Although the servers should only be offline for a small window of perhaps an hour or less, allow a few hours either side just to be safe.

Any questions, please contact us.
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Scheduled Maintenance Period (Start times)

US – ILLINOIS
Sun 3-Apr-2011 5:00 AM

NEW ZEALAND
Mon 4-Apr-2011 12:00 AM*  

AUSTRALIA (Vic)
Sun 3-Apr-2011 10:00 PM*  

UK/EUROPE
Sun 3-Apr-2011 11:00 AM   
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This maintenance period is planned to be outside of work hours for most ProWorkflow users, so should have minimal impact.

if you have any questions, please feel welcome to contact us.

With international assistance, there are many rescue teams still searching the rubble for survivors and will be for some time.

It looks like it will take many years to rebuild the city, restore hope and for people to stand tall again but it will happen. Cantabrian’s are tough people and the city will be rebuilt.

You can follow the news here:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/

ProActive Software (Developers of http://www.proworkflow.com) is a 10 y/o global project management software company operating out of New Zealand with two main offices, a development office in New Plymouth and sales/support office in Christchurch. All our subscription servers and customer data is hosted in the US.

We want to let people know that our Christchurch team are all ok. We operate in a commercial office 20 mins out of the city so had a good shake, but were relatively unaffected. One employee has had damage to her home but generally speaking we’re all safe and well.

Our Christchurch office suffered no damage, power and phones this side of town are completely unaffected and we’ll all head back there next week to resume as ‘normal’.

Regarding the business side, we are reminding people though that all our subscription servers are in the US at a top data centre (LayeredTech) with full redundancy so there won’t be any downtime.

We only have the sales/support team in Christchurch and they’re operating fine. The development team is in New Plymouth so they are all unaffected. Despite the ProWorkflow team going through two major earthquakes in 6 months, ProWorkflow has had zero downtime and retained good support and service. This is the benefit of a cloud based business model.

As individuals, our hearts and prayers go out to the people of Christchurch. Many have lost families, homes, jobs and are living without water, power and sewerage.

We’ll personally do what we can to help people, but if anyone wants to offer donations to help the Christchurch relief effort, we suggest you donate to the Red Cross from this page: http://www.redcross.org.nz/donate

I’d like to personally say thank you to all the customers that have emailed us with messages of support. It means a lot to the team.

If anyone has questions concerning either the earthquake or ProWorkflow service, feel welcome to contact us through the support page and we’ll get in touch.

- Julian Stone

CEO, ProActive Software Ltd

It’s always good to get this type of feedback and keeps our batteries charges so we can continue to deliver value to the ProWorkflow user base.

Read from top down… 

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Hey Julian,

I just wanted to say kudos to you and your team for putting together such an amazing mobile version of your site. Richard has really outdone himself. It’s a beautiful interface with amazing CSS functionality for mobile devices.

Plus it offers all the stuff the iPhone app has been missing. We’re all very impressed and just wanted to say thanks for being the awesome company, product and team that you guys are.

We couldn’t be as successful of an agency without ProWorkflow. Say hi to the rest of the team for me. Cheers.

David P. Smith | President
www.envision-creative.com
facebook | facebook.com/envisioncreative
twitter | @envisioncreativ

=========================================

Thanks David!

Julian Stone
CEO – ProActive Software Ltd
http://www.proworkflow.com
Web Based Project Management Software

=========================================

Hi Julian,

I can’t wait. You guys always keep building the product towards excellence. It’s the same philosophy we have with our company, our products/services and the way we treat our clients. We’ve had lots of vendors not adhere to the same level of commitment to quality that we do and it’s really refreshing to have a vendor in our corner that works like we do.

Thank you for that and you may absolutely use my comment in your blog. In fact, if you ever want to do a client profile on us and how we use your product or just sing huge praises about your stuff, let me know and I’ll help in any way I can.

Take care.

