There are currently routing issues near our data center in the US which are causing speed issues and timeouts for some customers. ProWorkflow itself is running normally and all data is safe and secure, but the routing issues are severely affecting speed at times. The engineers at the data center are working with Internap’s network engineers and we will update you as soon as they update us.
Further updates from our service provider can be found at http://ltstatus.com/?p=10821 but we have provided them below:
EVENT UPDATE 22-MAR-10 16:45 CDT: Network Services continues to monitor the overall status of the Chicago and Cedar Falls networks. The issue that impacted customers with route latency is, as previously report, largely resolved. There are continued reported issues with customers with services which reside in the 74.200.0.0 network when traversing Internap. We are working with Internap to address these issues. Thank you for your continued patience as we work through these remaining issues. An update will be posted as we have additional information.
EVENT UPDATE 22-MAR-10 18:55 CDT: Network Services continues to monitor the overall status of the Chicago and Cedar Falls networks. The Network Services Team is aware of routing issues reported by customers in the 74.200.0.0 network. We are working to identify any common elements of these networks and to identify a solution to these issues. We appreciate your patience as we work to identify the source of the routing anomalies. An update will be posted as we have additional information
EVENT UPDATE 22-MAR-10 22:15 CDT: In an attempt to stabilize the networks in Cedar Falls and Chicago and to restore full connectivity to all IP subnets, the Network Services Team will perform some emergency intrusive hardware testing of one of the devices in Chicago on 23-MAR-2010 at 00:00. During this time, we expect customer connectivity to experience brief periods of unavailability as the testing progresses, with a total disruption of 20 minutes or less. We appreciate your patience while we complete this emergency work tonight. An update will be posted as we have additional information
EVENT UPDATE 23-MAR-10 05:30 CDT: In an attempt to stabilize the networks in Cedar Falls and Chicago and to restore full connectivity to all IP subnets, the Network Services Team performed several intrusive hardware testing procedures on devices in the Chicago network. The results of these maintenance events suggest that most of the routing anomalies have been identified and resolved. However, there is a component of variability that exists as a result of our interaction with Internap. We have escalated these residual issues to Internap management and will pursue them to final resolution. We appreciate your patience during this entire process. An update will be posted as additional information is available.
EVENT UPDATE 23-MAR-10 10:45 CDT: As a result of our investigation with Internap, they have discovered and repaired our primary routing connection. Network Services believes that this is and has been a primary contributor to the routing anomalies we have experienced over the past 36 hours. Because of our strong desire to recover the service, we will be enabling BGP routing on that repaired circuit in an emergency window in the next 15 minutes. While this may cause some momentary latency as routes re-converge, this will be a transitory experience and should result in significantly better connectivity for LT customers in Cedar Falls and Chicago. We appreciate your patience as we work to resolve this issue permanently.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this is causing and we would like to assure our customers that we are doing our utmost to resolve this issue at soon as possible.
ProWorkflow’s automated email alerts are one of our most popular features, they can be sent out for key events such as when projects are nearing due dates or when a new task is created. Unfortunately, these alerts use quite an old template so we’ve brought them up to date with the new design styles used by our messaging alerts.
Due to how these templates are stored, we need to update them for all accounts at once and we are aware that a small number of customers have modified the standard email alerts. We have done our utmost to identify these accounts and are contacting each customer directly so you can opt out of this change but if you have not heard from us yet then please let us know if you would prefer to keep your current alerts.
As always, backups are in place so if you change your mind or don’t contact us in time then we can roll you back to the old alerts without any problems!
For now, here is a quick before and after just so you can see the changes we will be rolling out.
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Here’s the OLD design:
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And the NEW design: (Much tidier)
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As part of the normal process of people changing solutions to meet changing needs we occasionally have new customers coming to ProWorkflow from Basecamp (or other project management tools).
To make it easier for the Basecamp users to move their data into ProWorkflow we made a quick import utility. Contact us if you are trialling ProWorkflow and want to move your Basecamp data in.
Print Me
Looking below it’s amazing to see how far our project management software has come from the original design sketches. Seriously people, these were my original briefs to Alan Barlow (Cofounder) at the time.
No huge scoping documents, documentation, peer reviews, industry research, tight visuals or anything! No large teams of usability experts or developers – just two hardworking bootstrappers (working remotely from each other) with a loose idea, a few pencil sketches, and understanding partners who let us work all hours to turn the idea into what is now the ProWorkflow project management solution. A world class tool managing huge amounts of customer info globally.
