activeCollab Blog Archive

There was an interesting article on Vitamin about open source and making money out of it. Well, to be honest, I think it was more about something else, but that's another story ;)

That article has a big problem because it started with two assumptions:

• activeCollab is here to directly compete with specific project management tools and put them out of the business
• activeCollab is here just to make money

Both of them are wrong.

First, activeCollab is here to provide a useful organization tool for the people who need it. Idea is to provide value to users, not to directly compete with other products.

One small example: if we find that import feature for some existing tool will benefit our users or we get 10 requests from them asking for it we'll most probably implement it. That will not mean that our goal is to put company that made that product out of business. It just means that we implemented a specific feature that can make life of activeCollab users easier. Simple.

Second, there is an article that I wrote to explain why is activeCollab free. Take a look at it, nothing has changed. I have a few more ideas how to make money out of this project, but none of them include closing the source or killing the free version. If you are willing to risk, you can make money out of the open source project. And I am. I don't have much to lose and everything to get - experience, connections, great reference and product. And of course, the money.

When I look at my current position open source is the best way to go.

Advice to everyone: remember what motivates you, what you love to do, what your goals are and get going. Don’t let common way of thinking slow you down.

activeCollab 0.6 was a simple bugfix release without any new features. It was released to resolve known problems with alpha1 and as far as I can see it was a success. It really solved the problems that it was meant to solve (installation problems mostly) and it is pretty stable for such an early release.

First release since alpha1 that will introduce new features is activeCollab 0.7. Biggest feature added to 0.7 is new files section. Documents section will be completely removed and replaced with new code. All existing data from documents section will be moved to new files section by an upgrade script (upgrade system is also new in 0.7) so you don't need to worry about that.

Today I'll share to screenshots with you:

Files index page (screenshot 1) notes

• Files can be grouped in folders
• When listed files can be grouped by date created or by a filename
• Images are presented with a thumbnail in the list
• File description uses textile so you can put details description with all the formatting you need

File details page (screenshot 2) notes:

• New files section supports file versioning. Most recent revision is highlighted with yellow border and every revision can have short (or long) description.
• Users can post comments on files just like on messages. Comments can be marked as private also

Things that are part of new files section but you can't see on this screenshots are:

• Files can be marked as private (just like most objects in activeCollab)
• Important files (just like important messages)
• Comment locking
• Search through text based files (txt files, code, xml documents etc) through standard project search

activeCollab 0.7 community preview will be available in a few weeks so you'll be able to play with this new features pretty soon.

Any comments?

Today something really exciting happened: Dreamhost have deployed activeCollab 0.6 as a one click install for their customers.

There is no file upload or stuff like that. Go to your control panel, under the Goodies select One-Click Installs and select activeCollab from the list. You will be offered to create a new database or to select an existing one. When you submit the form you'll receive an email with the instructions how to set up an administrator account and provide your company details.

This is really great because it will bring activeCollab in front of the users who just want things to work, not to hack their way around.

Thanks to Dreamhost for this move!

I launched the first alpha at the end of June. At that time only people who knew about activeCollab were Serbian development community and few people who read SuperDeluxe (weblog by Milos Radovic, in German). People welcomed the idea of free, open source project management tool that focuses on simplicity so I knew that we are on the good track.

Few days later activeCollab got listed on eHub and everything started to move pretty fast. Everything went wild when activeCollab made up on the front page of Digg with 1450 diggs and 160 comments. Site went down because of the heavy load so we replaced in with one static page, screenshots and download links. That was enough to get people started. Second big wave of visitors we got few hours after the first wave from Digg when activeCollab was features on Techcrunch and presented as a free Basecamp alternative. That article created nice discussion - 100 comments. Even David and Jason replied.

People liked activeCollab a lot. I got tons of mails that varied from short messages from people who just wanted to say hello and give they best wishes to the project to pretty long messages, support requests, feature requests and even a few job offers (not just few, more than 10 to be more precise)!

Recently activeCollab was mentioned in SitePoint newsletter. Its small article at the end of the newsletter but it brought pretty nice traffic to www.activecollab.com.

www.activecollab.com got into Movers & Shakers section on www.alexa.com with growth of 1700%! That doesn't surprise when you know that activeCollab is online for just three weeks with all those “big” events and the fact that 290 people blogged about activeCollab in that short time (according to Google blog search).

Thank you people! You did your job great and I'll try to provide best product for a price that is hard to match: $0.

From now on you can always have latest changes and bug fixes from Subversion (SVN) repository. The code in SVN should not be considered stable. You can browse the repository from your web browser. Its not pretty, but it works.

To checkout a copy of the source code execute:

svn co http://code.activecollab.com/svn/ac/trunk/

If you wish to submit bug fix or code modification please contact us or create a new ticket