We have been fielding a lot of questions about CPO’s next version that is due out very soon.  The work is still fast and furious here with a private beta release date of March 31 looming large.  There are a few things that current CreativePro Office users should know as we finally enter the release phase of this long project.

When are you releasing version 2.0?

We have decided to do a private beta release of CreativePro Office 2.0 on March 31 with a public release shortly thereafter.

Why did you guys miss so many release dates?

This is an honest question and the answers are many.  Mainly, the scope of work was much larger than anticipated.  In retrospect, we may have tried to cram too many features into the initial 2.0 release. But, since version 1.0 has a pretty complete feature set, we knew we had to match and exceed that benchmark which I believe we have done. 

So what great new features finally made it into the new version?

Too many to list here but the ones we’re most excited about are:

• Much improved shared calendaring including export to Google calendar. Tasks and project dates automatically list on the central calendar.
• The task manager has been entirely redone.  It’s very robust and includes neat features like file attachments, message threads, email notifications, export to Excel file or PDF.
• Team roles and permissions are now user defined so you can give your team as much or as little control over your account as you wish.
• Much better integration between timesheets, expenses, and invoicing.  You can now create an invoice from a timesheet or time clock entry with 1 click.  Very cool!

Will the 2.0 version remain free?

Yes and no.  CreativePro Office 2.0 will have a free option among several premium, paid options.  We will release the official pricing structure very soon.

I’m an existing CPO user.  Will I be immediately forced to upgrade to a paid plan?

No.  We are allowing a 6 month grace period after launch for existing users to migrate to a free or paid plan on version 2.0.  If you decide that you do not wish to continue using CPO we will provide a data extract feature so that you can get your data out of the system and migrate it to another service.

Will version 1.0 still be available for free?

No. Version 1.0 will not accept any new subscriptions after April 15.  Existing users of version 1.0 will have 6 months from the public release date to migrate over to a CreativePro Office 2.0 subscription.

Will there be an open source version of CPO 2.0 that I can host on my own server?

Yes, but it will be available after the public hosted release.  The reason is that we have to do some tweaking to the self-hosted version to insure a smooth installation experience for the widest variety of users.

Will the price of the open source code stay $150.00?

No, the price point of version 2.0 will be higher.  We will release official prices within a week.

Are there help files or tutorials with this version?

CPO has been developed to be as intuitive as possible to use.  However, we realize that support in many forms is necessary for a satisfied user base. The forum and priority email (for subscribers) will be the primary means of helping our users find their way around CreativePro Office 2.0.  Tutorials and help files will be built out as we see a need.  For example, if we see that many users are having trouble with file uploads; we’ll create some help content around that specific issue. We are definitely going to create some comprehensive help content for the self-hosted, downloadable version though.

What plans are there for foreign language versions?

We have long fielded the request for different language versions of CPO.  Our plans are to include over 10 translations in version 2.0.  We already have the translations more or less sketched out but we will be working as much as we can with native speakers to fine tune the translations. 

Can I add my own currency?

No but we have added over 45 currencies to version 2.0 and will add more at your request.

Our plan for CreativePro Office is to continue to integrate more and more features over time as this application becomes profitable.  While we might not be able to give you a specific date for a specific feature roll out, be confident that we have many improvements in store for the future.

Thanks for reading.  Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Dear trusty, faithful users and new users alike,

Despite periodic silence, work still ticks on here in development of 2.0.  The silence here can be easily explained:  development is to be a process that is, in our case, more often just done and less often talked about.  To put it succinctly, we are working.

On our part there has been a little bit of dismay over watching the date we intended to release come and go.  In reflection on what is causing the delay, Jeff realized a few things:

1.  The scope of work for version 2.0 has increased significantly since it was originally conceived.  Originally, 2.0 was to be a rewrite of the code so that future added features would have a stable code-base.  But what happened was that while in the code, tinkering, it seemed more logical (and more interesting) to start the process of making some of the more major improvements that were slated for the future.

2.  The amount of anticipated collaboration for the task of version 2.0 decreased by about 66%.   A smaller team made more work to be done.

3.  The hosting situation caused a bit of a slowdown for awhile but has since been rectified.

As we saw the date of anticipated release approaching, there were signs that things weren't going to work out as planned.  The release date was too ambitious, based on a "best case scenario" when excitement was high, and the scope of work was smaller. 

Now, a year after beginning, Jeff is just pushing for that next release date.   There had been considerations of releasing with what we had completed, but that would have fallen short on what we had told users to anticipate.  We are setting the date to end of February 2010, which seems entirely reasonable since version 2.0 is 80% complete.

