We are still several months from the release of OnTime V11, but the development progress is coming along incredibly nicely. You see, V11 is a major upgrade for us. We decided to put the brakes on adding new features. OnTime V10 is already the most feature-packed product in the industry. It’s also a leading tool in terms of ease of use and usability. But we want to be the tool that every software developer enjoys using every single day. While OnTime is on the short list of the top software project management tools, it’s safe to say that none of the tools in our industry are particularly enjoyed by software engineers who use them.
That’s because software engineers know what’s possible and they are rarely satisfied with any product. There are some exceptions. One such tool is GMail. GMail, by far the most popular email client used by software engineers, is a tool that even software engineers rave about. GMail is brilliantly simple, yet feature-packed and unbelievably fast. In fact, until GMail debuted, most software engineers thought that the performance results seen in GMail was virtually impossible from a web-based application.
When we started the development of OnTime V11, we challenged ourselves to “deliver the user experience of GMail in OnTime V11.”
To do that, we have to nail a lot of different things perfectly. It’s a big challenge. In some respects, it’s even tougher than GMail itself because GMail deals with managing the incoming mail of a single user. Emails have very limited number of fields (to/from/cc/bcc/subject/body). Emails are nearly always organized by date and they are all read-only. In an email application, there’s never hundreds of other users making changes, adding custom fields, creating filters and editing the very same items that you happen to be looking at. Email, by comparison, is a walk in the park.
Taking all the complexities of a multi-user project management software into consideration, delivering a GMail-like user experience seemed impossible. It’s a far more complex task. We are talking about querying on dozens of fields, including custom fields, sorting the results and possibly grouping it by yet another field all the while grabbing the currently selected item’s attachments, related items and other pertinent information to be displayed in a beautifully simple user interface. Some thought “it can’t be done.” I may have been one of them.
It wasn’t going to be easy. That was for sure. I knew that if we wanted our tool to be enjoyed by millions of developers worldwide, we had to try everything we could. So we did.
We started with a complete re-write of the main OnTime Web Home Page. That’s the screen where the vast majority of OnTime users spend 99% of their time when working in OnTime. Since we were re-writing the page from scratch, we also redesigned the UI with the User Experience on top of mind. This new home page has been the focus of our development efforts for nearly a year and I’m happy to say that our results so far have exceeded our most optimistic goals.
Here are some words that I would use to describe the new OnTime V11 Home Page:
I can’t wait to show you some screenshots and videos of what we have built, but that will have to wait until next week when I will give a sneak preview of OnTime V11 to the crowd coming to the free Arizona Scott Guthrie event on April 22nd. If you are in Arizona and can make this event, I highly recommend it. ScottGu does an amazing job every year and as usual, I will be taking the stage for about 10 minutes to do a short talk on a couple of different topics. One of my topics will be the preview of OnTime V11.
I’m excited to announce that we have decided to make both RocketSVN Server (Subversion Server for Windows) and RocketSVN for VS (SVN add-in for VS) 100% free. Indefinitely. For unlimited users.
While we have been doing great additions to both open source projects (Ankh and Subversion), we decided it was important not to charge for the work we’ve done. We’re also happy to make the RocketSVN Server source code available on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/rocket-svn-server/
This gives everyone access to the web-based UI and code we’ve written for the Windows Authentication integration to run Subversion on top of IIS.
I just realized that my last post to the Ship Software OnTime blog was back in February of 2010. This year has zipped by. It’s been an absolutely amazing year for us at Axosoft and I wanted to end it with a quick summary of some of Axosoft’s 2010 highlights:
New Offices
In April of this year, we took advantage of the low real-estate prices and bought (not rented) a brand new office space that was built to our specifications. The space has been amazingly energizing and we’re very proud of it because we believe it provides a balance between worker privacy, high level of collaboration and an inviting atmosphere.
At the heart of our new office design is the 6-person team work room. Every employee at Axosoft (minus the receptionist and accounting) works inside of one of these team rooms. These team work rooms are our own design and they feature:
An open atmosphere to facilitate team collaboration
A closed atmosphere so that the chatter of one team does not affect the productivity of another
Screen privacy. While every work room has one opening at the center, the wall with the entrance is a glass-wall that contains a privacy film preventing a walker in the hall from seeing screens of individuals.
Lots of whiteboards. Whiteboards are important to productivity, so every work room is covered from wall to wall with a 4′ high “Wall Talker.”
