Communication Module led our survey with 29% respondents favoring it. About 50% people gave us new names, activeComm and activeTalk being suggested by more than a couple people. Here are some other suggestions we liked:

• Bullhorn
• Chatter
• CollabConnect
• Cowbell
• Lingo
• LiveWire
• OmniComm
• WaterCooler
• Yap Module

We also had two people mention this will be a useless module!

Thank you for your suggestions

Thanks to all those 66 who took the survey. Special thanks to everyone who wrote to me with additional comments. It’s always good to get your feedback – even if it’s negative!

So, why did I select Communications Module as the name?

• It is easy to understand
• It gives a good sense of what the module could be about (though it’s not specific)
• It goes well with our other major module names – Planning / Reports.
• A lot of you preferred it (or some variation of it)
• I only made it plural – so instead of the original “Communication Module”, it will now be “Communications Module”

When is it coming out?

About a week from now!

Keeping my fingers crossed and burning some midnight oils

I am looking forward to using this module myself. I know there is a lot of work pending to get it release ready, but we are working hard to get there.

Did the result surprise you? Got something to share? Post it in comments below!

Upgrading to Planning Module 1.6 (or Tickets Plus 1.2+) requires some extra work – apart from the standard “upload the ‘for-upload’ folder and install module from admin” procedure. Since we have decoupled Planning module and Tickets Plus, and that Tickets Plus is now a module, we need to bring the installation back to a cleaner state before uploading Planning module / Tickets Plus files.

Here’s what needs to be done:

• Uninstall Planning module from activeCollab admin (this is not mandatory, but will keep things simpler). Rest assured, uninstalling Planning module won’t remove any of your data.
• Do not uninstall Tickets module. Uninstalling Tickets module removes all tickets from the system. You don’t want to do that.
• Delete the activecollab/application/modules/planning folder from the server.
• Delete config/tickets_plus_config.php file as well.
• It’s best to re-upload Tickets module folders from original activeCollab source. But at least, delete following four files from activecollab/application/modules/tickets/helpers folder: function.object_category_icon.php, function.select_assignees_box.php, function.select_box_redirect.php, function.select_workflow_status.php
• You can now upload all contents of for-upload folders from Planning and Tickets Plus module .zip files.
• Now, go ahead and activate Planning and Tickets Plus modules from admin.
• Clear compile and cache folders from your server via FTP / SSH.
• Go to Tickets list in a project. You should see the live search box near the top.
• Verify Planning module is working fine.
• That’s all! Enjoy the upgrades now.

What kind of errors are expected?

You may see Smarty Error and Fatal error: Call to undefined method Tickets::getWorkflowStatuses(). They may come from a file in Planning or Tickets module. Both can be resolved if you follow above instructions.

activeCollab 2.3.2 is the only officially supported version now

Please note that we only support activeCollab 2.3.2+ now. Our products may work with earlier versions (they generally do) but we won’t be able to support activeCollab compatibility issues if any.

Will this upgrade break anything else?

We don’t think so. This undefined method problem is the only one we anticipate. If you notice any other issues, please report them on our support forums.

I had made changes to tickets_plus_config.php. How do I apply them again?

Copy over planning_config.php from activecollab/application/modules/planning (if you are using Planning module only) or tickets_plus_config.php from activecollab/application/modules/tickets_plus as config/tickets_plus_config.php. Now make changes to this file. Your updates will be used by both Planning and Tickets Plus modules.

And for every day in these two years, I’ve felt my team is not using activeCollab to its fullest. We dealt with a lot of emotions – inertia, confusion, lack of clarity, overwhelm, neglect and resignation. I demonstrated activeCollab features to my team, had team leaders personally teach their subordinates, pushed people to log everything in PMS, offered incentives for it, threatened to cut salary wages if they do not log hours and a whole bunch of other tricks. Yet participation levels were below my expectations. Some members still found it difficult / unintuitive / out of their flow to get into activeCollab and track their work.