We’re now a tight team managing critical info daily for thousands of people worldwide. They depend on us to deliver results daily and we do. They expect the solution to work reliably daily and it does. We deliver the goods and have done for years.
Below are some of the original design sketches sent to Alan to work on. We just communicated lots, built the app and then started to build a business!
Now we have:
- Thousands of users globally
- 629,022 projects created
- 2,620,234 tasks created
- 9,349,890 hours tracked
- $301,762,038 has been invoiced through ProWorkflow
(Note: these are from live accounts and don’t include trials) - An awesome team in 2x offices
- A pile of servers
- An iPhone App (One of the top in our industry)
- Time Tracking Widget
- Integration with Xero, QuickBooks and Kashflow
- 3x plans for different account sizes
- Support, Help site, Videos, Blog etc
- A professional and robust API
- Most backend systems we have built and automated (including multicurrency recurring account billing)
This post should also be a little encouragement to people that you can build a world class solution and business from nothing. We did this with no debt or funding – only sweat equity! Just some smarts and hard work.
The first Visuals!
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Collaboration Concept:
The basic idea behind ProWorkflow is that Staff, Clients, and Contractors can login to one place, see their work and all work on the same page. Essentially all working on the same project together.
The ProWorkflow tool makes sure all the permissions are under control so people only see what they need to see and can only access what they need to access.
We manage project in 2 screens when most other solutions take up to 10+ screens to do the same thing! Here’s a few of my early sketches to figure our our core process/permissions model.
Below are some of the very first ProWorkflow visuals as supplied to Alan (Cofounder) to develop.
Job (Project) Page:
This is the original ‘Projects Page’. Pretty loose visual, but it’s quite funny seeing that we used to have the navigation on the right. It’s all a heap more professional and powerful now.
Job (Project) Details:
In the original version you would expand the Job to see the details. Nowadays we click through to a new ‘Project Details Page’. This old version was pretty basic.
Timesheet Page:
This is still pretty much the same concept so I think it must be time to rethink this page using some new technology available.
Contacts Page:
This has been extended somewhat…
Notes Page:
Pretty simple really. Not much to say here…
Calendar Page:
And my all time favourite development visual – the ‘Calendar page’. Brilliant! The developer (Alan) must have loved me for sending this brief. I think developers must have great patience at times to put up with designers like me 
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I’ll see what else we can find in the cupboard from the ‘early days’ that can be blogged. Possibly real screenshots of version 1.0?
We received an email from our upstream server provider today notifying us that on Sunday (Chicago, US) morning, they will be doing some minor server maintenance. During this time connectivity may be affected for a period of 10-20minutes.
- EVENT START DATE: 28-02-2010
- EVENT START TIME: 00:00 CST
- EVENT END DATE: 28-02-2010
- EVENT END TIME: : 06:00 CST
They have assured us that for most customers there will be no downtime, but just thought we’d keep our ProWork’ers in the loop just in case they’re working over the weekend.
We’re often asked what browser is the best to use with ProWorkflow. Our response for quite some time now has been to suggest using anything apart from Internet Explorer, there are a couple of reasons for this but the largest factor is speed.
ProWorkflow’s project management app is a data intensive application and isn’t typical of a normal website, this means we make your browser work harder than normal! Each browser renders a website and processes any active code using a different engine and some are much quicker than others. On smaller pages in ProWorkflow you won’t notice much difference but as you work with more complex projects you can save valuable seconds which soon add up.
We last did a similar speed comparison about 6 months ago and Chrome was the winner, since then there have been a few updates to Firefox and Internet Explorer and we have also added Safari to our officially supported browser list so we were keen to repeat our test.
These are the browsers we tested:
- Chrome (5.0.322.2)
- Firefox (3.6)
- Internet Explorer (8.0.6001.18882)
- Safari (4.0.3)
And here are the results: (in seconds)
Chrome is the clear winner with Firefox in second, followed by Safari and Internet Explorer. If you are using one of the slower browsers then you could save 30% of the loading time just by switching to Chrome.
Download Chrome Today!
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What’s really great news is that looking at our last test, we can see that ProWorkflow is quicker than ever and that’s a reflection of the hard work our developers have been putting in to optimising performance. We’ll have another rollout coming soon which will bring even more speed as we are doing some further tweaking and the results are already looking fantastic!
