activeCollab 3.0.1 BETA, Available for Download

Ilija Studen Staff

Jan 23. 2012. 11:36 pm

Hi everyone,

We are proud to announce that activeCollab 3.0.1 BETA is available for download from your profile pages. Since New Year, we've been working on:

1. Inspector widget for view pages. This is foundation for more interactive management of objects - when you update object details, changes are automatically reflected on the page. Plus we have a cool new tracking feature for tasks that lets you see tracked time and expenses, as well as how they meet your estimate, at a glance.

2. Redesigned the way you manage home screen tabs and widgets. Management functionality is there, but we still need to pay with the style. Home screen manager is rough at this point, but 10 times more usable and it shows where we are heading with it.

3. Redesigned how objects are converted from PHP objects to JSON. This under the hood work is foundation for inspector and many other areas. At this point it is also cause of some performance issues as well as some smaller bugs (we are aware of these problems and working on them).

4. Email templates and notifications where they were missing, with some interesting template designs (we hope you'll like them).

5. Number of bug fixes, tweaks and under the hood changes.

We still consider this an early beta, so recommendations that we provided in original announcement still apply:

1. This beta is early beta release. Don't use it in production!!! You should not even think about running it for your projects at this point. In a couple of weeks or so yes, but now - NO!
2. If you are wondering where upgrade instructions are, see #1. We have upgrade script written and tested, but you should skip that step at this point. Instead, set up a new activeCollab 3 instance and play with it - get familiar with the new interface, new tools and see how you can benefit from them to get your projects done faster.
3. Don't send us bug reports - we have plenty of them already (100+) that we are working on. Instead, report only real blockers and small issues that are easily overlooked, as explained here.

While we are talking about bug reports, here's a small list of big issues that we'll be address during beta period:

1. At the moment, only browsers that support history API (HTML5) can use the beta. This excludes older browsers, as well as IE9. Use Chrome, Safari or Firefox.
2. Localization support does not work, so only language that's currently available is English.
3. There is no support for themes or color changes at the moment.
4. Reporting functionality is not in place. You can help by suggesting reports that you might find useful.
5. There's way to many queries on some pages.

… plus all other bugs and issues that we find.

activeCollab 3 is available as an additional download on your license page:

As mentioned before, upgrade instructions are not provided at this point - you should only set up a new installation to get familiar with the system.

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Panagiotis K. Dev

Jan 24. 2012. 8:14 am

#2

One expression for home screens... wow!

BUT! (there is always a but...)

I tend to feel that AC3 instead of making me productive it kind of making me want to play with it rather than work with it...

We can split quality in two points on the y axis, the upper quality which is the point where something is very good and the lower quality where is the point when something is not good at all.

Based on Pythagoras there is a Golden ratio somewhere between those too points and once you reach that ratio you actually could say *in theory of course* that you reached the best potential of your system.

Now with AC3 I believe we got way more of that golden ratio and we try to reach the upper quality on y axis where things end up to the paradox of choise where I can't really say if it good or bad, but what I can say is that...

... some years ago, I realized that I need a tool that would help me manage myself as a freelancer, so I started to make a plan how it should work and everything, once I spend some days on the plan I end up with a huge schedule with insane amount of tasks need to be done, then I though that this is not productive, the time I will spend on that system to be made if would be converted to money would be a huge price to pay, and if you consider that in that time the income would be significantly decreased because I won't be able to work on other projects while I would work on this one, so I rejected that plan and instead I tried to find a tool that would fit my needs so I searched a lot once I got a big list of project management tools I asked myself what I really need from a tool and the two main dependencies was:

1) The system must be self hosted
2) The system must be open source in order for me to be able to extend it

With only those two dependencies the long list decreased into a list less than the fingers of one hand... So still I had to choose but at least the choise now is much harder than previously, so I asked what I need more?

1) I need the system to be pretty (who don't like beauty anyway?) in order for me and my clients to enjoy the system and not to be frustrated with it.

2) I needed some UX dependencies by the system from client perspective, I wanted it to be simple for the client to use (or at least to be able to configure it in order to be like that)

3) I need the system to remind me my tasks and not just store my tasks in and depend on me to remember them (same goes to my interaction with clients)

So it wasn't hard to end up with ActiveCollab...

Now that I knew that AC fit's my needs I did all the financial analysis I had a tried AC on their hosted trial and I end up buying the corporate license and start working with AC.

There are lot's of things that I regrate paying for and AC is certainly not one of those because I spend some money for a system to serve my needs as a freelancer on the business model I had some years ago and it still serve my needs today as a business manager and business plan having changed lot of times already, so the investment I did back then paid back I can't even count how many times.

In the bottom line where my point is that AC is a system where each new version adds not pointless features, but features that offer business value and this is what makes the difference from the other systems in the market and this is why I love AC so much so far and by the time I say I can't be more exited about a release of AC... A51 proves me wrong each time...

