Today, we’re making OnTime 12.0.1 available for download and as of a little while ago, all OnTime OnDemand customers are running OnTime 12.0.1. This release is primarily focused on bug-fixes that slipped through with version 12′s release.
One important enhancement we added was support for IE 7 in the OnTime Customer Portal. We were overly anxious and jumped the gun on dropping support for IE 7 in the Customer Portal with version 12.0′s release. So I’m happy to say that Customer Portal version 12.0.1 adds back limited support for IE 7.
Here is a full list of everything that has changed:
Customer Portal Enhancements:
Now has limited IE 7 Support
Fixed Customers that had search criteria were not getting cleared after upgrade to version 12.0
Fixed Items in embedded portal grid were not scrollable
Fixed Workflow Step notifications not firing for new items created in portal
Fixed Auto-Filter Public Items throwing error when using ‘Customer’ as filter condition
Fixed Attachments in Large Text Fields allows for multiple uploads but only attaches first file
Fixed Embedded portal not refreshing item grid list after save and close
Fixed Open item in a new window not working in IE
Fixed Parent and Child Picklist were not loading correctly if hidden on IE8
OnTime Web Client Enhancements:
Added PDF button to the grid to create a PDF document based on current filter and group by settings.
Fixed Drag and Drop attachment produces error when accordion is pushed below items grid
Fixed Audit Trails always shows items edited through customer portal are edited as the initial contact assigned to item
Fixed Custom picklist using customers list which contain ” ‘ ” produces an error if you edit the item
Fixed Adding attachments to large text field error if adding a non-image file
Fixed Adding attachments into large text fields would not work intermittently
Fixed “Enforce workflow step selection for items” setting should not affect other settings in edit project
Fixed Deleting workflow being used by project produces error on save project
Fixed Edit project produces an error if a large text field is assigned to the project
Fixed Users could not save item in a new workflow step if user permission didn’t allow move to another step
Fixed Add user licenses on manage users produces error in Installed version
Fixed Customer contact not being inserted on add item if selected on accordion
Fixed Viewing a project then closing window would cause grid not to update any project selection after
Fixed Edit button disabled in view menu if user only has workflow edit privileges
Fixed “Notify Customer” checkbox is not selectable in IE9
Fixed Selected Team Member is not getting assigned to the <assigned to> field on add item
Fixed Adding users with new user defaults produces error
Fixed When adding team members through the accordion, the user list was not getting refreshed after save
Fixed User options menu not scrollable
Fixed Linking wiki page inside editor produces error
Fixed Wiki pages disappearing after add in some cases
Fixed Wiki pages for Archived Projects do not display in the wiki tab
Fixed Projects and Releases assigned in field templates are not being applied on add item
This past weekend, we released a major new update to the TransferBigFiles.com site. The update features:
A brand new user interface that looks nicer and is much easier to use!
Streamlined interactions to eliminate unnecessary page loads making the site much faster!
New contact management features which add drag-and-drop contact grouping so you can easily send transfers to a whole group of people
A new tutorial system that shows you how to use the new TransferBigFiles.com interface
A new “Favorites” feature to quickly see the transfers that are important to you
As with the major release of OnTime a few weeks ago, the new TransferBigFiles.com updates are all about continuously making the product easier to use and super fast while maintaining an exceptionally low price.
Almost every day prospects who are evaluating OnTime will ask us “how does OnTime compare to [Fill in a Competitor's Name]?” Of course, the answer to this question is very subjective and requires a detailed analysis of the needs of the prospect. It might not matter how fast two cars can go from 0-60 if the prospect is looking for a minivan with sliding doors. In software, the problem has additional complications because new releases are constantly changing the specs. Keeping up and answering that question totally accurately and objectively is impossible for a vendor.