The February release is planned to be beta tested and ready for use.

Thank you for your patience and hope that you will continue to looking forward to this as much as we are!

If we haven't said so before, a big THANK YOU to all the buyers of the CPO Source Code.  Your purchases are lighting the fire under our pants to keep improving CreativePro Office daily.

There are source code patches available to amend some of the bugs that our much appreciated bug testers have found.

The link is here:

http://creativeprooffice.com/site/patches

We are currently working on CreativePro Office 2.0 that we hope will be available by the end of March and possibly earlier.  We are excited about this release as it will be the "new improved" version with more features that users have been requesting and numerous bug fixes.

Ok, I know the CPO calendar is a little, shall we say, underwhelming. Essentially, it's functionality is ripped right from the Pageflakes calendar widget - it's unobtrusive, and I hope easy to use. But it's small and, currently, there's no "mother calendar" behind it such as one would find with 30 Boxes or Google Calendar or any of the 1000+ web calendars that are available. And that's the point - there are many stellar calendar apps on the web and I just didn't see the benefit in spending 2-3 months creating yet another.

30 Second Overview

Calendar entries are maked as icons in the day that they occur.  There are currently icons for project start dates, meetings, deadlines and general events.  More may come later - for example invoice due, task deadline, etc.  Hovering over an icon gives you a quick view of the details for a given entry.

For a more detailed view, click on a day and the entries for that day appear. You may delete entries from this view. 

Adding an event is quick and simple.   

I think the calendar widget achieves what I originally wanted which was a quick, at-a-glance, overview of my daily schedule without a lot of clutter.  This widget tends to fail once you get more than 5-6 entries for a given day.  But then, most of the time I have a maximum of three entries and often less than that.

Future Plans

Some of the improvements I intend to make in the next version of the calendar widget are:

1. iCal and hCalendar support (import and export)
2. RSS feed of calendar entries
3. REST integration with some popular web calendars
4. Ability to designate entries public or personal so your team can share a calendar
5. Better integration with other CPO features like tasks and invoice dates.
   

Ultimately, I don't want my users to have to learn the idiosyncrasies of another calendar. I would rather the calendar widget simply act as window to whatever calendar users already enjoy using. However, the stand-alone functionality should be good enough to provide light duty event scheduling.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

If you've been following the GoPlan Blog for the past few months, you'll know they've been able to generate quite some buzz with an invitation only release a few months back. Well, GoPlan is now available to the masses - I signed up for the free account last night. It is impressive and kudos to the guys at WeBreakStuff.com for producing a nice app!

If you don't know, GoPlan is an online project management suite with some nice collaboration features built in. From the GoPlan blog...

Goplan is an online project management solution. It allows teams and individuals to collaborate through tasks, file management, real-time chat, online calendaring, and many other features.

Ok, I created my account and I logged in and was immediately infatuated with the eye candy. GoPlan looks great. It's got an intuitive layout, pretty icons and a soothing color scheme - maybe a bit like Blinksale . Now I realize look and feel is very subjective. 37 Signals and their Basecamp product have the whole "simple is genious" thing going on and that's fine. But frankly, I'm a bit shallow. When I'm using an app for an hour or more, I want it to be pretty. Ok, enough said about that.

So yeah, I wanna be GoPlan - I want CreativePro Office to be just as pretty and just as simple to use. But playing with GoPlan for awhile brought me back to just why I built CPO in the first place. For example, GoPlan has no invoicing feature - yet. It has no expense tracking feature - yet. It has no timesheet feature - yet. I say 'yet' because GoPlan is very much in an early release stage and the team may add these features later. Or they may stick with the core feature set they have now and that's great and it will work stunningly for a lot of users.

But my vision for CPO has always been a complete end-to-end solution for the single developer or very small (2-5 people) development team or the single developer with 2 or 3 subcontractors, etc. By end-to-end I mean from drafting an estimate to sending the invoices - every stage of the project life-cycle is handled by one app. Back in the day, I used to get really tired of creating estimates and quote in a Word template, then tracking my hours online, using Outlook as my default task manager (you know what I mean), and then creating invoices with an Excel file. Things are much better these days and apps like GoPlan do a lot of the heavy lifting. But I still need to access 3 or more apps to get everything done.

For now, I'm sticking with the end-to-end approach with CreativePro Office and we'll see how it works out. Maybe it's just too darn complicated to pull off well.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff