In this series of blog posts we would like to give you some working examples of how to leverage SharedStatus to help you in real world environments. This post will focus on using SharedStatus to help build a new web site.

The first step is to create a project to hold your work. From the main SharedStatus Dashboard click Create a project, then enter the name for the new web site (Spring 2011 Website Refresh for example) and a description.

We're going to include how we want people to use the labels to help keep track of things so for now leave the description blank; we'll return to it after the next few steps.

Labeling Items In Your Project
Next we will add our labels. The labels are important because they will help you organize your project and better understand what needs to be done. The power of labels are that more than one can be applied to an item and they can easily be added or removed as you progress through your project.

• Requirements: this label will be used for messages and tasks that contain actual requirements for the web site, usually from the stakeholders.
• Feedback Needed: this label will be applied to items as people on the design team create content they want others on the team to provide feedback on. After enough feedback has been received (usually on a message that may include a screen shot or page content, though sometimes a task) the author of that item can remove the Feedback Needed label.
• Final: this label is applied to a message, task or file that contains...

Labels are a powerful way to organize your SharedStatus projects. The key advantage over having a single category is that you can apply as many labels as you like to any message, task or file in a project. Very often things arent easily classified with a single attribute; labels let you think about your project assets in a different way.

A label can represent a variety of different attributes. To update yours just go to the Settings areas of any of your projects. Below are a few examples we at SharedStatus use to help manage our internal projects:

Critical: We apply the critical label to any task (or message) that requires immediate attention. At any point in time we can see whats critical on a project by limiting our view to items that have the critical label applied.

Need Feedback: This is actually a transitory label. With the large quantity of messages and tasks that we place in our more active projects, sometimes we want a way to call out things that we want feedback on from other team members. Once the creator of the task or message has received enough feedback they remove that label.

Reference: There are many times when we need a place to record important instructions for something. It may be as simple as a process for uploading files to a specific web server or details on how to renew some certificate. By applying the reference label we call out to any project members that this is something that they may not need to read right away but could serve as reference material...

We just released some new user interface updates to SharedStatus. Some of these are just subtle tweaks to make the pages cleaner, while others are designed to add a little sex-appeal. At least that's how Josiah describes them!

The navigation bar along the left side now has small icons next to each entry:

In addition you'll see changed in the way messages are presented:

Not the comments for a message are not auto-expanded in the message area, making it easier to find the discussion right from the top level.

Another change is with the main Dashboard:

The tabs are now much easier to see and navigate with. Take a moment to browse around and let us know what you think!