We’ve been working on a new help site with documentation and help on working with Goplan. It is far from complete, and is currently a work in progress, but we’re putting it out there now in hopes that you guys find it useful already. We’ll be doing frequent updates based on some of the things on Get Satisfaction as well as the most pressing questions that we get on our support email address.

Visit help.goplanapp.com.

Like with everything we do, we’re always looking for feedback and ways to improve. Check out the new help site and if you see things we should change, or have things we should add in mind, please do let us know! Thanks everyone! Oh, and happy holidays!

Update: this deal is now over – thanks to everyone who signed-up! We’re definitely running more deals like this one in the future, so keep an eye on our twitter feed and this blog!

Managing projects doesn’t have to suck. It also doesn’t have to blow a hole in your wallet.

So between Black Friday (November 26) and Cyber Monday (November 29), we’re slashing the price on our Unlimited plan down to $35/month. If you compare that to the competition – Basecamp comes to mind -, with Goplan you get a great UI, more features and great support, all for a killer price.

This price is valid for as long as you remain a customer. You’ll be able to use Goplan without any limits on users, projects and storage, for $35 dollars a month – forever. Goplan has been around since 2005, and we’ve been making people happy since. Hope you like the offer, and as with everything we do, we look forward to hearing what you have to say. Happy thanksgiving!

Read more and sign-up by clicking here.

PS: If you’re in a modern browser (Firefox, Chrome or Safari), check out the html5 canvas goodness in our globe! Developers: want to see how we built the snowglobe using canvas and device orientation sensing? See this blog post over at our Webreakstuff blog.

As some of you know, with the recent update to our new Teams and Permissions functionality, we had to do a few updates to our Free plan (namely, reducing the number of users and projects it allows you to have). This came as a bit of a surprise to a few of our users, one of which emailed us. The email we sent is below. We are posting it here (edited slightly for brevity) in hopes of hearing your feedback on this change.

I understand your frustration. Changing our Free plan (particularly for users who were already on it) has been a tough decision. Alas, also one we had to do. Maintaining an open service for many (many) thousands of free users is tough, and it takes a toll on everything we do. Support email is filled with requests from free users and more servers are necessary to run the application.

We love having the ability to give people our product for free – I’m sure we help many people who wouldn’t be able to pay for our paid plans in managing their personal projects. We do it with pride. We do, however, run it at a cost we pay for ourselves, and there’s only so much that our bank accounts can stretch to support free users.

In order to keep accommodating people on the free plan, we had to change its limits. There were people managing big money making companies (even household names) with our free account as its limits were quite permissive. That is an unsustainable situation for us. So what we did was level our free offering with the rest of the competition, and hope the product speaks for itself.

We feel like we have the number one product out there for online project management and collaboration. We also have the most competitive pricing. In short, what I’m saying is that we believe that if you go beyond 1 project and 2 users, you’re probably good for our startup plan, which we believe is pretty good.

I hope this helps explain our reasoning.

At the end of the day, we’re honored that people choose our product over the competition. It makes us proud, and makes our team come back to do this every day. We’re sad about having to limit our Free plan a bit, but our business so demands. Our goal is the same: to provide the best service out there, and to keep improving our product. We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!

Hey everyone! In order to do the big migration to the new teams and permissions functionality, Goplan will be down for a few hours tomorrow in order to make sure everything migrates safely. We apologize for the inconvenience these hours of downtime may bring, but rest assured it is for a good cause. You’ll be able to follow our process through this blog and our twitter account.

As always, feel free to comment, tweet or email any questions you may have on the new functionality and the migration we’re doing. See you after the big move! We are super excited and hope you are too!

Upgrade status report:

Saturday, 4:40 pm GMT: Update time! In about 20 minutes, we’re bringing down the servers, backing up everything, upgrading functionality, and bringing it back.

Saturday, 5:42 pm GMT: We’re running the final batch of integrity checks to be sure that the migration runs smoothly. Once we’re done, we start the process.

Saturday, 6:11 pm GMT: Here we go. We just brought the servers down and are now backing up the database in order to start the migration.

Saturday, 6:27 pm GMT: Migration has just started. We expect the whole process to take just over one hour. We’ll report back once it’s over!

Saturday, 7:41 pm GMT: The migration has ended successfully, and we’re making sure everything’s good to go. We’ll keep you posted.

Saturday, 8:19 pm GMT: Looks like we’re almost good to go. We need a bit of time to double check and make a second backup post-migration.

Saturday, 8:56 pm GMT: We’re done! You should now be able to see the new teams/permissions functionality in your accounts. Let us know if you run into any issues!

We’re really excited about the changes we’ll be rolling out next week. We’ve been hard at work on some of these things for quite a while now, and can’t wait to finally have you try them out. Without further ado, here’s what’s coming:

Teams and permissions

The big thing we’re rolling out is our “teams and permissions” functionality. You’ll soon be able to divide your users into teams, which can then be assigned to projects with specific permissions (like the ability to read only, or read and make changes). Any user can be in several teams, which means possibilities are endless. You’ll be able to organize your users any way you like.

Permissions solve the problem many of you had of needing a way for your users and collaborators to be limited in the things they could do. So now there’s two main access types to a project, which will be configurable by company administrators through the Projects screen: read only access or read-write access. You can set permissions at the user level, or at the team level (so in a given project members of a “Design team” might read and write, whereas someone else – or a different team – might have read-access only).

