Use your most valuable hours to do your most valuable work (i.e. don’t check email first thing in the morning)

When you complete something you’ve been working on for 6 months, you will feel a deep sense of satisfaction (and relief). That’s what I’m feeling now!

I wanted to revamp Apps Magnet’s website for a while! I did an initial wishlist 18 months ago, and began actual work 6 months ago. The velocity improved in last two months and we finally completed the revamp yesterday.

What’s in it for you?

So what’s so special about the redesign?

Simpler, Easier My Account Area

All your downloads are easily accessible. You can even see when your support / upgrade license expires and can renew quickly. It looks prettier too! Logging into My Account also lets you comment on blog posts and leave product reviews easily.

Organized Product Catalog and Smarter Shopping Cart System

The products list looks a lot cleaner now and you can easily find any product you were looking for. You can add items to your shopping cart without page reloads and the whole checkout experience is simplified. Product reviews and ratings help potential customers evaluate a product better. We have also enhanced product information pages.

The shopping cart is accessible on any page, and facilitates quick checkout. The system will also allow us to use payment gateways other than PayPal in future.

Trainings, Tutorials and Videos get priority

We’ve moved acVarsity to the top navigation. You can access all our activeCollab related tutorials, videos and tips from there. This section already contains many useful resources, and we plan to keep adding to it in future.

Starting a Community

We have amazing customers and we believe it will be awesome if we shared their successes, and let them help each other. We have added product review feature to share your experiences with other activeCollab users. We will also be adding customer success stories (and potentially a forum) in future.

Cleaner, New Age, Mobile Friendly

Our new site is responsive. It adapts to your device – big or small. The graphical redesign is simple and emphatic typography helps you scan through the content faster.

We have spent a great amount of time making small enhancements. And will continue to do so. Our goal is to have you achieve your goals faster!

What’s Next?

Your Accounts Are Already Migrated!

All accounts from the old members area are already migrated to the new system. So go ahead and login to your account. Download your latest product updates and renew access to any products that have expired.

And Leave Us Some Product Reviews Please!

Our products have been around for long time, but since the review feature is new, we don’t have many product reviews. If you’ve used our products, we request you to leave a few product reviews and ratings. That will help fellow activeCollab users decide if our products will fulfill their needs.

What Are We Using On The Backend?

What powers the new website?

• WordPress – as the base platform
• WooCommerce – for shopping cart and digital downloads
• Propulsion theme – for responsive and clear layout
• A custom made child theme – we’ve made lots of modifications to Propulsion and WooCommerce with our carefully crafted child theme
• Custom made WooCommerce extensions – we’ve created plugins for WooCommerce to handle renewal pricing and chained products (for combo / bundle offers).
• Zopim – for live chat customer support and realtime visitor analytics
• WHMCS – for support tickets – we may build something that integrates either with activeCollab or WooCommerce in future
• W3 Total Cache – for performance optimizations
• And lots of care and attention!

Frankly, what took me the longest was deciding what platform to use. There are tons of shopping cart / membership solutions out there. We use WHMCS on Putler. We’ve been using DAP on Apps Magnet for two years. We are using E-Junkie on StoreApps and used it on Apps Magnet in the beginning.

I wanted something that offers shopping cart, billing management, helpdesk and knowledge base. WHMCS was closest. I even started customizing it and writing integration code for WordPress. Eventually we zeroed in on WooCommerce. It is open source, has solid codebase and is constantly improving. We had to build our own plugins for some core features – renewal pricing and bundle products. And we will build a few more in future. But being able to see the full source code and easily create customizations was a big plus.

And well… there are still lots of pieces we still need to add.

What do you think about the revamp?

Do you like it? What would you still like to improve? Got any questions / suggestions? Post a comment below and let me know!

Thanks! 😉

Today we are releasing updates to four modules.

Assignments Plus module for activeCollab v1.2

Ability to bookmark an assignment page – with filters – for quick access later on.

Many clients wanted a quick way to save their assignment filters, and run them in future without the need to select all filter criteria again. Assignments Plus already remembers your most recent filter choices, but in this version we make it possible to save any assignments plus filter result for later use.

And it’s a clever little browser trick! Starting with version 1.2, you can bookmark any assignments plus search result page. Perform any filtering you want, and use your browser’s “Bookmark This Page” feature (Ctrl+D on most browsers) to save these filters for later use.

When you come to that bookmark again, it will retail the filter choices you made earlier.

Fixes in this version:

• Private objects were not displayed in headings
• Assignments plus icon missing in admin panel
• Header of popup window not displaying in IE

Confidential Items module for activeCollab v1.3.6

activeCollab 2.3.8 compatible version

acHack – Gravatar v1.3.3

activeCollab v2.3.8 compatibility version.

Communications module for activeCollab v1.3.1

Fixes “JavaScript disabled error” in Internet Explorer 7 – 9.

As usual, you can download these updates from our members area.

We just released an update to Tickets Plus module for activeCollab. This version (1.6.1) adds support for Quickify – an excellent activeCollab addon from activeLabs. And fixes a number of bugs we introduced in version 1.6!

Enhancements

• Added support for Quickify from activeLabs

Fixes

• Error “Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated” in PHP 5.3
• Compatibility with the activecollab 2.3.2
• Reply of comment via email made it private
• Reply to comment via email removed all assignees
• Status update activity added twice
• Ticket creation via email set workflow status to “Open” instead of default workflow status

This is a recommended upgrade for everyone using Tickets Plus.

The third year passed quicker than first two Apps Magnet completed three years and entered forth on 12th February 2012. We do have lots in store for you in our forth year and also some specials coming your way soon! Stay tuned!

We updated Assignments Plus, Tickets Plus and Confidential Items modules recently. Here are the change logs.

