What's New for August, 2008
Our monthly feature release timeline...
We've redesigned the Team Room to be easier to use than ever!
See your whole team
Team members are now arranged in a tile pattern instead of a long list. With four tiles across on most screens, you can probably see your entire team without scrolling down Better presence indicator.
It's even easier than before to see who is online right now, and who has worked in the last 24 hours.
At long last, time zone conversion!
One of the top requests we've heard, especially from Buyers, is to show the local time zone of your team members. We heard you! So whether your teammates are across the country or across the globe, you'll always know what time it is wherever they are, all in the team room.
Filtering and sorting for bigger teams
For larger teams, it can be difficult to sort through all of your members, so we have added new sorting and filtering based on name, role, and when they have last worked, as well as a "quick search" option to find a specific team member quickly.
We hope you find these improvements useful. Please let us know your thoughts in this thread.
Yes, you can hide a team
Owners can now hide teams. Hiding a team makes it disappear from your team room and all pages with a team selector bar — no more scrolling through a list of inactive teams! A hidden team is not deleted from the system. We find hide to be more useful than delete because you can toggle the show/hide setting whenever you need to on the new My Teams page.
Please note that you cannot hide a team if it has an active assignment, or any team members (besides yourself). You may remove additional team members such as managers and ACs in your Roster.
User security is a top priority here at oDesk. In addition to entering a password all users must now also answer a security question to perform sensitive operations. We also added an option to receive vital notifications via SMS.
Why do I need a security question?
Users log in with their user ID and password to use most of our online and software features. Due to concerns about fraud and unauthorized access to financial information we've added an additional level of security to protect users' accounts. The security question helps prevent unauthorized access if a user's password is stolen.
Read more about the security question in the help pages.
How do I set my security question?
The next time you access your My oDesk page you will be prompted to create a security question.
How do I choose a security question?
The security question and its answer should be intuitive to you and easy to remember. Having said that, make sure to select a question to which the answer is difficult to guess.
What is a security (SMS) email notification?
Many cellular phones come equipped with SMS (text messaging) capabilities. If you choose this option we will immediately send a notifications to your cell phone of changes made to your account.
Why should I add a security (SMS) email address?
We strongly suggest that you use a security (SMS) email address that forwards to a cell phone. That way you can be notified immediately of changes to secure settings of your account, even if you're away from your computer. In the event of unauthorized account access, the sooner you know there's a problem, the better.
What if I don't normally receive email on my cell phone?
Your phone probably has the ability to receive SMS (text) messages sent to a special email address (e.g. 8881231234@yourprovider.net). Contact your carrier or check out this Wikipedia article to learn more.