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 [email protected]. 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 [email protected]). 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.

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!