New year ahead, which means a load of great new features.

It’s been another great year at TeamworkPM and we have seen our customer base continue to grow even further. We had some great new customers join TWPM and we have rolled out a load of great features and improvements.

Although a lot of our time this year was spent sitting behind our desks replying to customers or building new features, it was great that we got the chance to travel over to Paris at the end of the year for Le Web 2010. Peter and myself really enjoyed getting the chance to meet face to face with some of you and a chance to show TeamworkPM off to a whole bunch of new people. Just before our trip, Dan even found a girl brave enough to marry him, so all in all it was a good year.

As one year ends and another starts, I thought it would be cool to take a look at our live updates page to see how many updates Dan and Peter managed to roll out. I have to say it’s impressive. It took me about five minutes of just clicking quickly on "Show more" to finally get to January of last year. I was hoping to save the whole page and upload it here to show off but there was just no-way to show an image of that size and make it readable, so make sure to take a look yourself.

It’s wasn't untill I got the chance to pause and look back at all the updates that I really realized just how many changes and improvements were put in place during 2010.

When you're living it, it feels like we are never getting on top of the new features because as we roll out a new feature we are already talking about the next one, how cool it would be if it was there and how people will love it. It’s kinda like the carrot on the end of a string story - it's always being dangled in front of our faces but we never ever get to it. Below are a few updates I pulled from the list just to hightlight some of the great new features that came out.

Some of the big updates rolled out last year:

  • Speed improvements to the whole system
  • New improved calendar
  • Recurring events
  • The ability to link accounts
  • More and better language translations
  • New Billing section
  • Freshbooks Integration with our billing section
  • Improved daily emails
  • New people and companies section
  • Improvements to Milestones : Mini-Calendars
  • New reports and ability to customize reports
  • Project Categories
  • Improvements to permissions within TeamworkPM
  • Full public API released
  • iPhone App released
  • UI improvements
  • Improvements to the task timer
  • And a whole load more......

There are far too many updates to list here but if you’re interested in seeing everything make sure you check out our updates page.

That now brings us on to this year. We already have a whole load of wonderful ideas and updates in store. One thing we have always been upfront about is where we are taking the product and what we are working on. We have a published road map of new features we are currently working on as well as ideas we have for new features.

Most of these improvements and new features have come directly from our customers. We have ideas on what direction we are going with TeamworkPM ourselves and what new features we would like to see but I have to say what turns our ideas into reality is based largely on the feedback and suggestions that we receive from our customers.

We would like to start off the year by thanking all of you that have sent on your ideas and feedback, along with your nice letters of encouragment and praise. (always wecome and nice to recieve)

We hope you are enjoying seeing some of your ideas actually turn into cool new features that everyone can use and benefit from, and we hope you are also looking forward to all the new features we have coming soon. Below is the list taken from our live roadmap on what we are working on.

Coming Soon
  • Overhaul of Messages Section
  • Autosave option on Notebooks
  • Notebooks: Redesign
  • Messages : Create task from message
  • Desktop timer app
  • Affiliate programme
  • Calendar: Print Support
  • Messages: Support for Markdown
  • Tasks: Add Task Dependencies
  • Email dropboxes
  • "Lockdown" - advanced privacy option
  • Recurring Tasks
  • Contacts - at project level and overall
  • Improve Feedback System
  • Android app
  • Calendar : Add toggle between "My Calendar" and "Full Calendar"
  • Tasks: Notifications Tab: Ability to set notifications/reminders
  • A whole pile more......


May the new year ahead be a good one for you all. Keep the feedback coming and make sure to keep telling your friends, business partners, even gym buddies about TeamworkPM. Actually make sure you tell the gym buddies soon! Once you stop going to the gym in about another week - you won’t see them again till next January ;-p

From all of us at TeamworkPM HQ have a great new year!

Preview of new sites feature coming to the iPhone App

We it's been a very busy time here in TeamworkPM HQ over the last weeks as we have been working on some nice new features and improvments to the application which we hope to release over the next few months.

One feature we added recently to the web App was the ability to quickly switch between Teamwork accounts you had. Since we released that we have been working on adding this functionality into the iPhone App as well. Below is a short video I shot video this morning of the new switcher feature running on our developers iPhone.

Let us know you throughts on this new feature and other's you would like to see in iPhone App.

Preview of the new calendar

We are getting very close to releasing our new calendar feature which we are been working on now for some time now. Peter is pretty much just in the process of adding the final touches and tweaks to the calendar as I type, he also just has the final phase of tests to carry out as well.

A few of the new features with the new calendar are:

  • Recurring events
  • Drag and drop functionality
  • Multiple reminders
  • Quick add of events
  • Start and end times on events
  • And many more

Before we release it I thought I would quickly show you all it actually running. Now even since I shot this video yesterday there have already been a few improvements to it so you will really have to wait for the release to see how the full version turned out. In the mean time it does give you a very good idea of just how it is looking and how some of the functionality is working.

Now I'm afraid to say that this is not the greatest video I ever shot. It's a very rough and ready video which I shot using my iPhone. I had to do this because we are running it on our test server and I can't connect to that one via my mac, and it is my mac which I use for doing screen captures as it's the one with the software on it.