But there is one spec that rarely changes and is less subjective: Price. Any vendor can provide a truthful and objective price comparison chart. Some make their prices hard to find, so we thought it might be helpful to put together an Agile/Scrum Tools price comparison for different user counts. Most of these competing products are probably great, but if the tools from multiple vendors meet your needs, your costs may play a big role in your decision-making process. This chart may be helpful:
SaaS Agile Tools – Pricing Comparison for 1 Year
10 Users
20 Users
60 Users
120 Users
OnTime Scrum
$100
per year
$1,400
per year
$4,200
per year
$7,200
per year
Jira + Greenhopper
$200
per year
$1,500
per year
$4,500
per year
$7,500
per year
FogBugz
$3,000
per year
$6,000
per year
$18,000
per year
$36,000
per year
Target Process
$3,000
per year
$6,000
per year
$18,000
per year
$36,000
per year
ScrumWorks
$3,000
per year
$6,000
per year
$13,500
per year
$25,500
per year
Ultimate Edition
$4,680
per year
$9,360
per year
$28,080
per year
$56,160
per year
Ultimate Edition
$5,880
per year
$11,760
per year
$35,280
per year
$70,560
per year
In addition to choosing a product based on how it serves your needs and taking cost into consideration…choosing which company you will be working with ought to factor into your decision as well. I know it’s a big deal when I make choices about the software that Axosoft uses.
Your criteria will vary, of course, but I think it’s important to say that Axosoft is constantly striving to be the type of company with which we would actually enjoy doing business. What does that mean? To us it means:
Having a phone number that reaches real live people
Having smart employees who can answer questions quickly
Having super fast support that gets to the bottom of issues quickly, communicates efficiently, and helps customers accomplish what they need to do with our software
Never outsourcing support! Talking to a script-reading support rep half-way around the world on a 1/2 second delay is not our idea of saving money on support costs.
Providing refunds if we screw up, or if our customer is not happy
Producing frequent product updates that provides meaningful improvements for our customers
If you follow this blog, you know that we made a ton of new announcements this week (new products, pricing, web sites, logos, etc.). Last Friday, we had a little pre-release party that inevitably led to a few of us taping our iPhones to nerf guns.
Today, I’m excited to announce our biggest transformations to date – for both the OnTime product and Axosoft as a company. This transformation is bigger than just a new product announcement or a new pricing strategy. It’s also a fundamental change in how we will do business in the future. We’re changing a lot of things and I want to go through the process and the reasoning behind why we are making these changes.
Most of the Axosoft Team as of March 2012
It’s hard to believe that 2012 marks the 10-year anniversary of Axosoft and OnTime. A lot has changed since 2002 when I first started developing OnTime. Desktop applications were still predominant. Google wasn’t even synonymous with search yet (remember AltaVista?). Gmail and Google Apps didn’t exist. Neither did iPhones and iPads. There were some rumblings about social networks like Friendster, but Facebook wasn’t even a neurotransmission in Mark Zuckerberg’s big brain.
Axosoft has changed, too. We’ve grown from a one-man shop (me) to just shy of 30 people, and we’ve done it profitably and organically without any outside funding. We’ve gone from my little home office to a roomy 12,000-sq-ft facility in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona. It features a gym, showers and a game room / lounge (you should join us, we’re hiring).
Axosoft’s Infrastructure
Some of the changes we’ve experienced over the past decade have been related to the technologies we use to run Axosoft. Looking back, we have seen the following transitions within Axosoft:
We switched from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to Google Mail and Calendar
We use Microsoft Word & Excel less and less and started creating and sharing documents and spreadsheets with Google Docs
We started replacing Dell Notebooks and Desktops with MacBooks and iMacs.
We abolished Internet Explorer in favor of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari.
We hung up on our Blackberry and Windows Mobile smartphones and began answering our iPhones
We traded Microsoft Windows’ hour glass for Apple OS X’s spinning beach ball
We used fewer desktop apps and more cloud apps.
The changes in the products that we depend on to run Axosoft, got a few of us thinking about the whys and hows of these product transitions. Why were we changing products that were already working for us? and most importantly:
How do new products win in a market that is already dominated by established and well-funded players?
