With new possibility to import tickets from a spreadsheet, Comindwork creates a lot easier way to manage issues: tickets, tasks, bugs, requests etc. Now you may either one-time import your tickets from legacy issue tracking system to use in Comindwork, or apply this feature to update items using Excel or another spreadsheet software. I prefer Google Docs.

How to import tickets?

First, customize your issue/ticket process. Create all the fields you have in your legacy system, and make them look in a similar way.

Then you'll need to go to Project settings and find Import Data link under appropriate process customization. Either prepare spreadsheet with new items, or export existing items.

To export data, click on Export to Spreadsheet icon when on the list view. Thus you'll get your CSV file ready for making changes and re-uploading.

The rest of the process is really easy.

• Import your CSV file
• Map spreadsheet fields with Comindwork workflow fields
• If you're editing items, specify the unique ID field
• Verify your data once again before import
• Et voila! Your changed items, as well as new items, are imported into the system.

Please let us know if you have interest in this functionality, and want to use it in another way. Thanks for staying with us!

Alex

Comindwork семимильными шагами идет в сторону создания платформы для бизнеса. Мы постоянно добавляем возможности настройки всего - начиная от бизнес-процессов и полей задачи, и заканчивая отсылкой писем от Comindwork через собственный почтовый сервер.

Да, появилась потребность, появился клиент — и мы это сразу же реализуем. Теперь вы можете настроить для своей компании общение через почту в обе стороны:

Отсылка почты

Вы можете настроить фирменный стиль ваших писем. Если вместе с вашей командой Comindwork используют ваши клиенты,  им приходят сообщения от, например, "Корпоративный Интранет". Более того, как уже говорилось, вы можете слать письма, используя собственный SMTP-сервер.

Получение писем через POP3

Бывают случаи, когда вы больше любите работать через почту, чем через веб-интерфейс. Тогда для создания задач, или обсуждения вики-страниц мы даем возможность настроить ответы через ваш собственный POP3-сервер, или IMAP-сервер. Это еще больше дает возможность встроить Comindwork в политику безопасности компании.


Все эти возможности доступны администратору компании в меню "Настройки".

Для чего это нужно?

Первое, самое важное, — это безопасность. Comindwork соединяется с вашим почтовым сервером по защищенному каналу, и гарантированно шлет письма только вашим пользователям. Второе - это отсутствие задержек в доставке писем, и возможность указывать внутренние почтовые адреса пользователей без опасений, что они будут кем-то подсмотрены. И третье - вы можете настроить свои спам-фильтры как часы.

Удачи в построении инфраструктуры для своего бизнеса!
Алексей

Last month we've worked hard to improve adoption rate for customer teams. The way we did that is pretty standard: it's usability and user experience improvements. I'm sure that our clients have already found many new shiny things. Let me highlight just a couple of them, the ones that we're really proud of.

One-click search

Quick way to find data is one of the keys to quick work. And now it's more easy to search from any page on your Comindwork site. Instead of  "Search" tab, there's a handy widget that opens many possibilities to enhance your search. Just see the right-top corner of Comindwork environment.

Collapsible conversations

When collaborating on tasks or tickets, sometimes there's a situation when discussion grows really big. We've followed the great idea that's used in GMail: all the old messages are collapsed by default. Within a ticket, you may now add comment quickly, reply, cite, add video reply - and browse through previous messages easily.
Please let us know what you think of these improvements. And do not hesitate to propose your own improvements - your voice will be heard!

Keep talking!
Alex

Comindwork makes first small steps toward becoming a PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service.

In most knowledge-based companies you have a lot of data that you need to share, collaboratively change, discuss, analyze and store somewhere. It's fun, but Comindwork allows all those things in one place. I've created a small funny video to show the main possibilities of  data transformation in our system. Enjoy!



As always, feel free to give these features a try and let us know what you think.
Keep talking!
Alex

Comindwork is dedicated to become really close to customer team and clients. That's why we launch "External Login widget". It's the way to put link to your Comindwork to your company web site. 
The widget may work in various ways:

• Link that opens internal log-in form
• Floating form that sticks to any position in browser
• Small or big in-line form at specific place on your site

We encourage you to put Comindwork Login widget to your site, for your team and clients not to forget how to log in. And also this would help us to spread the word about our system.  Just go to your Setup -> Get Widgets menu, and add widget HTML code to your site. You may see how this works already on our site, www.comindwork.com as a sticky link on the right edge of the browser.

Let us know what you think of this new function!
Keep talking!
Alex

Today I want to express my gratitude for our existing customers. And to our leads, to those who are interested in Comindwork but fail to become our clients, due to different reasons. This post is for you, my beloved client :)

Thank you for being so demanding. Due to high standards that you put on the quality, we're constantly working on improvements. This makes our own business grow, drives our organization changes. When applying all the new features of Comindwork to our processes, we understand a lot about how it's possible to make things even more user-friendly, understandable and convenient. And how to make our business run in other way.

Thank you for being different. Different from our organization, and from any other client. Thus we see any tool from different perspectives, and see how it may be used for different purposes. The key thing here is customization, and this causes Comindwork to become more a platform, a PaaS solution, rather then just one more project management solution. You want to be able to change everything - and to have really great templates and presets. That's what makes us see the project management from a really broad point of view.

Thank you for your passion.and commitment. Adoption of new tools requires a lot of work and fun from both vendors and clients. When we see how people struggle with current restrictions of Comindwork. When we see high level of commitment to improve business processes. When we receive feedbacks from you, with really great suggestions and questions. We feel that we're doing something valuable.