Assignments Plus module for activeCollab v1.1

Enhancement

• Filter and group assignments by client
• Search on the category name
• Assignments Plus icon back into its original place in top menu
• Admin panel settings to view/edit assignment into popup or new tab

Confidential Items module for activeCollab v1.3.5

Fix

• Email notification on private objects also sent to users with no access to see private objects

Tickets Plus Module 1.6

Fixes

• Unable to complete ticket from sidebar on ticket details page
• Unable to update comment visibility
• Notifications sent to users with no access to see private objects

Another update to Tickets Plus is due in next few days as well.

As usual you can download these updates from our members area.

We just release updates to three products – Tickets Plus, Planning and Confidential Items modules.

The Tickets Plus update solves an annoying, long time issues with email notifications. Earlier versions used to send three different email notifications when one changes the status and assignee while adding a comment to a ticket. Now you’d get only one!

We got a headstart on this when activeLabs / Nathan Sudds submitted their code to send one email even if multiple actions were performed on the comment. We enhanced that code and even added support for making a comment private or confidential. This way, you can make the comment invisible to people who don’t have access to see private items or people who are not assigned / subscribed to this ticket.

Here’s the full changelog for Tickets Plus 1.5.9

Enhancements:

• Combine email notifications of new comment, workflow status change and assignee change. Now user will get only one notification instead of three (Thanks to Nathan and activeLabs for their code contribution that served as starting point for this.)
• You can now make comments private or confidential.

Fixes:

• Call to a member function “getLanguage” on non-object
• Workflow status label break (Thanks to Fran for reporting and providing a fix for this. http://bit.ly/wwBlWs)

Here’s what’s changed in Planning Module 1.7.4

• Fixed: Subscribers not added on Tasks.

Here’s what’s changed in Confidential Items Module 1.3.4

• Tickets Plus module 1.5.9 compatible version.

As you can see, Tickets Plus update is big, while the others are minor.

We encourage you to download the latest versions from our members area and try them out.

Looking forward to your feedback!

It seems like we are going to have a lot of fun doing the activeCollab 3 webinar. As the activeCollab team releases first public beta of aC 3, we will follow up with a free webinar – demonstrating new features, sharing our analysis of aC 3, how you could transition to it, and generally answer your concerns and questions.

And we’ve got great company! Ilija Studen from activeCollab team has agreed to be on this webinar. And Nathan Sudds from activeLabs, Guy Cortesi from eSolve Solutions and Willem Nieuwboer from GFX International will be on the panel too! We will share our screen and have audio conferencing as well. We will answer questions from the audience and share our opinions as well.

This is the first time ever that such rockstar activeCollab developers are getting together. We would have loved to have everyone on the webinar, but we can accommodate only 100 at this time. I can promise this is really going to be awesome!

So if you are looking forward to activeCollab 3, go ahead and sign up for the free webinar! (and spread the word!)

Think Big! That’s what I kept experiencing in my US tour in October. A coffee cup would be five times larger and fifteen times costlier in the USA than my office in India. Everyone was talking about changing the world. Everyone was talking about millions. You can’t stop but get infected by this passion.

I returned on 5th November and last 33 days were about catching up with work. Pending deliveries. Revamping code structure. Solving bugs. Adding new features. Brainstorming our plans for 2012. Training new team members. Just keeping the neck down and working hard.

And then there is activeCollab 3. Yes, it’s looking great and is just around the corner! We get access to developer previews and it’s progressed faster than my own expectations over last two months. So I thought we should share our activeCollab 3 plans with you – as it is they are centered around you!

activeCollab team has been working hard too.  Apps Magnet develops some of the most loved activeCollab extensions and hence we’ve had early access to activeCollab 3 preview builds. From what we have seen, aC 3 is a major revamp – both in terms of the user experience and internal programming. And as activeCollab 3 release date comes closer (promised to be December 2011), we asked this question to ourselves:

How can we create a delightful experience of migrating to activeCollab 3 for our customers?

activeCollab 3 Interface Preview

We thought about questions and concerns people may have about upgrading to activeCollab 3:

• What’s new in aC 3?
• How easy will it be for us to learn activeCollab 3?
• It seems to have a completely revamped user interface. How fast is it?
• I have lots of critical data in activeCollab 3. Will that be transitioned correctly?
• Is it reasonably bug free? Is it ready for production?
• Will my third party plugins be compatible with activeCollab 3?
• Is it worth upgrading to activeCollab 3 now? How long should I wait?
• I’ve been waiting for “feature x”, is it there in activeCollab 3?
• Will I have to purchase the upgrade again? Who’s qualified for a free upgrade?
• What’s the easiest way for me to determine if we should upgrade?

Basically, your concerns will revolve around the usefulness of the new version for your organization and the costs of upgrading (time, money, training, downtime…). Since most of you also use our plugins, you’d like to find out when will we release activeCollab 3 compatible versions and if they will be free.

So we’ve thought of this action plan. Do post your comments and suggestions below.

• Within a week of activeCollab 3 Public Beta Release: Showcase activeCollab 3 to our customers via a webinar – screen sharing the new interface with our commentary, and answer questions
• Within a month of activeCollab 3 Public Beta: Ensure our modules are compatible with aC 3 – including Tickets Plus, Planning, Reports, Confidential Items, Assignments Plus, Time Reports Plus, Communication and Hide People
• Schedule another webinar about transitioning from aC 2 to aC 3 when activeCollab 3 is near final public release
• Provide upgrade / transition service to clients who want us to take care of the transition
• Continue working on improving our products on aC 3
• Continue supporting our products on aC 2.3 for another six months
• Be available for any support clients may need in choosing to and carrying out transition to activeCollab 3

What do you think?

How would you like us to support you in reviewing activeCollab 3 and transitioning to it? Let us know via comments below!