David P. Smith | President
www.envision-creative.com
facebook | facebook.com/envisioncreative
twitter | @envisioncreativ

=========================================

It’s been a great year this year and we’re looking forward to a fantastic 2011! We’ve had good times, some stressed times, all sorts of technical, product and people changes and managed to keep growing the business in a global economy that’s still on the mend. 

The fact we grew as a company through 2010 and matured as a solution is testament to being on the right track product-wise, having some great skill on deck but mostly the ongoing support from the ProWorkflow userbase.

Despite all the challenges thrown at our team during the year including the odd natural disaster, we achieved great things both from a product and business perspective so I wanted to say a big thanks to the ProWorkflow team and our awesome customers! We hope the solution is delivering great value to your businesses and that we’ll offer even more in 2011!

When I look back at what’s been accomplished over the past 12 months it’s actually a heck of a lot and has given us a fantastic springboard to deliver even more! I really appreciate our team and just want to say a big thanks to them!

I hope you all take it easy over the break and come back refreshed! Thanks again and we look forward to speaking with even more of you this coming year.

Here’s a list of just some of the accomplishments in 2010!
.

Product Highlights

• 57 major product updates released!
• iPhone app released
• Files and Messages features
• iCal Integration
• Doubled the speed of the app on all the main pages
• Basecamp import tool released

Business Highlights

• Added thousands of users
• 38% revenue growth
• New server infrastructure
• Sales Conversion rate doubled
• Dramatic increase in “Enterprise”-size customers
• Help Center went live – http://help.poworkflow.com
• API Center launched – http://api.proworkflow.com

Personal Highlights

• 50% increase in staff
• 1 new staff baby
• Customer Survey with great results
• Survived a 7.4 magnitude earthquake with no downtime or injuries!
  .

We have a lot planned for 2011 and a few big upgrades coming out very soon so keep an eye on the blog!

Happy New Year people!

Julian Stone, CEO
ProActive Software
www.proworkflow.com

My name is Kylie; I’ve just joined the fantastic team here at ProWorkflow!

My job here at ProWorkflow is Software and Administration Support, so I’ll be one of the friendly voices you hear at the end of the phone when you have a question.  I’m really looking forward to the new and exciting challenges of working here. I come from a background in Administration but have had some experience in the IT industry. I am really looking forward to talking to you all, and helping you with your questions.

Outside of work I enjoy Snowboarding, Painting, Motorsport and shopping (as all girls do).  I have taken up snowboarding this year and by the end of the season I managed to make it down the mountain without falling over, so really looking forward to next season, planning on taking on the jumps – so broken legs and arms, here we come!!

So that’s a little about me, feel free to drop me a line anytime and I’ll be more than happy to have a chat and help you out.

- Kylie

This wasn’t a decision we took lightly since it meant putting a hold on most of our development work, but with our current rate of growth we needed to add extra capacity.

It’s been a busy time for our development and networking teams who have done a fantastic job and completed the migration just over two weeks ago. All of our customers are now on the new infrastructure and we’ve already received a huge amount of positive feedback. We thought it would be interesting to share the results of our own testing of several pages within ProWorkflow including some of the most intensive.

As you can see, the new infrastructure is roughly twice as fast so ProWorkflow is making our customers even more productive!

We’re got some further speed enhancements planned and there are some great features coming very soon that will improve usability and make it even easier to manage multiple projects, track and adjust staff workload and keep on top of time entry!

Watch this space!

Note: If the update doesn’t work, you may need to reinstall AdobeAir and then reinstall the Widget. Your settings will remain intact.

——————————————————————–

The most recent Adobe Air update that was released on Friday has caused the ProWorkflow Time Tracker to stop working for some customers.

Our development team are investigating this issue as a high priority and anticipate that a fix will be released within the next 24 hours. In the meantime as a temporary fix for any customers who need to use the Time Tracker, you can uninstall Adobe Air 2.0 and then download and reinstall the working 1.5.3 version using these links:

Adobe Air 1.5.3 for Windows

Adobe Air 1.5.3 for Mac

We will post an update as soon as a 2.0 compatible version of the Time Tracker is available and are very sorry for the inconvenience, we realise just how important the Time Tracker is to you.

