After releasing our GitHub integration last week and seeing all the positive feedback, we figured Bitbucket should be the next up, another application for source code hosting. This integration works in pretty much the same way as the GitHub integration, so teams that use both Bitbucket and AgileZen can now associate their commit messages with story cards! Please review the Bitbucket article in our knowledge base for detailed instructions on how to get set up with this integration. Once you’re up and running, you can comment in your messages with the AgileZen story card number and have the commit message appear under the changeset list on the story card.

We hope you’ll check it out!

We love supporting the open source community, so we decided to integrate with the Project Hosting on Google Code, a free collaborative development environment for open source projects. Our integration with Google Project Hosting allows you to associate commits in your Google Project with story cards in AgileZen. This lets your team stay up to date on the latest development work and view a history of commits for each story. If you’d like more information on how to set this up, please check out our knowledge base article.

If you’re actively working on an open source project and want to use AgileZen to manage your work, we have a free account with one project and unlimited collaborators specifically for open source! Please contact us at giving@agilezen.com with information about your project and a link to your repository, so we can get you set up.

Today we released the integration of AgileZen with Campfire, a web app for real time group collaboration. Like our HipChat integration, Campfire can be used to see notifications about the status of work items, so you can get updates about AgileZen story cards along with your chat. This means that even if you don’t have your AgileZen project open, you’ll still be up on the latest information!

This is a project-based notification system (as opposed to email and IM notifications, which are user-specific), so you can associate messages in a certain AgileZen project with a specific room in Campfire. If you’re the account owner, you’ll see the new integrations tab on the home screen of your projects. All you need is your Campfire User API Auth Token and the Campfire Room URL to get started. It’s really easy to set up, and the full instructions are available on our help site.

Many of our customers have posted integrations they’ve written to the API forum on our help site, so be sure to check those out too. If you’ve written integrations with AgileZen or would like to, let us know because we’d love to see them!

We’re happy to show off our new team blog! We’ve doubled the team size over the last year and we’re looking to hire again soon, so it seemed like the right time to create a place where anyone on the team could share their opinions or talk about what they’re working on in their own words. Posts on the new team blog might include anything from office events, our experiences with certain technologies, or other fun stuff like beer and burgers!

That being said, this blog will remain focused on product and business updates like feature releases and hiring.

Happy belated new year to all of our users! 2010 was a big year for AgileZen — we were acquired by Rally Software, moved our office to North Carolina, and hired Brec, our first employee. We surpassed some major user and revenue goals, and have continued to improve the application to meet customer demand.

At the end of the year, we took some time to step back and evaluate our goals, and decide which direction we wanted to take AgileZen. Now that the holiday season’s passed, we wanted to share a sketch of our 2011 plans with everyone and talk a little bit about the technological improvements we’re going to be making.

We believe that AgileZen is best suited for two things: visualizing work, and improving communication between team members. In order to support that, we’ve got several product objectives for the year.

First, we’re working to complete AgileZen’s REST API. When we released the first (read-only) version of it, we had every intention of completing it in short order, but other work continued to leapfrog it in terms of priority. I’m happy to say that we should be rolling out a beta version of the completed read-write API soon. There will be some minor breaking changes to the current API, but don’t worry if you’ve already built something on top of it — it won’t be too painful.

Simultaneously, we’ve started to re-tool our user interface a bit. When we originally built AgileZen, we decided the server should be in charge of rendering all of the HTML and sending it back to the client. This worked fine for awhile, but it’s slowly started to make maintenance and enhancement a bit more difficult than it needs to be. We’re now re-engineering parts of the UI to support client-side MVC (model-view-controller). With this model, all rendering will be done on the client, and the client and server will only send JSON-encoded data back and forth.

To support this new UI, we’ve started building a client-side MVC framework we’re calling Kanso, which will make the development of HTML5 web applications like AgileZen much simpler. Several other frameworks with similar goals exist already — the front-runner of those that we evaluated was SproutCore — but after taking a close look at each, we settled on writing our own. Kanso is written in CoffeeScript, and we’re hoping to eventually release it as open source once it matures a bit further.

We spent quite a bit of time last year to get a better understanding of how customers use AgileZen, and what parts of the product work, and what parts don’t. Based on some feedback and experimentation, we’ve decided to create a new view inside of AgileZen called the unified work screen that combines the board, the work screen, and the story focus screen. By joining these screens together, you won’t have to navigate forward and back between screens, and you’ll be able to maintain your context and stay in flow while you’re working. We’re really excited about this one, and we’ll be talking more about this as time goes on.

Finally, one of our primary goals for 2011 is to make AgileZen a real-time web application. That being said, we won’t be satisfied with just adding a few popup notifications when things happen — we want AgileZen’s real time capability to be seamless, and hard-wired into the product’s DNA. This means that we have to take a step back in the short term, but it’ll allow us to make a huge leap forward in the long term.

Last but certainly not least, we’re also planning to add some people to the team this year! We’re still working on who and when, but we’re going to be looking for some talented folks to join us in development, marketing, and interaction design. If you think that this might be you, drop us a line and let us know what you can bring to the table. We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for making 2010 a great year for AgileZen! We’ve got some big ideas, and we’re working hard to make 2011 an even better year for our users.

Today we released comments in AgileZen! You can now keep your conversations about work items organized by commenting on story cards. Many users expressed a need for this feature as a way to communicate with team members, so we hope that they’ll help keep everyone on the same page.

Here’s a quick tour:

To create a comment, open the story panel and click on the comment icon.

This will open the comment editor where you can enter text and/or Markdown.

The discussion is organized by time, with the most recent comment on the bottom. Each comment has the date and time it was created as well as the avatar and name of the user who created it. You can edit your comments by double-clicking the text (just like you can with the story card’s text) and you can also delete them if you need to.

