News & Updates Archives - Page 12 of 17

AceProject gets upgraded tonight

AceProject 4.6 is ready. We will begin the upgrade cycle tonight, with the free accounts, the Hosted-Standard accounts and the Hosted-Advanced accounts.

AceProject 4.6 was developed in 10 short weeks. We experimented with the Agile product development methodology: shorter development cycles coupled with complete product testing and documentation at the end of each cycle, instead of just at the end.

The results are amazing. We were able to release AceProject faster. More than that I believe testing at each development phase will give a higher quality product for you, our users. The more bugs we were able to find before the release, the fewer you will find when your accounts get upgraded to the new version.

Please tell us your impressions of the new AceProject!

What’s new in AceProject 4.6?

We now have inactive project templates, project templates that exist exclusively
as templates. With inactive templates, users don’t receive email notifications
and task reminders to its tasks. Moreover, tasks that belong to inactive project
templates are not displayed in task lists and reports.
AceProject now allows you to share a document
with someone who […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-12-08T12:47:00-05:002008-12-08|

A New Version, A New Help System

As the help pages writer for AceProject, let me talk a bit about our new help system.

I’m actually a musician and one of my main influences is the rock group Kiss. I love their musicianship, their music and their stage show, of course, but they also taught me great things in life. They often said in interviews that they built the rock band they had never seen and always dreamed of. I realize that this is exactly what we do at Websystems, in the project management software business. We built the tool we had never seen and always dreamed of. Our new help pages are based upon the same motto: This is the help section I have never seen and always dreamed of.

Personally, when I look at help pages in general, I’m unsatisfied most of the time. It looks as though help is something that must be provided, but the time spent on its writing should be minimal. That’s not our philosophy. We want to provide quality support, and quality help files, in order to […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-11-26T14:36:00-05:002008-11-26|

More AceProject 4.6 peeks!

AceProject 4.6’s development is going well! We are progressing much faster with the agile development method. Overall, this method makes AceProject 4.6 always ready to be released, because we test and document each iteration, instead of waiting at the end to find and fix the bugs. This turns out to be much more efficient.

Thanks our great development team, I can show you more of AceProject 4.6.

Task History

Many clients love our Task History feature, which logs all changes to a task automatically. Unfortunately, this option was not enabled by default in AceProject, we everyone had to remember to always check that little box. Well, not anymore. Task History will now be enabled by default when you create a project:

Google Chrome support

AceProject already supports Safari. Since Safari and Chrome use the same Webkit, it wasn’t a big challenge for us to support Chrome. Plus, the ability to make application shortcuts is a nice way to have AceProject on your desktop!

Task comments in the user tab

It used to be that you […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-11-21T18:23:00-05:002008-11-21|

A sneak peak at AceProject 4.6

We are entering out third and last cycle of development for AceProject 4.6. So far, the agile method has been working well, and we think AceProject 4.6 will benefit greatly from shorter iterative development cycles.

Today, I want to show you three really nice improvements we’ve made to AceProject.

No need to close the task to save your changes

We were getting a lot of comments from our users about the inability to just Save a task in AceProject. Before 4.6, you need to navigate to another tab or close the task in order to save your changes. It was annoying and a waste of time.

Well, not anymore! We’ve added a new option to the Update button: Update + Keep Open.

Documents go public

Another request we had from our user was about documents, that it woul be nice to permit some documents to be seen by people outside their AceProject team. We thought that was a great idea!

Now, AceProject task and project documents can be public. When a document is public, anyone who […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-11-14T12:19:00-05:002008-11-14|

AceProject is skin-deep, and we like that!

AceProject 4.5 introduced more flexibility for our clients to brand their project management system to fit their corporate image. Before AceProject 4.5, our clients could upload their own logo to replace AceProject's, and put their own company name in place of AceProject in the page title.

Now, with AceProject's skinning feature, you can choose the color scheme to use in your account!

More than that: if you don't like our predefined skins (Forest, Vista, Cherry, Sunset, Flame, Chocolate, Navy Blue, Classic Blue), you can always change the colors one by one:

As our President, Daniel, explains it: "AceProject is often a tool that must integrate with our client's other tools and Intranet. With the skinning feature, AceProject can fit with the corporate image. On our end, the skinning feature closes the gap to customize AceProject's interface, since now all visual […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-05-21T13:43:00-04:002008-05-21|

AceProject V4.6

AceProject 4.6 is full of customer-requested improvements that are sure to make project management easier and smoother.