Changes under the hood

ProWorkflow is developed in ColdFusion and has been for many years, during that time there have been some great new features added by Adobe and wherever possible we look to take advantage of these. Most of the time these require just small changes but this time around we had to think a bit more deeply (and by “we”, I mean our overworked developers).

Previously, each of our customers had an entirely separate set of files that provide the logic for ProWorkflow. So when a user added a new task they would be using the “add_task.cfm” file that was stored in a folder dedicated to their account. Every account would have its own copy of this “add_task.cfm” file even though they were all identical.

This approach has worked really well but had a few key drawbacks that we wanted to overcome:

• Performance – having every customer requesting copies of the same file meant more load on our servers because we couldn’t cache effectively.
• Updates – with several thousand customers, the process of rolling out updates was time-consuming, server intensive and generally quite difficult to manage.
• New accounts – each new customer required a lengthy setup process.
• Storage – every file was small but several thousand are needed to power ProWorkflow, having copies for each customer was eating away at our hard drives.

It’s been just over 6 weeks of early mornings and late nights but we are thrilled to say that with a mix of ingenuity, persistence and caffeine we completed the final testing phase late last week. Every member of the ProWorkflow team has been involved in testing every feature, button, link and setting within ProWorkflow across multiple browsers. I feel it is a real credit to everyone that we are not only still talking to each other but remain good friends afterwards!

We have already been using this new “Shared Code” approach for new trial accounts and it is going very well, it’s a bit too early to start giving performance figures but we will produce those in coming weeks. We will be rolling out to existing accounts over the next 1-2 weeks, carefully monitoring to ensure there are no issues.
.

What’s next?

The new shared code model will bring performance improvements to all of our customers but more importantly it will dramatically shorten our update rollout time. This means our developers spend more time making ProWorkflow even better and everyone gets the changes at the same time! It also opens up the door for some fantastic new features and you’ll be hearing about those in the coming weeks.

"Fantastic App, even better support!"

Version Info: 7.6
Purchased Date: November 01, 2009
Project Manager, Trent Design
January 31, 2010

Pros

As a long time Basecamp customer, we had been looking for the "next step" for several months but held off because of concerns that our users would struggle with a new system.
We came across ProWorkflow through a recommendation and signed up for a free trial (just like Basecamp). There was a lot more to it than we expected but the support was great, with useful training videos and REAL people on the phone!
It’s a big leap ahead of Basecamp and in the few months we’ve been using ProWorkflow, we’ve been really impressed at the speed of development. A few of my team are also using the iPhone app (which is free, take note 37signals!!) and love it.
Support has continued to be terrific, the team have helped us with any questions and go far beyond what I would expect.

Cons

Coming from Basecamp, the interface is busier but with more features I suppose that is unavoidable. There are some occasions where 2-3 windows are used when 1 would do the job but I’m assured that this is being worked on and the developers haven’t let us down so far.
Otherwise, it’s hard to pick fault with!

Overall

A great example of online software done right, I can’t see us ever moving to anything else!

We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience which, whilst outside of our control, meant ProWorkflow was unavailable to some customers during this time. This is the first instance in over 7 years where we have experienced these issues and we will be working to ensure we continue to meet our previous track record of class-leading reliability.

EVENT UPDATE 23-MAR-10 14:30 CDT:  Following the activation of BGP on the newly repaired Internap circuit, all outstanding intermittent routing and connectivity issues in the Chicago an Cedar Falls LT Data Centers have been resolved.  The resolution of these issues suggests an underlying routing issue at Internap as well as physical-layer connection problem that was isolated and resolved earlier in the day.  Operations and Network Engineering are monitoring customer connectivity and the status of the BGP peering session, respectively.  We appreciate the patience and understanding of our customers during this process.