We did a ton of research on the design of our new offices and experimented with numerous configurations before we settled on the 6-person work rooms. Coming into this space, we were all a bit nervous because none of us had ever worked in such an environment. We were going from Cubes to these 6-person offices. The transition turned out to be unbelievably smooth. Within the first 3 days, everyone felt at home and I would hear chatter about how much superior this configuration was to the cubicles we had left behind. I personally went from an isolated one-person office to one of these team rooms and I absolutely love it!
Some of the other features of our new offices include:
Flex Offices – There are times when users need that extra bit of privacy for a private phone call or they need to be on a long conference call, need some concentration time or need to make a recording (we do a lot of videos here at Axosoft), so we built flex offices that anybody can use.
Gym – We decided to create a gym complete with rowing machine, stationary bike, treadmill, free weights and kettle bells. The “box” is ideal for the new hard-core crossfit addicts.
Showers - Having a gym would be useless without showers, so our new offices feature two showers so that employees can sweat it out and still smell great at the office.
Lounge – Our little lounge area has a big-screen, an XBox 360, Nintendo Wii and some foam guns. Be careful.
Along with the new offices, one of the best investments we made in 2010 was in buying everyone new chairs. In deciding on the chair, we did our own research. We obtained sample chairs from Herman Miller (the Aeron , Mirra and Cella), Steelcase (the Leap), HumanScale (Liberty) and 9 to 5 (Strata). Then we decided that every employee would work on every chair for at least 1 hour, then pass it on. After experimenting with all the chairs, each employee would make their top 2 picks. We also decided to hide the cost of each chair so that nobody would be influenced by the price of the chairs.
Almost immediately, the 9 to 5 chair was out of contention. After a few rounds, the Human Scale Liberty was also out. The Herman Miller Cella got the reaction “what were they thinking?”. So it was a showdown between the Herman Miller Mirra, the Herman Miller Aeron and the Steelcase Leap chairs. The Mirra beat out the Aeron in comfort from numerous people’s experience. However the overall winner and top preferred pick was the Steelcase Leap chair. It also turned out to be the most expensive of all the chairs we tested at nearly $800 each.
We’ve been extremely fortunate in that we are overtaking an empty office shell next door to us and more than doubling our office space once again to over 12,000 square feet of space! Until March of 2010, we were crammed into a 3,000 square feet space. The new space will be a natural extension of our existing space with similar design and should be completed in April of 2011.
Besides OnTime 2010 (V10.0), this year, we also launched a couple of new Subversion-related products:
RocketSVN for Visual Studio - This Ankh-based Subversion client takes the popoular open-source Ankh Subversion tool which integrates SVN features inside the Visual Studio environment and adds easy-to-use keyboard shortcuts, integration with the OnTime Project Management Software and some other enhancements that we thought users will find useful.
For OnTime users who use the RocketSVN for Visual Studio client, they will find that all changes and commits can be easily associated with defects, features and tasks that are tracked in the OnTime system. Users can easily move OnTime items to the appropriate workflow step directly from RocketSVN for VS. The integration between OnTime and RocketSVN for Visual Studio makes this the ideal SVN client for Visual Studio & OnTime users.
Currently, RocketSVN for Visual Studio is Free! As we continue to enhance the product, we expect to eventually start charging $49 per user to provide the funds needed to continue its development.
RocketSVN Server for Windows – Subversion users on Windows have always been longing for something easier and more integrated with the way Windows users work. RocketSVN Server for Windows is designed for Microsoft-centered teams that want to use Windows-integrated authentication and/or they want Subversion to run on IIS.
Additionally, the RocketSVN Web interface makes the administration of users, repositories and groups a lot easier. Surely beats the old edit a text file to add a new user method.
Currently, the RocketSVN Server is Free during the beta period. After the release, we expect the pricing will be 100% Free for the first 2 users and $79 per user for the 3rd user and on. Additionally, RocketSVN Server licenses will include the ability for RocketSVN for Visual Studio clients to access the RocketSVN Server without needing any additional licenses. So a 2-person team will be able to use both RocketSVN Server and RocketSVN for Visual Studio 100% free! It’s the ideal Subversion Server for Window & IIS.
Axosoft has been offering its flagship OnTime solution as a hosted service (SaaS) since 2003. However, for the most part, our sales had been dominated with licensed (installed) purchases instead of the SaaS solution.