After months of fighting, I realized that this phenomenon is not limited to us. It’s universal.

Here’s the proof for it, results from our recent customer survey. Here’s what people said they find most difficult with activeCollab.

What's most difficult with activeCollab?

34% of 120 respondents to our recent customer survey said “My team hasn’t embraced it as much as I wanted them to”.

The number one reason for non-achievement is non-action. One way to encourage action is to make it very simple to take action. If people think it’s easy to perform an action, they are more likely to do it.

Sure, this is a core design principle for our products. One recent addition to our suite of products for activeCollab is Quick Add Plus. We installed Quick Add Plus on our system a while back. Only a few people knew about it so I got the whole team together and did a quick demo.

Here’s a comment I got on our PMS soon after:

Using activeCollab after a long time... Thanks to that "Q" thing...

My team found it less confusing and easier with Quick Add Plus. It lets you press “q” key on your keyboard to bring up Quick Add window. It even lets you add new tasks and track time on specific tickets / tasks right from that window. Basically, the most important, most common actions can now be initiated with a single key press – from anywhere in activeCollab.

This sudden discovery shot up team participation. The PMS is now a pleasure to use!

I knew Quick Add Plus is useful, but am delighted to see it’s brought people back to activeCollab!

What if you could simplify actions for your team? How can you make complex things enjoyable?

Watch a video and learn more about Quick Add Plus from here.

Do you use Quick Add Plus or any of our other products? What’s been your experience?

(Image courtesy Bassi Baba)

From: Brian of RealisingPotential
To: Nirav Mehta
Subject:  Quick Add Plus is fantastic

Hi Nirav,

Talk about perfect timing. I came away from our management meeting today
with two of our directors saying that they found entering data, in this case
timesheet information, into AC was painful and slow. I promised that I would
look at this and purchased Quick Add Plus, installed it this evening,
created a quick sheet for them showing how it works and they are exceedingly
happy. This is a great add on and I would encourage all of your users to
give it a try, at $27 it is an absolute bargain!!

Best regards,
Brian

I sent a thank you email to him and here’s Brian’s reply after an hour.

Hi Nirav,

Happy to provide a testimony as this has saved me a lot of time,
even in the past few hours it has more than paid for itself. 
We are just restructuring our project templates and project
structures now that we have been playing with it for a few
months, the Planning Module is fantastic and the only thing
that I am missing tonight is one more indent to cover the
project definitions that I am working through but I can
overcome this :-)

Best regards,
Brian

I am very glad our products are saving you time and energy. That’s really our intention and it gives me joy to hear such stories

Working on better time reports

So while we save you hours by making activeCollab more efficient, we are also working on an enhancements to Time Reports that will make it easier to review the time your team is tracking. Time Reports Plus will allow grouping time records by Project, Users, Date and Billable Status. You will be able to see a nested view of these, and can also quickly update their status / move them to trash!

Malay Ladu from our team is working on getting this to feature complete. We will then apply any finishing touches, prepare a demo video and post it for you guys!

Lot of other interesting things happening…

There is tons of things happening on my side. I am actually thrilled and will share more updates as we keep checking off items from our assignments list!

Wish you another productive day!

Reports Module is one of the most successful activeCollab related products developed outside A51.

That’s right. Hundreds of customers use Reports module and they all find it invaluable. Here’s a comment we got a few hours ago:

I use both your Reports and Planning modules. LOVE them both.
– Monica

We eat our own dogfood. We use our products daily and listen to our customers. Frankly, we developed Reports module for our own use. When we couldn’t imagine living without it, we released it as a product.

Sometimes you download software and you just can’t believe how bad it is, or how hard it is to accomplish the very simple tasks that the software tries to accomplish. Chances are, it’s because the developers of the software don’t use it.
– Joel Spolski on Eating your own Dogfood

Thankfully, our software does not fall in this category.

The Story Behind Reports Module

It’s been over a year we launched the Reports module. We were using activeCollab for managing projects and needed a better reporting system. We wanted to track velocity of projects (rate at which they are completing), iteration charts (kind of work done each week) and insights into most active and longest open items. We also wanted to track what items needed attention and were risky / dependent on others.