Active and Inactive Project Templates – AceProject now has both active and inactive project templates.
- An active template is a project you can use as both a template and a project to work with. Its entire structure can be copied. Its tasks are displayed in task lists, such as “My Tasks”.
- An inactive template is a project you can only use as a template. Its entire structure can be copied. However, it cannot be used to work with as its tasks are not displayed in task lists, such as “My Tasks”. No email notification is sent for inactive templates.
Document Management Enhancements – There have been many improvements to the documents feature.
- File Attachments are now Task Documents Same function, new name. We wanted to make AceProject more uniform throughout its interface. We simply renamed File Attachments for Task Documents.
- Public Documents – AceProject now allows you to share a document with someone who is not logged in to AceProject (even non-users). When you […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-05-12T07:00:24-04:002008-05-12|

AceProject 4.5 is out! Now what?

It's finally online: you can use AceProject 4.5 online now! What's new? You can read the release notes here, but in a nutshell:

New, cooler, shinier Gantt charts
Dynamic templates
Easier time sheets
Better custom reports
Skins

AceProject 4.5 took about 6 months to make, and we are very proud of it. I think it makes AceProject nicer to look at and easier to use, and that translates in happier customers.

Now that it's out, I can stop talking in the future tense when I give demos to future clients. A new version release always boosts my pride in AceProject, puts a spring in my step and my voice Smile .

Now what?

On the development side, we get the great question: what do we do now? Which features are we going to develop? What's the next big step for AceProject? On the product management and marketing side, this is an incredibly creative period, where I feel anything is possible. It feels awesome.

I can't wait to see what we will put in AceProject 4.6, which […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-04-25T14:35:00-04:002008-04-25|

AceProject V4.5

Once again, we went through our wishlist and came up with enhancements that had been requested for a long time.

Gantt Charts Got a Major Makeover – We have implemented new Gantt charts, which are actually in Flash format. Our customers will be glad to notice that:
- They are now quite easy to print. They can be either shrunk to fit the paper size, or be printed in full size with your preferred printing tool.
- They can be saved as a jpg image, which can be emailed.
- Task dependencies are now clearly identified. Actually, progress bars are linked with dotted lines when the corresponding tasks depend on each other.
- A “Daily View” is now available at both the project and the administration levels.
- A month and a year drop-down have been added in order to let you move back and forth in time more quickly.

Parent/Child Project Relationship – Project templates are now more convenient to use thanks to the “Parent/Child” relationship. It lets you create a parent project which can have several child projects that are linked with it. This way, […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-04-22T14:00:21-04:002008-04-22|

Due dates and release-ready

Presently, the team at Websystems is in the final stages of getting AceProject 4.5 ready to release. We are testing the new system as much as we can, so we can release as bug-free a system as we can. However, we also know there is a one-month period after the version release, where we will be correcting details dug up by our users. As much as we know AceProject and as much as we test it before release, there is nothing like thousands of users to find a few bugs we overlooked.

In the end, it's the calssic case of being too close to the tree to see the forest. There are as many ways to use AceProject as there are users, and it is simply impossible for us to replicate how each user navigates the system and uses the features. The whole release process is very impredictable. At Websystems, we never committed to a specific date for a new release version.

Sure, we have an idea of when the new version will be released. […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-03-10T12:16:00-04:002008-03-10|

AceProject V4.4

This upgrade includes several bug fixes, as well as several enhancements that have been asked by our customers frequently. This upgrade is a good balance of new features and user experience improvement.

Save clicks when un-assigning users from projects and tasks
- When un-assigning a user from a project, he/she will be automatically un-assigned from all tasks (both incomplete and completed) in that project, both assigned and to review.
- Users can now be un-assigned from completed tasks under “Multiple task assignment”, in the “Edit User Information” page.

Email notifications at the project level introduced – We are glad to introduce the first two email notifications at the project level. Basically, one notifies specific project assigned users when a “Project Document” is added while the second one notifies users when a reply is posted to a topic, in the discussion forum.
The 75 Mb file size limit has been removed for “Project Documents” and “File Attachments” – We have removed this limit for allowing users to upload larger files. From now on, users can upload files of any size, as long as […]

By Daniel Raymond|2007-10-01T07:59:32-04:002007-10-01|