As some of you have already noticed, we released a new version of Zen last night! This version has quite a few changes, but the most significant is the addition of task lists inside of stories. Here’s a quick tour to give you an idea of how to use the feature.

You can add tasks to a story when you create it by clicking the Edit Tasks button on the Add Stories panel. From the board, you can add add tasks to an existing story by clicking the new tasks button on the story toolbar:

You can add tasks to a story from the story screen as well. Once a story has tasks, you will see an additional section on the story card, similar to the one shown for file attachments. This summary indicates both the total number of tasks and the number that have been completed, along with a rough completion percentage:

Bear in mind that if all of the tasks are not equal in size, this completion percentage isn’t a perfect indicator of how much of the story is complete. Still, it can be helpful to check the completion status of a story at a quick glance. To view the specific tasks, click the summary, and the card will fold out:

As you can see, this story describes the development of a simple e-commerce payment page. You can re-order tasks by grabbing a task’s drag handle (on the left) and moving it into the position you want. If you decide you don’t want a task anymore, the button at the right will delete it from the story. Unlike stories, there is no process for tasks to travel through – they’re either finished or not. To mark a task as finished, click its checkbox. From then on, when the story’s task list is expanded, Zen will show a description of who finished the task and when:

To collapse the task list again, click Hide. In this case, since we checked off a task, the story’s task summary will be updated to reflect the new status:

So, that’s a quick tour of tasks. While you should obviously feel free to use the feature however works best for you, remember that tasks typically should not line up with the columns on your board. For example, if you have a phase on your board called Test, you probably shouldn’t add a task called “test this story.” However, you might want to add multiple tasks related to testing, like “regression testing” and “cross-browser UI testing”, both of which are expected to be finished within the Test phase.

The easiest way to think about it is that your story is a goal that you want to achieve, the tasks are steps toward that specific goal, and your phases are the milestones that all stories must move through in order to reach completion.

Like I said, tasks are the biggest addition, but certainly not the only one. We’ve made quite a few bug fixes and usability tweaks:

1. You can now set priority, deadline, and owner when creating a story, instead of having to go to the story screen to set them.
2. Switched to MarkdownSharp for Markdown rendering, which means we’re now running on the same flavor of Markdown as used by Github and Stack Overflow.
3. URLs within Markdown-enabled fields are now automatically turned into hyperlinks.
4. Added the ability to link to stories by entering the story number in any Markdown-enabled field; for example: entering #123 will create a link to story 123.
5. Removed the hotkeys for expanding the backlog and archive which were interfering with some users’ keyboard-fu. (We have plans to add a lot more keyboard shortcuts to the app, so they’ll be back eventually.)
6. The magnifying glass on stories is a normal link again, instead of being controlled by JavaScript. This means you can right-click and copy the URL for a story, or middle-click to open it in a new tab.
7. The problem where some projects’ cycle time charts were out of chronological order has been fixed.
8. The problem where some projects’ efficiency ratings were above 100% has been fixed. (Don’t worry, you’re still awesome, just not 5000% awesome! :)
9. Performance charts now respect individual users’ date format selection.
10. We’re no longer relying on HTTP verbs other than GET/POST, which should solve problems with overly-aggressive corporate firewalls.
11. Several other minor visual tweaks.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, we’re all ears!

When we launched Zen last year, we decided not to accept payment via purchase order. This was mainly due to the effort required to process them – credit card transactions are very easy to automate, which allows us offer Zen at a much lower cost to our customers.

Since then, we’ve had several people ask us to allow them to pay via purchase order. We hate turning customers away, so we’ve changed our policy and are now accepting purchase orders for customers interested in the Unlimited, Plus, or Pro plans, who are willing to be billed annually instead of monthly.

For more information, check out our updated pricing page, and if you have any questions, feel free to send us an email.

We followed up our big release last Thursday with a (thankfully!) much smaller one. We’ve fixed a few stray bugs that snuck into the release, and introduced a couple of features that were “low-hanging fruit”:

Priorities

Story cards now have a formal priority field, which can be set from the story screen. We’ve typically used the position of the story on the board to indicate relative priority, and tags to collect stories into priority groups, but after several users asked us for a formal place to put priorities, we decided that it would make a nice addition to the product.

Priority works just like the size field, in that it’s just free-form text. We plan to use the MOSCOW system to assign values (must, should, could, would), replacing our tags of the same names, but if you’d like to use numeric values or your own rating system instead, go for it. When you give a story a priority, it appears on the story card’s header next to the story size, as well as being displayed on the sidebar of the story screen.

