In the last 2 days we launched 2 new features (the new project status widgets and the generic post-commit hooks for developers), so we thought we’d go for 3 features, 3 days in a row. This one’s something we wanted and you wanted too. A company-wide calendar, listing calendar events, tasks and milestones happening in all the projects you care about in your company. The new calendar is stepping into the shoes of the very old (and quite outdated) company agenda, which basically listed the same thing, but in a way that was not as friendly.

This feature is now active on all user accounts, and can be accessed straight from the dashboard by clicking “Company calendar” in the sidebar (the old “Company agenda” link is now gone). Keep in mind you can’t add events through this calendar interface yet as it is read-only, but it’s in our plans for the future.

Hope you like all the new features and updates we’re rolling out. As always, your feedback is quite welcome. Reach us in the comments here or by email at support@goplanapp.com. Thank you!

Here’s something exciting. We’ve just rolled out project statuses for the Goplan dashboard – if you login to your Goplan account you should see them already. These allow you to get a quick glimpse of your project’s progress, based on the amount of tasks that are still remaining. If you click the project status widget you also get a rundown of the number of tickets pending on that project.

People have been asking for this feature for a bit, and we’re very happy to be able to roll it out today. We’re definitely interested in hearing your thoughts on this feature and ideas for improvements on the dashboard if you have any. Hope you like the updates!

People who’ve been with us for a while know that we’ve been working on an iPhone application for Goplan. They also know it never launched – a cause for some dispair and disappointment, both for our users as well as ourselves. We thought we would explain why the app isn’t out yet and what we’re doing instead.

We saw an iPhone application as a way to access Goplan when mobile – something we’d appreciate ourselves, and that we know users would like to have too. However, in recent weeks we noticed how long we were spending on creating an OS-specific application for the iPhone (for a small number of our users) and not dedicating to the main product. After pondering on this for a while, we came to the conclusion that we’d better serve our users by focusing our efforts on our main web application’s features and experience.

So it is with a bit of sadness that we announce that we dropped our plans for an iPhone specific version of Goplan, at least for the near future. We want to keep improving the main application for everyone, and by focusing on it we’ll better serve all our users. We’ll also start to think about an HTML-based version of Goplan ready for mobile devices that people on iOS devices, Android and Blackberry can enjoy.

We know this decision is bound to disappoint quite a few of you – particularly those who’ve been waiting for it for a bit. But it is for a good cause. We want to nail the perfect project management experience online, and focusing on the main app is the best way to do it. Our API is available for developers who want to build app on top of Goplan. Our reframed focus on the main app experience will bring lots of great things and updates to Goplan (today we rolled out a few UI updates and the new post-commit hook support for developers). As always, we welcome your feedback regarding this announcement. We work on Goplan every day for you guys, so your opinion matters. Thanks!

This is a developer feature – if you manage your software development projects on Goplan, this post might interest you. Read on!

A couple of weeks we launched post-commit hook support for Github. We don’t discriminate based on version control systems or services you use, so today we’re launching generic post-commit hook support on Goplan. So if you want your source code commit messages to show up on your project’s activity feed, you can check the updated “Hooks” page inside each of your Goplan products for information on how to push messages to our system.

We’ve had several requests for generic git and subversion support, so here it is! We hope that these features help you keep track of everything related to your projects right from inside Goplan. Let us know if you have any feedback on this feature or our product as a whole.

We’re big fans of Github. We use it to host our source code (both open as well as closed), and have individually been users since the very early days of the service. It makes us quite happy to launch post-commit hook URLs for Goplan projects.

So if you create software and host your source code on Github too, you can go to any of your projects on Goplan and use the new “Hooks” menu to grab the URL to use on Github as a post-commit hook. This makes your source code commits show up in your Goplan activity, linking directly to the commit on Github. Exciting! Let us know in the comments how you feel about the change and if you are looking for something else. Happy post-commit hooking!

Note: The Agendacat picture above is from the Octodex and was created by firstdegree.

We just launched our brand new infrastructure (codename Bender – after the Futurama character). This means that if you access Goplan now, you’re accessing your data through new, faster and more reliable servers. This post, which may be a bit on the techy side, outlines how Bender works and what you can expect from the upgrade.

We’ve been on Amazon‘s servers since they launched their cloud computing solutions years ago (Did you know Goplan was actually the first publicly accessible application running on Amazon EC2? We were profiled on Wired Magazine about it back then too). It allows us to grow our infrastructure easily with usage and to maintain great performance. Despite being on a great datacenter, however, our server configuration was running a bit stale and our machines were not on their tip-top performance – even though Goplan has always been snappy for most our users.

So, we decided to start fresh, with a brand new infrastructure configuration, on brand new servers. Bender is basically a combination of new servers and new software running on those servers. Although this means there’s no actual new features on Goplan based on this announcement, you can expect more reliability, speed and security. Bender lets us scale faster than before, and recover from any mishaps faster too (luckily we didn’t have many of those in our history, but we want to be safe). One thing that we also expect to improve is our email delivery – we’ve made a few changes to make sure no email from Goplan is marked as spam by automated filters, so if you had issues with emails from us being marked as junk, that should be fixed.

If during the next few days you experience any issues accessing Goplan or doing things you expected to be able to do, please let our team know by contacting us at support@goplanapp.com. Thank you!

We’re really happy to announce that a feature many of you have been waiting for has now been implemented and rolled out to our production servers. You can now create new projects based on former projects by copying milestones, tasks and tags (you can select which of these to copy on project creation).

To access this functionality, go to your Projects list and click “Create project” – you can then access templating options by clicking “Show template options”. Select the assets you want to copy from your old project to the new one and you’re good to go.

A note on copying milestones and due dates: When copying milestones we shift the milestones due dates relative to the project creation date. This works great in most of the cases, but you may need to adjust these manually after the new project is created to make sure they fit your needs.

Feedback welcome: as with everything we do, your feedback is important to us. Try the feature out and email us any feedback you may have (our team is always available at support@goplanapp.com). Thanks!

It seems like we’ve been growing quite a bit in the last few weeks, which means we have to do a bit of server work in order for Goplan to keep the speeds you are accustomed to. We’re doing those updates right now, and will keep this blog post updated with our progress.

This may disrupt service for about 10 minutes, for which we apologize. We’ll be back to our speedy and stable ways in a second.