Since we are a software company that is often going up against established and well-funded players (even Microsoft is one of our competitors), we thought it would be important to answer that question. We started examining the products we had been switching to and they all appeared to have the following things in common:
Feature Rich – Although the new products didn’t necessarily have the same features as the products we were switching from, they never lacked the must-have functional requirements and often had killer new features of their own that we never had before.
Easy to Use - All the new products that we had switched to were significantly easier to use than what they replaced. That meant we had much lower ramp-up curves to learn how to use the new product and less reading of documentation.
Fast - All the new products we were using were faster than what they replaced. We could accomplish the same tasks in much shorter times.
Cheap – In all cases, the new solutions we were using were similarly priced or cheaper than what they replaced. Now, before you say, “What about the Apple tax? Aren’t Macs more expensive than Dells?” The answer is actually no. Here is an article I wrote on the subject several years ago.
The Sweet Spot
So, if we were to visualize their commonalities…it would look something like this:
The best tools are Feature Rich, Fast, Easy and Cheap
Virtually all the products we were switching to landed right in the “Sweet Spot” of the diagram. Surprisingly, even in very mature markets, there is still a black hole (as far as products go) in the sweet spot. Well, this is where we want to be in everything we do at Axosoft moving forward.
So we asked the question “how does OnTime V10 (that was the current version of OnTime back then) measure up against this diagram?”
We realized we had become the Microsoft of project management software for developers in the following ways:
We had an extremely feature rich app that was not exceptionally fast or easy. We could argue that we were pretty cheap at $19 per user per month or a 10-user edition of our product for $29/month. But with Express, Pro and Enterprise versions of our software, the price could go up to $37 per user per month. Our pricing was both confusing and not exceptionally cheap. On our diagram, here is where OnTime belonged back in 2010.
OnTime V10 was only feature rich.
So starting 2 years ago, we set out to change that. After an 18-month rewrite of our OnTime Web product, with a focus on fast and easy, we released OnTime V11 in July of 2011. And we can truly say that OnTime 11 is now a category-leading product for ease of use and speed. As a result, OnTime 11 has been our most successful SaaS offering to date. That was a promising start, but we hadn’t touched pricing. In fact, all the conventional wisdom on pricing is that “you can increase your price, but you can’t reduce your price in the software business.” Every software CEO I spoke with advised us not to reduce price. It’s also risky to reduce price because a reduction in price guarantees that you will lower revenues if you don’t substantially increase volume.
With the release of OnTime 11, we had done well and turning back to our diagram, we had made great progress:
OnTime V11 was Feature Rich, Fast and Easy, but not Cheap
But we still weren’t in the sweet spot, which brought us to pricing. In all fairness, though, OnTime was priced competitively when compared against most solutions in our space. Plus, OnTime has traditionally included 3 products in 1: Scrum with bug tracking, Help Desk with a Customer Portal and a Team Wiki. But…while Axosoft and OnTime have enjoyed tremendous success, Atlassian’s JIRA has shown that having a feature-rich product that is also cheap, can be an extremely powerful force in a market that’s missing a sweet-spot product.
JIRA is Cheap, but not Fast or Easy to use
So we decided to start working on making OnTime’s pricing exceptional. Starting today, we will offer OnTime Now (the Hosted/SaaS version of OnTime) as 3 separate products:
OnTime Scrum (includes bug tracking)
OnTime Help Desk (includes a web-based customer portal)
OnTime Team Wiki (perfect for dev team collaboration)
To make pricing exceptionally attractive and simple, our new pricing is:
$7 per user per month for each product
For teams of 10 users (or fewer) it’s just $10 per month for the entire team
To give you an idea of how this compares to our old pricing, OnTime has traditionally been priced at $19 per user per month (for Pro) and $37 per user (for Enterprise). Since most of our customers are mainly interested in OnTime for Scrum project management and bug tracking, a team of 20 was paying up to $740 per month. Today, that same team can pay as little as just $140 per month. That’s an example of up to an 81% price reduction!
