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.
We have decided to do a private beta release of CreativePro Office 2.0 on March 31 with a public release shortly thereafter.
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.
Too many to list here but the ones we’re most excited about are:
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, the price point of version 2.0 will be higher. We will release official prices within a week.
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.
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.
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.
