I was wondering if you’d consider giving Apollo a go too: http://www.apollohq.com

Apollo covers both project management and CRM. It has cases&deals (or “opportunities”), calendars, timers, and several tools to help your team coordinate.

Let us know!

Merc.

It doesn’t look like this has been implemented and 9 months later. I take it it’s not coming?

Thank you once again for your feedback.

First of all, thank you for exhaustive explanations. Several things I want to add:

1. I’ve checked FAQ and your tips from initial Wrike setup. Unfortunately it doesn’t work exactly like it was explained. A couple of times I had an email with label in brackets in the subject field and the task wasn’t added to the group. They was appended to the root.

2. Your explanation of pricing plans makes the thing clear. You should add them on the website.

3. With invitations I didn’t mean limiting access to data – it is done well although I haven’t mentioned that in the review. My point was that quite often on CC list you have people who aren’t directly involved in project, task etc. They’re there only to let them know about some things. It wouldn’t be unusual to have customer on CC just to let them know you scheduled some task to one of your people.

Thank you for your review of Wrike. We appreciate your positive evaluation of Wrike’s email-based project management concept. As you noted, we worked out a system of email notifications that helps you follow every detail of the project progress. We’re also pleased that you found Wrike a simple tool to use for projects, as we’re doing everything possible to make our subscribers’ work easy and comfortable. Thanks for pointing out the fact that the interface is clean and intuitive.

It’s a pity you didn’t check FAQ page of Wrike’s site, as there you would be able to find the exact rules how to label emailed tasks in the subject field. Actually you just need to put the group title in square brackets e.g. [group title], write the task title and put the due date in square brackets, like this [yyyy-dd-mm]. The email body will be copied in the task description. You will find more information here and here

As for updating tasks by using the “reply to all” button, that feature is coming next week, so we’ll be glad if you continue using your Wrike account to take advantage of intelligent reply processing for e-mails. We follow our users’ feedback and their requests about tasks dependence feaure. We’re currently working on this feature. It’s a high priority for us, so expect it to be delivered to http://www.wrike.com within a couple of months. There are some architectural challenges that we want to solve elegantly. Our system has an open sharing model with possible many-to-many relations. This makes it easy to use on the user interface side, but at the same time makes technical implementation of features like dependency a tricky part.

We would like to point out that Wrike helps you to realize a small team collaboration model with no need to pay for extra accounts. That is why we have free individual and power user plans. People can collaborate effectively with their team, almost at almost no cost. They create one paid account and a couple of free accounts. So the team leader/manager can share and assign an unlimited number of tasks with his team members.

The beauty of Wrike is in its simplicity. Invitations to the system help to make the process easier without additional steps. So you don’t have to go to a particular page every time to add new people. Our intention is to make users’ experiences with Wrike easier and more pleasant, so if you send an e-mail to John Smith and add wrike@wrike.com to recipients, John does not get access to the full project. He only gets an access to that particular e-mail and that particular task. There’s no need for you to send any embarrassing e-mails. People will not get access to your crucial information. They only have access to what you explicitly grant them the access to. We are not sure whether you already knew about this system behavior, so we wanted to explicitly outline this. Anyway, we plan to make our invitational e-mail much lighter, just like the one you get from LinkedIn nowadays. We are also working on a feature that will let people mark tasks complete with one click from their e-mail. That will help the most conservative stakeholders to stay away from the new tool and still be able manage projects.

We know that there is always room for improvement. That is why we are working hard to enhance our software and make our users’ lives easier. Thank you for recognizing Wrike’s development growth potential.

There’s a free trial on the site.