OnTime OnPremises (Installed)
These changes will not affect the OnTime OnPremises (customer installed version of OnTime). OnTime OnPremises will continue to be sold as a Pro edition and an Enterprise edition for the same pricing as before. Installed applications are more complex to sell and support which is why these pricing modifications are not being applied to our installed offering.
Our New Pricing vs. Competitors
Prior to today, the low-priced leader in the industry was Atlassian’s JIRA. There were no other “feature rich” products designed for software developers that were cheaper than JIRA. Products like BaseCamp, Trello and Asana, while they are wonderful products, don’t fall into this category because they are general purpose tools that are not feature-rich for scrum or agile software development teams. For example, none of them fully offer custom fields, custom workflows, the ability to determine which fields show up on add/edit forms, automated burndown charts, and a slew of other features that are required by Scrum and Agile teams. That’s why I’m not including those products for consideration in this article.
So this is how we compare to other feature-rich Scrum and agile tools:
1 Year SaaS Pricing Comparison for Axosoft OnTime vs. Atlassian JIRA, RallyDev, VersionOne
With this pricing change, OnTime is now the lowest priced Scrum project management tool on the market for most teams, sometimes by an order of magnitude. So now for a similar price to Atlassian’s JIRA, dev teams can obtain a cohesive, enterprise-class Scrum product that is feature rich, easy to use and exceptionally fast.
We think we’ve nailed the Sweet Spot with OnTime V12.
OnTime V12 Hits the Sweet Spot of Feature Rich, Fast, Easy and Cheap
Honda Civic vs. Mercedes Benz
We suspect that some of our over-priced competitors will look at our new pricing and make the comment, “you get what you pay for,” or “you can’t expect to pay the same for a luxurious Mercedes Benz as you would for a Honda Civic.” While those traditional sentiments and analogies may generally hold true for physical goods, they don’t apply to software.
With physical goods, the old adage, “you get what you pay for” is generally true, but it doesn’t necessarily apply to software. With software, each user gets a product that’s worth what the entire group of users has collectively paid for.
It’s worth examining what that means. Since the cost of a new user is exceptionally low for software vendors, price is simply a function of volume. If a software product that costs $50 million to develop attracts 100 million users, it will generate fantastic profits even if it’s priced at just $1 per user (for simplicity’s sake, I’m ignoring the cost of supporting each user). That same product would lose millions of dollars at a price of $1,000 per user, if it only attracted a few thousand users at that price point. In contrast, if Mercedes Benz could sell 100 million cars tomorrow for $10,000 each, they would lose a fantastic amount of money. Despite the $1 trillion in revenues these sales would generate, the cost of producing 100 million Mercedes Benz sedans will far exceed $1 trillion in materials alone.
So, in the software industry sometimes it is possible for the Mercedes Benz of software to have a Honda price tag! It might even have a skateboard price tag! ”You get what you pay for” doesn’t apply. Another way to put this is that it’s impossible to tell which software product is the Mercedes Benz of its class based on price alone. You’re better off giving it a test drive and deciding for yourself.
New Web Sites Too
With the launch of OnTime V12, the new products, and the amazing new pricing, we also decided to really jazz up our web site. We went back to the drawing board and started the web site from scratch. We decided that Axosoft.com should be all about the company, careers, our blog and an overview of our product offerings. We want each individual product line to get its own super-focused web site. So, all the information about OnTime is provided on the OnTimeNow.com site. OnTimeNow.com provides more information and screenshots than ever before and getting started with OnTime has never been easier than with the all new Getting Started Page.
Here’s to the Next 10 Years
The last 10 years have been an incredible ride. I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the smartest people in the industry, doing some really cool things together.