Those being said, I will end by altering a world known phrase.... I'm hungry of AC but I'm not foolish because I can see the value it provides and me as many others in this community can take advantage of that value for their own benefit.

Thanks

Aviant™ | Zend PHP 5 Certified Engineer
PHP Development / Symfony 2 / Zend Framework / JavaScript / HTML5 / CSS3
Online CV: panosru.com

Lukas R. Pro

Jan 24. 2012. 2:44 pm

#3

Hi everyone

Thank you for the new upgrade which looks really fine!

You asked for proposals for reports. Here you go:

* We really need some financial reports, say
** list all invoices per project
** create sums of invoices (all, issued, paid, between two dates, of one client, of one project, etc.)
** possibility to summarize estimates and effective billed costs by client or project

* Then we need more options in grouping the data of the reports (we actually use Time Reports + 3rd party module, but this is not so satisfying because these grouped reports cannot be saved.)
** Summarize time reports by multiple items (person, date, project, milestone, client etc.)
** optionally show time record or only sums
** have icons on the sums to create an invoice of all included items (where applicable)

* Then it would be great to have a report for a procect with billable and non-billable items on it (we use them to show our clients what we did and how much of this will get billed)

It would be great if any of these reports could be integrated in the home screens!

Yes, that's it for the moment...

Feel free to ask any questions if you don't understand anything.

Regards and keep up the good work!
Lukas.

www.rtp.ch
Twitter: @rtp

Ilija Studen Staff

Jan 24. 2012. 10:47 pm

#4

@Panagiotis: Thank you, we are glad to hear that :)

@Lukas: Thank you for the suggestions. We are compiling a list of reports that we plan to develop for activeCollab 3, and we'll definitely take your suggestions into account. Some things may not be possible, or may be possible just to a certain extent, but we'll know the specifics once we start working on these reports.

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rafi Pro

Jan 26. 2012. 10:01 am

#5

Looks like you guys did a great job..

However I don't see any download link for the beta on my profile page :(

Ilija Studen Staff

Jan 26. 2012. 1:41 pm

#6

rafi:
However I don't see any download link for the beta on my profile page :(

Hello Rafi,

Your support and upgrade plan expired in 2009. activeCollab 3 is available to everyone who purchase a license since October 1st 2009. If you purchased before that date, and haven't renewed since than, you'll need to renew your subscription to get access to this release.

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Daniel C. Pro

Jan 27. 2012. 1:23 am

#7

This is looking fantastic.

I am concerned my company will not be able to migrate to it because of a couple of key things:

1 is the misuse of labels. We got a third party module for ac 2.3 to help us manage those labels, but that obviously does not exist yet for this and won't for a very long time. Not being able to see all labels in the task view, or quickly update them from any view is a major oversight in my opinion. The only way to get a good "overview" of tickets and subtasks in a project is to go to outline view and expand each one individually. a simple "expand all" or "expand all below this level" might be enough, but being able to quickly "grab" tasks that are unassigned or update the label (better named "status") of tasks in bulk will slow us down quite a bit.

Thanks for all your hard work on this, and i hope my suggestions are considered!

Daniel C. Pro

Jan 27. 2012. 1:38 am

#8

Forgot number 2!

The calendar seems to still be lacking, where I could see it getting as completely uselss as in v2.x. with no differentiation between tasks, milestones, etc on the overview, i have to hover or click over every single day. Since we run many projects at once, we'll likely have 100 or so items on the calendar, and not really know what any of them are. Even with the labels it'll get very "full" and indigestible.

Having a running gantt chart view such as with milestones was something I was really really looking forward to as well to utilize for resource planning. it really should be available for more than just milestones, where i feel it actually doesn't add much value on anything smaller than a year-long project. being to see an overview of tickets (tasks) along with their current status (label) is something that is absolutely crucial to our management of projects.

Ilija Studen Staff

Jan 27. 2012. 12:40 pm

#9

Hello Daniel,

1. What exactly did you mean by "Not being able to see all labels in the task view"?

2. Why would you want to "change labels from any view"? Here, we define a set of labels and agree with the team members how they are used, so they change ONLY when process changes. I guess people will mostly use it like that, instead of reconfiguring them frequently.

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Daniel C. Pro

Jan 27. 2012. 5:05 pm

#10

Hi Ilija, thank you so much for the reply.

I did realize that in the "tasks" view you are able to group by label, so that actually makes a VERY big difference. However, what I was specifically speaking of is the ability to see the label along with the task name when viewing tasks grouped by something like milestone or category. A project manager may only be interested in finding out what tickets are blocked on a milestone deadline that is coming up, or a design lead may only be interested in seeing tickets marked "fixed" for tickets that are part of the "design" category so that they can be verified and closed.

I don't mean to say that the list of available labels should be changeable quickly.

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