Launching "Portfolio" - For consultants, enterprises, communities

Posted by Andy Singleton on Tue, Feb 15, 2011 @ 11:46 PM

An Assembla workspace is a power tool for one software team. If you have a lot of teams or clients or projects, you need the just-released Assembla Portfolio. It gives you a place to see all of your code, tasks, and activity, and get all of your people connected. Read about it at portfolio.assembla.com.

We built Portfolio with three use cases in mind:

Client projects: Many of our subscribers are consultants, outsourcers, and agencies that are doing work for clients. For them, we've tuned Portfolio with branding, client views, time reporting, and unlimited projects.

Enterprise: With Assembla Portfolio, organizations can benefit from a centralized portal that shows them what is going on, and collects all of the information from each project in one place for future maintenance. And they can still support their various decentralized teams and outsourcers and suppliers with a choice of tools, repositories, and workflows. For them, we provided Stream views, Ticket reports, centralized user management, project templates, and Manager roles.

Community: Software platform providers range from small open source project, up to SAP. They want to share code, work together on software, and build engagement. For them we have public portfolio views, project propose/approve workflows, and ongoing innovation in code contribution workflows.

We've been working on Portfolio for the last six months, and for the last two months I have been using it every day to look in on teams and team members. Now, new customers can get a portfolio on-demand in sixty seconds.

The Portfolio view can be laid on top of your existing spaces. If you are already a subscriber, you can get a free 30-day beta trial of Portfolio by grabbing your Portfolio name at this top-secret location. Or, get a free Portfolio for open source or other publicly visible projects here.

Packaging

Subscribers pay $20 per "core" user per month, and get unlimited projects, and unlimited "watchers", who can be clients, bosses, or other hangers-on. There's no reason not to be transparent, and you can keep all the information about all of your projects ready to go.

Public Portfolios

In a public portfolio, the activity Stream and Spaces list are shared with all visitors. Users can fork, or they can start new projects by grabbing the templates that you provide. I'm not sure that all of these workflows are exactly right, yet, but it's going to be fun when it revs up.

And there's more coming...

For users of our existing Workspaces, there is a lot of stuff still coming in our Q1 upgrade blitz - localization, custom status and custom workflow, Kanban, and big repository upgrades. We will be peeling back the layers on these features over the next month.

Screenshots

Edit the home page, logo, and style

branding

Make project groups or user groups, and save them as filters. Voila, you have your own private view of the world.

space filter resized 600

See a ticket dashboard for all projects, or for a selected group like internal development projects.

ticket dash resized 600

Click through from any of the dashboard categories and get a nice sidebar filter for further drilldown. Yes, we are going to upgrade the Space ticket tool to use this type of filter.

ticket sidebar resized 600

See what a user is doing across all of your projects.

user report2 resized 600

Projects can be Proposed, Active, Template, or Archived. Approve and reject proposed projects. Set up pre-configured project templates for your adoring masses.

activate resized 600

Let us know what you think, and how we can improve this first release.

Tags: enterprise, assembla releases, tutorials

COMMENTS

I am looking for your definition of "core" user. Can't find it. We are reviewing tracking systems here in the library where I work. I love assembla, but I don't know if the $20/month per "core" user is something I could pitch successfully. Depends on the definition of "core" user I think.

posted @ Wednesday, February 16, 2011 3:57 PM by Adam Candler

Under this new pricing, to keep what we're currently using, our price will go from $49/month to $480/month. That's a complete non-starter for us. The portfolio features are useful, but only to two of our 24 users who are managers. The rest of the users are either very casual users or work on a single project at a time. It doesn't make sense to us to have to pay for ALL core users to get this functionality.

posted @ Wednesday, February 16, 2011 4:32 PM by Danny Brand

Love Assembla. Love the Portfolio beta. Hate your pricing. I'm already paying you $250/month; my costs likely to go up based on my current team structure. Really, really unhappy about this.

posted @ Wednesday, February 16, 2011 9:18 PM by Tony Walsh

I would like to see this reviewed.
We are a small company currently using group plan. We have 8 internal people (staff & contractors). I think for a company with multiples spaces, portfolio really adds value & we would happily pay the increased price for these our staff & managers. $49 -> $160 / month.
We also have some specific spaces for external projects & customers where those customers wanted more access to the space to be really involved in the planning & development process, they don't use the Portfolio and any of its management tools, just their space, but have access to Tickets, Agile Planner etc. I think there should be a way to consider these users as non-core users, maybe something between $0 & $20 / month. At the moment these users add a substantial cost with the current pricing mode. We could potentially add a lot of customers, but now will no longer be able to.

posted @ Thursday, February 17, 2011 4:29 PM by Craig Fox

Thanks Sergio that sounds great for our requirements.

posted @ Friday, February 18, 2011 7:37 PM by Craig Fox

Hi Craig,

I checked watcher permissions on http://portfolio.assembla.com/plans and actually they can have EDIT permission in the SupportTool (which is similar but it's not the TicketTool). For the TicketTool they can have VIEW permission at most.

Sorry for the confusion

posted @ Saturday, February 19, 2011 7:58 AM by Sergio Romano

Hi Andy,

It's a sad truism that all good things must come to an end.

You have done a great job with Assembla. You deserve to make a ton of dough, and I understand that it's time to cash out.

I wish we had the cashola to stick with you, but alas you have outgrown shops like ours. I'm sad to say that with a heavy heart we'll be leaving Assembla for Redmine.

Best of luck to you and the team. You deserve every penny.

posted @ Wednesday, March 02, 2011 6:19 AM by Akil Franklin

Andy - Wow, that's great news! We love Assembla around here and there is no way we are going elsewhere if we can avoid it!

posted @ Monday, March 07, 2011 8:07 AM by Akil Franklin

Comments have been closed for this article.

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