Today's release comes with the usual package of small improvements, and some bigger features that are worth reading about.
Affiliate plan - make money, give away discounts
The new Assembla affiliate plan pays a 25% commission to users who refer new subscribers. You can also give away a $5 discount, just by giving potential subscribers your login name as a referral code, or by referring them with an HTML link tagged "?afflilate=<your login name>". You will find details about the Affliiate plan in the new "Affiliate Program" and "Affiliate Earnings" pages of the Money tab in your user/start tab bar. It takes only one click to agree to the Terms and Conditions, and then you can start giving out the discounts - here.
Activity Stream for all your spaces
Get real-time view of activity in all of your spaces. Observant users have probably noticed the new Stream tab on the user/start tab bar. Use the right sidebar to follow and unfollow events from particular spaces, get a report on one space, or navigate to a space. Tell us what you think. If you like it, we might use this page as a simpler, more active, default user/start page.
Hide the Team tab in Support spaces
We got a good response from users that tried our Support tool - here - to collect support requests and tickets. Many users configured the Support tool to be visible to watchers or public users, and they wanted to hide the Team and Stream tabs. Originally, we didn't offer permission settings for those tabs, because they are permanent features of every space, and not optional tools. In this release, we give you a permission setting that will hide the Team tab. We are not providing an option to hide the Stream tab, because we need to guarantee at least on visible tab, and we hide the non-permitted events from visitors, and we need to give every user a chance to edit his email alert settings on the sidebar. This change should free you up to show the Support tool to more customers.
Videos
We organized our screencam videos here in the new Features section. They illustrate workflows like "Space Creation and Configuration", and "Time Tracking and Reporting", as well as individual features such as Portfolio, Messages, and Wiki. We will enhance this list soon with the most important workflow: how use Assembla Tickets in agile development.
Sign up for a beta test of the Private installation
Our Plans page mentions an installed version of Assembla, the Private installation, and we have heard from a number of people that need an installed product to meet security requirements, or for customization. Our first few installations were challenging. It's not easy wrapping up a scalable online service with more than a dozen servers and processes.
So, we made a VMWare image with everything installed and ready to run. And, we built an installer application so that you can configure it in minutes. And, we moved the home page to a wiki so that you can customize your message to users. And, we added a process dashboard so that you can see what is going on with all of the bits whizzing around. We're getting ready to offer this complete package with unlimited workspaces, full source code, and a perpetual license. We could use your feedback.
If you want to try the Private install beta release, sign up by filing a ticket here.