Smartworks Trial 4.9

Smartworks Trial 4.9 is a 30-day trial edition with the features given by Enterprise version, which is a group of applications used by people in a workgroup to plan, share, track and manage information flow. SmartWorks has been specifically designed for Small and Medium scale Enterprises to improve their business productivity. Smartworks-PE includes the Project Planner, SmartTracker and Meeting Manager.

SmartWorks Project Planner is an enterprise project management solution, which helps to plan, manage and track a project. It provides the flexibility to split a project into well-defined tasks in a spreadsheet like interface. This software allows a project manager to define calendar, create dependencies between tasks, mark milestones, assign resources, set priorities, maintain risk database, manage cost, view Gantt charts, resource distribution across projects and resource usage graphs, project graphs and more. 

SmartTracker is a user-friendly, general-purpose tool with customization features for tracking and monitoring the workflow. The item “Change” is the only constant thing. Smart tracker helps you and your organization to manage changes effectively.

SmartWorks Meeting Manager takes care of booking the Meeting Resources, Meeting Room, Setting up an agenda for a Meeting, Action points for attendees, Post action points for a meeting and tracking of post action points, Reminders for meetings, Change status of meetings after its completion and thereby finding out the effectiveness of a meeting, collection of Meeting minutes.

Major Features:

1. Project Planner's Features:
   • Easy project creation and capture project initiation phase information with project initialization wizard
   • Cost graph for effective project cost management
   • Effective Risk Management by identifying project specific risks and with Global Risk Database
   • Inbuilt risk management with mitigation and contingency plans and risk related graphs
   • Analyze effectiveness of risk management with Occurred risks Vs Identified risks; Planned Vs Unplanned Occurred risks etc. Get to know the effectiveness of contingency and mitigation plans
   • Analyze Critical tasks and workflow of the project with Gantt and Network diagrams
   • Gantt chart can be saved as an image and in HTML format
   • Project start date can be edited to shift the entire project
   • Resource dependent calendar, resource distribution resource allocation, resource availability views
   • Earned Value Management view and graphs
   • Hide and unhide project
   • New looks to PP - skins
   • Get the status of the project anytime since project participants can take ownership of their tasks by logging in to the plan
   • PERT calculations and PERT analysis for Optimistic, Realistic and Pessimistic project end dates with graphs
   • Project end date projection depending on the current status of the project
   • E-mail notifications to Manager and leader and concerned project participants about important activities of the project
   • Project graphs and reports for easy analyzing of project progress
   • Support for task notes and attachments.Drag and drop attachments. Export task notes
   • Project templates for future reuse in case of similar work
   • Compatibility with XLS, MPP, XML
   • Ability to share selected project data by importing them to PPR, XLS, XML and HTML formats
   • Maintain data security by user hierarchy and login features
   • WBS by an easy editable and printable spreadsheet like interface to divide the whole project into sub-tasks to define what the project is
   • Collect statistics of a project using Project Graphs
   • Capability to read MS-Project MPP file format
   • Printable Gantt chart to analyze the progress with respect to time, resources or status
   • Network Support provides the ability to log on to a project from any machine in a networked environment
   • Project tracking made easy since project participants take ownership of their tasks
   • Support for task properties like summary , priority , milestones, duration, status etc
   • Summary view to view overall status of the project
2. SmartTracker's Features:
   • A Simple and easy to use user interface and easy customization features to tailor an organization's needs
   • The customization can be done for each of the projects as per project requirements and to suit the needs of the Managers of different Projects.
   • E-mail notifications for important activities for concerned project participants
   • Built-in security with login and user hierarchical status
   • Query support and report generation features for simplifying analysis and decision making capabilities through reports
   • Ability to create global projects where all users in an enterprise can report and track problems
   • Spell checker for report's contents and description
   • Reminder and warnings to users who slip their schedule
   • Change report status based on verification status
   • Import and export features from and to XLS and XML format
   • Correctness of the process can be verified by dividing the process in to
   • number of verification states
   • Activity planning to close reports in timely manner
   • Ability to store complete history of each traceable entity
   • Automatic mails sent to one who reports the problem, helps to know
   • the progress towards the problem fix
   • Additional security feature for projects
   • A process can be divided in to number of process states
   • Capability to generate reports in both text and HTML formats
   • Process of responding to requests is made faster by auto assign solver verifier feature
   • Warning and reminder mails can be sent if the report is not closed in
   • time
   • A built-in Project Wizard to create projects for all SmartWorks plugins
   • Allows all the entities/processes to be tracked from start to finish
   • Users involved in a process can change the status, depending on the progress towards completion
   • File attachment feature to elaborate a report/problem
   • Strong and flexible query; Query strings with AND OR NOT operators is possible
   • Correctness of the process can be verified by dividing the process in to
   • number of verification states
   • Every process can be assigned a criticality, priority, type, functional area etc
   • The reports and it's response can be copied from one project to another
   • Meeting Manager's Features:
   • A calendar like interface to view meeting schedules
   • Organize meetings easily by blocking the rooms, resources and meeting participants
   • Get to know the availability of meeting participants, rooms and resources at the time of meeting
   • Get the confirmation for attending the meeting from all meeting participants
   • Feature to inform the non-attendees of a meeting
   • Sort the meetings based on ID, date and subject
   • Summary of my meetings for the current month
   • Change the meeting status to Held, Not Held, Complete etc
   • A quick view of pending and completed action points
   • Email / instant note notification for any changes in scheduled meetings and timely meeting reminders
   • Sort the attendee list for easier selection
   • Post meeting action points can be set and tracked
   • Send mail to organisers, admin, resource incharge
   • An Organizer and a quality manager will be able to see the history of meetings based on a re-occurrence
   • The organizer can assign a to-do list for an attendee
   • A customizable TODO list that can display current schedules and action points
   • Calculation of effectiveness of the meeting once the meeting is closed
   • Set action points to all/each meeting participant
   • A printable calendar view that displays monthly schedules in an easy way
   • Dialog showing logged in user's meeting summary for that month
   • Meeting organizer can select attendees from list of personnel in an organization and notify all attendees about prospective meeting
   • Once a meeting is complete the Organizer will have the option to set a list of action points and change the status of a meeting
   • One can organize either a public meeting or a private meeting. A public meeting is the one where any user (who are in the personnel database) can elect to participate without any restriction. A private meeting as the name implies is specific to a group of people who are explicitly intimated to attend a meeting
   • A printable appointment view to briefly see the appointments of the selected day
   • The meetings can be exported to an MS Excel sheet

