Happy Holidays.  The development team has been busy over the past few weeks making improvements to brighten your new year.  We have something for almost every serious user of Assembla spaces.

Commercial space price reduction to $19/month
We are changing the price of Commercial spaces to $19 from $49.  The Commercial subscription adds features that are required by demanding commercial projects, including off-site backup, encryption, reporting, freedom from archiving, phone and email support, and disk space.   If you have a volunteer project - open source, hobby, or school project - we can configure the system to give you extra disk space in the free plan.

Dashboard
We are testing a new dashboard tool that shows important project information on a single page, including ticket and commit events, messages, milestone status, and other important project information.I am enjoying this feature a lot.  Currently, it's an optional tool.  To get it, go to the Admin tab on your space, select the Tools subtab, and select "Add Dashboard" from the list.  As the space owner, you can customize the dashboard with a drag and drop layout manager.  Just select "Edit this dashboard" on the top of the page.

Ticket Report Builder
Users of the popular Tickets tool can now build and save custom reports using a nicely formatted report builder form.  This is something that every team using Tickets will appreciate.

API
Assembla now offers a Rails-style REST API that allows management of tickets, files, time reports, spaces, and user accounts.  We'll be adding to this as required. You can find the first round of documentation on the wiki in our documentation space.

Screen-capture client (alpha release)
Assembla's local client uses the new API to capture screen shots, file screen shots with tickets, and optionally log time with periodic screen shots.  It's written in java so that our users can run it on windows, mac, and linux workstations.

External trac/svn tool keeps code on YOUR site
We can now satisfy users who want to keep subversion repositories on-site for security or performance reasons.  Our "remote tool" installation which allows them to hook local trac and subversion into Assembla workspaces.  That allows them to add any of tens of thousands of Assembla users with a single click, use the team permissioning across all tools including local svn, use the enhanced email alerts, etc.  It's the exact same setup that we use for our internal trac/svn servers, packaged as a virtual server, and connected to Assembla by Web services.

Chat design upgrades
We changed the formatting and moved to a flexible, full-page design in the chat tool.  There are a few known bugs in this implementation, but we decided to release it and let people take a look at it while we tweak it.


We have a strong and permanent commitment to providing free services.  That's why we include unlimited users and all of the small team features in our free product, without holding anything back.  However, we also need to make sure that our system has spare resources and adequate funding to provide great service for active users.  We have thousands of spaces that are no longer used, and we hear that there are a lot of commercial projects that don't support the service with a subscription.  So, we are cutting the commercial space price, and simultaneously preparing to archive unused free projects that are more than three months old, and making an effort to get paid subscriptions from space owners who consume substantial resources.  You may get a message from us asking you to upgrade, or to register as a "Volunteer" project.