Is it a sign of the times that the cloud-based tools that allow us to work together better now need a tool of their own to work together better? A meta betta togetha tool in other words.
Sounds ironic, but it’s a fact that we struggle to manage the multiple communication streams we’re connected to - we’re running out of sandbags to contain the overflow.
For those of you that have Pivotal Tracker as one of your streams, we have many friends in the community that are seeking to help folks stay on top of and act upon all that valuable info in these multiple streams. One pond that all your streams feed into if you will. Not wishing to play favorites, here are some of our more recent partners in alphabetical order.
Try them out and please tell us what you think.
300 Miligrams all your business information from various cloud services together in one place.
BusyFlow A workspace that makes your web-based productivity and collaboration apps work together.
Clutch All your project updates in one beautiful feed, and works with many popular project management systems.
Flowdock is a collaboration web app for technical teams.
Hojoki lets all your cloud apps work as one.
Teambox Joining social collaboration tools with online project management.
Traction Stream Listen to your applications and streams – curate and share what matters.
Last week, we launched a complete redesign of stories, as part of our ongoing effort to make Tracker easier and more enjoyable to use. We've received a great amount of feedback about what's working well in the new design, as well as what could be improved. As a product team, we're extremely lucky to have users who time and again have shown such passion - thank you, we really couldn't do this without you!
The redesign was a big change and involved some significant behind-the-scenes investments for big upcoming features. There were a few bumps after the release, and we've rolled out a number of fixes over the last week as well as some design tweaks based on your feedback. See below for the complete list.
Learn all you need to know about the state of the art in Agile SaaS. Don’t miss this FREE five week course from Professors Armando Fox and David Patterson of UC Berkeley, the authors of Engineering Long-Lasting Software.
Aside from the fact that they’ll be using Pivotal Tracker extensively while teaching the benefits and how tos of test driven development, bi-weekly iterations, velocity and more, the course will also cover other tools such as Github, Heroku and Cucumber.
Class starts February 20th, so don’t dither, register now at http://www.saas-class.org/
Happy Valentine’s Day from the Tracker Team!
In the spirit of this pop-western-religious-hallmark-day we’re going to indulge in a public display of beta affection.
Pivotal Booster, from our friends at the Railsware Company, is a beautiful OS X client. It’s free, it’s in beta, it’s easy to install and if you’re a mac user there’s no reason not to get it.
Two features we’d like to call out that make this a must have: 1) My Stories View... across all projects. Very handy... we like it. 2) Toggle between stories assigned to me and stories requested by me. Great for the coder... and the manager too.
Railsware promises even more functionality in the next month or two. Here’s a sneak peek we’ve obtained exclusively for the Tracker faithful.
Stay tuned to this blog - We'll be highlighting more apps from the Tracker ecosystem in the near future.
Stories in Pivotal Tracker have been given a serious upgrade. For the most part it’s all pretty self explanatory - the functionality you’re used to is all there, just in a format that’s more intuitive, user friendly and hopefully you’ll agree, more appealing. Our advice, play with it and then come back and read the rest of this post, especially if anything is confusing.
You’re back, so let’s continue!
One of the goals of Tracker has always been to make collaboration around your story backlog as easy as possible, so that your team spends less time managing your project and more of it actually building things. We think there’s room to make that not just easier, but more enjoyable, even fun! So to that end, great usability and user experience are major themes in our backlog for 2012, starting with this story redesign.
See below for all the highlights.
We've got a major update of Pivotal Tracker planned for this weekend, which requires downtime while we run a fairly major database schema migration.
The update is planned for Saturday, Feb. 4, at 9:00 Pacific Standard Time (PST), or 17:00 UTC, and we expect it to take approximately one hour.
Apologies for the inconvenience, but we're hopeful that you'll like what we're rolling out!
For real time status updates, please follow @pivotaltracker on Twitter.