Before launching our premium services, we’re upgrading our servers to have more capacity and lower response times.

Teambox is having a great response from customers, and we want to prepare for the growth to come by scaling now. We will do this by clusterizing our database servers, and adding more CPU power to the application servers.

During the upgrade, our servers will be working slower than usual. No downtime is expected.

If you experience any problem, please report them in our support page.

Thanks!

Thirsty for more? Keep on reading

• New in Teambox 2.0: Twitter feed with attachments
• Paint it white
• Designed for Sales vs. Designed for Use
• It’s just a matter of scale
• We’re hiring!

Dear Teambox community, we have big news to share with all of you. After two years of hard work, we’re about to take a big step towards solidifying our collaboration platform.

We’ll be introducing paid premium accounts over the next days. While you can still use Teambox for free, we’ll be offering extra features and storage so you can get more done and support our development.

Current users, do not worry. There will be no change to the two pillars of our success:

• Our free hosted version will remain free with reasonable storage limitations.
• The project will remain open-source, licensed under the GPL. This means you can always run your own copy and keep up with our developers’ break-neck speed of improvements.

Special pricing will be available for existing members and early adopters of the Teambox service.

If your current free usage of the Teambox falls outside of the limits for free accounts, we’re here to help. Contact us and we’ll see what we can do (non-profit organizations will get special treatment, for instance!).

Active contributors to the development of the Teambox will also get a special treatment.

We strive to remain community-focused, delivering new features continuously based on your ideas and suggestions. Paying customers will receive a higher priority treatment, so we can both deliver a great product and offer solutions to professionals in needs.

Stay tuned, specific pricing plan details coming soon!

The Teambox Team

Read also

• A worse basic edition

Cucumber is one of the wonderful libraries we use to develop Teambox. The philosophy behind it is defining what the code should do, and then making your code satisfy those conditions.

That way, it doesn’t matter what’s beneath. Only the results matter, and you’ll be sure it doesn’t break. This is known as Behavior Driven Development.

Thanks to Cucumber, I found a great piece of insight:

Business value and Minimum Marketable Features

Before adding any feature to your design, you should ask yourself “why should I do this?“. If it responds to any of the following, you’re in the right direction:

• Protect revenue.
• Increase revenue.
• Manage cost.
• Increase brand value.
• Make the product remarkable.
• Provide more value to your customers.

An example given in their site is explaining why a site like Youtube should have a login feature:

In order to drive more people to the website and earn more admoney, authors should have to login, so that the content can be displayed with the author and appear more trustworthy.

Before adding a link to your Terms and Conditions, ask yourself why. Before adding JS animations. Before setting up a menu with 10 tabs. You’ll find out which your core features are, and what you can get rid of.

Chances are this will help you building something easier to understand and less complex to make.

> Cucumber’s site.
> Popping the why stack

Read also

• Migration complete

Oh, wow! It’s been two years the project took off, building, experimenting, playing, iterating, learning.

It’s time to grow the team, once again. Teambox is hiring. Are you a rock-star developer? Are you an experienced sales guy? Do you have the best contacts in the market?

We are looking for full-time warriors to join the team in Barcelona (Spain), possibly moving to San Francisco during the next months.

Teambox is a growing startup with two active projects. We’re an international and young team. If you want a challenge and a big change in your life, join us!

These are the open positions:

Rock-star developers

We’re looking for somebody who can…

• Code beautiful Ruby on Rails code.
• Is experienced with unix environment (mac, linux).
• Show us your Github repository, past projects and contributions.
• Understand development is about user experience.

Skilled sales guys

It’s time to build a commercial network! We need you to contact potential customers for Teambox and Potion, so you’ll need:

• A deep understanding of the Internet market.
• Language skills and experience in a given region (USA, France, Germany…)
• Prove some previous experience with sales.
• Show us how many followers you have on Twitter!

If you’re interested on any of these, apply for a job at jobs@teambox.com.

Tell a friend, too! It’s not like you find job opportunities everywhere, nowadays

Read also

• How to make a screencast video
• What’s going on in the kitchen?
• Whiteness
• New on Teambox: Auto-refresh activity feed
• New in Teambox: Email notifications when mentioned

Developers and artists become often obsessed with perfection. They won’t ship their work until it’s perfect. And, of course, it’ll never be perfect.