We started generating these reports using SQL queries on activeCollab database. We created a few MySQL views, ran a set of queries and exported a CSV file at the end.

One day, I resolved to make this look prettier and put together a dashboard with charts and lists populated from these queries. I polished it over the next few days and put it up on our activeCollab setup. The reaction was “WOW!” We kept it going for a while, but Reports module was destined for something bigger.

Software Services vs Products Dilemma

If you are a software services company, you write a lot of code. You build tools that save you time. Most of these tools have great value, but only for you. At times, you dream of generalizing these tools and releasing them for greater good. But often they end up as internal side projects. Sometimes you release them, but can’t give them enough attention since you already have other paid projects waiting.

I’ve been through this experience two dozen times. In last 12 years at Magnet, I’ve initiated about 22 products. Most died. Some were released as open source. Some became popular. Some took life of their own. None gave us revenue we could sustain. Paid consulting projects kept running the company and product ideas remained only a wish.

I was not going to repeat that mistake this time.

If you do it, do it for good

When I decided to release Reports module to public, I was clear it had to be a long-term product, a paid product and something that I will pay enough attention to. No more side projects. I wanted something that will become a business in its own.

Reports Module Sales Trend

Over the last year, Reports module has evolved. Nine releases in a year, many bug fixes, enhancements and a major overhaul, Reports module has come a long way. We have also seen sales grow after our initial launch, slow down, and then pick up once again after the major 1.6 version launch. We have incorporated a lot of user feedback (we feel privileged to have participating customers!)

Today, Reports module gives us insights. It helps us track project progress, how the team is doing and even the overall system usage. There are enormous improvements in the “prettiness” too!

Reports Module in Feb 2009 (click for full view)

Reports Module in Feb 2010 (click for full view)

We have our wish list open though, and there are improvements we are planning for this year.

activeCollab team did a comprehensive review of the module – features, usefulness and its working. At the end, they said:

Reports module can be a very useful and handy tool, especially if you’re working with clients and great number of people. Everything is accessible easily, available at one place, and simple to set up.

Everything is accessible, available and simple! – that sums up our principles for developing software. We use them on all our software and are glad activeCollab team recognized them clearly. (I hope they finds Reports module useful for tracking their projects as well!)

I want to end this post with a summary of I think contributed to our little success with Reports module (and our other products).

Success Factors

• Unexplored, super niche market: Reports module was the first commercial module for activeCollab. First reporting tool of its kind. activeCollab has a small, but participating and forward thinking customer base. This really worked.
• Accessible, available, simple: Our focus is always on keeping only what’s important and making it easily accessible. Things that would take you hours to do, we want you to do them in minutes. We want everything simple and easy to understand. We spend more time thinking about simplifying our products, than in writing code! Everything from our products to demo videos is designed with our users in mind.
• Community participation: We made it simple to give feedback. We’ve had some great feedback from customers and we improve our products with that. Participating on activeCollab forums helped establish credibility as well.
• Long term vision, self-interest and passion: I founded Apps Magnet to be a sustainable long-term business that makes money by making people more productive. I am passionate about programming, productivity and making a difference. Apps Magnet is an expression of my passion. We make products that we want, we build them with passion, and are happy to find enough customers who share this passion.

Thank you for reading! I wish you a passionate and productive day today!

(dancing balls image from Flickr)

Guido mentions that since activeCollab is web based, it is much easier to get all parties involved together. Communication is smoother and customers can participate in the development process.

They also use our Planning and Reports modules for activeCollab and said:

Reports we use internally for all projects and looking around to see how many hours the various components in a project cost and whether it matches the data in the planning module.

With this understanding we can better estimate for new projects, see where any bottlenecks, thus increasing our efficiency.

I am glad our products help increase efficiency and better track your projects Guido!

Thanks for sharing your story.

How are you using activeCollab / our products?