COMMENTS
Possibly an interesting package if it is in fact more than I can accomplish with your sites alone. I would be interested to know to what extent you have done the work of integrating your platform to the outside world. I am presently planning to use buildix for continuous integration and will be making a lot of use of the xml2rpc plugin of trac for instrumenting my websites.
That's a great question. Buildix gives you a set of team tools that is very similar to our free workspaces, without Assembla's on-demand hosting and user network. If you are using Buildix (or have some other form of local hosting and continuous integration), how do you hook into the network? We provide scripts which will allow you to hook your local trac and svn into Assembla workspaces, exactly the same way that our internal trac and svn servers are hooked in. That allows you to add any of tens of thousands of Assembla users with a single click, use the team permissioning across all tools including your local svn, use the enhanced email, etc. I haven't announced that yet, but I am providing it on request to Manager subscribers.
If you decide to use an Assembla hosted repository, you can trigger Cruisecontrol from the optional on-commit hook in our hosted subversion.
Next month we will offer a full REST API.
Our eventual goal is to offer a "tool" that represents a virtual server with preconfigured continuous integration. That will take a few months.
Our software is open source (although not free), so you have a number of options for building on to it.
Removing staffing module from free space is not a good idea. Rentacoder, guru, odesk, elance, getafreelancer allows me to post jobs for free. Only when I hire a developer for my project I need to make the payment commitment.
You guys are doing great. You have a very wide acceptance in India. Yesterday I met some of my friends and co developers and almost everyone is using assembla in their company (from small to big) for various agile practices and tools. They use tools like scrum, milestone etc and they like it.
So my point is add more value added services and charge a premium for the same, but don't take away what you already gave.
Assembla operates in a very niche segment where very few have ventured out, like no one would use odesk for agile software development. So keep up the good work.
Thanks
Sachin
Sachin, you may be right. However, we do offer a free trial of the Manager pack, so if you need to post a job, we'll approve you for a free trial. We think that process gives us the ability to qualify buyers so that we get better jobs. That will attract better talent. Also, by charging a subscription fee, we can support a broader range of jobs, including jobs that are outside the billing system. The other staffing services that you mention are excellent for what they do, but they offer small jobs, temporary jobs, and limited choice of arrangements for the buyer. I am not sure that the world needs Assembla to do the same thing, when you already have those other alternatives. We'd like to help people set up more serious relationships. Time will tell if we are right about this. We will continue to evaluate strategies that will allow us to present the best job opportunities and attract the best talent.
Hey guys, I just started to use Assembla by opening a couple of projects not related to software development--and you know what, the guy who introduced me to your site was jokingly saying "keep your projects out of Assembla, this is programmers realm" ;) So I think, Assembla is doing really well if even regular projects got started here.