Looks like Santa came in early this year! And he’s got candies for you!

We released updates to four modules over two days. These are important updates and we recommend all customers to upgrade.

You can download them from our members area right away. If your license has expired, we recommend you renew (links available after logging into members area).

Here are the new releases:

• Planning Module 1.6 – Important release. Minor fixes, separation of Tickets Plus and minor enhancements.
• Tickets Plus Module 1.2 – Major enhancements, the warrior’s sword
• Time Reports Plus Module 1.2 – Major upgrade. Adds run time filter support on Time Reports
• Confidential Items Module 1.1 – Major release, fixes a few bugs, improves overall support

We are happy like kids! Enjoy your holidays!

We are releasing Planning Module 1.6 today. The best got better!

Highlights of this release are:

• Tickets hacks are now a separate module – Tickets Plus Module and include major enhancements
• You can now work full screen with Planning module
• Some long standing bugs are gone – private milestones and version conflicts are the main ones
• Planning Module (and other latest releases) now officially support activeCollab 2.3.2 and onwards (we are dropping support for older versions)

Upgrading requires some work, else you may see errors

Upgrading to Planning Module 1.6 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.

Click here for upgrade instructions.

Common Questions you may have

Why are we separating Tickets hacks as a new module?

Short answer: operational efficiencies.

Long answer: Tickets enhancements have been a huge success. As we call them – they are like a warrior’s sword. A warrior needs to keep his sword sharp. And we plan to enhance Tickets Plus regularly. We started selling Tickets Plus as a separate product couple months back but included all files in Planning module for your convenience. This means every time a new version of Tickets Plus comes out, we also need to roll out a new Planning module version. We would also need to closely coordinate development of both products. And as we released a new version of either of them, customers will have to upgrade them too. This was getting complicated. Hence we decided to split. We can now work independently on each product and you can now upgrade them independently as well.

Do I have to pay again for Tickets Plus?

No! Tickets Plus module is complimentary to all Planning Module customers even now. All Planning Module customers will see new Tickets Plus Module downloads in their accounts. Use links there to download your copy of Tickets Plus.

Why are we dropping support for older activeCollab versions?

Frankly, to make our (and yours) lives easier. We believe activeCollab 2.3.2 is a solid version, and everyone should upgrade to it. Secondly, supporting multiple versions took longer time in development, testing and customer service.

If you are using older version of activeCollab, you can download / use earlier version of Planning / Tickets Plus modules.

Should I upgrade?

Oh yes!

My license has expired. What should I do?

Please renew your license. This will give you an additional year’s upgrades and will help us continue bringing improvements!

When will “Feature X / Y / Z” be available?

We are defining priorities for the next version of Planning Module. There are some ideas we are considering – like better printing, multiple projects in outline view and resource management. Please post your suggestions on our forum and vote for features you like.

Here are full release notes.

Release Notes

Enhancements

• Separated Tickets Plus from Planning Module
• Tickets Plus: Live search on Tickets List view
• Tickets Plus: Added In Progress workflow status
• Tickets Plus: Workflow names and CSS associations updated, so you can now easily change workflow status labels
• Tickets Plus: Quick Update now only changes responsible person so other assignees are preserved
• Tickets Plus: Enhanced List and Print views
• Full screen mode: Planning Module can now fill your entire browser screen via Full screen mode.
• Added support for Confidential Items Module: You can now make items confidential from Planning Module itself.
• Added Actual Hours field in CSV export

Fixes

• Milestones were created as Private for Private Projects
• Cards view search function was broken. Fixed.
• Tickets Plus: Drag and drop did not work in tickets list
• Notifications said “Created” when the item was updated

Next Actions

• Login to your members area and download the latest versions (you can also renew your license from there)
• Buy Planning Module today if you haven’t already done so – it’s still our most loved product!

The MIB saved our galaxy with Confidential Items module for activeCollab. Now they are happier than ever because version 1.1 just came out.

This is a major update as it fixes couple of critical issues and adds minor enhancements.

Here’s what’s changed.

Release Notes

• Email notifications for confidential items will now work
• Confidential option won’t show on Projects, Documents or Milestones now. Since they can’t be made confidential.
• Only people who can edit a confidential item, will see Edit link
• Updated the icon for better – thanks to Steven for this!
• Tickets Plus module support added
• FIXED: Category view in Tickets and Pages showed confidential items
• FIXED: New Files added were not confidential even if selected

Click here to learn more about Confidential Items module and see how it can benefit your organization.

Time Reports Plus is a runaway hit. Our customers keep telling us how much they love it and how it simplifies billing, tracking and discovering usage patterns.

Now you can discover insights even quicker.

Runtime filtering for Time Reports

Time Reports Plus now lets you filter at run time. You may have created a Time Report with some conditions. But you can change all of them with Time Reports Plus. Additionally, you can select up to three summary parameters and include actual time records if you wish.

Without this, you would have to create new Time Reports for every combination of filter choices you wanted to apply. Creating a new report for every condition was a major headache. Now it’s gone!

Release Notes

• Added run time filtering options for person, date and status
• Minor improvements to styling – display and print

Click here to learn more about Time Reports Plus, and buy it at $49

Tickets Plus module for activeCollab is an awesome enhancement to activeCollab web based project management system. It’s like a warrior’s sword. You wouldn’t expect a warrior to get out to the battle field without his favorite sword. When you have Tickets Plus module, you can work through your pile of tickets with ease and grace!

Today, we announce Tickets Plus module version 1.2. This is a major update since we have transformed Ticket Plus hacks into a brand new module. We have also added a ton of enhancements and fixed some annoyances.

• Live Search: You can now filter tickets list as you type. I can bet you’ll love it!
• Quick Update now only changes the “responsible” person for the ticket. Your assignee list now remains intact.
• Added In Progress workflow status. Also made it easier to customize workflow status names and colors.
• Enhanced Print view
• Sort by Ticket ID and Category too now
• Confidential Items support: Now you can select multiple tickets and make them all confidential
• Fixed an issue where tickets were not reordering via drag and drop

Checkout Tickets Plus now. It’s awesome indeed!

We also released version 1.2.1 after this. That adds support for Latest Comments First.

Click here for upgrade instructions.

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.

—

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?

We are live now!

Time Reports Plus uses your existing Time Reports and lets you summarize them by Project, Person, Date or Billing Status. You can select up to three of these parameters and can also see sub totals at each level. You can select multiple time records and batch update them right from the reports screen. There is no new icon to click or new page to go to. Time Reports Plus automagically enhances current time reporting screens – both at project level and globally.

• Learn More – story behind Time Reports, What it can do for you, Screenshot and more…
• Watch a video tutorial about time reports and making them more useful with Time Reports Plus
• Buy Now at $49

Grif – who inspired us to build this module, commented on quick tour video. And here’s what he said:

LOVE THIS !!! I have been waiting my whole ActiveCollab life for this. Sign me up.

I am really excited with this module! Look forward to your feedback.

Ever since we launched Quick Add Plus, we’ve been getting fan mails! People have said it added the missing piece to the puzzle, how it’s so intuitive and how it saved them hours of back and forth. Here’s an email I received yesterday.

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!