Deadlines

Story cards now also have a deadline field, which is also edited on the story screen. This provides a nice way to mark tasks that have a hard delivery date. When you give a story a deadline, it appears on the card header, like size and priority:

When the deadline is today, or has already passed, the date will turn red to indicate that the story may be overdue:

Task lists within stories are on the way next. Keep the feedback coming!

Zen went live in July and the past four months have been a blur. Over the last few weeks we’ve been relatively quiet, as we took a step back and focused on improving our infrastructure, code quality, user experience, and performance, and snuck a few features in while we were at it.

So, without further ado, here’s a quick tour around what we’ve been up to:

New Public-Facing Website

First, by now you’ve probably noticed that our blog has a new theme. This is to match our completely-redesigned public-facing website! When we launched the original site back in May, Zen was still under heavy development, and parts of the application were pretty ugly to look at. That’s why our old public-facing site didn’t feature much in the way of screenshots. Now that Zen has stabilized and we’ve been able to put a coat of polish on it, we’ve created a brand-new video tour to demonstrate the product.

File Attachments

We’ve mentioned it was in the works already, but we’re happy to announce that paid plans now support file attachments! File storage is determined by your plan size: the Personal plan comes with 3GB of storage, the Pro plan has 10GB, Plus has 20GB, and Unlimited has as much as you’d like. You can upload multiple files at once (think Gmail), and once attached, files are available with a quick click directly from the board. Attachments can be up to 50MB in size, which we think should be enough for any uses – if you need more, let us know, and we can tweak the maximum.

Archived Projects

The new version also introduces the ability to archive projects. When you archive a project, it’s taken offline, but all of your data is retained, so you can access it again if you ever need it. Only paid plans support archived projects, and the project limit for each plan now represents the number of active projects you can have at once – there’s no limit on the number of archived projects.

New Story Screen

One of our favorite new features in the new version is a much-improved story screen. Originally, the story screen was mostly a read-only area, where you could view performance metrics and the history for a given story. In the new version, anything you can do to a story from the board, you can also do from the story screen – including editing tags, colors, moving the story between phases, attaching files, etc. Certain things can only be done from the story screen, like renaming and deleting attachments, and deleting the story itself. We’re trying hard to avoid the temptation to cram a lot of functionality onto the limited real estate of the board.

Soft WIP Limits

(Edit: Forgot to mention this one originally!) If you’re using work-in-progress (WIP) limits, you’ll notice that you can now override them as necessary. Your process, and by extension Zen, should never get in the way of your work. Now, if a phase has the exact number of stories to match its WIP limit, its header will turn red, and if you over-fill it, the entire column will turn red to indicate that the WIP limit has been violated. To see the new WIP limits in action, check out the video here, under Focus at the job on hand.

User Experience Improvements

We’ve also made significant improvements to the user experience, and we’re pretty confident we’ve squashed pretty much every bug that you’ve pointed out. Naturally, if you find any issues (new or still-lingering), let us know… we need you to keep us honest. :)

We’ve also made some dramatic improvements to our infrastructure, and while you won’t appreciate them as much as us, we’re confident that it will allow us to speed our release cadence dramatically going forward. This means more features and faster bug fixes, which is something that our users will appreciate more than cleaner code. :)

Performance Improvements

We’ve introduced bundling for our CSS and JavaScript files. This means that all of our different scripts are combined into a single file, which is then optimized, and delivered to you in compressed form. Zen’s CSS stylesheet is now only 14KB, all of the JavaScript for the entire application is only 125KB, and you only need to download it once! Long story short, this should dramatically improve Zen’s performance; particularly the speed at which individual pages load.

30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

Last but certainly not least, because we’re sure you’ll love Zen if you try it out, we’re now offering 30-day money-back guarantees on all paid plans. If you cancel your account or downgrade to the free plan within 30 days of purchasing, any charges that were applied to your account automatically refunded. We’ve updated our terms of service and billing policy to represent this change, so please give them another once-over to see the changes. (Only the sections involving refunds have been altered, the rest is exactly the same.)

The Road Ahead

So, what’s next? Well, on this release we deviated pretty dramatically from our usual way of doing business. Since several of the updates were interrelated (particularly with the new public-facing website), we were forced to move away from our typical cadence of releasing new features constantly. Believe me when I say we’re excited to get back to doing rapid-fire releases over the next few weeks!

