We've made hundreds of improvements since our last "upgrade" posting.  I'm going to highlight some small upgrades that Assembla users might want to take advantage of, because otherwise they will be lost in news about bigger changes next  week.

For those of you with public projects - you can now allow any user to join, and any member to invite new members.  This is like Facebook "open groups".  To turn it on, just go to the space, to the Admin tab, to the Security subtab, and select the checkbox for "anybody can join this space".

We've responded to a lot of user requests from the Suggestions list, so please keep posting bugs and suggestions there.  You can now select specific people to receive an email alert when you enter a flow message.  This is a Basecamp feature that was widely requested.  I especially appreciated a request to show the latest Scrum report for each user.  We've also added a complete report on user activity that is linked to the Team page and the scrum report.

If you have applied for a job or submitted information to appear in Talent searches, then you know that we keep track of skill information, and an uploaded resume, on the user/skills page.  Our original goal was to share the resume only with potential buyers / employers, but we heard from some users that wanted to show the resume publicly and get it found by Google.  So, we have upgraded all of the permissions for your public profile.  You can select sharing with Public, Teammates, or None for the skill information, and separately for the resume.  If you select Teammate permission, the information will be shared with employers on jobs you apply to, but it will not be shown publicly.  You also have a link on that page to see your public profile, so you know exactly what the public can see.  Our guiding principle is always to give privacy control to the user.

We have made many upgrades to the Tickets tool.  The ticket tool is suprisingly popular, and is used by hundreds of projects, even though we have not officially launched it.  I say surprisingly, because we also offer Trac ticketing, and there are hundreds of other approaches to ticketing available.  Everyone who builds software incrementally (our whole world) needs ticketing, and the Tickets tool is a simple, well integrated way to get it.  We have simplified the layout, added reports requested by customers, and added dependency relations.  We implemented search in Tickets, integrated it with the sitewide search, and added a query language for building your own ticket reports.  Our roadmap for the Tickets tool comes mostly from user requests, so please keep making suggestions.