In designing the new teams and permissions functionality we’ve made a few changes to users. Most of them are trivial, but there’s one thing you need to keep in mind: the notion of collaborators is going away. Collaborators were users that had access to a given project only. Since our permissions let you do the same thing more easily, everyone’s a user from now on. During the migration to the new functionality, we will automatically create teams for your collaborators, so that they still have access to the projects they were previously on.

Plan updates

With the redesign of our teams and permissions and the removal of collaborators, we had to do a few updates to our plans. Professional and Unlimited accounts aren’t affected, but our Free and Startup plans will suffer minor adjustments. Here’s a breakdown of the new limits for Free and Startup plans, that will be going live next week:

• Free plan: 2 users and 1 project, with 100mb of storage space.
• Startup ($10/mn): 10 users and 10 projects, with 10gb of storage space.

There is a small number of companies who will be negatively affected by this change, and we’re here to help out those that are. Companies on the Startup subscription that go beyond the new limits for their plan will be given an extra 6 months of today’s limits in order to adjust (usually by archiving old projects or removing old users). If you have any questions as to how the plan updates may affect you, feel free to contact our support team. Again, only a small minority of Startup companies will be affected – Professional and Unlimited plans remain unchanged.

iPhone app updates

Finally, a short update on our iPhone application. Those of you who’ve been checking out Get Satisfaction have probably already seen an early screenshot (head there if you haven’t). We’re hard at work at it and don’t expect it to take much longer. There will be a post dedicated exclusively to the iPhone application soon, namely to answer some of your questions on pricing (hint: free for users of our paid plans) and schedule. Keep an eye out on our blog for more screenshots and app-related posts very soon!

A little known (but amazingly powerful) feature of Goplan is the ability to mark any two things(*) as related by using tags. Example: Lets say you have a task, and want to associate it with maybe a couple of discussions and a couple of other tasks or files on Goplan. By associating these assets, you’d have direct links to the others when looking at each individually. Quite powerful indeed – and the best thing is, you can start using this functionality right now. Let me show you how:

Here’s what happens in the video: we’re creating a new task, and using the tagging functionality, we add tags for each of the items we want to “connect” the new task to. This is easy by using autocomplete. Type in a “d” and you get auto-completed discussion titles. Type in a “t” for tasks and tickets, etc. You can use the arrow keys to navigate suggestions, and enter to select one.

When we finally click to view the new task, you’ll see that the items we’ve selected are listed in the Related items section of the task view. Give this a try on your own accounts. Hope you like this tip!

(*) There’s virtually no limit to the number of things you can associate ;-)

As you may know, Goplan allows you to send emails that create new tickets automatically, and also lets you comment on items by email directly by simply replying to the notification emails you get. Some people have a bit of trouble using this functionality, so we thought we’d help out with a post.

Making sure your email gets to us

Always email from the email you login with: For security reasons, we only allow tickets and comments to be created by people who’s email addresses are on Goplan, so make sure that when you’re emailing, that you’re emailing from the email address you login with into your company space.

When emailing tickets, make sure you’re emailing the right address: The address that you email tickets to is special and private. You should never share this email address (unless you want to explicitly give other people the ability to create tickets in your projects – which is certainly okay for some projects). You can find the right address to email new tickets to by going to your project’s ticket creation screen and looking in the sidebar. A screenshot is above.

We hope these two tips help you make better use of the emailing functionality! We’ll be posting more tips soon – there are quite a few lined up.

These have been a few long days for the team here, but it was worth it, because we finally get to announce the latest features on Goplan – some of which I’m sure will make many of you happy. Here’s what’s new:

Tickets can now be associated with milestones: Since we first built Goplan, we allowed associating tasks with a particular project milestone. Many of you – quite correctly – suggested that we did the same with Tickets. So now we have. Milestones can have both tasks and tickets associated with them. Project managers now have more control over what needs to happen in order to hit a given project milestone.

Projects can be exported in XML: One of the questions we got more often in our support email was if it was somehow possible to export a given project, for archival or backup purposes. Our answer was always “you can always use our API, but we’re working on something better”. That something better is here. You can now click “Export” next to any project in your company’s projects list to get an XML formatted file you can keep. Being committed to letting people export anything they add to Goplan means we’re really happy we’re finally announcing this feature.

New credit card processing: We revamped our plan page completely, and now allow credit card payments – no more forcing you to create and maintain a Paypal account. If you do have a Paypal account you prefer to use, we’ll still let you do it – but if you don’t, your life is now much easier.

Better text input: We made it much easier to input correctly-formatted text into Goplan. You don’t need to use Textile anymore, or save a comment multiple times to get the format right. What you see when you’re typing in a new comment, a ticket description, discussion or task content will be exactly what you get after you save. Hopefully this makes it much easier for you to collaborate on Goplan.

Other tweaks in the code:

We also did a number of smaller tweaks in the code that hopefully will help you guys. For the curious, here are a few of those changes:

• UI updates on many screens
• URLs typed in comments now hyperlink automatically
• Task due dates can be removed again
• Fixed a typo in the document category screen
• Comment box is now cleared after typing and submitting a comment
• Fixed a typo in the subscription warning email

Keep sending us your feedback:

This update will hopefully make your lives a little better. We’re very happy about the new ability to export projects, new text input and better ways to subscribe to Goplan. We wouldn’t be able to do this if it wasn’t for your great feedback so keep it coming. As always, we’re listening to your thoughts on Twitter as well as our support email at support@goplanapp.com.