Get Ready: acGarage is coming

We are getting ready for the launch of our next product – acGarage.

It’s a new product and we believe it will significantly help all activeCollab users.

One customer pre-ordered it already and we are looking forward to his feedback.

Any guesses on what will this product do?

😉

We are working on the next release of Reports module for activeCollab and want your feedback on two new reports we are adding: People and System Reports.

We are close to completing development on this. You can see a few screenshots of the new version here on activeCollab forums.

People Reports

Allow you to filter users and see their activity stats. Monitor work progress and hour logs easily. Here’s how we are planning this screen to be.

People Reports Mockup - click to enlarge

System Reports

There is no way to find your overall system statistics with activeCollab. Here’s a simple screen that gives you all the “birds eye view” numbers you may need.

System Reports Mockup - click to enlarge

What do we want?

We want your feedback on the reporting fields included, the overall look and feel and the ease of use. All suggestions are welcome.

Thanks in advance!

First, thank you for your overwhelming response to Planning Module! We are thrilled by your feedback and praises!

We are also committed to making the product even better. We released a bug fix + feature enhancement update today. Here’s what’s changed from version 1.0.

Changes from v1.0 to v1.1.1

Enhancements:

• If there are unsaved changes, prompt user to save when she goes to another page
• Skip “Open” child elements with “Completed” parents when “Show Completed Items” is unchecked.
• Item positions are managed within items and not at project level

Bug Fixes:

• Tickets are always created with Private visibility
• Ticket not saving when navigating by clicking on another item in list
• Duplicate Ticket IDs created when switching type from Ticket to Page and back
• Crash if Pages or Checklists module was not active
• Show Completed option does not save state
• Focus lost after clicking on Type drop down in Outline view

Thanks to everyone who found, reported and helped us solve these issues.

A lot more is happening at AppsMagnet

We are working on a lot of things. Here is list of upcoming milestones:

• Reports Module – mockups of next version, feedback from customers
• Planning Module training videos and documentation
• (new) acHacks – Professionally supported hacks to AC, one every month, with “under-the-hood” explanations
• (new) Upgrade & Housekeeping Module – automatic AC / Extensions / Theme upgrades and automated cleanups
• (new) acJournal – weekly newsletter on new and noteworthy about activeCollab
• (new) Mylyn plugin for AC
• (new) Basecamp Importer for activeCollab

We are proud and excited to present to you Planning Module v.1.0.

Our Planning Module for activeCollab has been in development for last 8 months. We released a beta in May 2009, and today, we are releasing the first stable version.

Quick Links

If you are as excited as we are about this, here are some quick links for you:

• Read about the benefits of the module
• Take a Quick 2 minute Tour of Planning Module
• Planning Module Demo – Try it Yourself
• Ready to buy? Go ahead, and buy it now. It’s only $149, and will be worth the price just in days.

Planning module is an activeCollab extension. It requires activeCollab version 2.1 or higher.

You can reap the fruits of our hard work

There have been a number of enhancements from the beta release. It took us much much longer than we anticipated to develop this product. We have spent days brainstorming and debating – to get a feature right. We spent equal time on fine tuning and giving finishing touches. This has been real hard work!

But you can reap the fruits of it. And that’s why we made this product in the first place. You can use Planning module to plan, review and revise your projects much faster. Our tests have shown 5X speed and productivity increase. That’s real breakthrough results.

Deep sense of satisfaction

We built this module to scratch our own itch. We had dozens of projects running on activeCollab. And a number of people using it. People with different skills and motivation levels. It was hard for us to get everyone follow a structure for planning their projects. Hence harder for me to review their plans. It would take me a lot of convincing to revise a plan once made. My team felt it takes them too much time to go through all the activeCollab screens and create / update milestones, tickets and tasks.

We started building Planning module with these aims:

• Make it simple to create project plans
• Reduce the number of clicks and page flips required to review / manage a plan
• Make it easier to update project plans (our plans needed revisions almost every week!)

Today, I am deeply satisfied to see Planning Module deliver on these aims.

• Creating or editing project plans is as easy as typing in a text document
• I can review the entire project plan from a single page, without many clicks
• Batch update give me flexibility to update multiple items at once – including things like “Push all these items 4 days ahead”

See it to believe it

I can go on and on about Planning module. I would rather like you to experience it yourself. Here’s what you can do now:

• Read about the benefits of the module
• Take a Quick 2 minute Tour of Planning Module
• Planning Module Demo – Try it Yourself
• Ready to buy? Go ahead, and buy it now. It’s only $149, and will be worth the price just in days.