So I apologize for the shaking hand held video but it will still give you a good idea of how the new calendar is shaping up.

I have also attached a few screen shots here as well for you to all have a look at.

 

New billing portal allows you to pay directly with your credit card without using Paypal

It's been 2 years coming - we reached the point where Paypal no longer makes sense as the only way to pay us. So for the last week I have been locked away adding support for monthly or annual payments directly from your credit card... and I'm delighted to report that it went live just last night.

 
How does it work?
Well you go to your Subscription page within your teamwork installation as normal but then you hit this upgrade button...
 

 
...you are then taken to our new Billing portal at billing.teamworkpm.net:

 

 
As you can see, we now allow you to enter your credit card details quickly and directly but still provide the Paypal option if you need it. The Billing portal is secured with 128 bit SSL security so you can enter your card details with complete peace of mind. We will debit your credit card every month (or every year) recurring until you cancel your account and you can easily switch between plans at any time.
 
(ps. I couldn't help myself, I had to add the Killer Monkey into the footer.)
 
Rolling it out - A Side Note
It was funny, I was there in the office after completing days of testing thinking that I'd love to roll this out to just 1 real customer to ensure that everything went smoothly, when I spotted a new feedback message come in. The message subject was "Unable to pay" and it read "Hi. I was trying to pay online and I don’t want to pay through paypal. Is there another way. Thanks Rick". Music to my ears, I sent Rick a reply...
 
Hi Rick,
 
I'm here late in the office finishing our new payment gateway.
 
How  would you like to be the first user to give it a go?
You'll be able to pay us directly.
 
Waiting to hear back from you.
 
Peter
 
From Rick:
That would be perfect! Just let me know what I Need to do. Thanks Rick.

I replied:
That's great Rick.
 
OK, I found your installation and I've enabled the credit card checkout for you.
You are our very first non-Paypal customer and this represents the culmination of a weeks work for me.
This is going to be historic.. epic even :p
 
Just go to the subscription page and you should see a credit card entry page.
 
I'll be holding my breath here...
 
Peter,
    Wow awesome. It worked perfect.  I checked my account and it shows as processing. Thank you very much. Anything on that Iphone app. Rick
 
Lol. Nice getting a response like that. Thanks Rick.
 

Why ditch Paypal?
Well we didn't ditch it, Paypal has been great for us and we will continue to support it. But many of our loyal customers have told us time and time again that they love Teamwork but hate being forced to pay us with Paypal, as you see above with Rick. For many more, Paypal is simply not an option for their organisation.
 
The second reason is ease of payment. Paypal adds a layer of complexity that is annoying for our customers and loses us business.
 
The third reason is entirely selfish... switching away from having Paypal as the default payment method makes financial sense for us. You see, Paypal is great for getting started with an online businesses because there are no set-up costs and it offers instant utility. Comparing Paypal to traditional Credit Card processing gateways, the gateways have a high initial cost and a higher cost per transaction while the number of transactions are low but as this graph (knocked up in seconds) shows, the number of transactions reaches a point when the cost of using Paypal becomes higher that the credit card gateway. We reached that point a long time ago.

 
A note on Security
Just a quick note on  the new recurring credit card processing - for security we don't store your credit card details in our database. Instead we send them to our credit card processing partner and we get just back a code that represents the credit card. This means your credit card details are kept completely secure even though we process your payments every month.
 
Thanks for reading. Hope you all enjoy the new checkout.
I'm moving on, locking myself up again and concentrating on getting the IPhone app out the door before I hear any more screams about it. :)
 

Assign tasks to multiple people now live

Just a quick post announcing that we have rolled out the Assign Tasks to Multiple People feature we have been working on for so long.

Sam, Peter, Ryan and myself scheduled an early Saturday start and after a few hours of last minute testing and polishing pushed the code live.

After the API, this was one of our biggest and most frequent requests and we are very proud of our final implementation. This was not easy to implement.

Peter (AKA Topper) will be describing the process, design decisions, challenges we faced etc in a follow up post in the next few days.

As always, we love hearing what you think so leave a comment or post a Tweet!

Dan.

Stolen screen shot of assigning tasks to multiple people.

Peter, AKA Topper, has been working away like a Golden God (his words not mine) on getting our latest new feature for TeamworkPM out the door. It is of course the ability to assigning tasks to multiple people.

I must take my hat off to him as it's looking pretty bloody sweet at this stage. I have just been in his office checking out how it looks and and how it's working.In fairness when he has his moments he's good ;-) it is a savage piece of work. Between Peter and Dan fighting it out they have done an amazing job in keeping this feature really simple and easy to use and I have to say I can't wait for this feature to launch as It's something I have needed myself loads when working on projects.

Below is a screen shot I stole off Peter's computer a few minutes ago when he had his back turned. It's just a quick shot of where the new feature is going to appear on the task screen.

Peter wanted to be the first to post up screen shots of his work but I couldn't resist beating him to it :-)
He has a load more screen shots that he will be posting up along with a nice detailed blog post here, in the engine room blog, in which he will outline how this feature works and looks. Hopefully his post will be up over the weekend for you all to read.

Until then enjoy my stolen pic.