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.

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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?

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!

We are so busy working on our products and taking care of customers that I forgot posting an update about our product updates here! Here are some quick updates.

• Planning Module 1.5.1 is out. Fixes a timeline related problem. It’s a recommended upgrade if you are still on 1.4 range.
• Reports Module 1.7.1 is out. Fixes a few issues with permissions. Recommended upgrade.
• Released Gravatar support 1.1. This is a compatibility release for activeCollab 2.3.2
• All our products are now compatible with activeCollab 2.3.2 release.
• Launched a new client section. Single place from where you can download all your purchases.

What are we working on these days? Some big ticket items on our current work list are:

• Overhauling acGarage so that you don’t need to share your FTP details with us. I think this is going to be a major improvement, but will share details once I have a test version.
• Pigeon work is slow for now, sorting out some technology decisions.
• Building activeCollab 101 online course. Again, more on this in a few weeks!
• Upgrades to PlannerX – multi user support, integration with OAuth system and feature enhancements

Our weekdays are busy and weekends are busier… I am keeping my fingers crossed!

Quick Test: Which image can you relate to more? A or B?

It’s always more satisfying to talk with people with faces. When you can put a face to a name, you suddenly feel related. This connection helps you collaborate better.

I have worked on hundreds of projects using activeCollab, Basecamp and other solutions. Many times I have not even met the client in person. Seeing their face just makes it so much more comfortable when I next call / email them.

activeCollab allows users to upload an avatar image, but most clients won’t bother doing it. This means you will see those dull, gray default avatar icons while you work with them on your projects.

Enter acHack – Gravatar. This hack will pull avatar image from Gravatar if none found on activeCollab. It’s a little hack that makes a lot of difference.

Click here to learn more about this hack.

Tickets is probably the most used aspect of activeCollab. Our latest offering – Tickets Plus – adds loads of productivity enhancements to Tickets module.

Benefits:

• Add Estimates and Start dates to tickets
• Track status of the ticket via Workflow Statuses – new, reopened, feedback, acknowledged, assigned, resolved, closed.
• Quick Update a ticket – change status and assign to a person
• Icons for ticket categories – makes it easier to review them at a glance
• Quickly jump to a ticket by entering its ID
• Enhanced ticket listing view – adds workflow status, one click description of the ticket, due date and more…
• Sort tickets list easily
• Quickly update status of tickets via batch update
• Track changes to a ticket better with full change log
• Jump to ticket edit screen right from tickets listing – save time
• Use estimates, start dates and statuses in template projects – they will all adapt to the new project’s dates

These hacks were available exclusively to Planning Module customers for over a year and we are now making them available to everyone. The hacks are available at $49 now.

Learn more, watch screenshots and buy this product from here.

We just released our latest product – Inline Pagination (for comments in activeCollab).

This module allows you to see comments from next page on current page for discussions, tickets, pages and files. You can now see all comments on single page. Quickly review them, make connections between what people said and take decisions. No back and forth / page reloads required.

This nifty little productivity enhancer will surely impress your team and client! We can promise that.

Learn more, watch a quick tour video and buy this product from here.