We hope you like all the changes and our commitment to passionately pursue the sweet spot in everything that we do from here on. Please, don’t hesitate to tell us what you think in the comments. Here’s to the next 10 years…
Last year we announced that, moving forward, Axosoft would focus more on the OnTime Web client while the OnTime Windows client would be put on cruise control. A lot of people interpreted that to mean that we wouldn’t be updating the OnTime Visual Studio addon in the near future.
That is absolutely not the case.
In fact, with the OnTime Windows client taking a bit of a back seat, we’ve had time to focus on rebuilding the OnTime Visual Studio extension from scratch to make it better than ever. And for the first time, the new Visual Studio addon/plugin/extension (whatever it’s called these days) will work with the OnTime OnDemand product!
Setup & Configuration of OnTime Visual Studio Extension
Let’s start with the little stuff…
We wanted setting up and configuring the OnTime Visual Studio extension to be as simple as possible. You can find the new OnTime VS Plugin in the Visual Studio Extension Gallery. Of course, you can install it from the built-in Extension Manager in Visual Studio with just few clicks. The install process has become exceptionally easy.
Once installed, configuring the extension to work with your OnTime OnDemand (or OnTime V12+ OnPremises installation) is super easy. All you need is the URL to your OnTime installation and your normal login credentials:
OnTime V12 VS Plugin Configuration
Now you’re ready to go.
Improved Everything
If you used the old OnTime Visual Studio plugin, you’ll immediately notice that everything has been improved:
Improved grid with powerful filtering
Support for Subitems (parent/child relationship)
Completely new Add/Edit/View form with an updated look and feel
New side panel for item detail information
Faster response times
Improved overall look & feel
If you’ve never used the OnTime Visual Studio plugin before, it’s time to take a serious look because it lets developers:
Easily view any items assigned to you or reported by you
Add new items easily or Edit and View any existing items in the system
Quickly add attachments, comments, etc. from the side panel
Quickly mark items as complete or move them along the workflow
Work with OnTime items without ever leaving the Visual Studio IDE
Here are some screenshots to give you a taste of the new look and feel:
NOTE: This blog post only pertains to our hosted customers on the OnTime Now system. If you are using OnTime in an Installed environment, these announcements will not affect you in any way.
Today, we are announcing a lot of new changes that will affect your OnTime Now account and pricing in a very positive way. It’s quite exciting actually, so lets get started:
Going forward, we are offering OnTime as 3 individual and fully integrated products:
OnTime Scrum (project management & bug tracking)
OnTime Help Desk (customer support and web-based customer portal)
OnTime Team Wiki (dev team collaboration)
Starting today, each of these products will cost just $7 per user per month.
If you signed up prior to April 1st, 2012, your account will contain all 3 of these products automatically for the same or a lower price than you were paying before.
Additionally, your account has been upgraded to include OnTime Customer Portal for an unlimited number of customer logins. And of course, we’re talking about the new and improved OnTime Customer Portal.
We have also grandfathered you into a much lower price per user if you choose to keep all 3 products.
I have also written a long blog post about the reasoning behind all the changes.
We have made it easier than ever to manage your account, adjust users, add and remove products or cancel your account entirely. Any OnTime administrator can now do this from inside of the OnTime product from the “Tools” menu by choosing “Manage Account.”
OnTime V12 Tools Menu Manage Account
OnTime V12 Manage Account
There’s also lots of other new features in OnTime V12 to be excited about too. Here are some of my favorites:
Redesigned OnTime Customer Portal (for YOUR customers)
The OnTime Customer Portal which allows your customers to report bugs, see your product backlog and manage support incidents, has been re-written from scratch. The new interface matches the new OnTime look and feel, performance and ease of use. Best of all, if you didn’t have the OnTime Customer Portal before, you’re in for a nice treat. All existing OnTime Now customers will get the new OnTime Customer Portal included as part of their account starting today!
