Pivotal Labs is a DevZone partner at Dreamforce, and we'll be there to talk agile and Pivotal Tracker. If you're attending the conference, come to the DevZone in the Cloud Expo and say hi. We'll be doing demos, showing upcoming features (including Epics), and entering visitors into a daily prize drawing.

I'll also be doing a 30 minute talk on agile development and Tracker in the Lightning Theater. It's this Wednesday at 6pm, in the DevZone. Stop by!

We've just published a new video that introduces the concepts behind Pivotal Tracker. It talks about the agile process that works best with Tracker, including story breakdown and estimation, prioritization, and workflow. If you're new to Tracker, or would like to make sure you're getting the most of out of the tool, this should be 8 minutes well spent!

We recently launched a Facebook fan page for Pivotal Tracker. If you're on Facebook, check it out, and give it a like! Not only will you get to keep up with all the latest news and updates, you'll also be able to share feedback using the integrated, Get Satisfaction powered, Pivotal Tracker community forum.

It’s been six months since we announced pricing for Pivotal Tracker. As Tracker grew to become the world’s favorite agile project management app, and an essential service for thousands of companies around the world, this became a necessary step for us, in order to continue providing a great product with world class support.

Since then, we’ve rolled up our sleeves, and went to work on a long backlog of features, as promised. So far, we’ve rolled out a number of core usability improvements, as well as new features such as custom point scales, multi-story drag and drop, a brand new iOS app, and more.

As part of the pricing introduction, we offered all existing users 6 months to continue using Tracker for free, in order to give everyone plenty of time to evaluate their options.

This week marks the end of this 6 month free period, and we really couldn’t be more grateful for the fact that the majority of you have chosen to stay with Tracker - thank you! You’ve given us the mandate to make Tracker the best possible collaboration and project management software for development teams of any size, everywhere.

An update of Pivotal Tracker for iOS (released last week )is now available in the iTunes App Store. It includes a number of stability fixes, including better handling of local data store corruption, and the app should no longer crash when opening a project with no stories in the icebox.

In this week's update to Pivotal Tracker, we've made it easier to apply and remove labels to/from stories, with a new auto-suggest and click-to-remove widget. We've also made the Google Accounts sign-in integration more flexible.

We're excited to announce the release of Pivotal Tracker for iOS, the officially supported Pivotal Tracker app for the iPhone, iPad, and the iPod Touch!

You may find Pivotal Tracker for iOS to be familiar - it's based on the popular TrackerBot, which Pivotal Labs recently acquired from Vulpine Labs LLC.

Happy Friday! We've just rolled out some changes to Pivotal Tracker, which we're hoping will have a very noticeable impact on usability, especially for those of you who manage large projects. You can now select multiple stories with a few clicks, using shift-click, and drag them together to a new location. Also, iPad usability has been greatly improved - for example, story panels can now be scrolled with one finger, and you can move stories via drag and drop

Dragging Multiple Stories

Changing business priorities on large projects has always been a bit painful for us, having to drag stories one by one. Cloning panels helps with this, but really, what we've always wanted to do is just select a whole group of stories, and drop them in their new place in the backlog or the icebox with one action. You can now do this, and it's even possible to drag stories that are in-progress to the backlog or icebox and it just does the right thing (un-starts them).

Click on the screenshot above to see a larger version.

To select multiple stories, use the small checkboxes to the right of story titles. If you'd like to select a range of stories, select the first story in the list, then shift-click on the last story. This will select all in the range, and allow you to drag them together, or use some of the other actions in the Stories drop-down, such as export to CSV or move to another project. Note: range select with shift-click only works in a single panel at a time, but you can select multiple ranges of stories across the whole project.

The Stories drop-down menu has been changed - it now shows the number of selected stories more prominently, and we've removed the old bulk story move actions (move to icebox, etc), since this is now possible (and easier) with drag and drop. Note - the Stories menu allows you to unselect all selected stories, which can be useful if you're moving a lot of stories around in steps.

Note: We realize the that the checkboxes are a bit small, and hard to click on - we'll be addressing that in an upcoming release. Also, in certain panels and/or browsers, shift-clicking on a checkbox highlights text on the page, we'll be fixing that as well.

iPad Usability

We've addressed most of the major usability issues on the iPad, and Tracker (the web application) now supports one-touch scrolling of panels, drag and drop, easier expanding and collapsing of stories, and displays properly in both orientations.

In horizontal orientation, you can see up to 3 panels at one time, and 2 panels in vertical orientation. But, you can open others, and the panel section will slide sideways to reveal newly opened ones. Dragging sideways will move the panels left and right.

To drag a story, touch it for a brief moment, until it turns yellow, then drag it.

Possible Issues

One of the reasons that all these usability changes were possible, and fairly easy, is because we've changed the underlying drag and drop library that Tracker uses. We've tried to test thoroughly, and there are some minor issues, but there is fairly good chance that you'll find some as well. Please let us know, by email to tracker@pivotallabs.com, in the comments here, or over at Twitter.

We'd love your feedback on these changes. There are more new features lined up!

Pivotal Tracker is a founding member of NetworkedHelpDesk.org, a new initiative to help "create a seamless communication stream among multiple partners and suppliers to deliver an awesome customer experience."

Led by Zendesk, NetworkedHelpDesk.org is on open application programming interface (API) that will make it easier to connect disparate systems in areas such as project management, customer relationship management, issue tracking, and customer support.

We're excited to be part of this initiative, and look forward to building richer, bi-directional integrations between Pivotal Tracker and other applications in the product ecosystem that help our customers collaborate across their entire organization.

If you're interested in joining the initiative, check out the API, and join today!

As we blogged about last week, all pages in Tracker that require you to sign in are now served exclusively over secure HTTPS.

As part of this update, we've also improved how "remembered" sessions work. Select the remember me checkbox on the signin page, and you'll stay signed in for two weeks in that browser. This now works across multiple browsers .To clear all of your remembered sessions, just sign out anywhere, and resetting your password will clear all remembered sessions as well.

We've also made it easier to keep with all of the latest and greatest 3rd party tools and add-ons for Tracker, with a new RSS feed. Follow this link to add the feed to your feed reader, or click the RSS link at the top of the 3rd party tools page.

If you haven't been there recently, there are now around 80 third party tools listed, including the popular TrackerBot, an iPad/iPhone client for Tracker, Pivotal Tracker Analytics, an on-demand business intelligence application from GoodData, the Pivotal Tracker Story Board, a Chrome extension that shows your current iteration as a card wall, and many others!