The Daily Galaxy clipping

Apps Magnet’s Confidential Items Module was instrumental in saving our galaxy from the looming alien attack yesterday.

An alien was on his way to destroy our galaxy. MIB agents J and K were able to find him, fight him and kill him. In a fight that could possibly destroy our galaxy, MIB won and saved us all.

MIB – our top secret service agency – uses activeCollab web based collaboration & project management software. activeCollab helps MIB work effectively on their projects. Obviously they have a lot of confidential information so when it came to opening up their activeCollab with other public service agencies, MIB hit a roadblock. MIB hired Apps Magnet to develop a new – confidential items module. As the name suggests, this module lets them share a document / work item / secret article only with those people that they want to. They use this module to keep secret information secret.

Surprisingly, MIB gave full credit for this victory to Apps Magnet’s Confidential Items Module.

MIB representative Agent K told us, “Teamwork made us successful. And if we did not have the granular access control provided by Confidential Items Module, we couldn’t pull it off”.

Agent J said: “If it wasn’t my courage, Dr. Weaver’s support and well… (admitting hesitantly in his own style) that Confidential Items Module from Apps Magnet, our galaxy would be destroyed by now.”

Good folks at Apps Magnet build the best activeCollab extensions and back it up with outstanding customer service. And we can’t tell you the next assignment we’ve given them…
MIB

When we contacted some other customers of Confidential Items Module, they shared similar opinions. One said this extension to activeCollab is a small step for Apps Magnet, but a giant leap for activeCollab community. The module supposedly fills on a much desired functionality in the popular web based project management system – that of sharing documents, work items and information only with designated users, a granular, user opted access control system. Something that’s easy and powerful.

Apps Magnet builds the most loved extensions for activeCollab. While their Planning and Reporting modules have been community’s favorite so far, their latest products are taking everyone’s activeCollab productivity way beyond expectations.

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Disclaimer: MIB name, logo and related material copyright of Sony Columbia and respective copyright holders. Images used here only for demonstration purpose.
Apps Magnet is not associated with MIB in any way – this report is for product promotion only!

We are using activeCollab for about two years now. We manage all our projects through it and encourage team members to track everything in activeCollab. We call this our Project Management System – PMS for short.

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)

We announced late last week that we plan to release a new module – Confidential Pages – in two weeks. While development was going in full swing we realized:

• It will be confusing for users to have a new module for confidential pages
• Features provides by Pages – like versioning, tracking changes etc were not that important
• Pages functionality is very similar to Tickets
• As a matter of fact, it will be very good to have Confidential Tickets
• The reason why we wanted a separate module was that it will not create problems for any existing modules. Hacking a core module can cause things to break – e.g. Confidential Tickets may show up in Planning Module
• After thinking about this long and hard, we concluded that Confidential Pages Module will be no more.
• We will promote Tickets Plus as a first class module for activeCollab (instead of the current “hack” status). This new module will support Confidential Tickets – tickets accessible only by people who are subscribed / assigned to them (and Administrators)
• This will also mean less maintenance for us as we have to manage  a single product
• More importantly, it means Tickets will now pack immense power. Imagine creating tickets that only a specific person in your team can see.

What do you think? Is this wise? Will it make more sense?