We’re now wrapping up the invite stage for Goplan - meaning we have enough people to test out the application and send in feedback. During this time, we sent over 1000 invites, and gave each person a few invites each to share with their friends and colleagues.

What happens next?

We’re wrapping up the changes to the application, and will be opening up to the general public very soon. Those of you who already have accounts will get to keep your projects and data, so nothing will change except the addition of a few features and some fine tuning across the board.

We’re also be announcing our pricing model soon, as well as a few other pieces of news. If you have any questions, please send them in at [email protected]. Thanks to the people who have been using Goplan and sending in feedback - it’s thanks to every one of you that we’re building a better product.

Stowe Boyd over at /Message has a review of Goplan, our online collaboration product - which we’re officially launching soon - with quite a few screenshots and raising a few good points. He covers some of our features, compares our solution to the competition, and highlights some of our strong (and weak) points.

If you still haven’t checked out Goplan, we are taking a few more people into the limited testing stage soon - so drop us an email at [email protected] and we’ll get you in the queue for invites. Thanks for helping out - all the feedback we’re getting contributes towards building a better product.

More goplan information

Goplan product page, homepage and official weblog and pictures over at Flickr.
Previous posts: on slow launching, on the test stage and on not using the term “beta”

(Crosspost with our main weblog at Webreakstuff - read)

A couple of weeks ago we posted about our support for Internet Explorer and promised to work on it because even though we prefer features to hacking support for browsers, we can’t deny the fact that most of you guys work with clients who don’t know better.

Anyway, as you may know, the Internet Explorer 7 team has announced that the new browser will be launched officially during the current month of October, so we ramped up the effort to support it, and a few hours later, we’re done.

In the above screenshot you can see Goplan running on the new Internet Explorer 7 (under Vista), but support for older browser versions (we focused on IE6, anything lower is a little too old) is included as well. This new update will be rolled into the live servers in a couple of days, so keep your eyes open.

Technicalities: For those wondering about specifics, adding support for IE consisted of hacking our way through the browser’s hasLayout problems with floats, and adding a workaround for IE’s issue with form submission on multipart forms.

You might have noticed by now that Goplan is down. This is due to the fact that Amazon EC2 (where Goplan is deployed) is performing some upgrades.

All,

We will be performing upgrades to our beta software in Amazon EC2 data centers over the next few hours, and you may not be able to reach your instances for up to several hours. We will let you know when upgrades are complete. The upgrade should not result in any loss of data, and you will not be charged for this inaccessible time. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience, and we appreciate your support.

-Brian@AWS

Sorry for the inconvenience. We’ll be back in a few hours.

UPDATE: We are back up.

A few days have past since our last piece of news, so here are a few updates on Goplan - on our support for Gantt charts, our presentation at Shift 2006 and some of the most recent code changes.

Goplan and Gantt diagrams

Leisa Reichelt over at Disambiguity has a great post on Goplan, Gantt charts and time tracking in projects. She mentions how it seems like all web-based project management applications seem to have forgotten about Gantt. The truth is, we didn’t forget about Gantt, but we’re also unsure that Gantt is the best possible visualization scheme for project deadlines on a screen - and that’s what we’ve been thinking about. We still are planning on bringing Gantt-diagram printing capabilities into the application, but we want to have a top-notch visualization method for the majority of people who want to keep track of time without using a printer.

Goplan at Shift 2006

We’ve shown Goplan publicly again, this time at Shift 2006, a conference that happened on the 28th and 29th of September in Lisbon, Portugal. We also took the opportunity to send a few more invites (to those present and those of you who had sent emails) and get some feedback on the application. People seem happy about it, and we’re running fast towards our public launch date - which should happen soon (but more about that in a few days).

Updates

About 10 minutes ago we updated the live servers with a slew of changes we had been working on this past week, so some new features were added and a couple of bugs we got through our feedback system were fixed. Here’s a detailed list of some of the major public-facing changes:

• General: textile support improvements across the application
• General: tickets and notes can now have attachments
• Files: available storage space indicator is now present on the file management screen
• Chat: you can now paste code into a chat-room
• General: deleting notes, posts, tickets or files now asks for confirmation (woops)
• Calendar: calendar selected day is now timezone aware

Yesterday I posted an article on our main weblog that talks about some of the reasons behind goplan’s slow launch, and about the benefits of taking things easy.

We are fans of the “release early, release often” model of agile development, and live by it. Small numbers means measurable feedback and quick response. By limiting ourselves to around 250 users for the first week, we managed to get the right feedback and act upon it, by releasing daily updates to our feature set and fixing the issues we encountered along the way. That made people happy, and one happy planner beats a few thousand unsatisfied users.

Click here to read the whole article.

It’s been a week since we opened our public invitation phase on Goplan, and even though we haven’t invited that many people in yet, we do have quite a few passionate users. People who either email or send feedback (through the application itself) saying how much (or how little) they like what we’ve been doing.

But I wanted to extend the question to the rest of you following the blog and using Goplan. What do you think of it now? And more importantly, how is it helping you manage your life and your projects? You don’t need to leave a reply if you don’t want to, but if you have something to say, do get in touch.

We took the downtime in the last hour to update the live code to the latest stable revision, and with it came a couple of new features that some people will be interested in. These are an improved file display (see the screenshot below) and preliminary printing support, for those of you who need to keep physical copies of your project’s updates.