Workamajig Tip: How To Use the Project Diary

Within Workamajig, the Project Diary is an important, but often misunderstood, functionality that provides you with the ability to quickly communicate brief, informal messages to other people, such as co-workers, clients, and vendors that have access to a given project. This tutorial will help you use the Project Diary more efficiently and correctly.

The Project Diary is your central place to capture communications for a project. This is useful to ensure that important data that needs to be associated with a project becomes part of the permanent record of a project. This correspondence tracking can be useful when you need to document client changes, particularly if you have to document changes in a budget, and relay communications to co-workers, clients, & vendors.

Project Diary notes are intended to be informal in nature, and should not be treated with the same formalities as email. If the content of your message needs to be formal, and requires a full To, CC, or Subject line, use should use email. If you do opt to use email, you can then use the method described in the next paragraph to get a copy of your email inserted into the Project Diary. This methodology helps keep your inbox tidy, and prevents the Diary from becoming cluttered and excessively long. It should also be noted that Diary notes are listed in chronological order, in other words, the newest notes are listed at the bottom.

Creating Notes From Email

You can use the Project Diary function to store email you send outside of Workamajig to the Project within Workamajig.  This is as simple as sending and email to or CC’ing the email address provided to you by your System Administrator that is setup to receive Diary notes. Within the body of the email you simply need to include the project number in double brackets “[[PROJECT Number]]“. You can also attach files that you would like appended to the Project Diary, however it is important to remember that these files are not stored in Digital Assets/Files and will not show up when searching for files.

You can also add Diary Notes directly from the Project Central screen. From Project Central you can enter a new note, browse all of the notes that you and others have posted, as well as reply to notes. When adding notes from Project Central you also have the option to email a copy of the notes to others who have access to the project.

Creating Notes From Project Central

To send a new note Click on the “New Note” button, enter the text of your note, choose whether or not this note should be allowed to be seen by Clients if they have access to the project, and select people that should receive a copy of your note in their email, and click “Save”. This will post your email to the diary and email copy of the note to those that you selected.

To reply to a note in the Diary, click on the link to the right of the original Sender’s name and Date of the original note labeled “(Reply)”. This will allow you to type and post a response to the original sender’s note. After hitting the “Save” button your note will now appear in the Diary indented below the original note.

Active Directory Tip: Access External Website With The Same Domain Name As Your Internal Domain

It is often the case that companies use their external domain (i.e. enirtia.com) for their internal Active Directory domain, and this is completely fine, except when you want to access your website which is hosted on an external server.

Active Directory automatically sets up an internal DNS server for use on your network, and assumes that it is the Authorative server for the domain you used, which in our case here is “example.com”. When clients on your internal network ask your Active Directory DNS server for a lookup on example.com it is going to direct them to one of your domain controllers. If you request”www.enirtia.com” and you happen to have IIS running on one of those domain controllers you will see whatever the default website that is running on that server.

To get around this we need to add a redirect to your IIS server, a Host record to your internal DNS server, and a delegation to your DNS server, all of which are simple to do. These changes are based on the assumption that your external website is setup on external DNS servers with an “A” record pointing”www.enirtia.com” to the IP address of the server that is hosting your website, and that example.com without the “www” is setup with a CNAME record pointing at”www.enirtia.com“. If it is setup in the opposite manner this will not work.

Host Record:

First find out what the IP address is of the external web server if you do not already know it. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > DNS and locate example.com. Right-click and choose “New Host (A or AAAA)”. Type “www” into the name field, and the IP address of your external web server into the IP Address field. Click the “Add Host” button to save.

IIS Redirect:

To redirect “http://enirtia.com” to “http://www.enirtia.com we need to create a redirect in your IIS server. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services and locate the Default Web Site. Right-Click on the default web site, and choose Properties. Go to the Directory tab and setup a redirect to point to”www.enirtia.com”.

DNS Delegation:

To create a DNS Delegation you must know the names of external name servers servicing your domain name. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > DNS and locate example.com. Right-Click and choose “New Delegation”. Type www into the Delegated Domain field, click next and provide it with external authorative name servers for your domain name.

Mac OS Tip: Change Screenshot Default File Format

Most Mac OS users are familiar with the Screen Shot functionality and its many options and key combinations, all of which is dependent on how nimble your fingers are (see the table of key combinations for screen shots at the end of this post), but did you know that you could change the default file format that they are saved as?

By default, since Mac OS 10.4 all screen shots are saved as PNG files, before that they were saved as PDF files. However there are many folks that still would like to save their files as a different format such as JPG or GIF. This is an easy change to make, but it requires you to fire up the Terminal to make the change.

1. Locate the Terminal App. /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
2. Type the following:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type "file type"

Replace “file type” with the extension of the file type you wish to save as such as PDF, JPG, GIF, etc.

Screenshot Commands