Hello community, hello aC developers

I have known aC for quite a while since it was still an open source project and stubled upon it while looking for a project management tool for our web development department. We are a small (10 employees) IT consulting and web design company located in Bonn, Germany. As the web design section is growing right now the project management we did till now with Mindmanager or simply using our calendar doesn't work for us anymore as projects become more complex and more people are becoming involved.

So I had a look at classical project managent tools like Merlin2 and what's available on the project management market at the moment. After working with Merlin2 for some days I noticed that it is not what we needed as we were more focused on learning how to use the system than managing our projects ;) I had been using Basecamp some time ago (the 49$ paid version) but it was just too expensive and limited (especially because 37s did not intent to support german language), so in the end so we canceled our accounts.

After playing around with a lot of project management applications (webbased and not webbased) we decided we wanted to have sth. like basecamp but with the possibility to extend it the way we need it. As our data belongs to us we don't want to have a hosted solution. So I came across aC and as the limited trial is really limited I thought "Well, let's give it a try" and so we bought a copy of the corporate edition yesterday (having in mind there's a 30 day money back guarantee)

My first experience: aC has great potential. The user interface is clean (and was the main reason we are trying it out!) and the functionality is good. u
But I'm a little bit disappointed that some in my opinion really essential features are missing.

Really really missing features (These should have been adressed before going "live"!)
- Sitewide categories for milestones, checklists and tickets or at least a template function to setup categories fast. first would be better.
- internationalisation / localisation ( german clients want german interface). we can do the translation. but give us a tool.
- templates for projects like in basecamp containig default milestones, checklists and tickets. it's a time killer to have to setup everything manually. 99% of projects have the same project processes. PLEASE really work on this first before everything else - it takes way too much time to setup everything.
- define your own project states, not only the 4 available at the moment
-e-mail reports (example: report containing states of all projects that can be send to CEO)
- automatic reminder for milestones, checklists and tickets via email like in basecamp. i want my project management to remind me what's due.


Features that would be nice to have:
- Add new client or milestone while creating project or ticket etc. without having to go to the users or milestone page.
- Time tracking feature (i.e. Start - Stop button, count time and add to the project)
- Due date for checklists, not only for the tasks
- Simple private "task list / to-do list" for every user that are not related to any project. I don't want to use different tools so it's great to have some sort of basic "todo" function that doesn't require to be a project etc.
- Option Button "Save and add new ticket" (or project etc.) to add multiple things easily
- Option how many recent activities are shown on the dashboard
- Option to hide project from dashboard (even when it's active)

I know that sounds like a lot but I think that aC has a great future ahead if you don't make the mistake and ignore your clients. That's what made us quit Basecamp.

Really important: Roadmap and outlook for future releases. You're selling a project management tool - let your clients know that you're working on aC and what's going on. Use the blog more intensely and write about the development. You must not enable comments but please communicate way more. Don't leave us standing in the rain like "Hmm well perhaps they're thinking about the feature. We can only hope this is coming some day.. Time for coffee..." - we'd like to know what's going on behind the scenes. You're selling a product now. It's not open souce anymore and the expectations of your customers are different now!

Please let us know what's coming next and if we have to return the product because we don't know if it's going to go into the right direction or if everything's ok because we know: "They're working on it. We'll standby."

Just my 2 cents..

Best regards,
Sebastian, amcm GmbH, Bonn Germany