What makes part of a51 charm is that the team who developed activeCollab is working on creation of new modules and improvements, maintenance of the system, and customer support. We give our best to help people solve problems and issues, and encourage them to ask whatever they want to know about activeCollab. That’s why we were not concerned, worried or badly surprised when we reached 10,000 support request tickets in our Help Desk tool. We were proud of it.

One might say that 10,000 tickets is quite a number – 13.7 tickets a day, including weekends, vacation and holiday time. But it is not as exhausting as it seems. There are periods when tickets arrive more frequently, like publishing of a new release or Beta testing intervals. It’s the time when people are testing new things and features on their own systems within specific conditions, and it is expected that problems might occur, or that there would be some questions about new functionalities and improvements. Furthermore, most of the bugs (it happens sometimes) are revealed in these couple of days; and if the Beta is on the run these reports are priceless to us. Otherwise, it’s quite peaceful and quiet, with couple of  emails per day in our Help Desk.

Statistics claim:

• 45% of support Tickets were activeCollab related questions or problems,
• 14% were pre-sale questions,
• 12% Installation and Upgrade issues
• the rest of the Tickets were related to the other subjects (such as purchase orders, business inquires, demo related questions,…).

It’s interesting that there are not many feature requests. They are usually given as a pre-sale questions, inquiries about some of the system functionalities or suggestions on how somethings can work better.

Analyzing most frequent Ticket category (activeCollab related questions or problems) we came to a conclusion that most of the people who address us are well trained professionals who wish to set the system up to fit their needs completely. They have figured out the way things are working just by playing with the tool, testing different setups and trying out the Modules; most of the time they just need advice or confirmation that their configuration of the system can be implemented and that some of features can work in the way they wish.

Of course, there are “heavy problems”, system malfunctions and error reports, and we are always trying to solve them in the shortest notices. Our practice is to be helpful and at service to our customers all the time. That’s why support correspondence can sometimes last for a couple of days, or even weeks. We just want to make sure that everything is working properly and people are satisfied with their activeCollab.

In these two years support tickets has brought us some overwhelming experiences, good friend and fans, valuable lessons on customer relations, priceless feedback and many pleasant and encouraging words.

Thank you all for sending your support Tickets! We are here to help you so “please don’t hesitate to contact us” :)

When the first commercial edition of activeCollab was released in october 2007. we didn’t think much about refunds. Back then it was not such a big deal, the only important thing was to get to release 1.0. When the serious sales started, we got first requests for a refund. No matter what the reason was, it was a hard fact to accept that there will be people who are not satisfied with the product and will want to get their money back and we had to state our “official refund policy” and stick with it. We introduced “30 day, no questions asked money back guarantee” and never looked back – it was a good business decision.

Here’s what we have concluded from our two year experience in selling software:

• Deal with the fact that there might be some people who will not like your product. Sometimes the product is not working well for the customer when they implement it; sometimes during the refund period company finds more suitable solution; sometimes they don’t manage to find a guy who will set up and maintain the system for them, etc. There can be a plenty of reasons.
• You should look at the refunds as operational costs. That is simple “safety net” that buyers can use if they don’t like what they have bought. The worst thing that can happen is to let costumers “smash to the ground” and end up with something they don’t need or recognize as a waisted money. Rest assured that in this case people will not tell good things about your product to their friends.
• When it cames to refund policy, there’s no place for your ego. No one is asking money back because they don’t like YOU or because they want to hurt YOU; it’s simply because the product or service they payed for didn’t work for them.
• Common money back periods in software industry are 30, 45, or 90 days. We are offering 30 day money back guarantee, but sometimes we give money back even after a longer period, taken special circumstances into consideration.
• Ignore the possibility of someone abusing your refund policy. One of the things we learned is that you should let fair players to have easy access to your product; and not treat them as criminals or cheaters. Not everybody is trying to play tricks on you. 20 people with the positive refund experience are more valuable asset then making a complicated system that will prevent a couple of potential abusers, but make the others give up trying.
• Percentage of money back cases is significantly higher with the new products. If you are starting your business it’s a good thing to know, so don’t panic if refund rate is a bit higher than you expected in the beginning. Most important thing is to release the product and keep on working on its improvements. Latter you will have better, more reliable and competitive product with less refunds and more income.
• Speaking of numbers, new products have up to 5% refund ratio (activeCollab 1.0.x had much lower refund percent) and developed mature product have up to 1% of orders refunded (in our case below this rate). Refund rate begins to grow with the usage of more aggressive marketing techniques.
• No Questions Asked refund policy means that you need to give the money back first, and then maybe ask certain questions. This kind of behavior shows that your company has “we are happy when our costumes are happy” – user centric attitude. Problem is that with this policy you don’t let your users change their mind (it happens, based on experience of companies who don’t offer No Questions Asked refund policy, but discuss every refund request with the customer before issuing a refund). We offer No Questions Asked money back guarantee – we give money back first, and then ask questions (see #9).
• Refund is a great chance to find out what’s wrong with your product. “Yes, we are offering No Questions Asked money back guarantee, but it would really mean a lot to us if you could spare a couple of minutes and tell us why weren’t you satisfied with our product?” We get the answer in 75% of cases, and that kind of feedback is priceless – just listen and fix the problems.
• If you are not selling goods, but bunch of “zeros and ones” there’s no reason for not making a refund if your product is not working for your costumer. If they didn’t get the value they expected, then refund is only fair deal. It’s simple as that.