Enhancements:

1. Project Planner 4.9
   • New features in Project Planner 4.9
   • • Quarterly Resolution in Gantt Chart/Plan Gantt View.
       
     • • The 'Gantt Chart' of a project can now be viewed in quarterly resolution also. This enhanced view will specifically be helpful for projects which span for long durations. The gantt chart can also be printed and exported as an image(*.bmp or *.jpeg), in this resolution.
       • Also, the width of the 'Gantt Chart' can be customized for the different resolutions, i.e. daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly resolutions
     • Export to MPX
     • • The projects created using the Project Planner can be exported to MS Project Exchange format(.mpx), which can be viewed using MS Project and Primavera Project Planner.
     • Project Status Change
     • • There are various status present for a project, such as 'Canceled', 'Completed', 'Ongoing', 'Stalled' and 'Others', which the manager or an admin can set. There is an option to enter remarks while changing the status of a project.
       • When the user chooses the status as 'Completed', while there are some tasks which are not complete, then an option to complete the tasks will be displayed. Hence, all incomplete tasks can be forcefully completed in one shot.
     • The Timescale Units in Gantt Chart
     • • The project day number that can be displayed in the X-axis of a Gantt Chart has the option to be displayed with or without its respective time scale. This option is present in the ‘User Preferences’ of the Plan View and Plan Gantt View.
       • For example: The daily resolution of the Gantt Chart can be displayed, with its X-axis as D1, D2, D3……
   • Bugs fixed in Project Planner:
   • • The saving process has been enhanced to improve the performance, making it more robust and reliable
     • The validations performed while importing the projects from MPP, PPR, XML files have been improved.
       
     • The check boxes in the 'Classic Skin' of Project Planner looked like 'cross marks'. Some of the users complained it was misleading. This has been replaced with a 'tick mark' image.
       
     • The error while importing the MPP file, where some of the resources were not imported, is fixed.
       
     • The status of the summary task was calculated as 'New Task' when all its sub-tasks had its duration as zero days or zero hours. This used to happen only when the option 'based on the duration and completion of the sub tasks' is set in 'Project Privileges'.This is fixed.
       
     • The start and end dates entered in the 'Page Setup' dialog of the 'Gantt Chart' view was not taken into consideration while printing it out. The tasks between the start date and end date as entered in the 'Page Setup' dialog will only be printed out now.
     • There exists an option 'Set Templates' for the 'admin' to add, edit and delete document templates of a project. The delete template option was not working as desired. This is now fixed.
2. Meeting Manager 4.9
   • New features in Meeting Manager 4.9
   • • Export Meetings to MS Excel:
     • The meetings can now be exported to an excel sheet. Various options have been provided while exporting the meetings to excel, such as
     • • A range of dates can be entered, between which the meetings have to be exported.
       • The user can specify the fields which needs to be exported. The user has the option to select/unselect the following fields while exporting:
       • • Meeting ID
         • Meeting subject
         • Meeting agenda
         • Meeting status
         • Meeting time and duration
         • Organizer, attendees and non attendees details
         • Meeting room and resources
         • Action points for attendees
       • The user can also sort the meetings(both ascending and descending) by ID, date of the meeting and the subject of the meeting, while exporting to excel.
   • Bugs fixed in Meeting Manager:
   • • Reminders were set for the 'admin', whenever the meeting was organized by the 'admin'. The 'admin' cannot be an attendee for a meeting and hence the reminders are not applicable to the 'admin'. This is now corrected.
       
     • The error message "The calendar can not be modified. Please check if you have the necessary permissions to modify the calendar" which was displayed while modifying the calendar of a particular user, is corrected.
     • Sorting the users, whilst organizing a meeting caused the last user in the list to be selected. This is corrected.
       
     • The 'Associated SmartWorks Project' that was set while organizing a meeting, was not displayed while modifying that meeting. This is corrected now
3. Smart Tracker 4.9
   • New features in Smart Tracker 4.9
   • • Copy Report/Response: The users can copy a report and its response, of a particular project in the SmartTracker to another project in the SmartTracker.
     • This option is provided for all users, irrespective of their status.
   • Bugs fixed in Smart Tracker :
   • • The Root Cause Analysis(RCA) of a report/defect which can be entered while modifying the status of a report was not assigned correctly, when there were more than 10 RCA values. This is corrected now.
       

Requirements:

• IBM PC pentium
• 64 MB RAM
• 500MB free disk space