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!

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 [email protected].

We’re deploying brand new code to Goplan, and for the next 15 minutes things may be shaky. Everything will be back to normal soon, so keep an eye on this blog and our twitter feed for updates. To know what’s coming after our gnomes leave the server farm, check out this blog post.

Update 1: We’re done! Enjoy the new functionality.

Update 2: Some people have mentioned that some of their comments are now unstyled. We are aware of this. The system is still processing all comments - it may take a while to get to yours (we have a huge database) but we’ll get there and everything will look perfect in a bit.

Our team’s been busy working on many things (including the iphone/ipad app - more news on it quite soon), and we’re almost ready to launch the first batch of changes. Here’s a few of the things that are about to be updated on Goplan:

Text input will change dramatically. Many of you (and ourselves) had problems with the way you write comments, discussions, or fill things like task descriptions. Textile, which we use for text input is “okay” but far from a perfect solution. So we rebuilt our text-input from the ground up. You’ll now be able to preview things *as you type*, instead of having to guess how things would look like after clicking “Submit”. The screenshot above reflects those changes - we think you’ll love it.

More flexible ways to subscribe. We’re finally ready to offer more payment options as an alternative to Paypal. We’ve spent the last few weeks looking into every nook and cranny in order to allow you to securely subscribe using any major credit cards directly from Goplan - effectively dumping the need for a Paypal account. With this major update, we’ll be ready to give out promotional codes, have more flexible payments, and be easier on you. We can’t wait to launch this.

There’s a lot more coming in the next few days - we expect to launch these changes first thing next week. We’ve been getting an unprecedented number of feedback emails (thanks! keep them coming!) and have been doing quite a few tweaks based on your awesome feedback. Keep an eye out on this blog and our twitter feed for updates!

A few of you have been waiting for this for quite a while, so here’s some good news: Now you can attach files to any comment on Goplan. No more linking to remote files, or uploading files, then copying links just to show that new design. Now you can include files straight from comments to discussions, tasks, tickets, or other files!

The feature is already live for all our users, so feel free to start using it right away. We hope this improves the experience of discussions on Goplan. As always, feel free to send us your thoughts and feedback. There’s a lot more coming, so keep an eye on our blog!

While work continues on large things like the iPhone app and a revamped permission system, we decided to roll out a few minor features we’ve been working on. So about an hour ago we updated Goplan with the ability for administrators to edit profiles for the whole company - something people have been requesting for a long time - and better filtering on the time-tracking screen.

In the next few days we’ll be rolling out more features we’ve been working on, including the ability to attach files to any comment anywhere on the application, which should make it much easier to collaborate from anywhere inside the app - like discussions, tasks and tickets. There’s a number of new and exciting things coming, so keep an eye out on this blog ;-)

As a bonus, here’s a photo of the office while we work on the upcoming iPhone and iPad applications. More updates on that one are coming very soon too. We’re considering doing a few blogposts on the design and development decisions behind the app.

This time at around 5pm CET (noon EST) we deployed a few bug fixes and new functionality (more on that in an upcoming blog post) to the live servers. With that code update we introduced a small bug that prevented a few of our users to create new assets (tasks, tickets, projects and documents) on Goplan. As soon as we noticed the problem we brought the maintenance page up to fix the issue.

The system got back to normal a few minutes later, and no data was lost (as most of you know, we have a very strict backup and security policy). We apologize to those of you who experienced the issue and want you to be sure we’re taking steps to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again. After all, project management isn’t fun if you can’t create new tasks :-)

Thanks for understanding, guys! Now back to the regular program.

We’ve been hard at work on some features we can’t wait to show you, and while we’re not ready to spill the beans on everything just yet, here’s a hint of part of what we’re about to launch. Many of you have asked for the ability to create tickets by email so that you can integrate Goplan with your other workflows without having to use the API* (even though you could!) - or just to have a way to create tickets on the go.

We’ve heard that request and we’re aiming to launch ticket creation by email within the next few days. Also coming are a huge number of UI tweaks and improvements, many based on the amazing feedback we’ve been getting through email, the feedback form, Twitter and Get Satisfaction (click here to see Goplan on GS).

More updates and blog posts are coming very soon - keep an eye out for them!