Looking at this list given above, you may realize that we are for an open, sincere and simple refund policy. It’s been working really well for our business in the past two years.

It is useful to remove the obstacles, both mental and physical, between a buyer and the product. One of the biggest barriers is a risk of loosing money on something not really needed, and refund is a simple way to make it go away.

Can you imagine how excited we were when we first found out that Snow Leopard will be available in Serbia on the official release day (august 28th). “Yeah! There will be no need to make orders from the USA, and drag with all the paperwork and boring procedures with customs” we thought, but…

But, when D-day came and when we went to the local shop to buy our copies next monday, we found out that each and every copy of the new Mac OS were sold. We even made a search in Belgrade with no luck. We had to wait until a new shipment, from Cupertino, arrives.

Wow!! Is there really so many people in Serbia using Mac? Willing to upgrade? And pay for the software? (A little note: Serbia is well known for high precent of pirate software usage / read: Windows pirate software). That was an amazing revelation for all of us.

However, explanation to the “mystery with the number of Mac users in Serbia” came about a week latter. Local Apple equipment store salesman told me that only 30 copies of Snow Leopard reach Novi Sad, and that they were sold out on the first day.

Finally, two weeks latter we got our Snow Leopards!

Here you have our first impressions:

• Goran: “I noticed that performances of my computer has become more efficient and better. I also like having date placed next to the clock, because I believe that every clock should have up to date feature. Plus the price was OK.”
• Ilija: “Internet looks 10 times better on Snow Leopard :)”
• Dušan: “Since I have just installed this upgrade to my computer, only thing I can say on the first look is that I like the visual improvements and increased speed; for the rest, we’ll see. I’m shore that I will enjoy using Mac, as always.”
• Oliver: “It messed up my MySQL (luckily, all data was still there), lost all of my Apache and PHP settings. And I hate the blue glow on focused window in Exposé. Love the improved performance and Airport animation upon connecting to a network :)”
• Ivana: “Nice package and the picture. O, what a cute kitty cat! That’s all I can tell… I’m a customer-public-relation-writer-and stuff like that girl, and I don’t really know that much about OS in general :)”

Feel free to share your impressions on Snow Leopard with us and tell us how it fits for you.

Vacation time is over and, believe it or not, it’s nice to be at the office again. It’s been a while since we’ve been all together in here, without anyone on the vacation and it’s really pleasant to work with all of colleges again; kind of like a first day at school after the summer break!

And the summer… oh, the summer time was so great! Some of us traveled to distant and interesting historical places; others have visited Mediterranean islands and cities; some spent the vacation time at their good old homes; some have discovered interesting towns and natural beauties of our own neighborhood; and all of us had a good time. We have managed to get some rest and charge the batteries for a new round.

