Coming Soon: Improved File Collaboration For Everyone
Just last week, we rolled out major improvements to how you can work with files in PBworks to our business customers. We’ve gotten such a good reaction to these improvements that we’ve decided to make them available to everyone, including free users.
Starting with Release #520, everyone will be able to tag and comment on files, while premium users on Classroom and Campus Edition will be able to set file-level access permissions, just as they’ve been able to do with wiki pages and folders.
You can read up on all the details here.
Network Folders and Improved File Collaboration
We’ve done a lot of work on our business products to make it easy to create workspaces. Whether you use one of our built-in workspace templates, a template from the Template Store, or your own custom templates, you can create a customized workspace in less than a minute.
The process is even faster with our Salesforce.com connector, which allows you to create a custom workspace, including data from Salesforce.com, without ever leaving that application.
All this hard work has generated the intended result–our business customers are creating hundreds of workspaces per network. And once you have hundreds of workspaces, you need a better way to organize them, which allows you to group related workspaces and reflect how you run your business.
Enter Network Folders. Much like the folders in each workspace, Network Folders let you create a hierarchy. Network Folders create a hierarchy of workspaces, which can reflect the internal organization of your company, your clients, or both:
For example, Anderson DDB Health & Lifestyle creates hundreds of workspaces per year, just to manage the projects of one major client. Network Folders let them reflect that client’s organization (35 business units, 5 geographies) within PBworks.
Learn more about working with Network Folders.
We’ve also made major improvements to the way we handle files and documents.
In PBworks, wiki pages provide a lot of functionality beyond simple viewing and editing. You can comment on a page, providing another way to collaborate outside the main page content. You can tag a page, making it easier to find when you search for it. You can even set custom security settings on a per-page basis.
Now we’ve brought that same level of collaboration to files and documents. While you can still simply focus on uploading, downloading, and sharing files, you can now comment, tag, or secure individual files, just like you can with individual wiki pages.
This can be especially helpful if you’re gathering feedback on a file, either internally or from a client. Now you can upload that new logo design, share it with your client, and get notified when that client provides his or her comments.
Learn more about working with files.
Both Network Folders and the improved file collaboration are available on our paid business products.
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