Today’s ProWorkflow Rollout!

We’re Rolling out a ProWorkflow Update today!

We are currently in the process of rolling out an update and should be finished by this evening. This is a small update with some requested fixes and improvements. There will bed be no downtime during this rollout. Here are a few items from this update:

• Dependent Tasks
  We have added a heap of usability mods to make Dependant tasks easier to grasp and harder to mess up. We have also added some onscreen messaging to help guide you through the creation process.
• Custom Reports
  The ‘Project Category’ field has been added as an option in the ‘Custom Reports’ builder. This will add greater flexibility to reporting.
• Meta Page Titles
  In the ‘ADMIN > Developer Settings’ page you will find an option to change the ‘Meta Page Title Variable’. This is the text that shows in the browser title and on the task bar. Using the new option will give you ‘Contextual’ page titles. So if you have many windows open, you can see at a glance which one is which.
• Project Tasks
  On the ‘Project Details’ page, there is a ‘Copy Tasks’ link. In here we’ve added a ‘Create Template’ option to save time creating Task Templates for you to reuse!
• Project Tasks
  We added full ‘Order Number’ validation so that if you try to add duplicate Task Order numbers it won’t let you. This will also help Dependant Tasks work more smoothly.
• Add Task Templates
  Up until now Task Templates were added in the ‘Edit Project’ popup. You can now add Templates from the ‘+Add Task’ dropdown.
• Resources/Files
  You can now sort ‘Project Resources’ by filename, size or date modified on the ‘project Details’ page.
• And a few more code tidy-ups…

We’re just getting through a large server migration and then will be knocking off a lot more development and feature enhancements!

Put this date in your Calendar!
- April 11-13th
 

What’s Happening?

We’re installing new servers! We currently host a number of customer servers at the California based Fastservers Data center. Recently we were informed that this facility will be closing in a few months and all customers moved to the newer, faster and better located Fastservers Data center in Chicago. This also gives us a good opportunity to upgrade these servers to brand new, faster servers.
 

What will this mean for customers?

This server move will mean faster ProWorkflow performance, more reliable service, less downtime, and will also provide better speed of access for our European customers!
 

Will there be disruption? Downtime?

We will be working hard with Fastservers to minimise the effect of this change on ProWorkflow users. We do need some time to complete the transition, this has been scheduled for the 11-13th of April (Depending on time zone). See below for approximate local times.

This will be over Saturday or Sunday depending on time zone. This will be Easter weekend, so many of you will some more natural downtime. Please put this in your calendar and let your staff and associated ProWorkflow users know about the downtime.
 

Important Note: Your account’s URL will change!

All account URL’s will change. This is because we’re moving many accounts to different server positions to provide better geographical service. Your old account will have a redirect, but you will need to notify all who use your ProWorkflow account of the new address once this has been generated.

Quick Tip:
You can use the ‘Quick Email’ feature on the ‘Contacts Page‘ to send out an email to everyone about the new account address.
 

Will we be backed up?

Yes! ProWorkflow’s servers have great, well tested backups, however we’ll also perform manual backups of each server prior to the server move. Your data will be safe.
 

Scheduled date!

Below are the approximate dates and times for the server moves. Please be aware that whilst we will attempt to perform the move within these time windows, we may be a little earlier or later… The best way to plan is to prepare for a day either side for contingency.

Note: Whilst we will be working on all accounts over the time periods below, your individual customer account downtime will be significantly less.
 

On another note – Our New Affiliate Program!
You may not be aware that we’ve just started an affiliates program. So if you’d like to be rewarded for customer referrals, visit this page and sign up as an affiliate!
https://www.proworkflow.com/PWF_affiliates.cfm
 

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About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for:
ProActive Software, ProWorkflow, ProWorkflow Blog & Julian101
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We’re regularly asked about reseller and affiliate programs by happy customers or tech companies so we’re please to offer an affiliate program for referrals to sale.

Refer people and companies to the ProWorkflow solution and when they sign up as an ongoing customer, we’ll thank you with an affiliate payment! Easy!

Note: The affiliate program only pays out for Subscription accounts at this time (ie: not code sales)

WHATS THE COMMISSION STRUCTURE?

ProWorkflow subscription accounts sell for $10, $20 or $30 per user per month depending on the plan chosen.

We have 3x plans ($10, 20, 30 per user p/m). But ultimately there is a monthly price for an account based on the number of staff users.

So for example, a typical sale could be $160 per month.
The Affiliate program pays out the first month’s value of the signup as a one-off affiliate payment. This payment is paid out after the 3rd month the customer is with us.

Example: Customer signs up on the 15th Jan 09 for a $160 per month account

ProWorkflow receives from the customer:
    $160 on June 15, 2009
    $160 on July 15, 2009
    $160 on August 15, 2009

The Affiliate program will pay out $160 (first month) to the affiliate when 3rd month’s invoice is billed, ie: after the 15th August.

