The purpose of this guide is to teach Emarsys clients how to use Mavenlink exclusively on projects managed by Emarsys.
If you want to know more about how to use Mavenlink outside of Emarsys projects, get in touch with their support team or visit Mavenlink's knowledge base.
What is Mavenlink
Mavenlink is a modern project management platform built to bring together people and projects. Mavenlink incorporates the following areas:
- Project management
- Resource management
- Business intelligence
- Team collaboration
Getting Started with Mavenlink
Accepting an Invitation
Before you can access Mavenlink, you need to be invited to join a project as a client. You will receive an email that looks like the following:
Click on the link to join the project. If you have never had a user account in Mavenlink before, you will be asked to enter your Mavenlink password.
We recommend you to choose a unique password and to store it in a safe place.
The Mavenlink Dashboard
The first page you see after logging in is the Dashboard. The dashboard has 6 widgets:
People
You can navigate user profiles from other people using Mavenlink from your organisation or common projects.
Activity Feed
Shows the latest activity from all the projects you participate to.
Time and Utilization Tracking
Shows how much time you have tracked during the present week and in the present day. You do not need to log time if you are participating to Emarsys projects as a client.
Projects
Shows the title, the progress and the lead person for your top 4 projects.
Your Tasks - Next 7 Days
You can check on your actions in short term period. You can also click on a task, see more details, and post updates.
The Activity Feed
Mavenlink works very much like a social network - you can post messages and tag people. All the public messages of a given project can be found on its Activity Feed.
Despite there being several ways to see the activity feed for your projects, we recommend you to navigate to the project you are actually collaborating on, and check that activity feed.
This is important because most of our projects contain a Pinned Post at the very beginning of the activities list, where the Emarsys project manager will list the status of the project and all the actions.
Public VS Private Posts
Posts can be Public or Private.
- Public posts can be seen by any user joining the project in which the message has been posted, at all times.
- Private posts can be seen only by the people they have been shared to.
We recommend using Public posts at all times, to make sure everyone will get an update if their email notifications are fully enabled.
Tagging Users in Your Messages
Tagging people in your messages is highly recommended. This makes the activity feed more readable and ensures that everyone is getting notifications regardless of their email notification settings.
Email Notification Settings
The email notification settings can be reached from the drop down menu that appears when you click on your name or profile icon from the top right section of the Mavenlink window.
Alternatively, you can just go to https://emarsys.mavenlink.com/settings/email while logged in, and the page will load up with your current settings.
Post Notification Emails
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Send email notifications about all posts (Recommended):
- Keep this on if you are a lead project manager.
-
Send email notifications about relevant posts only:
- With this you will receive messages only if the user tagged you by name, or using @all.
- Useful if you need to have only a minor involvement in the projects you are part of.
Post Notification Frequency
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Send email notifications about posts as they occur (Recommended):
- This will notify of all the activity in real time - however, the option above counts so you can achieve different combinations.
-
Send email notifications about relevant posts as they occur, and bundle other post activity into a daily digest:
- This works similarly to "Send email notifications about relevant posts only" but every post where you have not been tagged by name or using @all will get bundled in a email with other posts.
-
Send email notifications about posts where you are @mentioned as they occur, and bundle other post activity into a daily digest:
- This is an ulterior filter to the above options - You will only receive real-time email notifications if you have been tagged by name - Posts where the @all tag has been used and other posts will be bundled
- Bundle all post activity into a daily digest
Task Notification Emails
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Send all task notifications (Recommended):
- Keep this on if you are a lead project manager.
-
Send relevant task notifications on assignment, date, or status change:
- This will send a notification only if you have been assigned to the task.
- Do not send task notifications on assignment, date, or status change
-
Send new issue notifications (Recommended):
- This is a switch, not an option. It enables sending notifications when an Issue is created, rather than a milestone/task/deliverable.
Week Ahead Email
- Send week ahead email
- Do not send week ahead email
We recommend you to receive the "Week Ahead" email, since it is very useful and tells you which tasks are due.
Mavenlink Tasks
Overview
A task is a project item describing the following:
- What needs to be done
- When
- In what priority
- Who needs to do it
The image below shows the settings of creating a new task:
You can add a description to every task. In our example it is "Set up daily data sync".
