We're moving Pivotal Tracker to a new, faster database server with solid state drives tomorrow, and performing some other maintenance that requires downtime. To minimize disruption during work hours in as many parts of the world as possible, we're planning this maintenance for tomorrow, Saturday, March 31, at 9am Pacific, and we anticipate it to take approximately one hour.

To get the latest updates, and real time status of this maintenance, please follow @pivotaltracker on Twitter.

It’s official - Pivotal Labs, the company that made and owns Pivotal Tracker, has been acquired by EMC, and we are thrilled! You can read all about it at Pivotallabs.com/emc.

What does this mean for Tracker, and more importantly, all of our great customers around the globe? In the near term, it’s business as usual.

Tracker has grown in popularity beyond our wildest expectations these last six years, and we owe that to our extremely loyal and passionate user community. Up until about a year ago, our work on Tracker was focused on our own needs at Pivotal Labs, to allow us to work more efficiently with our clients, and to promote our brand of software development. In other words, we’d been more Pivotal-focused than customer-focused.

That said, we’ve been changing that for a while now. We want to build more of the features you are requesting, we want Tracker to be in more languages than just English, we want to offer more integrations... and the list goes on. Of course, all that takes resources.

Now, we have EMC in our corner. A company with a great reputation, and plenty of resources. They know they’ve acquired a great product as part of the deal, and they are eager to see Pivotal Tracker grow to be the best Agile project management tool in the market.

To all of our customers - thank you! This is a new beginning, and we look forward to serving you better.

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.

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.

We're working on a new version of the Pivotal Tracker developer API, with a long list of improvements. The release of this is a few months away, but to prepare for it, we're removing the old version (V2) of the API. This change (removal of V2) is tentatively planned for January 27, 2012, just over three weeks from today.

If you're using the API, please make sure that you're using the current version (V3), as requests to V2 will no longer work.

To see which version you're using, look at the URLs of the requests you're sending. If you see "v2" in the path, for example /services/v2/projects, you're using the old version, and will need to upgrade to the current API version.

If you have any questions, or could use help figuring out how to make your code work with the V3 version of the API, please send an email to tracker@pivotallabs.com.

Apigee, a company that helps you use and develop APIs, just announced a number of new API consoles, including for Pivotal Tracker. The Pivotal Tracker API Console allows you to explore the API from within your browser, and makes it easy to test and debug your code that uses the API. Check it out!

For the rest of the new consoles, see the Apigee announcement blog post.

We're planning the first of an on-going series of Webinars for Pivotal Tracker users for next Wednesday, Dec 21, at 11:00am PST (19:00 GMT).

This is going to be a 1 hour session, via GoToWebinar. Anyone is more than welcome to join, but this particular session will be geared towards new Tracker users. We'll go over the agile concepts behind Tracker, show how to get started with your first project, and give you a tour of the most commonly used features. At the end, there will be an opportunity to ask plenty of questions.

Please register in advance, at the following URL:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/520854266

Instructions for how to join the Webinar will be emailed to you after you register. Since GoToWebinar requires you to download and install an app to join, we suggesting connecting a few minutes before 11:00am on Wednesday.

See you there!

Hojoki is a new collaboration app that promises to "make all your cloud apps work as one", by integrating many of the most popular services that your team uses daily (including Pivotal Tracker, of course) into a personalized activity stream.

Once configured, your Hojoki activity stream shows you when a story is created, edited, started, finished and deleted. Hojoki also shows you all of your project members, and allows you to search for who created a story, who requested it, and who is responsible for implementing it.

Version 1.1 of the Pivotal Tracker for iOS app is now available in the iTunes App Store. This update adds the Search and My Work panels, a redesigned iPhone interface, and many overall usability improvements. All the details after the jump, below.