How does it work? Where are the banners?
When signed up, login to the Affiliate area and click on the ‘Creative’ tab. There are banner ads and text links to place on your website. Simply copy the appropriate code, place it on your site and the ads will appear. People that click the ad and sign up for a subscription account are tracked and will appear in your reports.

Note: Affiliate payments are only applicable for sales that occur within 180 days of clicking on your website ad.

WHERE IS THE REPORTING?

You will have access to a login area for affiliates where you have access to comprehensive reports about your referred traffic and affiliate sales.

HOW DO I GET PAID?

We are using the MyAp system for the affiliate program. This is one of the leading solutions for affiliate management. As part of our contract with MyAp, we will approve payments and transactions, but MyAp will post cheques out to affiliates when due. These will be sent out on the timeframe shown above.

WHAT IF I HAVE QUESTIONS?

If you come across any issues or have questions, please contact us through our contact form.

Something I’ve had many customers asking is how they can convert their time figures into decimals using a spreadsheet, it’s something that’s really easy to do if you know the correct formula to use.

I’m going assume that you’ve exported the data from our system so it’s in the format 1:30 (1 hour, 30 minutes), a good report to export is the Time Summary report (found on the Reports Page).

Converting your Time to a Decimal

If you have 1:30 and you want it as a decimal (1.5) then create a new column alongside your time figures then enter the formula =hour({cell})+minute({cell})/60

Cell Formula

You’ll need to make sure the cells are being formatted correctly, so select your “Time” column, right click and select “Format Cells” then make sure you’ve set the cell type to Custom h:mm

Time Cell Format

Then do the same for your “Minutes” column and make sure the cell type is set to Number with no decimals

Minutes Cell Format

You should end up with a nice list.

The ProWorkflow solution – www.proworkflow.com is a web based project management solution developed in New Zealand by a tight virtual team. Our servers are in California, the CTO (Founder) in New Plymouth, CEO (Founder) in Rural Christchurch with some staff, and a top developer in Fiji!  We’re a tight team and we have focused on process automation so our costs grow slower than sales – what we call a low inertia business.

From day one, we set out  to build a global business founded on our low inertia business model.  We’ve never just been NZ focussed, it is as easy to reach Los Angeles, London or Levin so why not?

We’ve worked hard to setup automation for trials, sales, support, billing, licensing, client account maintenance and support; leaving our staff free to really talk to customers.  The model has run in profit from day one and the organic growth has allowed us to invest revenue back into the business to support top class infrastructure to support our SaaS application.

“Remember that in SaaS, the app is to SaaS what the hamburger is to MacDonalds – people forget that. The app is a small part. To go global the BUSINESS MODEL and INFRASTRUCTURE and SYSTEMS need to scale… The actual application is the least of your worries. Automation and infrastructure leave people to do what they do best, interact with people to solve problems.”

Supplementing our top team, the backend system called “ProCodeManager, which has seen nearly as much development as ProWorkflow is the ‘Engine’ behind the business and provides us with information on every bit of activity in the business, including dashboards for all user activity, follow up, account management, and financial performance.  PCM also highlights issues, ie: mail backing up, server errors etc. So it helps keep us all  on the ball!

The company has no debt, no cash needs beyond sustainable growth, market salaries, corporate governance, no need for funding, sufficient cash in bank to consider dividends, a 7 figure revenue and a growing happy user base.  We can see the growth and customers tell us PWF really helps in their business – a great place to be,  The PWF solution is essentially  ‘recession-friendly’ as it allows customers to  focus on efficiencies. Saving money in hard times is a handy substitute for revenue growth. Furthermore big business is breaking into small businesses in the USA (and all over), creating a much larger market of SME’s (our target market).

As about 75% of our revenue is charged in USD from offshore customers and the US Dollar has finally returned to a realistic cross rate that has been a shot in the arm for us, we really would like to see the New Zealand government taking more note in policy of our wild currency fluctuations.  It would help us plan better.

In our view the key metric for business is revenue per employee, we are driving for a target of US350k per person, at this level we are relatively immune to what the world does in terms of economic activity.  We are exposed to some risk through broadband connectivity so the better and faster our connections to the world the better for us.

Expenses are relatively fixed and we should be able to drive about 300-500k of revenue per staff member.

With hard work and determined effort  we have made page 1 on Google for the term “Project Management Software” and are now finding an increasing number of referral based sales as we’ve been around a few years now. We’ve been aligning our marketing spend to our product releases and the tidiness of PCM and will tweak it more as our organic growth increases.

We released Xero and QuickBooks integration last year, a Time Tracking Widget in Q3 08 and have just finished the ProWorkflow API.  We have a growing number of developers lining up to get into the API, either to integrate with their intranets or to build cool apps! We plan to build an app library for the ProWorkflow solution this year.

The ProWorkflow affiliate program is about to be launched late Feb and our plan is to drive this hard. We want to reward those who refer sales to us.