The next two features that we’re planning to roll out will be the ability to create task lists within each story, and the introduction of a powerful new search engine. We will be returning to release-per-feature, with a goal of a new release every week.

Thanks again very much to everyone who’s sent in feedback, and please keep it coming, along with any questions you might have. It’s fantastic to see so many people as excited as we are about Zen, and we love hearing from each and every one of you!

We’ve been working hard to make improvements to Zen, and we are very close to launching a website redesign as well as some significant (and most requested) additions to the application.

We’re looking for short testimonials for the new version of our website! If Zen has helped you or your company improve, please let us know by sending your quote to niki@enkari.com.

Please include your name, your company (if applicable), and a link to your company’s website if you would like it included with your quote or testimonial.

This Sunday, we’ll be moving Zen to a new, faster server. The system will be offline for no more than one hour as we perform this migration.

Maintenance Window:
Sunday, October 18th, 10pm – 11pm Eastern (2am – 3am UTC)

We apologize for the inconvenience, but these upgrades will improve the overall experience of the product. To stay up-to-date on the migration process, be sure to follow us on Twitter.

This is just the first step in a series of upgrades we’re making to Zen to improve performance and usability, as well as adding some much-requested features. Shortly after Zen is up and running in its new home, we’ll be rolling out some significant updates to the software.

We won’t keep you in suspense for too long, but watch our blog and Twitter for more information!

We are excited to announce that we’ve accepted the first outside funding for Zen. Enkari, Ltd. was awarded the Innovation Fund Stage A grant in the amount of $25,000!

The Innovation Fund was established in 2007 and supports technology-based entrepreneurial endeavors in Northeast Ohio. It is a joint endeavor between several local institutions including our alma mater, The University of Akron. We’d like to thank the selection committee for this amazing honor.

The funding will be used to take Zen to the next level and continue improving and evolving the service for our customers. More information on what we have in mind will be coming in the next few weeks.

Happy Labor Day to our United States users! We’ve been hard at work, and we just pushed an update to the site that improves a few things.

Changes to Editing

We made a few changes to editable fields throughout the application:

1. All fields are now editable by a double-click instead of a single click. This means that text is more easily selectable, and links within editable fields are clickable.
2. Story cards now support Markdown, meaning you can add rich formatting to cards’ display on your board, not just to the details field. Project descriptions now support Markdown as well.
3. You can now edit cards from your board by double-clicking the text! To expand the card (displaying the toolbar), just click the header of the card.

Here’s an example of the Markdown support on story cards:

New Support Portal

We’ve gotten some very positive feedback about our customer support, but email has gotten a little difficult to handle. To improve even more, we’ve launched a new customer support portal. When you click the feedback link inside Zen and send us a message, you’re now creating a new ticket inside our support system. This will help us ensure that every user gets a prompt response to every question or issue.

The support portal is powered by ZenDesk, a great support service. Despite the name similarities, there’s no affiliation between our products except in spirit. :)

Bug Fixes

We’ve also corrected some minor nagging UI issues that users have found.

Work in Progress

We’re working on a few things that we hope to get pushed out this week:

1. The ability to attach files to stories, which is the most-requested feature at the moment!
2. Support for task lists inside of stories.
3. Moving the add stories shade to be horizontal, so you can keep your backlog panel open as you add stories. This will also pave the way for some upgrades to the work screen that we have up our sleeve. :)

Thanks again for your feedback, and please keep it coming!

Last night, we pushed a new version of the site with some updates to our charting system. Originally, snapshots of your projects’ key performance indicators (KPIs) were taken each night, but we found this method of capturing metrics limiting. Instead, the charts are now based on the current data from your projects, collected live when you display the charts.

In addition to the obvious advantage of having your data always be current, the new way of tracking your performance data will allow us to provide drill-down support in the future. For example, you will be able to view historic KPI values for all stories with a given size, color, etc. We’re not ready to roll this out just yet, but it’s on our roadmap, and yesterday’s upgrades will allow it to happen.

We’re working hard to continue to evolve the product to match your feedback, so please keep it coming!

A few people have contacted us to say that they just missed the ability to use the coupon code that we announced on the mailing list and Twitter before launching. Since we’ve had such a great response from Zen during our first month, we’ve decided to extend the coupon offer through August 15th!

If you sign up for, or upgrade to, a paid plan before midnight on August 15th, you can use the coupon code KAIZEN and save 50% off your first month.

Thanks again for your support and feedback. We’re very excited about the positive response to Zen, and we’re working hard to improve the tool every day.