OnTime V12 Customer Portal
We’ve also re-built and re-organized the configuration screens to make them easier:
OnTime V12 Customer Portal Settings
Users can self-register (and you may optionally require approval before they are allowed in the system):
OnTime V12 Customer Portal
New System Options Screens
OnTime’s system options were starting to become complex. We’ve re-worked the System Options and consolidated a number of screens to make it simpler to navigate:
OnTime V12 System Options
New Manage Users Screen
The manage users screen has also be re-worked to be easier and faster to work with:
OnTime V12 Manage Users
New Projects Screens
Projects in OnTime are extremely powerful. Since projects can represent departments, products or any other organizational or product hierarchy, OnTime allows you to have different field templates (arrangement of fields and default values for fields) as well as different workflows for each project. By default, each project inherits the settings from its immediate parent making management of these settings extremely easy. In OnTime V12, the project management screens have been completely redone to make them much easier to configure and work with.
OnTime V12 Add/Edit Project Window
We hope you like what you see as we continue to work on making OnTime Easier and Faster with every release.
It is challenging to find a good, high-level summary of Scrum that you can share with your team. One that visually describes the core concepts of the methodology in a way that anybody can understand. After having produced the new Scrum in 10 Minutes video, we decided to take a stab at this using the visuals from the video. What do you think?
Late last year, I felt it was about time to update the now 3-year old “Scrum in Under 10 Minutes” video. The video has been immensely popular having been viewed over 600,000 times. In that time I have received a tremendous amount of great feedback for improvements to the video. I had a few ideas of my own too, so I wanted to see if we could redo the video and still keep it under 10 minutes.
For nearly a year I’ve also had the pleasure of working with Shane, Axosoft’s resident videographer. Shane is an amazing artist and he helped make the new scrum video visually unbelievable. We’ve been working on the new version of the video for nearly 3 months (actually mostly Shane has been working on it and I just keep bugging him), and it’s finally ready for its debut.
It’s been less than 45 days since I wrote about the great new features in OnTime 11.1, and we already have another substantial release with lots of new features. I want to highlight some of my favorites.
Confirmation and Undo
With the new drag-and-drop functionality that was introduced in 11.1, we made it a lot simpler to make changes to a large number of items at the same time. For example, just select a bunch of items, drag them to a team member, project or release and instantly those items are reassigned. Drag one item(s) onto another item, and you’ve just created a subitem with a parent / child relationship. It’s a wonderful time-saving feature, unless of course you drop the items you’re dragging onto the wrong parent item, team member, project or release.
In 11.2, the new confirmation system will inform you of what you just did and when possible, it will give you the option to undo it for 30 seconds:
Ooops! You just reassigned 9 items to Joe instead of John? No problem. Undo.
Ooops! You didn’t mean to drop 4 items onto another item, making them into subitems? No problem. Undo.
It’s great knowing it’s there, even if you never use it.
Quick Add
Sometimes, when you want to add several features (or user stories) into OnTime at once, all you want to do is add the title of each item successively — getting all of the features out of your head and into OnTime. You can later assign them to the appropriate team member and provide additional details.
Quick Add is your new best friend:
When you use the keyboard shortcut [C] to add a new item, the new Quick Add form immediately opens up giving you the ability to quickly add the title, hit [ENTER] and be on your way. But for those times when you want the full add form to open, no sweat! Just hit [TAB] and the full add form will open. What makes the Quick Add form really great is that all of the default values from your field template are preserved, even for fields that you can’t see. So if your field templates defines new items to be assigned to the {CURRENT USER} by default, they will be automatically assigned to the user who is creating the new item. Additionally, the Quick Add form will even show required fields. It’s another amazing time saving feature that I no longer can live without.
We realize that this could be a love-it or hate-it feature, so users can optionally turn off the quick add of new items from User Options. I wasn’t crazy about having the ability to turn it off because it’s such a wonderful time saver, especially when combined with field template default values and required fields. But, of course, not everyone uses OnTime the same way I do. I still encourage everyone to give it a try for at least a few days.
