Product Updates and an Infrastructure Upgrade

A busy bank holiday was spent by the team here at project-extranet upgrading our hosting infrastructure and putting the latest version of the core project-extranet software into production and deployed across all hosted extranets.

Increasing demand for our extranet services has meant we have been keen to ensure that we have the backend scalability necessary for both demand today and the future. To this end in the latest update (project-extranet v3.6) we have re-architected large portions of the core document storage framework as well as improving the extranet’s ability to scale on web farms. The results of this work are mostly behind the scenes and, apart from some small necessary changes and usability tweaks, so you should not notice many differences.

New Url

One of the necessary changes made was to update the Url of the software from ‘cloud9’ to ‘we’, with ‘we’ standing for Western Europe (in case you were interested). Cloud9 was the entry point for our old hosting platform which has now been put out to pasture. We have put auto-redirects in place, so any links to your extranet login should automatically go to the new extranet url. We don’t anticipate many issues with this, but if you find you need help, please get in touch the usual way via the contact pages.

v3.6 lays the foundations for the next couple of updates, already well into planning and development, which includes some exciting new features.

It’s not all infrastructure stuff though. We have put three new Extranet Apps up into the Account App Store.

Search

Install this app into your Extranet and give your users the ability to search projects, documents, folders, the calendar, contacts and tags all from one handy location.

Results are customised to each user, so the results set only contains items they have permission to view and our built in relevancy ranking feature should mean the item you are looking for is right at your fingertips.

Tagging

The Tagging App creates a whole new way to organise the information contained in your Extranet. For each project you can specify a collection of tags that can then be applied to items within that project; documents, folders, calendar items, contacts etc...

You can then use the tags to find and filter all the items in your project.

e.g.
Show all items that are relevant to the tags ‘New Build Plot 34’ and ‘Invoices’ and ‘Plumbing’.
or
Show all items that are relevant to the tags ‘New Build Plot 34’ and ‘Ground Floor’ and ‘Blueprint’.

GPS Tagging

The third new App allows you to use a GPS enabled device (iPad/iPhone/Android/Windows Mobile/Blackberry for example) to add GPS data to your Tags creating Locations.

Extranet Assets (Documents, folders, calendar items etc) can then be tagged to these Locations (using the Tagging App), then when your team is out in the field all they need do is open up your extranet and see all items that are tagged to their current location.

Accuracy is around 5 meters, meaning you can create locations close to each other, then as you wonder around, have the extranet filter the results accordingly.

The example we like to use when describing this feature is a new build housing site. Each plot having a house built has a location based tag stored in the Extranet. The site manager can walk around each house on the plot using his iPad (other tablets are available) and the Extranet will automatically show the assets specific to the location where he is currently standing.

This is a new feature to project-extranet and as such we are really interested to see how it works out in the real world. So if you plan to use the GPS Location Tagging, or would like to trial it, please let us know and we will do our best to make the feature work well for you.

System upgrades & maintenance

Upgrade work is now complete and all systems are back online. We will post details of the upgrade here shortly


We performing maintenance and upgrade work on our systems this morning (Saturday 5th May). As a result there may be some service interruption.

This is to publish an updated version of the extranet and add significant improvements to our hosting infrastructure. We will do our best to keep any interruptions to a minimum and will re-post here once the work is complete.

Extranet Update: The New Document Workspace

Happy new-year everybody! One week back after the winter festivities and I hope you are all managing to keep up with your new year's resolutions and are now fully back into the swing of things, full of the anticipation for an exciting 2012! Well, at least until February anyway.


We have a lot planned for project-extranet in 2012; it’s going to be a busy year. We start off by introducing the new document workspace feature.

The aim of the document workspace is to enhance your extranets document collaboration capabilities, simplifying the interface around document management, and introducing a greater visibility of who has downloaded each document version.

As you can see from the screenshot above each version of your document now gets its own tab. Your project members can discuss each specific version by posting comments and you can review all document versions in one view by using the ‘All Versions’ tab.

You can also see who has (and who hasn’t) downloaded the document in the handy downloaded report. Very useful for making sure you and team members have the most up-to-date version.

I know some of you have documents that have documents with over 300 versions; this is designed to be of help in these scenarios as well as for those who only have a few.

Related to the document workspace, the newsfeed has also been enhanced so that when a post related to a document appears there is a direct link to that documents workspace.

Our help article for the document workspace can be found in our extranet help and guides section.

As always we hope you find the new extranet document features useful, and if you have any feedback for us please do let us know via your usual channel or via the contact section of the website.

To finish things of, I said at the start of this post that we have a lot planned for project-extranet in 2012 and this is true. I can’t say anything just yet, but stay tuned to www.project-extranet.com/news/ as we will be announcing something exciting very soon!

Until then…
Gerry

Extranet Update: Post your comments into the project newsfeed

A small update published to project-extranet today. This adds a ‘Post Comment’ box to the project summary page. This allows users who have can access a project with the ‘contribute’, ‘modify’ or ‘owner’ permission level to post comments directly into the project newsfeed.





We have also been doing some work optimising the newsfeed so that news items that are similar to each other and occur at a similar time are only shown once. So for example if a project member views a document, then quickly views it again, this will now only generate one entry in the project newsfeed.

As always this update is automatically applied to all Extranets and is available to all accounts.

project-extranet launches recruitment specific extranet apps

We know that the project-extranet platform allows businesses of all types to operate more efficiently internally and improve the service offered to customers externally and with our ability to create bespoke Apps we have created some truly unique offerings for customers.

Now we have brought that thinking to the recruitment sector with project-extranet for recruitment agents. We have long believed that recruitment agents could seriously improve the service they offer by making use of project-extranet shared workspaces. For each position being filled, create a project and populate it with the candidates being put forwards. Use all the collaboration tools to arrange interviews, stimulate discussion about candidates and manage candidate databases.

So by working closely with a number of recruitment agencies we have developed a series of Extranet Apps designed specifically for the recruitment business. These both improve internal operational efficiency and significantly enhance the service you offer your customer.

• Candidate Wall: Post your candidates to a shared workspace to allow your clients in to access, rate, review, download cv’s, request interviews, short list and reject, all at the click on a button.
  
  
• Candidate Database: Manage your candidates in one central location. Capture their history, store documents, keep track of their status.
  
• Task management: Process driven interview, rejection, shortlisting and follow-up tasks help your staff stay on top of their job and help you get more done with less.

More information about project-extranet for recruitment agents as well as a 30-day free trial can be found at www.project-extranet.com/recruitmentagency/

project-extranet upgrade live

The latest update to project-extranet has now been applied and normal service has been resumed.

If you find that your extranet is exhibiting funny behaviour, calendars, folder lists not showing their contents, etc please try refreshing the page using your browsers refresh function. It maybe that you are using an old copy of some of the files required to run project-extranet correctly.

Over the next few days we will be publishing guides and how-to’s explaining each of the new extranet features in detail and how you get the best out of them.

Meanwhile, the first couple of guides are already up. These explain how to set-up your User Groups (Getting Started with User Groups) and Calendar synchronisation, which allows you to sync your project calendars with Microsoft Outlook, Apple iPhone/iPad, gmail calendar and more. Setting up Extranet Calendar Sync.


Need help
If you have any problems or have any questions about the extranet we now have an online chat facility that is available to your extranets administrator users. Scroll to the bottom of the extranet and click the chat button.

Planned maintenance

We are currently applying an upgrade to project-extranet.com. There maybe some service disruption during the next few hours.

We will post again here when normal service has been resumed. This should be around midday.