So, here we are again, working at the full speed on some new stuff that we hope you are gonna love! We just wanted to let you know that we are back to full time and full capacity work and that we will continue to make and improve tools that make your work life much easier!

view from our office

This morning I was looking for a couple of things in the archives and I came across to an old activeCollab homepage. It was a gray “design” with big block explaining what activeCollab is and with screenshot of the Dashboard. Below the box was a list of 5 recent blog posts. On the right side of the homepage was sidebar with some additional information like downloads, links to important documentation pages, etc.

The last block in the sidebar was a list of features – the ones that are already developed and the upcoming ones. Features that had been completed were crossed over.

People liked this block because it could let them be up to date with what’s coming up next in activeCollab, without the need to dig through forums or documentation for a roadmap. Also, it felt great to cross over a developed feature from this list.

Open source days and old homepage are now gone, but I found this block interesting because now we do things in a completely different way.

Today at our homepage there is no block that promises any features. Future, by itself, is too blurry and hard to predict. Development of software like activeCollab may change priorities and its directions from time to time, depending on various factors. That’s why we are focusing on present and what activeCollab offers now, while the new features are matter of user’s needs, or needs and inspiration, and sometimes planing.

By promising a feature at the homepage of commercial product you are creating an enormous pressure to your team. Customers will repeatedly ask when the specific feature will be available, remind you how much they need it, be excited about how cool it will be when it gets included, etc. It’s perfectly fine and you cannot blame them for that. If this distracts you and creates additional tech support, if it produces more stress and tension, then just remember that it was you who put this information at the website and made an early promise. That’s one of the reasons why we don’t have “Coming soon” block any more.

When it comes to future Features and “Coming soon” announcements today, I stay quiet, because experience and two year practice shows that is much better to under-promise and over-deliver, rather than to make the list public and not be able to ship all the things that you have put there. First way will get you some friends and fans, the other one brings a headache – believe me :)

Our office is not a big place, but not too small either – we have just what we need. Each of us has something special on our desk (I have a ladybug, for example). But, the things that make our entire office more cosy are plants.

We have four of them and they are quite large specimens. Let me introduce them to you: there’s Ben (Ficus Benjamina), Yusa (Yucca Cane), Adam (Alocasia) and Filip (Ficus Elastica). We are all taking a good care of them. As time passed, we have learned the basics about the tropical house-plants:

• They need water, but don’t overdo it. We are watering them once a week.
• They like rain. We simulate that by spraying them every day.
• They don’t like to be on a windy spot, where is breezing.
• They don’t like to be exposed directly to the sunlight. Funny, but true – they love the light, but not to be exposed directly to it.
• They are really possessive and need to be loved. If you don’t give them enough attention, they will become sad and start to throw away the leaves.

That’s a short briefing about how we take care of our office plants. It doesn’t take much of our time, and it is relaxing. Plants at a51 office were definitely a good idea. But, they can be a drag if you don’t have enough time or will to dedicate just a little bit of your attention to them. In that case they will just die.

So, my advice is: have a plant if you plan to train your devotion and persistence. Otherwise, don’t bother yourself and your coworkers with a bunch of bushes and weeds.

That’s the thing with the trends – some of them are not here to stay. I’m going to tell you my story about the trends and people’s wishes.

In my early childhood there was a toy that I wanted so much. It was not a Barbie doll, nor unicorn pony, nor Teddy bear – it was Slinky. I saw a commercial on TV where a few kids played with Slinky, having so much fun, and I believed it. Every single day I was telling to my parents how much I wanted that toy. And then, one day I finally got it. I had my Slinky. I was so happy. But, tomorrow, when I took a better look at it, I realized that I have no idea what I am going to do with that thing. I was trying to throw it from one hand to the other, made different shapes out of it, toss it up and down, but that was not fun at all. I even tried to roll it down the staircase, but it didn’t help either. After half an hour I finally gave up, with a feeling that it was the most boring toy that I have ever had. I have never played with my Slinky again.

A lot of time has passed since this unfortunate event. Today I’m a grownup, with job, family and everything, but the other day, my old Slinky crossed my mind. One of the things I do at my job is to take care of my company’s blog, so I often read what the other company bloggers have to say. I simply couldn’t avoid noticing that company blogging has become boring – to bloggers, as well as to the readers, just as my old Slinky was to me. Has the company blogging became yesterday’s news?