Internally, we like Quick Add so much that it is inspiring us to improve and speed up other process, like adding Releases and Team Members (Users).
This is how Quick Add looks when adding Releases:
And this is the quick add screen for adding team members:
The new Quick Add form for Team Members has also reworked how new users are added. Now, new users will receive an email with a link for login and on their first login, they’ll be asked to set their own password. You no longer need to choose a password for new users.
A New Tutorial System
You’ve added your new team members to the OnTime system, but now what? Each time you add a new user, they need a little introduction to how things work. So we built a new Tutorial System that does just that.
When new users logs in, OnTime will give them a quick introductory lesson so they know how to get around. It should allow your new users to get the most out of the system.
There are also new tutorials for brand new databases to show new OnTime administrators how things work. Building the new tutorial system was the hard part. Now that we have it, we’ll be improving it and adding more tutorials in future releases.
Improved Appearance
You’ll find a lot of areas in OnTime that have been improved with a slightly refreshed look. The new view form is much more sleek as are the new add/edit forms:
The attachments section has been revamped:
So has the comments section:
Even the dialog buttons have changed for the better:
And now you can use [Ctrl][Shift] S to save your changes in the add/edit windows without having to pickup your hands from the keyboard.
Using Agile/Scrum Terminology
When you create a new OnTime database, the first time you log in, you will be given the choice of using Traditional or Agile/Scrum terminology.
This dialog simplifies the setup for scrum and agile teams. For example, rather than referring to items as Features, it will refer to them as User Stories. The flexibility to do this has always been in the OnTime system, but it wasn’t always easy to figure out. The new terminology setup simplifies the setup process and you can always customize it further through Tools -> System Options.
Note: If you are currently evaluating OnTime, you can reset your database in order to access the “Choose Terminology” option and the new Administrator Tutorial. Resetting the database will also delete all existing data from the system. You can reset your database from the Tools Menu -> Other -> Reset Data.
Lots of Minor Improvements Too
There are a lot of other improvements. Little things like the ability to type “8h” in a time field to represent “8 Hours” as opposed to having to type “8[space]h”. Or the new keyboard shortcuts [Z], [/] and [Ctrl][Shfit]+S to Undo, Search or Save and Close without moving your hands off the keyboard. Or the ability to quickly collapse all subitems and only view the parent items using the Parent indicator triangle in the header of the grid.
What’s Coming in 2012?
It’s rare for us to talk about what we plan to do in future releases of OnTime, but with our re-write of the OnTime Web in V11, there were a few things that were left out. So I thought it might be appropriate to candidly talk about some of the things that we hope to improve in 2012:
Improvements to Administrative Features - The OnTime Web V11 re-write didn’t include all the administrative UIs. In other words, we’ve got some left over ‘look and feel’ issues to address — things like managing security, workflows, field templates, etc. In 2012, we hope to gradually re-write and re-think each of these management areas to make them easier to use, consistent with our current UI standards, and we want them to deliver an unprecedented user experience.
OnTime Customer Portal – we are long overdue for a major rewrite of the Customer Portal. While the current customer portal provides a nice feature set, the user experience is not even remotely close to Axosoft’s new standards.
Visual Studio Integration – We’ve had OnTime as an add-in for Visual Studio since 2004, and this component can also benefit from an overhaul. I think our OnTime Windows client users who also use Visual Studio will be pleased with what we are going to do in this area.
Updated APIs – We have an awesome API set under the hood in OnTime and we hope to expose that for other developers before the end of 2012.
Dashboards & Charts – You’re going to get more charting than you ever thought you wanted.
There are a lot of other great things planned for 2012, but this should give you an idea of the functional areas that are high on our list. Just because it’s not in the above list doesn’t mean we’re not working on it. As you can see in the 11.2 release, we are now pumping out a ton of new functionality which includes both major and minor improvements.
This past weekend, we released a major new update to the 
