Applicom

Notification options and see tasks assigned to your company or anybody

Hi Friends,

This entry is to announce two exciting features in Apollo:

• Advanced notification options (with daily digests available!)
• Possibility to see, in My tasks, tasks assigned to "Anyone" or to your company

As a member of staff at Applicom, I got to use these features well in advance and I just couldn't believe how much they helped me in my day-to-day work. I can see why a lot of users requested them!

So, here are the details.

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Finally here: Basecamp import, and data export

Hi Friends! We introduced two features: a Basecamp-compatible data import, and a comprehensive data export for Apollo. These features are amongst the most-wanted ones, and have far-fetching implications.

Migrating to Apollo can be challenging: you might have several projects with valuable comments in a different project management system. This is why we worked really hard to write an import procedure that allows you to import your project from a Basecamp-compatible XML file:

This means that your projects, notes, milestones, etc. will appear on your Apollo workspace.

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Applicom, the maker of Apollo project management and CRM, is not for sale: our users come first

In the last few years, a number of web-based project management solutions appeared. A great number of them. I should know: Apollo is one of them. We started building Apollo when the market wasn't as crowded (although it was starting), and waited a long time before releasing it to the public; the main reason is that we didn't want to put out there something that we wouldn't use. And we were picky. Very picky.

Apollo is still missing some of the features we considered (and consider) crucial.

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Creating a universal nag message for people using old browsers

Nobody seems to talk about the "war of the browsers" anymore. Let's go back in time: First Netscape won, then Internet Explorer won, and then Firefox arrived and got half the market back, while Safari got its sizeable slice, Opera always stuck at 2%, and now it's Google Chrome on the rising -- so, in the end, and thank goodness, nobody won.

Today, it's not about winning the war of the browsers: it's about winning the war to kill old browsers, which are seriously slowing innovation down to a crawl. As Apollo's developers, we know this very well: we battle problems with old browsers every day.

Chrome auto-updates itself. Pretty much every Chrome user is now using Chrome 8, regardless of their OS policy to software upgrades. Firefox is following Chrome's steps, doing an auto-update to its latest version automatically. Internet Explorer users, on the other hand, are less lucky: there are tons of IE 6 users, lots of IE7 and a small army of IE8 users. There are also people using old versions of Firefox, Safari or Opera (although they are a minority).

It's time to stop this. Here is my proposal.

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New drag&drop and Remember Me features

Hi friends! Apollo keeps improving. Some of the changes are minor, and yet important to many users.

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Hide task lists

Hi friends! When working on a large project, with several task lists, things could get a little complicated: people often wanted to hide task lists that would only be relevant much later in the project (they might belong to a milestone that is months away, for example!).

This is no longer the case: task lists can now be "hidden" by project administrators.

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Projects can now be "on hold" -- what does it mean?

Hello friends! It's now possible, in Apollo, to place a project "on hold". A project on hold is still accessible to your users. However, the project's feed will not be updated; plus, upcoming tasks and milestones will not show up in the overview, in the "my tasks" area and in the calendar. Basically, the project will stay "silent".

Keep in mind that a project "on hold" is still considered active.

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File previews and lightbox

Hello friends!

With Apollo, you can attach files to messages and comments. This is a much needed feature: web designers often use messages and comments to show drafts; business people might share a contract draft or a business proposal; and so on.

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News on Apollo's development

After six months of being public (and six months of frenetic development, may I say), I think it's about time to talk about Apollo, its development, and how it's coming along.

It's very strange for me to think about the way Apollo was six months ago: we have been adding countless important features since we went live (cases & deals, group emails, etc.), and continue developing more and more important parts today.

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Apollo: going forward, and enjoying the ride!

When we started working on Apollo, we didn't quite know what to expect. We had several possible scenarios, but nothing was set in stone. We launched Apollo on the 27th of July, and we have been sending invites out ever since. For us, having Apollo as an invite-only application was important so that we could establish some kind of contact with our users; for each one of them, we tried to start a conversation.

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