Holiday Slowdown.

We hope that you've all been enjoying some time off this summer holidays. While we won't be completely away, we will be slowing down somewhat over the first three weeks of August. Because of that, we may not be able to respond to inquiries as quickly as you are normally used to. Thanks in advance for your patience.

New Patch Release, Status Update

Just a quick development update on our end. We've been busy working away on the next versions of CourseForum and ProjectForum.

One of the main things that we wanted to do with that was upgrade the core engine that drives the software, and that's been pretty much accomplished. That won't provide much of a visible change (other than maybe a performance boost), but does significantly improve our capability to continue moving forward with future changes. As discussed earlier, that will also involve dropping support for some legacy platforms.

The other big part has been updating how the Windows versions work, combining the "GUI" and "service" versions into a single download, and making it easier to switch between the two. We're also giving the user interface a refresh, and incorporating some other changes to make the software an even better citizen with newer versions of Windows. This work is close to complete; the main thing we'll still be working on is making the upgrade from existing versions of CourseForum and ProjectForum as smooth as possible.

Along the way, we've also identified and fixed a few bugs and made some other small changes, which we're making available today as part of a new patch release, version 6.5.3 (so this doesn't include the two things I talked about above). As always, details can be found on our website.

Survey: Other Suggestions

In the final review of results from the recent user survey, I wanted to share some of the other suggestions that people made for improving the product. In no particular order...

• Improve seach (in various different ways)
  
• Make it easier to customize appearance (e.g. simpler to do color changes, logo, etc.)
  
• Login/security improvements (mostly hooks to existing facilities)
  
• Better documentation, training resources
  
• Product support for structured data (simple database like tools within pages)
  
• Integrate additional tools or provide hooks to other web tools
  
• Some kind of programming API
  
• Several different sets of starting pages you could choose from, for different uses.
  
• Localized versions
  
• Additional markup/formatting
  

Survey: Dislikes

While we didn't mind seeing the few users who were sucking up and said that nothing was bad enough to drive them crazy, we know there are always things that we could be doing better. So without further ado...

The Editor

Mentioned by 20% of people as their first choice, various glitches, bugs and other weirdness in the WYSIWYG editor was the number one complaint. While this has been getting better in the last few versions (in particular 6.5.1 fixed a lot of copy/paste issues), we've obviously got more work to do here.

On our end this has been a challenging one to get right, but obviously its hugely important to do so. With the variety of different browsers and their versions, not to mention different ways that people are using ProjectForum, we've been beefing up our testing systems and processes to better capture the various special cases that are causing grief.

One thing that you can do to help is let us know when you see an error and as best you can, describe what is needed to reproduce it. Reproducing it is usually the tough part in any bug; after that, fixing it tends to be much easier. In particular we need to know:

• what web browser (and version) you're using
  
• what was in the page (preferably the 'wiki markup' version) before you saw the problem (the 'versions' feature can help with this)
  
• what you did (where you typed, what buttons you hit, etc.)
  
• what was in the page after, and when it's not obvious, what you expected to see
  

Other Dislikes

The second area that was mentioned was how difficult it can be to keep things organized. To some degree, this is endemic in any wiki-like system. Many people use ProjectForum in a mostly hierarchical manner, and so expect it to be easier to be able to jump to the 'next' page, go 'up', etc. We're definitely open to suggestions as to how this might be made easier to do.

Some aspect of 'user accounts' was mentioned by a few people, often related to how they might be hooked into an existing authentication system that is being used elsewhere (a feature available in our Enterprise version, but not the standard one). Also in that category was supporting groups of users, better user management, etc.

Requests for more formatting options was another common complaint. To some degree, this becomes almost a philosophical issue. While obviously adding more formatting to PF is technically very easy to do, we've been trying to stay fairly conservative in that regard. We view ProjectForum primarily as a communication and collaboration tool, not a document preparation tool. The more people are spending time messing with formatting, the less they're likely focusing on communication. And if pages are full of fancy formatting, they also make it more difficult for other people (especially those not as used to the system) to contribute and make changes. It's the same reason that rough drawings and sketches make it easier to discuss and change diagrams than a fully rendered 3D image would.