Thank you. We're doing our best to fit our clients. Be demanding to have outstanding quality of our product, be different to cover all business automation and project management needs, be passionate for constant improvement and constant changes for the better.

Here's my deep bow for you! :)

Keep talking!
Alex

We've launched new version of local installation trial package, versioned Comindwork 2.5.2.
 
New release is identical to everything that can be found in SaaS version. Comindwork is unique by providing flexibility to choose between working on our facilities and paying subscription fee, or by installing locally on customer's servers. The platform is really simple and does not need specific hardware of software installed. Additionally, we may transfer projects from online version to local, if a customer chooses to work locally.
 
Besides lots of minor changes, new features include:

• Working with IMAP emails
• More robust and powerful "custom entities" engine
• Custom tabs
• Ability to provide custom domains for separate clients
• LDAP integration
• New administrator's possibility to mass-import users, projects and files

 
Moreover, Comindwork 2.5.2 is optimized to run faster and occupy less system memory.
 
Download and try yourself :)
 
Keep talking!
Alex
 

Recently, there’s a lot of talks about total cost of SaaS, and why it’s not getting so much adoption from users. We at Comindwork are both vendor of SaaS solution, and active SaaS adopters. One of our goals is to make our work completely virtual, without using any in-house infrastructure. That’s what on-demand promises to be easy. But what’s bothering, is current payment schemes.

Business model of most SaaS vendors is "monthly subscription". It has already become the most widespread model, but is it the best one? Using SaaS is not renting an application - it’s an old ASP point of view. You’re actually getting the service. And “paying for the service” is different from “paying for availability of the service”, though it may interfere. I’m not too good in legal differences, but I believe when user is inactive, one should not be billed. You’re not paying for just the availability of electricity, right?

That’s why we’ve took a look at the experience of cell phones operators. As a starter kit, they usually offer “prepaid credits” model of payment. This is really nice when using the service from time to time. Applied to SaaS, we call this model “pay-as-you-go”. Not so buzzy, but true. Customers put credits on their balance, and the balance is decreased only when you’re using the service. This is especially cost-effective solution for small companies with unstable financial and work flows. And it’s a perfect solution for times of recession, when business may need to change really quickly.

There may be different ways to define and meter “usage”, based on time or amount of consumed service. Applied to project management, this can be amount of projects, or amount of total actions performed in the environment. Yet, we’ve stopped on the simplest model: customer companies pay only for the days when service is used, i.e. someone from the company is logging in and doing anything with the data.

The “pay-as-you-go” model has shown good results for us. Those who are not ready for stable use within the whole company, choose to pay on daily basis. The amount of users of pay-as-you-go is 36% of all users, and is constantly growing. We receive 40% of all payments as credits for daily use.

The same model is now used by Amazon Web Services platform, though for small businesses it feels like a trick: if hosting a simple system on single server, you can’t stop using the server. Again, customers pay for the availability of the server, but not the effective load.

Sure thing, such approach makes it harder for SaaS vendors to get stable income. They need to make their service a part of customer’s life, make it more adoptable. And thus balance on the razor edge between micro-payments and corporate prices. And it’s a good challenge for anyone.

It’s a good question for me, whether subscription model would survive on-demand trend. Please let us know what you think of the future of on-demand business models, and especially pay-as-you-go model implemented by Comindwork.

And, our sincere congratulations on Knowledge Day!

Keep talking!
Alex

Comindwork launches 4 new features for big organizations to make adoption quicker. We want to remedy the situation when a company already has lots of people, projects and data. And it wants to start managing projects online and migrate to Comindwork. The new features are:

• LDAP / Windows Active Directory integration
• Batch users creation
• Batch projects creation
• Importing files to multiple projects at once

LDAP / Windows Active Directory integration

Comindwork integrates with LDAP to serve two basic needs: synchronize users and groups from your Windows Active Directory or any other LDAP source with Comindwork; or allow logging to Comindwork with users Windows account, without need to remember password.
 
Even when you use SaaS version of Comindwork, it's safe to use Windows passwords: thus you never transmit your password over the Internet in un-encoded way, and there's no possibility to forget it.

Batch users creation

Besides LDAP synchronization and Google / Yahoo / Facebook invites, Comindwork provides one more way to start collaborating instantly by adding whole company team. Company administrator may wish to create all users in a batch, simply by uploading CSV spreadsheet with users information, together with assigning people to projects. No more need to invite people separately, or bother about inviting logins and passwords.

Batch projects creation

When you start working with Comindwork as a big team, it may be important to create instantly all the projects you need. This is exactly what Batch projects creation does. A good boost for company administrator.

Upload files across projects

Some companies work primarily with files as project documentation. And when you start working in Comindwork, you'll need to put all your project files to corresponding file storages in Comindwork. Sure thing, you may upload multiple files at once using web interface. But Comindwork provides faster way to upload any amount of files, keeping the directory structure. This is achieved by uploading single .zip file that is extracted automatically by the system.
 
You may read more about these features in Comindwork Help.
Please let us know what you think.
 
Keep talking!
Alex

In business world, it's still a little scary for a service firm to show to clients that it uses SaaS products. Especially it's the case when organizing "extranet-like" collaboration space with the clients.
 
So, your team and your clients are apprehensive about using SaaS extranet? Comindwork now solves this problem by pretending to be local, on-premise software. Moreover, why not put your own brand next to Comindwork everywhere? In web interface, emails, RSS.
 
That's why we've added possibility for our clients to customize domain name and system name.
  
The magic of sub-domains is an really an underestimated thing for SaaS. You can read more in Comindwork Help about how to enable custom domain.
 And let us know what you think!

Keep talking,
Alex