In the past few weeks we were having a discussion about what you'd like to see in activeCollab – from small things like minor interface improvements and tweaks to major features such is time tracking or invoicing. What most users don't think about (and don't need to thing about) is the price of every added feature.

In Apple Human Interface Guideline there is a section that covers adding features to software products. Here is the most interesting part of that section:

When making design decisions regarding features in your application, it’s important to weigh the costs, not all of which are financial, against the potential benefits. Every time you add a feature to your application, the following things can happen:

• Your application gets larger.
• Your application gets slower.
• Your application’s human interface becomes more complex.
• You spend time developing new features rather than refining existing features.
• Your application’s documentation and help become more extensive.
• You run the risk of introducing changes that could adversely affect existing features.
• You increase the time required to validate the behavior of your application.

Choosing appropriate features and devoting the needed resources to implement them correctly can save you time and effort later. Choosing poor feature sets or failing to assign appropriate design, engineering, testing, and documentation resources often incurs heavier costs later when critical bugs appear or users can’t figure out how to use your product.

I couldn't agree more. Every new or existing feature that does not benefit 80% of users should be thrown out.

Some will tell that good plugin architecture is an answer to this problem, but that solution is not a silver bullet. It creates support nightmare, quality and consistency across application can not be controlled any more and so on. Even plugin support should be approached the same way as any other features - does it provide benefits that justify introduced complexity. If not - skip that and concentrate on things that do matter.

I'm really impressed with amount of comments you posted on previous entry where I asked one simple question: What would be the first thing that you'd like to see CHANGED in activeCollab? There was a lot of comments so I decided to get all the requests, sort them and post them in a separate overview post. The list is pretty long and if you have something to add please post a comment.

Here is the list:

Minor update requests

Projects and project objects

1. Project progress based on number of tasks and/or milestones completed
2. Set project permissions when you create a project (on the same screen)
3. Upcoming milestones in calendar form on Project overview
4. Ability to reorder task lists
5. Multiple file download (select files, zip them and download them all together)
6. Repeating milestones
7. Requested tasks features
   1. Long description, multiple resolutions, priority, due date, multiple asignees
   2. Display tasks ID on the pages for easier reference
   3. Introduce task dependencies

Interface

1. Company logo on every page, including login screen
2. Hide “Tags” when there are no tags for a given object
3. Better Opera compatibility
4. Drag and drop reordering (for tasks)
5. Link to My tasks on every page
6. Improve navigation
7. Show projects grouped by company
8. Wider theme
9. Tag cloud
10. Date picker in forms

Clients, users, permissions

1. Make a specific person of every client company be able to update company info and manage member accounts
2. Per user language settings
3. Owner company members should be able to see what users have in their task lists
4. Allow non-administrators to create new projects

System

1. Set upgrade check off by default
2. Textile guidelines for every field that supports Textile
3. Improved theming support
4. Add one message to several projects
5. Per project default is_private value (#19)
6. Auto-parse URL-s in text fields
7. More object information (description and body) in RSS
8. Site-name property (currently we use company name in Dashboard header)
9. WYSIWYG editor
10. Users should be able (forced?) to upload daily reports
11. Ability to import a file from a file system. That way users will be able to upload files using FTP and simply import them into the activeCollab
12. Count date ranges only in terms of business days (skip weekends)
13. Support for collaborative writing (writeboards or some sort of wiki)
14. Simple export of data and backup
15. Upload progress bar
16. Ability to limit amount of uploaded data for a given company

Notifications and mailing

1. Send notification when task or file get posted
2. Include text or comment message in notification email
3. Daily digest type of notifications

Major feature requests

1. Integration with Google Calendar
2. Support for project and object templates
3. Gantt charts
   1. Milestones from all projects on a timeline
   2. Milestones for a specific project on a timeline
4. Time tracking with timers
5. Support for plugins
6. Chat module

Question is pretty simple, but still really interesting:

What would be the first thing that you'd like to see CHANGED in activeCollab?

Only current feature set counts - no new stuff or major thing such is time tracking, wiki or export (I'll archive that comments as soon as I see them). Just small stuff, simple things that are still there but are so irritating or badly implemented that you'd like to see them gone as soon as possible.

Less than a month after 0.7 was announced we have a small package of fixes for problems and annoyances we discovered. Here is the list of fixed problems:

1. There was a problem that let tasks from a private task list appear in application log.
2. Remember the good old problem when Safari truncated last character from the filename? Its gone now...
   
3. All downloads in file section are forced - even files that browser can open will open a Save as dialog (including images, text files, html documents etc).
4. Installer now properly detects if you are using HTTP or HTTPS.
5. Few bugs that resulted in application crashes (fatal PHP errors).

Upgrade to 0.7.1 is recommended.

You can download activeCollab 0.7.1 from Download page. Upgrade instructions are also available. Please note that upgrade is working only if you are upgrading from 0.7. If you are upgrading from an older version (including 0.7 Release Candidates) you should first upgrade to 0.7 and than to 0.7.1.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Enjoy the holidays!

Situations where you want to have client companies added to the project even when you don't expect them to actually use activeCollab to collaborate with you are not that rare. For example, you don't want any notifications sent to them or them logging in the system, but you want to keep track on everyone involved for the reference.

activeCollab does not support this "silent" clients as a special feature, but you can use existing system and be sure that no one will send any accidental emails to them or make them aware that there you are using some kind of project management system. Here is how you can set it up:

1. Create a client company (if you don't have it created already).
2. Add user to that company. activeCollab requires that client company has at least one member in order to list it in project permissions form. Adding a contact person is always a good idea.
3. Go to project permission page and add client company to the project without selecting any users. This way you can make sure that notifications are not sent to any client users by accident.

Do you have any tips or tricks of this type that you want to share with the rest of activeCollab users? Want to know how some particular scenario would be best implemented using tools available in activeCollab? Tips and tricks forum is made for this type of discussions so lets start filling it with useful information.