It has been a very busy start to 2010 for the ProWorkflow team and our developers are no exception, they’ve been working on some great new features as well as performance and visual tweaks to make ProWorkflow an even better experience.
This is our first big update of the year and we’re very excited about it, in fact there is so much that we have split it up into sections just so we don’t miss anything! We’ve also made a short video covering the new features so why not check out the changes in action.
February 2010 Update:
http://www.screencast.com/t/YjAyODJkO
Note: Click link above to view a bigger video size)
The update is being rolled out today. We hope you like the new features, it’s always great to get your feedback so do get in touch to let us know what you think.
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Project Priorities
We’ve had plenty of requests to add support for this feature and it’s now all yours to help you organise your projects and make sure you’re focusing your efforts where they are needed most.
You’ll find this option on the “New Project” and “Edit Project” pop-ups and of course you can see and edit it directly from the Project Details Page.
Having the priority on the Project Details page is useful but with the next new feature it becomes even better…
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Projects Page
Previously, the Projects Page grouped all of your Projects by category, this helped keep customers organised but didn’t give as much flexibility as we wanted.
We’ve now added 5 more grouping options – Client, Priority, Project Manager, Start Date and Due Date!
These make it easier than ever to keep track of your projects! You can still sort and search within each group and hide any groups you aren’t interested in by just clicking on the group’s name. Don’t forget that you can drag and drop projects between groups to change the category, priority and project manager, it’s almost too easy!
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Tasks Page
We’ve taken the great changes from the Projects Page and replicated them on the Tasks Page. There’s also the fantastic ‘Upcoming View’ that lists all of your tasks in chronological order so you can see at a glance what you have to do.
We’ve added some new settings in the ‘Personal Settings’ section (you can find the link on the right side of your Homepage) and these let you control the default sort order and grouping so if you find a view you really like then you can save it for next time.
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Task Details
We’re working on removing pop-ups throughout ProWorkflow and this new feature means you can now view task details directly from the Project Details Page, you can view messages, files and time records as well as adding new ones. To view these details just click the “+” icon on the right of the task name, to hide them just click the “-“ in the same place.
You can still launch the pop-up window by clicking on the name of the task and we’ve updated that window so you can view and add time records without needing to open a separate pop-up.
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Messages – Email Alerts
We’ve had fantastic feedback about the improved messaging system and the ability to reply to a message without having to log in to ProWorkflow.
We’ve tweaked that even further so now when you reply to a message you have the option to show the entire conversation rather than just the last message. You can also choose to send your reply to either the sender or to everyone who received the original message (just like “Reply to All” in Outlook).
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Reports Page
There are some much bigger changes planned for reports in the coming months but in the meantime we have tweaked the Reports Page so that it loads much faster by only loading the report filters when you click on the report you need.
There is also the option to export CSV, XML and pdf files directly from the Reports Page without having to run the onscreen report first, this a great time saver if you are taking exports on a regular basis.
That’s all for this update but we’re far from finished yet, keep an eye on the blog over the coming weeks for more news!
One of our ProWorkflow customers sent us this testimonial today. Make sure you check them out! And thanks to Stephen for the great testimonial! More Testimonials >
"At any given time, our company is in production on at least 10 – 15 web stores for our clients world wide. The lead job of our production manager, puts him in a position where he is constantly bombarded with details, files, notes etc on every aspect of our productions. And if you listen to his ‘wining’, it is ‘every minute of every day, and it never stops’.
Balancing this constant flow of information is a formidable task, unless you happen to be one of the lucky people out there in production land, and stumble on to ProWorkflow.
We can not give you enough superlatives on this program. It has brought our productions into a more streamline process and dramatically decreased our blood pressure overall. Just having a detailed and up to date list of all our productions and where they are in the grand scheme of things, is ‘priceless’, and that is what ProWorkflow represents to us.”
Stephen Manzi
Senior Production ManagerAdVision Multimedia Productions"
advisiongraphics.com
About Advision…
AdVision Multimedia Productions provides advanced Web2.0 services. They specialize in CSS and PHP programming and are known for their work primarily in the customization of XSilva’s LightSpeed webstore module along with a host of custom designed functionality for their clients.
They generally are hired by companies that already have an established webmaster and design team, but are looking to contract out, for those advanced talents that will take their website to the next level. They believe in putting the client is as much control of their website as possible, and it is their mandate to ‘make themselves redundant’. They are great team players, and love to teach people about ‘internet stuff’.
