Today's release contains a bunch of upgrades for existing and new customers. Read on to learn more about free trials, our fixed-price Max pack, ticket upgrades, portfolio upgrades, and more.
Free trial: We no longer require a $10 deposit from new subscribers. You have the option of creating a Private/Professional space without putting in any payment information. We will remind you about it when we run our billing scripts on the first of each month (for example, February 1).
This will help our users get started with some new workflows. For example, users can create new spaces for free, attach them to a portfolio (this can be automatic when they copy your template), and put them on the boss's subscription plan. This will be useful in my student portfolio.
If you are an existing subscriber, you also get a free trials. You can add any number of spaces or users and try them out. If you remove them before the first of the next month (eg February 1), we won't bill you for them.
Max pack - 100 users, 1000 spaces, $150/month: The fixed-price Max pack gives you 100 users and 1000 spaces for a full year for $1,800 - a low $150/month, or $1.50/month/user. Our bigger subscribers are typically software consulting firms with 10 to 100 employees. The Max pack equips everyone in the company with full service and no worries.
I am going to post a longer article about pricing and billing tomorrow.
Assembla Tickets: We cleaned up the ticket tool with a subtab top bar that makes everything easier to find. And on that top bar we have added significant new feature called metrics. Metrics shows you statistics about your outstanding tickets and your ticket activity in the past month, with a flash graph of open/close rates. We are hoping to add new and modified reports as users request them, so please head over to feedback.assembla.com and make your suggestions.
Portfolio: Portfolio - a tool that lets you make a list of spaces and report on them as a group - is an amazingly useful feature. Today I started using the new stream view (all events from your list of spaces) and ticket metrics view (the same ticket metrics, but for the complete list), and it is already making a difference in how I manage the business.
I have learned from customer calls that most customers do not know how to use the Portfolio tool, so we are planning to make some short videos that explain it. If you have more than two project spaces, will be worth the two minutes to take a look.
Git code browser sneak peak: We already support git with trac, and github. Now we are adding a handcrafted git code viewer to our Assembla-hosted repositories. It allows browsing of all branches, which our trac code browser does not support, and the handy "View as Web page" feature, etc. Current git users can try it out with a new link and checkbox option on your Git & Trac tool page, or by logging in and going to code.assembla.com. We will be offering an integrated git tool to new users next week.
Backup, including wiki and tickets: Our backup systems are working well, and we have never in the history of the company lost any data. We also offer (on the Admin/resources page of a space) to send files and repository data to YOUR Amazon S3 account every night, which would be convenient if you couldn't contact us because of a meteor strike or something. Our customers asked us to extend this backup to include database objects such as wiki pages and tickets. They also want to be able to download the full data set and use it somewhere else. We support your right to move your data around. So, we added a full backup option which exports our database objects in a json format. You can tell us to send it to S3 every night, or you can ask us to generate a file which you can then download.