Planning Module Demo

Keep the feedback coming in

We have received some rave reviews about the product so far. We are eager to hear from your experience. Tell us how you find it. Tell us what you would like to improve on! We know we still have a lot of things to do, and want to know what would be more important to you!

Thank you!

Times are tough. But if you start your day with an inspiring quote, you can very well succeed.

iQuotations - Charge your spirit

I love reading self-help books and attend training programs. I realized it’s only a few sentences in the whole book / program that really energize and motivate you. They shake you up. They motivate. And you take action. Action taken with that positive mindset brings success.

So what if we could collect a set of hand picked quotations and put them on an iPhone? That would allow anyone to get instant inspiration.

That’s what iQuotations does. It has been downloaded more than 50,000 times. The free version has limited quotes and limited features. We have another version in the approval process, and we will even enhance the free version soon.

iQuotations is a collection of some of the greatest quotes on productivity, lifehacks, inspiration and philosophy for your iPhone. Read a quote a day and take action.

Then tell us if iQuotations made a difference!

Quotes can be one of life’s greatest sources of inspiration. They encourage you to live your dreams and become the person you always hoped to be. iQuotations is geared towards helping you to achieve that.

It has different categories of quotes like inspirational, life hacks, productivity and philosophy. It also has got humor which will give you a chuckle or a deep belly laugh…

Go ahead, download it from AppStore. And tell us what difference it made to your life!

How do you upgrade Reports Module for activeCollab?

Here are the basic steps in upgrading Reports Module for activeCollab.

1. Ensure you have the latest version of Reports module.
2. Unzip the module on your computer. You should see a folder named “for-upload”.
3. Go to your activeCollab installation website. Go to administration panel.
4. Click on “Modules”, then “Reports Module”.
5. Click “Uninstall” to remove the current version of Reports Module.
6. Upload files from the “for-upload” folder to your server via FTP / SCP. Overwrite existing Reports module files in activecollab/application/modules/reports/ and public/assets/modules/reports/ folders. Make sure you upload files to the right locations and are not overwriting any folders other than the two above.
7. Go back to activeCollab administration screen -> Modules -> Reports Module.
8. Click “Install”. This will taken a snapshot of your data again and set up the Reports module.
9. Confirm that “can_use_reports” permission is enabled on appropriate System Roles as you need.
10. Upgrade is complete! You can now enjoy the fresh new Reports module!

Reports module used MySQL views to get categories and comment counts. Many customers had troubles configuring MySQL privileges to create views. We updated the code to let go of views – without compromising on any features!

The latest version of Reports module is available!

Feature Additions:

1. Clicking on an item in Most Active / Longest Open list will open it in a new window.
2. Report module does not require views anymore!
3. Checks available RAM and takes only as many weeks’ snapshot as possible. (In short, number of weeks snapshot to take = memory available in MB / 4)
4. Wrapped Reports SWF output in a <div> tag. Makes it easier to apply CSS on it. Thanks to Leon Poole for the idea.

Fixes:

1. Fixed problem where Reports overlapped Quick Add popup. Thanks to Leon Poole for the fix.
2. Used localized version of “iteration” in charts.

And it’s still at $39! Save yourself time and energy managing projects. Go ahead and buy the Reports module for activeCollab!

The way things are going, AppsMagnet is going to see a burst of activity in the next few months! Here are noteworty items from the last few weeks.

• We upgraded PlannerX today. Fixed a few bugs and added speed improvements. One major improvement is in reorganizing milestones as todo-lists or items. Basecamp guys added a feature to their API on our request and that saved a lot of back and forth. There are still known issues in PlannerX and we are working on improvements.
• Reports module is finding more fans! At the same time, the largest customer support issue has been VIEW creation permissions on MySQL. Many customers reported their server does not allow this. We are working on an upgrade that does not require MySQL views. This may slightly take longer to generate reports, but will work for almost everyone.
• Our feature additions to Reports module – project group level reporting, daily updates etc have also been welcomed.
• Planning module – I was happily surprised that so many people are waiting for Planning module! We released a paid beta to Reports module customers. Many people bought Reports module to get Planning module beta after that! We received some feedback and are working on it. But need more! Will be catching up with all beta customers this week to push it forward.
• iQuotations – our first iPhone app has been downloaded for more than 25000 times within one month of launch. The paid Puzzler has not picked up. We are now readying to launch some paid apps based on iQuotations. We are excited by their value, and look forward to a warm welcome from users!
• As we grow, customer support requests are growing. We will need to dedicate more time to customer support than development after major releases! Will also need better systems to manage billing and customer communications. But we are thrilled with the kind of customers we have. Your support makes us go an extra mile!
• There are other ideas we have in mind for AppsMagnet, more on that in the next update!

Thank you for your support!