All the work you put into something will be worthless, unless you get that product or site out.
Time is limited, opportunities will not be there forever and others will come with their pieces of work.

In an ideal case, we all think: Great product after years of work will become and instant success. But how? How will you communicate to your customers, unless you’ve built a userbase steadily over the years?

Of course it would help to deliver a proof of concept first. People would see it and use it, and you’d get valuable feedback to improve. You’d allow word-of-mouth to spread.

Whatever you are working on, get it out. Now! Some ideas:

• Make a site for it.
• Contact your first potential customers.
• Throw away that long feature list. Focus on your main 2 or 3 features.
• Release a private preview to a little group.
• Collect ideas for later. Don’t try to do everything now.
• Don’t implement something unless 90% of your users need it.
• Start charging as early as possible. It will show if your work is worth money and to who.
• Sell it, even if it doesn’t exist. You’ll need to master the sales techniques.

All your creativity, time and effort will be worth nothing unless you deliver. So find out the quickest way to do it and release it now.

As the guys at Thoughtbot put it: No art is ever finished. It only reaches a satisfying stopping point.

Thirsty for more? Keep on reading

• When is something worth implementing
• Quote: Ideas and money
• Forgot Password done the right way
• [Preview] Teambox Login page
• Teambox in the Green

One of the great things about having a support site is realizing what you failed to explain or document in your app.

During the last days, some people didn’t really understand how to assign a task:

Repeated support requests are calling for a change. We need to put information where the user expects it to be. Let’s see how we could explain better the right way to do things for new users.

Primers, your first-time guide

The first time the user visits the task section, there will be nothing there. It’s important to show him how to proceed from there, if possible being coherent with how they will work when the primer is not there anymore.

It’s about setting expectations and teaching what they can get done.

Notice all the text is written from the perspective of the benefits you’ll get from tasks, and not solely the way they work.

Creating task lists and tasks

Once the user is creating a task or task list, we need to guide by design.

We redesigned the form to set expectation on how task lists work, and set optional fields like dates.

More important than this was creating new tasks. We wanted users to set actionable titles, explaining what needs to be done.

Tasks like “do web page” aren’t explicit enough, but “propose new logo” is. So we need to suggest this in the process of creating a new task.

For bonus points, we set an autofocus on this fields to guide the next action.

Placeholders for text fields

Lastly, we used some HTML5 goodness to guide the user when posting a comment.

Empty textfields are yet another opportunity to guide the user. We used this area to give some tips and pointers on using tasks:

Results

Overall, the whole experience of working with tasks has been greatly improved. By teaching, we have smarter and more capable users, and that is great news for any app!

Read also

• Usability fails
• The mouse that wanted to be a keyboard
• Persuasive design: Suggesting over forcing
• Forgot Password done the right way
• [Preview] Teambox Login page

Although our website was good at explaining what Teambox is about, users had to go through screenshots, read and try to understand how it would actually work in a real case.

We were making users think.

The result was bounces: People that would feel too lazy to go through it, or sign up to try an account.

That’s why we’ve been working with John from Scraster. We produced a 5 minute screencast that takes you through a real-life usage of Teambox. Some sort of showcase and brief tutorial.

I think it’s worth watching it to understand how much you can deliver in a video: Swift tours, concepts explained, tips…

Let’s go to some key points about screencasting:

Making a point

A quality screencast is not only about showing somebody going through screens and covering features. You need to know your point: Are you trying to get new users? Then, showcase how they’ll be better using it. Is it to help existing users learn how to use it better? Then, go to the point and do it quick.

Be brief

The last thing you want is somebody skipping through your video. So make it direct and concise. There’s no way somebody will watch 20 minutes of video unless they’re already interested. So make a short 3-5 video, and then break any extra content in short 1-2 minute videos.

Tell a story

Your users will relate more easily to what you’re saying if you’re telling a story. Stories are catchy, and we want to hear them completely.

In our case, we featured a success story about a webpage design.

Illustrate concepts

Video and voice must support each other to highlight concepts. Whenever necessary, show a screen clarifying concepts or provide visual cues to show what’s important.

In our case, visual elements were highlighted and user stories and tips where displayed in special screens.

Which is the next action?