A corporate blog is affordable, easy to start, but mostly without any clear idea what it actually should be about. A company starts a blog, publishes a few interesting posts, and then either gives it up, or in the lack of the ideas starts with a bad and boring articles that no one wants to read. And if some self-proclaimed web guru consultant (web is full of these guys) is involved, then the blog is definitely doomed.

Company blogging requires just a little bit of your attention, some devotion and creativity. But, if you cannot make it work, it is better to give it up rather than pushing yourself into something that doesn’t fit to you. It is better not to blog at all, than to start it and then toss it aside like I did with Slinky.

Anyway, my point is that all of us should be more rational in our wishes, and think about things over and over again, especially when our time and money is in question. To desire something and want it so badly isn’t good enough. You need to know what are you going to do with it later, when euphoria is gone.

As a company who sells and supports a product of our own worldwide, we are writing and replying to quite a number of emails every day. We have learned how to respond and react to different types and styles of emails. But, the other day a curious thing happened – we had to write a letter, a real formal letter, to print it on a paper and to send it by a post service.

Since I have lost in a “Rock, paper, scissors” game, this task was assigned to me. I was confused at first, because even if I’m writing every day, I still had some difficulties to set my thoughts in the right direction.

Writing is a complex process: once you wrote something down it gets more real. When you see those words on the paper, you start to feel obligated to them. It’s not the same as having those words on some document put out aside among your files; it’s a written statement, personal or in a behalf of your company. It is not so different from blogging – it’s also a statement disclosed to millions of people on the web, which obligates you in the same way. And then I realized that I can do this easily if I change my writing style (to get more focused and serious, actually) and to structure the letter properly.

Communicating by email, chat, and social networks “corrupted” my formal writing, because my style became more relaxed, colloquial, and adjusted to Internet slang. So, in order to sound more formal, you need to get rid of these:

• abbreviations of words and phrases that are too long to write them in a whole.
• symbols such as :-). There’s no place for cartoons or emotions in your formal letters.
• jokes. Get serious, it’s a formal letter to a formal recipient with it’s formal bureaucracy, for Christ sake!

The other part was much easier – I just applied the same rules that I use in my not (so) formal correspondence:

• Introduce myself by telling my name and position in the company, so the persons who receive the letter would know who are they dealing with.
• Right on the begging tell what you need, reveal your intentions and the purpose of the letter.
• Call to action (if there is any) and/or benefit for the recipient, depending on what kind of letter are we talking about.
• Nice ending, like: “Hope to hear from you soon” with a bit of personal touch.

Finally, I have managed to finish my task. The letter sounded like we are some multinational corporation at least. A formal letter like this one will show that you are serious, determined and professional. It is good to stick to some of the advice posted above when you are emailing someone important to you and when you need to show that you know the business; it can make quite an impression. Otherwise don’t bother, ‘cause the informal style of communication is much cooler :)

But, people wanted it back; and we have added it back to activeCollab 2. This is how the new block looks like at the Dashboard:

Sweet, isn’t it? We’ve been using activeCollab 2 for the past couple of months and now I really do see the value of this information. I have to admit that I was wrong in the past: it’s not for “slave masters”, who want to know who is slacking and why a “top priority” discussion that they posted 15 seconds ago has no comments yet – it’s for the people who are working together.

The real value of Who is Online box is to be aware of the people being close to you even when they are actually kilometers away. You know that they have received the notification about your new discussion because you see them online, you know that you can expect their response soon, and that there’s a great chance that the discussion will be seen simply because everyone’s around.

Sorry for not including this in the previous version. While it’s not a complete game changer (unlike some other features introduced in activeCollab 2), the Who is Online section is one of those little features that make the difference. At the same time, it provides useful information and makes the teams feel being close even with oceans standing between them.

We have run into an interesting blog review of activeCollab, and even our friends on Twitter have recommend it.

It’s Tyrone Shum’s article “ActiveCollab Review: Helps You Manage All Your Projects”. We choose to present this article on our blog because besides explaining why activeCollab is good for him and his business, Tyrone also made a short video tour guide to explain how activeCollab works.

Thank you Tyrone! We really like it!