Pivotal Tracker is moving to a new private cloud hosting environment at Engine Yard this Thursday, July 22, starting at 8pm PDT.

Planned downtime is approximately one hour, but because we're changing IP addresses of the Tracker servers, it may take longer for DNS changes to full propagate.

If you've opened your firewall to a specific IP address for Tracker integrations, you'll need to make changes. We'll post the new address of the integrations server after the move, you can also 'ping api.pivotaltracker.com' to resolve it.

Apologies for the inconvenience, we're hoping for noticeable performance improvements in the new environment.

With Github's help, we've added Pivotal Tracker to the list of Github's built in service hooks, making it easier to tie commits to Tracker stories.

To set it up, go to the Repository Administration section of your Githup repo, click on Service Hooks on the left, and choose PivotalTracker from the list. Enter your API token, and you should be good to go.

More on Tracker commit hooks on the API help page.

We're forming a Tracker User Group in the windy city, and the first meetup is scheduled for Jul 22, at the Hashrocket Chicago office.

I'll be there to talk about the concepts and history behind Tracker, our experience with it, and will give a demo to those that are interested. It's a great place to give feedback and ask lots of questions.

Space is limited, so RSVP soon.

For the next month or so, we will be rolling out a series of changes to various parts of the Tracker server architecture, including moving to a Memcached distributed cache for certain requests, cookie based sessions, switching from Mongrel to Passenger, splitting the very large history table, etc.

We're doing this to improve performance, and eliminate potential scaling issues as our traffic grows. To reduce risk, we'll introduce these changes in separate updates, once a week.

These updates will occur on Wednesdays at 7:30pm PDT (including tonight), and last under an hour each. If there are any long running migrations needed, we'll plan them for weekends, or handle them incrementally, to avoid any extended down times.

We understand that these week night outages are inconvenient to many of you, especially in Asia. We apologize in advance, and will try and keep the updates as brief as possible.

The next scheduled meeting of the New York Tracker Users Group (NY.TUG) will be on July 1, at the Pivotal Labs New York office.

We will be giving an overview of the idea behind Pivotal Tracker and the common features. Based on time and interest, we'll also go into more detail about advanced features, upcoming features, and the philosophy behind Tracker.

Beverages and light snacks will be provided.

Please RSPV soon, as space is limited.

If you're looking for custom reporting and analytics for your projects, Easy Insight just added integration for Pivotal Tracker.

More details about how it works on the Easy Insight site.

We're big fans of the RubyMine Rails IDE, and are excited to see that JetBrains has added Pivotal Tracker integration in the latest EAP update.

The integration lets you easily pick a Tracker story from within RubyMine and create a task out of it. RubyMine tasks let you organize your work into different contexts. You can switch between tasks, and create source control changes based on them.

A common feature request from teams that have multiple projects on the go in Pivotal Tracker is the ability to move stories between projects. We've just added that feature.

Starting Jun 30, the Twitter API will no longer allow 3rd party applications (such as Tracker) to connect using your Twitter username and password. Instead, applications will be required to use OAuth, an authentication protocol that allows users to approve a 3rd party application to act on their behalf without sharing their username/password.

Pivotal Tracker now uses OAuth for project Twitter notifications. When you enable this feature for your project (see the integrations help page for more on that), you'll be asked to sign in to Twitter (on the Twitter site), and give the Pivotal Tracker application permission to access your Twitter account.

If you have enabled Twitter notifications for your project(s) prior to this release, the stored credentials are in the username/password format. You'll need to remove these old credentials, by clicking the 'Remove Twitter Credentials' button. After you've done that, click the 'Sign In With Twitter' button to re-enable the Twitter notifications using the new, more secure OAuth way.

More information on Twitter and OAuth can be found here.

We'll be making some DNS changes that affect Pivotal Tracker this Saturday, May 29, at 10:00am PDT. We expect a fairly short outage, but for some users, Tracker may be unavailable for up to 6 hours.