In 2009 we decided to do an in-depth study as to why that was the case. What we found was quite surprising. Our SaaS offering had a huge performance variation depending on the geographical location of the end-user. What we found is that users in Arizona, California and some surrounding US states might get a page load time of say 1 second while users on the East Coast of the US might experience that same page in 2-3 seconds. In Europe, it was even worse, 4-5 seconds. In Australia it could reach 6 seconds.
That was completely unacceptable. We were absolutely floored. At first, we thought maybe it’s our data center, however we had chosen one of the leading data center providers (Limelight) and after further testing, we eliminated that as the culprit. We then tested other applications provided by other big-name SaaS providers and we found that performance does indeed vary depending on your distance, number of hops and other factors to the data center that hosts the SaaS product. In short, what we found is that the closer you are physically to a data center, the faster the performance you receive.
After we realized how severe the problem is for ALL SaaS-based products, we assembled a team of software engineers to tackle this problem and spent the next several months creating OnTime Now. We had a head start because we had already been automating our systems and SaaS offerings for nearly 6 years. Our biggest challenge was bringing on new data centers online in a fashion that was easy to manage and still made the signup process extremely easy.
The results have been tremendous. OnTime Now provides the OnTime solution in 8 different data centers around the globe:
As a result of our efforts, in 2010 we’ve seen a major shift from Installed-based purchases of OnTime to SaaS-based purchase of OnTime Now. Whether users are in the US East or West coast, somewhere in the middle, in Canada, Australia or Europe, they now have a data center near them where OnTime Now is being served. In our follow-up tests, nearly all users experience sub-second page load times. It’s been a huge success.
The best part of the new service is the way in which signup works. During the signup process, OnTime Now will automatically select the closest data center location to the user, but it also allows users to do a speed-test to make sure that particular data center is fast. If not, they have an opportunity to change the data center:
Just a couple of weeks ago, we decided to do another game-changing event. We’re now offering the OnTime Now “Express” Edition for up to 10 users for just $10 per month!
ReLaunch of TransferBigFiles.com
Remember that little weekend project that we worked on back in 2005? Well, it turned out by early 2010 the site was getting over a half-million visitors per month, so we decided to create a dedicated team of engineers to make TransferBigFiles.com the fastest file-transfer service in the world. In May of this year, we re-launched the new TransferBigFiles.com. Having learned from our experience with OnTime Now, we built TransferBigFiles to be multi-homed in 7 different data centers around the world, making the performance unprecedented. We also offered some premium paid-plans, such as up to 100GB of online storage shared among a team of corporate users, the ability to receive download notifications, a drop box feature to receive files and much more. For iPhone users, we also created a TransferBigFiles iPhone app so they can send their uncompressed HD videos to anyone wirelessly.
The new site has been a big success and TransferBigFiles.com has become the first company spun off from Axosoft.
More Shift to Apple Products
Axosoft is primarily a Microsoft dev shop, but over the past 3 years, we’ve seen ourselves unimpressed by the PC World and we’ve completely shifted our hardware purchases to Macs for several reasons. That shift has continued and even accelerated as Apple’s products continue to dominate the industry and the gap between Apple and Dell/HP/[Insert PC Vendor Here] continues to widen.
Developing on Macs also provides the most flexibility. We can run any operating system and develop for any platform. While the majority of our development is done in Windows and .NET, the ability to create iPhone and iPad apps is very appealing. Additionally, most of our non-development staff runs Mac OS X because of the ease of use, stability and performance of the operating system. It’s been an all-around win.
A recent purchase of MacBook Pros, iMac and the 27″ LED Displays
Looking Forward to 2011
We’ve had a great 2010, but even with all the exciting events of 2010, I’m especially looking forward to 2011. We have so many great things in development that I can’t wait to share.
I’ll try to keep you more updated on this blog. One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to blog more, so if you enjoy my gibberish, stay tuned…
As you know, I am super excited about the new OnTime 2010 (V10) Planning Board. This new visual interface for viewing work items is an incredibly efficient way of working with, planning, tracking and modifying projects. The planning board makes it exceptionally simple to see what is going on in a project with a quick glance.
What is unique about the OnTime Planning Board in particular is the amount of information that is communicated in that quick glance. First, there is the card itself:
Each card on the planning board is intelligently designed to be clean, yet informative. You can see the assignee, the progress, the priority, the amount of work remaining, the original estimate, the release, the current status in the workflow and even the rating of each item. But even more impressive is all the actions you can take by interacting with each card:
Quick Edit – Want to reassign the item to someone else or a different release or change its priority? Just click the area for those fields and a quick edit window will allow you to change those items and more.