As our biggest user base is in the US, and the US has been dropping around 500,000 jobs each month, we have of course noticed some slowdown over recent months.  But once customers move past the shock of revenue falls, efficiency soon gets on the radar – so growth, for us, is back.  For us 2009 is about pushing out to new customers, keeping on keeping on with our efforts to supply good products, build on top class infrastructure from a low inertia operation.

So yes, we are in great shape. Slim, trim and rocking!  We will continue to work hard to support our customers and help then find efficiencies – a real substitute for revenue growth until the global economy bounces back

And my advice on company survival does not change in hard times or at any time.   Grow sales faster than costs, automate process, focus people on the stuff only people can do, have a real value (savings or revenue growth) proposition for your customers, if you can, be international from New Zealand.

Remember, if you have to SELL a product, you’re doing something wrong. Instead, you should be FACILITATING a purchase. Think about that for a bit…

Note: Republished from Julian101

Something I’ve had many customers asking is how they can convert their time figures into minutes using a spreadsheet, it’s something that’s really easy to do if you know the correct formula to use.

I’m going assume that you’ve exported the data from our system so it’s in the format 1:30 (1 hour, 30 minutes), a good report to export is the Time Summary report (found on the Reports Page).

Converting your Time to Minutes

If you have 1:30 and you want it in minutes (90 Minutes) then create a new column alongside your time figures then enter the formula ={cell}*1440

Cell Formula

You’ll need to make sure the cells are being formatted correctly, so select your “Time” column, right click and select “Format Cells” then make sure you’ve set the cell type to Custom h:mm

Time Cell Format

Then do the same for your “Minutes” column and make sure the cell type is set to Number with no decimals

Minutes Cell Format

You should end up with a nice list.

Most tech-aware people would have heard by now that on 30th Jan 09m Ma.gnolia http://ma.gnolia.com/ suffered a massive data corruption and loss scenario. Basically, the poo hit the fan and they lost all their users’ data and had no restorable backups! If you go to their website now you’ll see a sad looking holding page: (click to enlarge)

I’d say at a guess that it’ll be the end of them. It’s not easy to claw back credibility after an event like that. However, they were just a bookmarking service. You imagine this happening to a major SaaS application provider, ie: Project management, accounting, documents, etc. 

I’m trying to drive a little healthy fear into people as there are many online apps that haven’t addressed their infrastructure and backups. They may look good on the front end, but could just be a one man band with one server and no backups behind the scenes.

Make sure you do your homework when choosing a SaaS vendor for your business applications. At ProActive Software (www.proworkflow.com) we take the security and sensitivity of your vital business and project info very seriously and have professional infrastructure and top security, setup at who we consider the USA’s top data center – www.fastservers.net.

Here’s our data security page: Read about ProWorkflow Data Security.

Regarding backups, the ProWorkflow solution has automatic monitored backups that run 4x daily with a 14 day retention. That means we keep 56 copies of every customers’ database backup for up to 2 week rollbacks! The latest 4x backups are kept on the subscription servers and others are kept on the Fastservers remote backup servers.

In addition! We also allow customers to download their full database backup file at ANY time from within the application!

As it happens, sometimes you need the backups to restore for silly things, like if a customer intentionally (or accidentally) deletes a pile of their precious data…

Here’s an example of a ‘non-stressful’ backup restore we hade to do today. No big dramas… But was the easiest way to fix the issue for the customer.

Good Morning PWF,

We seem to have lost an entire category and our custom “look and feel”. We are looking for our Member Bank Projects category. Is there a way that you kind find and restore?

- CLIENT

Hi there,

Re: Look’n’feel. Just checking your audit log, it seems that XXXX (your Staff) has reset your look’n’feel settings. We’re not able to simply bring these back as it was a chosen option, however we could do this by restoring a backup.

Re: Projects Category. The Project Category was deleted on 2 Feb 09, and subsequently all projects and tasks within this category were deleted as that was the chosen option.

We’re either able to run a script to bring this info back, or restore a backup from before this time (all data entered since that time will be unavailable if we go with this option).

I’ll give you a call and check how you’d like to proceed.

- PROWORKFLOW STAFF

Hi PWF,

I think we’ll have to go with the restore of a backup. I understand that anything that happened this morning after the restored backup will be lost.

- CLIENT

Hi there,

Your account has now been restored from the latest backup which was made at 4.30am on 2 February.

- PROWORKFLOW STAFF

Hi PWF,

Perfect!  You guys saved my life…or at least my sanity

- CLIENT

SO it pays to have backups eh!

We made a change to the Upcoming Items section of the dashboard last week that I’m sure you’ll find useful.

When we re-did the dashboard we updated the Upcoming Items section to make it significantly better, one thing that always bugged me though was the fact we forced you to tick the tasks you want to complete and then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Mark as Complete”.

With this update we’ve removed the need to do this, if you want to mark a task complete just click the checkbox and you’ll see the task get a strikethrough to let you know it’s been marked complete.

It’s as easy as that!