Ok, users are now done watching your video. What do you want them to do next?
It’s important to display the next step clearly, without offering too many options. If you’re looking for signups, display the link below the video during the whole thing. If you want them to watch another video, display a link right at the end.

Common pitfalls are letting Youtube (or whoever) display related videos from other people, which would take users out of your page.

Empower users’ learning

It’s not about you and your wonderful product. What makes people want to use it is that your product will make them better users. And the way to do that is teaching.

Let your video show them how to do things better than they do actually!

The result

We uploaded the video and attached it to our Tour site (for new users) and to the Login site (for existing users wanting to learn more). In case you want to watch the full thing, it’s here!

Read also

• We’re hiring!
• What’s going on in the kitchen?
• Whiteness
• New on Teambox: Auto-refresh activity feed
• New in Teambox: Email notifications when mentioned

I read an article on New York Times: Structure? The Flatter, the Better. In it, they interview Cristóbal Conde about his management style.

The whole interview is quite interesting, and I’d like to share some snippets with you.

About Collaboration

Q. What are your thoughts on collaborative versus top-down management?

A. Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.

About Global Teamwork

[...] before, while there were global companies, they were really just a collection of very local businesses operating independently from each other. Now a global company means a company composed of teams that are themselves dispersed. So every team can be global in many senses, not just the company.

About Collaboration Platforms

But with the explosion of information, and flattening technologies starting with e-mail, I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything.

Q. How do you create that culture?

A. One thing we use is a Twitter-like system on our intranet called Yammer.

Q. How long have you used it?

A. About seven months. By having technologies that allow people to see what others are doing, share information, collaborate, brag about their successes — that is what flattens the organization. I think the role of the boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of the show, rather than being the lead.

I think too many bosses think that their job is to be the lead, and I don’t. By creating an atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people they’ve never met. It’s fascinating.

How does Teambox fit in

The article mentions Yammer. While Yammer is pretty cool, in the way you can share updates with your group, it’s pretty limited: Restricted to people in your company, no project management features.

Teambox brings a better collaboration tool.

• Post updates on a project wall to ask something or celebrate an accomplishment.
• Mention somebody’s @username to send them an email.
• Post updates inside a task. Plan what needs to be done.

Collaborating is reporting

Why waste time at the end of each week or month reporting? If your employees need to take the time to write down what they did, something is broken in your system.

With the proper collaboration tools, work completed is archived and useful as a report. So you can look at it at any moment later, and see what was done.

How do you use collaboration apps? Share your thoughts on this thread!

Read also

• Teambox 2.0 preview

Oh, my. We’ve been working hard for the last weeks, and I wanted to share with you some of the things that are going on with Teambox!

New Teambox site

Wanted to show Teambox to your friends? Our new site adds a Tour page, a Community site with guides and the good old blog.

Are you using Teambox actively? Send us a Testimonial and we’ll feature your company in Our Users page!

Added french locale

Thanks to Diane, Teambox est désormais disponible en français! To change this, simply go to your Settings on Teambox and change your language to French (or Spanish).

If you’d like to see your own language on Teambox, read or translation guide.

Take a tour to learn more!

Visit the Tour page to learn more about how Teambox works. Step by step, with screenshots and tooltips.

Read-only API ready

You can now access Teambox via API with XML, JSON or YAML formats. If you want more info on this to develop an app, contact us.

Started the mobile version

If you own an iPhone or iPod, point it to app.teambox.com to see the preview of Teambox Mobile.

Printable tasks

Heavy users have been asking for the ability to print tasks. Well, it’s here. Click the “print this page” link in the task lists’ sidebar, and you’ll get something like this.

Read also

• We’re hiring!
• How to make a screencast video
• Whiteness
• New on Teambox: Auto-refresh activity feed
• New in Teambox: Email notifications when mentioned

We asked you some days before whether you preferred a light or dark background.
The general answer has been: Paint it white!

So we are now defaulting to a light background.

It makes it more clear to draw attention to the right elements, and make interface look cleaner.

We’re considering custom colors and CSS to customize Teambox. More about that later!

Read also

• Which header actions do you prefer?
• CSS tip: Remove the dotted line for links
• We’re hiring!
• How to make a screencast video
• What’s going on in the kitchen?