The Activity section, where we create new posts, should be used to discuss with other project members how to achieve what we wrote in the description.
Mavenlink tasks are just like Jira tickets, they can have a hierarchy and you can nest as many as you want, reach deeper levels of detail within each layer, or just keep it very high level.
See below an explanation of the task-level fields:
-
Priority:
- The priority of the task.
-
Status:
- You can set the status of the task. If there are problems with the execution, you can mark it in red as "Needs Info".
-
Start/End date:
- Rather than changing these yourself, we recommend discussing delivery dates with your Emarsys project manager and let them handle dates.
-
Assignees:
- The general rule is that if you are assigned to a task, you are the one who should deliver it.
- If this is not the case, you can assign it to the person who should actually deliver the task.
-
Followers
- Followers are people who are not going to deliver the task, but want to track its status.
- You can add yourself to a story and see updates every time a detail has been changed.
In any case, we recommend discussing these parameters with your Emarsys project manager as most of our tasks have special functions or track specific things.
Tracking Your Tasks
There are two primary ways to trask your tasks:
- Use the project's own Task Tracker.
- Use the Tasks menu.
By clicking on TASKS, Your Tasks will open by default, but you can select other options by hovering your mouse over TASKS:
Your Tasks
The view Your Tasks cannot be customised, but gives you a good idea of what you should be working on as it sorts the upcoming tasks by default.
The Title column contains the project's title followed by the story title. Clicking either of those will navigate to the project or open a popup panel containing all the story information.
Other Views
If you would like to see a different set of columns, you can click on the VIEW / YOUR TASKS drop-down and select Your View instead:
Further Help
How to use Mavenlink
If you want to know more about how Mavenlink works you can navigate to their help portal and read articles or watch educational videos about their product.
Getting Help from Mavenlink
If you need immediate help with the software, the Mavenlink support team can help you.
Raising a support ticket or start a live chat
Log into Mavenlink and from the top right section, click on the Support drop-down menu. From this menu, select either Support Portal or Live Help.
If you are unable to log in, send an email to support@mavenlink.com
How to view your submitted tickets
On the Support Portal, at the top of the form there is the link "View Submitted Cases".
By clicking this you will see all the tickets you have submitted:
Troubleshooting
Issues with recovering your Mavenlink password
When using Mavenlink's password recovery form, you will receive an email containing a link, and by following this link you will be able to reset your password and create a new one.
If you do not receive any email, perform the following:
- Wait for 10-15 minutes to receive the email.
- Check your Spam folder.
- Use the password recovery for a second time and wait 10-15 minutes again.
- If none of these work, notify your Implementation Consultant Lead or Digital Project Manager Lead for assistance.
I cannot click on the link, or when I click I see that the website is not available
Sometimes, clicking on email links could lead to unsuccessful operations. This could be caused by an email client plugin, or a company deployed antivirus and firewall solution.
To solve this issue you can try these solutions first:
- Copy and paste the link directly into the internet browser window
- Copy the link but paste it into a different Internet browser - Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, etc.
If this solution does not work for you, get in touch with your IT administrator and notify your Implementation Consultant Lead or Digital Project Manager Lead for assistance.
Licensing issues
Sometimes you may get some errors due to a license or an expired Mavenlink trial. This could happen if you or your organization has used Mavenlink in the past.
To troubleshoot licensing issues, notify your Implementation Consultant Lead or Digital Project Manager Lead for assistance.
How to avoid automatic email responses from being sent to Mavenlink
Mavenlink allows you to receive email notifications for all the posts as they occur. This is very convenient because Mavenlink will create a unique email address for that post and will let you answer it without the need to login.
However, when someone sets up an automatic responder on their email account, this feature creates an annoying domino effect because each post notification will receive the automatic response, and if multiple project participants do the same, their automatic responses will trigger more automatic responses and just generate noise for everyone.
This can be easily avoided by disabling the post notifications. To do so:
- Before you set your automatic email responder, log into Mavenlink.
- Navigate to the Email Settings page.
- From this page, look for Post Notification Frequency and select Bundle all post activity into a daily digest.
- Click Update Settings.
From now on you will receive a daily digest instead of post notifications, and setting an automated responder will be safe as responses to daily digests go to no-reply type inboxes.
Remember to re-enable the email notifications when you come back from your holiday.