Since the day we began adapting OnTime for the Scrum process, it has been a huge priority on our roadmap.  Likewise, the more we dove into the methodology for development purposes, the more we realized that wanted to adopt this methodology internally.

Today Scrum is embedded within Axosoft’s company culture of getting things done. For example, our entire company participates in stand-up meetings — not just the dev team — as we strive to become an agile company, not just a company with a single department that uses an agile process.

Along the way, we’ve created some tools to help people understand and implemenmt Scrum.

Invaluable Tool #1: Learn Scrum in Under 10 Minutes

Like many organizations, we sent several of our team members to Scrum training, but then we saw the need for a quick presentation to get everyone else in the company (and future new hires) up to speed with high-level concepts.

So, to get our own team where it needed to be quickly, we developed what would become (much to our surprise!) the world’s most-viewed and highest-rated Scrum video ever created. As of this writing, the original video has been viewed over 650,000 times.

Here’s an updated version that we released just a couple of months ago.

Invaluable Tool #2: The Scrum Diagram

The video did its job explaining the high level concepts of Scrum in about 8 minutes. Next, we challenged ourselves to create a visual tool that could a) summarize the process visually at-a-glance and b) could be referred to more easily than the video.

Our Scrum Diagram was born, and it proved to be perfect for sharing and printing.

Want it? Download the Scrum Diagram PDF.

Invaluable Tool #3: OnTime Scrum

 Of course, the ultimate Scrum tool we offer is the one that our team eats, breathes, and sleeps: OnTime Scrum.

Understanding Scrum is important, but once you understand it — it needs to stay out of the way so you can actually get things done.  That’s where OnTime Scrum comes in.  Backlog management, sprint and release management, and burndown charts exist to make dev teams stronger, not to give them extra overhead to futz around with.

OnTime automates these important aspects of Scrum, and it has a lot of other features that make developers’ and managers’ lives easier: workflow automation, notifications and alerts, security roles, work logs, SCM & IDE integration, serious customization to ensure a good fit, and it’s mobile ready.

OnTime is refreshingly easy to use, yet it has an enterprise-level feature set. It’s extremely fast, and we don’t even have to add the qualification “…for a hosted software product.” It’s gmail fast, keyboard shortcuts and all.  Rounding out the trifecta, it’s unbelievably affordable at just $7 per user (small teams of 10 or fewer users get it for even less!).

Sign up & start the OnTime Scrum Tutorial Now »
Learn more about OnTime Scrum »

The problem, of course, is that great software engineers are hard to find, so we want to do something that will help awesome software developers find us.  Check this out:

1) Every new software engineer that we hire between now and August 1st will receive ALL of the items in this ultimate geek toy set:

That’s right. And this gift set will be for personal use and it’s yours on day 1 if you are a software engineer who gets hired between now and August 1st at Axosoft. No strings attached. The gifts are yours to keep…at home! At work, you’ll get the ultimate iMac 27″ with SSD drive and the works. Plus, you’ll get to work with some of Arizona’s smartest people and top software engineers in a pretty cool environment.

So the full list of the toys you get on Day 1 are:

• MacBook Air 13″ Model – The ultimate in portable laptops.
• New iPad 16GB Model – Need we say more?
• Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 – And you can control the thing through your new iPad! It’s crazy fun.
• Xbox 360 4GB Console with Kinect - You need some way to loosen up when you get home.
• GoPro Hero 2 Camera – Attach this thing to your helmet when you go sky-diving in Eloy.
• Bose QuietComfort 15 – This noise canceling headset is the ultimate in quality sound that makes you forget the outside world.
• Apple TV – Enjoy iTunes, Netflix and Airplay on your big screen.
• Roku HD – Hulu anyone?
• Kindle Fire – Give this one to your kids or significant other to keep them off of your new iPad!

2) Not a software engineer yourself? No worries, do your software engineer friends a favor by sending them to Axosoft. If they get hired, they get the cool toys listed above and you get a $600 Best Buy gift card so you can get some cool toys for yourself.

Ready to join the Axosoft Team? Apply Here (no resume needed!) or see all of our Company Benefits and Openings Here.

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

We hope you like the update!

• 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.

The all new TransferBigFiles.com

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
• and just no BS ever — we mean it.

Feel free to let us know how we’re doing.

This was a memorable battle:

By the way, we’re hiring! Come join us.

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…

Sincerely,

Hamid Shojaee
Founder & CEO
Axosoft

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:

OnTime V12 Visual Studio Extension

OnTime V12 VS Extension - View Item

OnTime V12 VS Extension - Edit Item

OnTime V12 VS Plugin - SubItem Support

OnTime V12 VS AddIn - Add Work Log

Let us know what you think.

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.

Download the Scrum Overview Diagram PDF

We are releasing this Scrum Overview Diagram under the Creative Commons 3.0 license so you can share it or put it on your own blog.