A new feature to customise your platform name

We have introduced a new customisation option today allowing you to refine how you incorporate your safeshareit platform into your business.

This new option allows you to ‘Name’ your platform.

The platform is named throughout as YOUR COMPANY NAME Collaboration Platform. For instance, the ACME Collaboration Platform. This new option allows you to change the words ‘Collaboration Platform’ to whatever you want.

For example, you could use the term ‘Extranet’ or in the case of one of our recruitment business customers ‘CV Tracker’. I.e. ACME Extranet or ACME CV Tracker.

You can find this new setting via Settings > System Settings > Platform Name.


This update also contains a few bug fixes and performance and minor usability enhancements. As usual all customers automatically get this upgrade applied to their platform.

If you have any questions, comments, or ideas we’d love to here them so don’t hesitate to let us know, either via your account manager or via the contact pages.

Project Extranet is changing to Safeshareit

 

It's been over four years now since our first v1.0 project-extranet software poked its head out from our labs and on to the Internet. In that time we've picked up some great customers enhanced our software platform and also refined our focus on our core values of delivering an affordable, easy-to-use collaboration suite.

It's been hard work, but reward came about a year ago ago when we managed to secure our first round of investment. Since then we have been busy beavering away behind the scenes putting our plans into place. Significant work gone into our core technology, both the platform software and the hosting environment upon which it runs.

We have also been looking at changing our branding and web-presence, and so, later this week we will be launching our new website and project-extranet will become Safeshareit.



What this means for you?

In the short term, very little. The Safeshareit platform is virtually identical to the current Project-Extranet Platform with the only differences being a tided up login page, the platform URL address will now be safeshareit rather than project-extranet and the term 'Extranet' has been replaced with 'collaboration platform'.

Auto-redirects will be placed on the old project-extranet addresses so any links you have in place will still work.

Everything else will be exactly as it is now. If you have any branding that will not change, and those of you who using the default project-extranet logo and colours, they also will remain as is.

In the long term, we are of course are working on new features and refining the existing ones, and have some exciting features in the pipeline, designed to make the Safeshareit platform better for you and you business. 

Get your Collaboration Platform for free

We would love you to tell your clients and friends about the safeshareit collaboration platform and we will reward you if you can deliver new customers. If you help us to convert one new customer we will give you a 10% discount from your spend with us. For each and every extra customer we will give you a further 10% discount on your bill. If you convert ten customers you can have a free platform for up to 24 months.

If you have any questions, or would like to participate in our referral offer above, please contact your account administrator.

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