You can collapse the expanded view of comments (above) to the summary view (below).

We’ve made a few other tweaks in this release. The first is that we changed the ready to pull and blocked actions to icons rather than text to make the most of the space available on the story panel.

We also changed the ready indicator. Now if you hover over it an arrow will appear, and you can click the panel to pull the story to the bottom of the list of items in the next phase. This is an easy way to move stories you are responsible for without having to drag them to the end of a long list.

Also in this release, we changed the rules a bit when it comes to HTML embedding. Originally, we let everyone enter whatever they’d like in fields that support Markdown (including HTML), but some users ran into trouble with badly-formatted HTML that would render their board unusable. We’ve changed the way we format Markdown to ensure that this won’t be a problem anymore. We’ve also limited the HTML tags that are allowed to be embedded to a short whitelist. For more information on what we support, see the formatting guide.

Lastly, those who do not have an avatar set in AgileZen have been given a unique picture. We will be relying more on avatars in the future, so it’s important that each person has a different one. We integrate with http://gravatar.com, so you can always change your avatar using that site. There’s instructions and a link to this site on your AgileZen settings page.

As always, if you have feedback or questions, feel free to chat with us on our new help site at http://help.agilezen.com.

As part of our release last Friday, we’ve enabled the ability to switch from monthly to yearly billing in AgileZen. It was highly requested by our customers and with that much demand, we started working on it right away.

We’ve had many customers who tried AgileZen for a few months, liked the simplicity and usability of the product, and wanted to commit to a year on their current plan, so we wanted to make yearly billing easily accessible.  We also had a large group of customers that purchased a year of service right after our public launch last year. Since these customers were coming up for renewal and wanted to continue with another year of service, it was time to build the ability to choose yearly billing into the software.

If you are currently on a monthly cycle and you’d like to switch to yearly, you can do so by clicking on “change billing” on your dashboard. The best part is that if you commit to a year of service in advance, you’ll receive a month of service for free!

This week was Agile 2010 in Orlando. I had a great time, learned a lot, and got to hang out with my Rally colleagues from Boulder. I spent some of my time in the booth doing demos and meeting people. The booth was really busy, and it was great to see people so excited about AgileZen. I love to see the nice things people say about AgileZen on Twitter, but to have someone tell you in person that they love your product is really amazing. I had such a good time showing off the new filtering features, as well as sharing a preview of what’s coming soon. Thanks to everyone who stopped by to chat with me!

If you are curious about what’s next in AgileZen, check out our recent press release. It summarizes the board filtering as well as discusses our upcoming release of filtering capabilities on the performance metrics. In addition to talking about features, it also announces our new discounts for educational institutions and non-profits. We are now offering 50% off a year of our pro, plus, and unlimited accounts for qualifying organizations. We’re happy to be able to give back what we can to people who are doing great things for the community.

I’m looking forward to sharing information about the new filtering capabilities in a few days, so check back soon for the update!

We’re excited to announce a new feature in AgileZen: filtering the board! You can now filter your board on everything from a story’s colors to tags to owner and more! Some of this feature’s highlights are the ability to:

• Toggle between fading or hiding information that doesn’t apply to your filter
• Name and save a filter to be able to re-apply it any time
• Share a filter with your team

We’re working on a manual that contains videos, screenshots, and descriptions of how to use features like filtering, but while we’re working on that, we wanted to be sure everyone could use this feature right away. Here’s a quick video that gives a basic overview of how to use the new filter panel. For even more information, check out the AgileZen wiki at http://learn.agilezen.com/filtering.

One year ago today, we launched AgileZen to the public. It had been a long road to get to launch. Niki and I had been building the product during nights and weekends for a long time, while I was still working a full time job, and she was still working full-time on her Ph.D.

When we finally launched, I had put in about 500 hours of solid development over the previous six weeks. I was crawling across the finish line. Niki and I were confident that we had a great product, but we weren’t sure if anyone would care enough to buy it, or even if anyone would even pay attention at all.

In the first week after launch, we had over a thousand signups, and we sold enough accounts to easily cover our hosting costs in the first 24 hours. To see that sort of reaction, it made all of the hard work we’d put in worthwhile. We knew we were on to something good.

It’s funny to say that it’s only been a year since we launched, because so much has happened in the meantime. The product has changed dramatically, and sometimes I forget that features we use all the time weren’t included at launch. Not only that, but Niki and I have sold the company, and moved from Akron to Raleigh to work for Rally Software. All great things — but our lives are very different than they were a year ago.

The other day, I stumbled across the very first mockup of the AgileZen interface, and on the product’s birthday, we thought it’d be fitting to share it with everyone.

It sounds silly when I think about it now, but originally I wanted the interface to be all grayscale, so it would blend into the background and let users focus on their work. I’m glad we didn’t go quite that far, but you can see shades of the approach in today’s version of AgileZen, and I’d venture to say we’ve succeeded so far in our goal of staying out of our users way.

Now that we’ve joined Rally, we’ve got all kinds of crazy ideas about things we can add to AgileZen. Some of these you’ll start seeing soon — very soon, actually — and some others we’re still debating about whether they belong in the product in the first place. After all, we’re still dedicated to keeping AgileZen simple and easy to use above all else. Now that Brec’s joined the team, we’ve got the capacity to implement some great stuff that we’ve always wanted but kept pushing off because of lack of time.

Not only that, but we can start taking shots at some of the harder problems people have in managing their work — problems that we’ve always felt AgileZen was uniquely positioned to solve.

Both us and the product have come a long way over the past year, but we have a long way to go and a lot of work still to do. Thanks to everyone for helping us along the way, and be sure to stay tuned over the next few months, because there’s some fantastic stuff coming.