Log Work – If you just logged a few hours of work on an item, just click the progress bar for that item and enter the time you spent on it. Immediately, the item’s progress bar, amount worked and remaining work are updated to reflect your work.
Move it Along Your Process – Is the item ready to go to the next stage in your workflow? Then just drag the item and drop it in the next column and voila! All the actions associated with that workflow step will automatically get executed. Items could be reassigned, email notifications sent, fields could be changed, processes can be launched and much more all with a drag-and-a-drop.
And that’s just each card! When you look at the Planning Board itself, you then see the true potential of this incredible new feature:
From the screenshot above, you can see the workflow that we have designed (#1), the grouping of items by assignee (#2) which includes the details of how many items each person is assigned, # of hours of work done and remaining and you can quick drag-and-drop items from one workflow step to the next (#3).
It simply doesn’t get any better than this! OnTime’s planning board is the world’s most powerful project management tool in existence today. Watch this video to learn more:
If you are a project manager, scrum master or product owner, drop what you are doing now and watch the video below. The new Planning Board in OnTime 2010 (V10) changes everything you know about project management tools.
It’s a brilliant new way of managing software projects. Each new feature or defect gets an intelligently designed “Card” that is packed with the essential details of each item laid out in an amazingly spacious way. Items can then be filtered and organized in a variety of ways to help project managers and scrum master manage visualize and manage the flow of each item.
But I can’t describe how amazing this is in words. You need to first watch the video, then get your hands on the Beta.
When the iPhone App Store launched, iPhone developers were impressively rewarded for their hard work and determination to get their apps on the App Store on launch day. Reading through a number of the iPhone/iPod/iPad developer groups, a similar level of excitement exists for the launch of the iPad, but unfortunately, that enthusiasm is going to die down quickly with a dose of reality.
There are a number of things that made the launch of the iPhone App Store an incredible success. Fist, there were already more than 8 million iPhones in the market by the time the App Store launched and that doesn’t count the millions more iPods that were also sold prior to the App Store launch. Then, there’s the fact that very few companies had a product to launch. On launch day, there were 500 applications available for download. The excitement was so high that nearly every one of those 500 applications received an incredible amount of free press, reviews and complimentary mentions in numerous blogs and online publications. Being first to market on the launch of the App Store, which itself was a historic event, meant that the worst applications would still receive thousands of downloads – if for no other reason, just for the curiosity factor.
The Launch of the iPad and the apps designed specifically for the iPad are going to have a significantly different story. On the day the iPad App Store launches with iPad-exclusive apps, there will be exactly -0- devices sold with owners who are eager to buy apps. Even if the iPad has an exceptionally successful launch, launch-day devices will likely number in the hundreds of thousands, not millions. To make matters worse, there are now tens of thousands of iPhone developers who will have their iPad-only apps ready to go on day 0, so the iPad-exclusive App Store will be far more crowded than the launch of the original iPhone App Store and since the App Store concept is nothing new, there will be a lot less written about the launch of the iPad exclusive App Store.
So lets quickly compare the two launches:
On Launch Day
Original App Store
iPad App Store
# of Devices Previously Sold and Ready to Use App Store
> 8 Million
0
# of Apps on the App Store Specifically for the Device
~ 500
> 10,000
(Estimate)
Sales Pace of Devices (iPhone / iPad)
> 2 Million / Month
~300K/mo
(Estimate)
In the long-run, being ready for the iPad will be a great win for the developers who take the chance and get prepared. The iPad will likely have a very bright future, but by no means is the launch of the iPad App Store going to create anything near the results of the original App Store. It’s important for iPad developers to check their expectations against the realities.
One of the most exciting new versions of OnTime is now in beta:
This new version adds an exceptional productivity tool called the “Planning Board” where users get to see all their defects, features, incidents or tasks in a “card” view with each card being placed in the appropriate workflow step. Each workflow step is represented by a column and users can drag-and-drop cards from one column to another to change their workflow step.
We thought it would be fun to imagine what the OnTime V10 Scrum Planning Board (a.k.a. task board) would look like when used through the iPad:
The touch interface of being able to drag-and-drop cards from one workflow step to another is going to absolutely rock on the iPad. I need to get my hands on one of these things asap!