Other things that were mentioned once or twice: hard to link to files on network drives, security model, proprietary database (which isn't at all true actually), difficult to set up, lack of support, poor extensibility, lack of a published API, too high a price, no PDF export, unfamiliar terminology, can collect spam, not enough tutorials.

That was about it for dislikes. Next time we'll wrap up with a few suggestions and other miscellaneous nuggets we found in the survey responses.

Version 6.5.2 Released

We've just released version 6.5.2 of both CourseForum and ProjectForum. This version not only contains a number of bug fixes (as you'd expect from the version number) but also some improvements and redesigns in the area of user accounts which should simplify things in a number of ways. Enterprise users (Campus for CF) will also note a couple of new permissions that are available.

Downloads and more info: ProjectForum and CourseForum.

Changes: detailed change log

Survey: Likes

Next up in our survey results, is the things that people said they liked about ProjectForum.

I will preface this by saying that most people overall seemed pretty happy; I'm sure there is no selection bias as to who completed the survey of course!

But we did get a lot of "keep up the good work" type comments, positive comments about our support, people sharing how important it is in their group's work, and some who've purchased it at each of the jobs they've had over the last few years. Thanks to everyone who shared that with us, it's very gratifying.

Likes: Easy!

Far and away, the biggest thing people liked was how easy people found ProjectForum to use. In fact, fully half of respondents put this as the very first thing they liked about PF; for an entirely write-in answer with no predefined choices I was pretty amazed by this.

Getting that right is one of the hardest things to do, but I think one of the most important for this type of tool. As best you can, you want the tool to just fade into the background, so that people can just contribute and think about what they're contributing, not the software. While I think ProjectForum is far from perfect in that regard, it's good to get the feedback that we're more or less doing this right.

The second most common like (about 10% of respondents' first choice) was also an "easy" one, namely how easy ProjectForum was to set up and administer. This has of course been another goal of ours, so good to see the feedback there.

The ease of use or ease of setup/admin came up as many peoples' second or third choices too of course, but it was just remarkable how many picked those as a first choice.

Incidentally, in the question asking you to describe ProjectForum in ten words or less, the words "easy" or "simple" came up in 30% of answers (including my favorite, "Easy, Easy, Easy, Flexible, Flexible, Flexible, Powerful, Powerful, Powerful, GREAT!").

Likes: Other

There were also a bunch of more specific "easy" answers: people found it easy to link pages, easy to upload files, easy to re-organize, easy to comment, etc.

Beyond that, we get several responses along the lines of "liked the ability to collaborate". Flexibility, adaptability, reliability also were mentioned several times as likes. Finally, a number of specific features were mentioned as "likes" (e.g. uploads, security, etc.) though no particular one really stood out.

Next time: what people dislike about ProjectForum.

Survey: Platform

The next result from the survey I want to talk about is the platform that people were running the ProjectForum server on.

Approximately 65% of you reported running on Windows, 20% on Mac, and 15% on Linux. Of the Windows people, 2/3 of those were using the Windows service version (the one that runs in the background like a traditional server process), while the rest were using the one with the little GUI front end.

While we had some anecdotal evidence (and download stats) that essentially supported this distribution, the platform question was one of the ones we were most interested to ask about, as we wanted to propose a couple of changes in that regard.

Solaris and FreeBSD

The first observation was that nobody in the survey reported that they ran on either Solaris or FreeBSD. While we do still get a number of downloads for each, I think it's safe to say that both of these platforms have decreased in importance over the years.

Our intention is to entirely drop support for these two, likely in our next release (i.e. 6.6), though the timing is open to change. If this is something that affects you, we obviously hope you'll get in touch to discuss this.

Windows

Right now, we encourage people to download the GUI version for Windows when first trying ProjectForum out; it avoids a lot of complexities related to services, admin privileges, etc. For most people, moving to the service version when they decide to get past the evaluation phase is the right next step.

(Incidentally, when ProjectForum first came out, most people were running Windows 98, which didn't - really - support services at all. And for those minority running Windows 2000, it was all still a bit foreign.)

What we're thinking of doing in the future is collapse the two separate versions down to one. The little GUI would work as it does right now, but if ProjectForum was installed as a service, it would control that instead of the "application" version. More importantly, it would allow you to install the service version right from the GUI, rather than via the installer.

