We just launched our brand new infrastructure (codename Bender – after the Futurama character). This means that if you access Goplan now, you’re accessing your data through new, faster and more reliable servers. This post, which may be a bit on the techy side, outlines how Bender works and what you can expect from the upgrade.

We’ve been on Amazon‘s servers since they launched their cloud computing solutions years ago (Did you know Goplan was actually the first publicly accessible application running on Amazon EC2? We were profiled on Wired Magazine about it back then too). It allows us to grow our infrastructure easily with usage and to maintain great performance. Despite being on a great datacenter, however, our server configuration was running a bit stale and our machines were not on their tip-top performance – even though Goplan has always been snappy for most our users.

So, we decided to start fresh, with a brand new infrastructure configuration, on brand new servers. Bender is basically a combination of new servers and new software running on those servers. Although this means there’s no actual new features on Goplan based on this announcement, you can expect more reliability, speed and security. Bender lets us scale faster than before, and recover from any mishaps faster too (luckily we didn’t have many of those in our history, but we want to be safe). One thing that we also expect to improve is our email delivery – we’ve made a few changes to make sure no email from Goplan is marked as spam by automated filters, so if you had issues with emails from us being marked as junk, that should be fixed.

If during the next few days you experience any issues accessing Goplan or doing things you expected to be able to do, please let our team know by contacting us at support@goplanapp.com. Thank you!

We’re really happy to announce that a feature many of you have been waiting for has now been implemented and rolled out to our production servers. You can now create new projects based on former projects by copying milestones, tasks and tags (you can select which of these to copy on project creation).

To access this functionality, go to your Projects list and click “Create project” – you can then access templating options by clicking “Show template options”. Select the assets you want to copy from your old project to the new one and you’re good to go.

A note on copying milestones and due dates: When copying milestones we shift the milestones due dates relative to the project creation date. This works great in most of the cases, but you may need to adjust these manually after the new project is created to make sure they fit your needs.

Feedback welcome: as with everything we do, your feedback is important to us. Try the feature out and email us any feedback you may have (our team is always available at support@goplanapp.com). Thanks!

It seems like we’ve been growing quite a bit in the last few weeks, which means we have to do a bit of server work in order for Goplan to keep the speeds you are accustomed to. We’re doing those updates right now, and will keep this blog post updated with our progress.

This may disrupt service for about 10 minutes, for which we apologize. We’ll be back to our speedy and stable ways in a second.

We’ve been working on a new help site with documentation and help on working with Goplan. It is far from complete, and is currently a work in progress, but we’re putting it out there now in hopes that you guys find it useful already. We’ll be doing frequent updates based on some of the things on Get Satisfaction as well as the most pressing questions that we get on our support email address.

Visit help.goplanapp.com.

Like with everything we do, we’re always looking for feedback and ways to improve. Check out the new help site and if you see things we should change, or have things we should add in mind, please do let us know! Thanks everyone! Oh, and happy holidays!