In other words, the one download would work both as a Windows service and a regular application, and you could switch between them using the little front-end GUI. I think doing it this way might avoid some confusion, and also help people make the transition when it is appropriate.

For the more technically inclined, right now the projectforum.exe is a Windows application that includes the GUI and the server code in the same binary, while the pfconsole.exe is a command-line executable containing just the server code. Under the new approach, the GUI would be in its own separate binary, and it would launch the command-line version, either directly as a subprocess (which would then be destroyed when the GUI application quits, as now) or via the Windows service manager.

If done right, this shouldn't present a huge change, and hopefully one for the better. But I know how things are set up is one of those things that some people have very strong opinions on, so I wanted to float this approach before going any further.

If you have your own ideas, examples of other apps that handle this well, etc. please share them in the comments.

Next up: likes and dislikes.

Survey: Who, Where, What

This is the first of several posts summarizing the results of the recent survey we ran. But first off, a big thank you to everyone who took the time to complete it!

Who

The first part asked about the group or organization using ProjectForum. As expected, you're a diverse bunch. Industry-wise, the responses are all over the map, ranging from creative agencies, engineering, finance, manufacturing, NGO's, schools, tech companies, etc. The most common (about 15%) was in healthcare.

Size-wise, about half of you work in small companies, another quarter in education (teaching or research), and the rest distributed more-or-less equally among non-profits, government, large companies, and "other".

Organizationally, over half of people reported using ProjectForum almost entirely within a single group or department, another third mostly within several departments in the same organization, and the rest used it mostly across organizations.

Where

Geographically, 65% said that all or most users were in the same office or location, with only about 15% having most of their users "far and away".

This makes sense considering the product emphasis on team collaboration, and considering that most people run the software internally, you'd expect a higher percentage of intra-organizational use.

And speaking of which, a later question asked about where the ProjectForum server was being run. About 90% of respondents answered either "on my desktop", "another machine in our department", or "our IT department", more or less equally.

What

As far as what people are using ProjectForum for, well over half of you are using it for some kind of intranet (e.g. directory, announcements, policies), as well as for project management or coordination. Nearly half use it as a way of collecting and sharing feedback from others on ideas or documents (replacing the n-way email discussion this often involves). And about a third use it for each of group or individual todo lists, document management, collaboration, etc. Most people definitely use ProjectForum for more than just one or two things.

Just one last thing today, and that is what other tools people were using alongside ProjectForum. The most popular one reported was some sort of file server or shared network drive, used by over half of you (I know, we have to make it easier to link to files on those servers from within ProjectForum...). Chat or IM, and mailing lists or discussion groups were each used by about a third. Most of the other tools included in the survey were used by somewhere between 20-30% of you. The one exception was Microsoft Sharepoint, which scored considerably lower. This isn't too surprising, as many shops that go that route tend to mandate putting everything inside Sharepoint, and locking out other tools.

Your thoughts?

Having dealt with a lot of ProjectForum users, these results confirmed my impressions that PF is used in a wide variety of different places, by mostly smaller, predominately co-located groups. People are using it for a lot of different things, and freely mix and match it with a variety of other more specialized tools as needed.

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on these responses, if there were any surprises for you about what your fellow ProjectForum users are doing with the software.

The next post will talk more about what versions of the software people are using, and also what platforms they are using to run ProjectForum (expect to see some changes to how we do things here...).

Survey Responses

After the last blog post, as well as a quick note to our announcements email list, we're starting to get some interesting responses to our survey. In a few days we'll share some of the (aggregate) results here, and invite discussion on possible implications.

In the meantime, if you hadn't yet had the chance to complete the survey, please do!. Will only take you a few minutes.

Help Improve ProjectForum

We've put together a short survey to gather some information about how people are using ProjectForum, so that we can continue to focus on improving the product.

The survey should only take a few minutes to complete, but your help in doing so would be very much appreciated. (Additionally, as this is the first cut of the survey, any feedback on the survey itself would be great... confusion questions, other suggested questions, problems completing it, etc.).

To participate, please visit projectforum.com/survey.