Going Open Source

It's always been our aim to keep Tree.io growing; we strive to make it the best and the most rewarding service in this highly competitive market. We do this by listening to and acting on the feedback of our customers.

Recently, when we sent out a feedback survey to our users with questions like "What would make you more likely to use Tree.io", we received an overwhelming number of responses from customers who expressed a desire to run Tree.io on their own servers.

We really want to provide our users with what they value, and because of this, in the near future we will be going completely open source, offering a zip file download of the entirety of Tree.io and publishing our full code base on GitHub for anyone to use and add to.

To be able to focus all our efforts on providing a quality self-install solution, after 1 Dec 2011 Tree.io will discontinue it's cloud hosting services. Our focus will be on giving users full access to running the code on their own servers or even starting up their own cloud-based services.

This will make Tree.io one of only a handful of major business management solutions available in the open source arena and we are very excited with the shift in opportunity this move will bring with it.

Please contact us for assistance in migrating your instance to your own servers or if you are interested in setting up your own Tree.io cloud.

New: Notifications, Reports and Attachments

Those of you who work on weekends might have noticed this already, but for everyone else, last weekend we released a huge update with loads of new features.

Here is a summary of how this update will make managing your business with Tree.io even better.

Notifications

We have improved the notifications feature in Tree.io. Before the update you could only receive notifications either as it happens or never. With the new system, you can set notifications to be delivered daily, weekly or monthly as well. This means you can review what has been happening throughout your business in the past week or month. We think you will find this makes it even easier to make sure things are going smoothly and everyone is on track.

Reports

We have also updated the reporting function to make it easier to use and much more powerful. You will now be able to do things like create a report on all your sale orders and get a figure for the average amount you get for a sale. Or create a report for your projects and see the total amount of hours spent on them all. We plan to make this even cooler in the future, but the main features we have implemented are averages, sum totals, minimums and maximums. Analysing the ins and outs of your business doesn't get much better than this.

Attachments

With the new attachments feature, you will be able to attach a file to pretty much anything within Tree.io. So instead of linking to a document in a comment thread when you want to show it to someone, you can simply attach it to your comment. This works with any comments, even the ones at the bottom of tasks. Whereas before you would have had to upload the document to Tree.io and then find it and copy/paste the link, now you can simply add it to your comment. This will make things much more simple, after all Tree.io built around collaboration, and we want you guys to be able to share your ideas with the minimum of clicks.

We know that some of you have requested these features in the past, and we've been working really hard to get them to you, so any feedback, comments or ideas are appreciated as always.

Pricing change

Just a quick update, the way we charge for additional users is about to change. Before, when you guys wanted to upgrade from the free plan to add additional users, you had to pay for the three free users as well as the ones you wanted to add. When these changes come into effect, your first three users will always be free. Yep just to show how much we appreciate you guys, you won't ever have to pay for your three original users. Also, because we believe in fairness, all of you who are already paying for our service will have your pricing adjusted to reflect this change.

As usual, we will be happy to hear any feedback or comments.

The Tree.io Team

Our API is ready

Hi Guys,

Well our API has finally been released. I know most of you have been waiting eagerly for it and we are really looking forward to seeing what you guys will do with it. I'm sure you are all really excited as well, but I have to remind you that the API is still in an early beta stage and it may take some time for us to iron out the bugs. However, the more you use this feature the easier it will be to get it to a stage where it will be ready for widespread integration. So if you are using the API and you come across a bug, please tell us immediately.

Improving our infrastructure this weekend

Hi Guys,

Next week there will be two more new updates we think you will get excited about. The first one isn't that special, as of next week we will be moving servers. We decided to make the change simply to ensure reliability and make sure your data is 100% secure. In short we want the best infrastructure we can get for our service in order to give you guys the best possible Tree.io experience.

The second change is something much much bigger. Next week we will be releasing our new API for Tree.io! While there was nothing wrong with the old API, we live by the philosophy that you can always improve something. Our new API will be fully-featured, allowing you direct read/write access to all of your data, all of the time. It features authentication via the de-facto standard oAuth protocol and a flexible JSON interface. You will be able to integrate your own website with Tree.io along with a whole host of other cool stuff.

The main reason for the new API however, is that it paves the way for loads of other amazing features we plan to integrate in the future. I'm cannot really talk about those at the present moment, but let me assure you, exciting times lie ahead for Tree.io.

New Features coming on Monday 18th July

Hey Guys,

We've been working really hard over the past few weeks to implement some really cool new features to your Tree.io.

The first new feature we've been working on is German language translation, so we can offer our product to an even wider range of people. The second is integrated, interactive Gantt charts. A Gantt chart is like a bar chart but instead of just displaying data it displays a project schedule. We got really excited about this as it makes it much easier to see at a glance what tasks are on for the day. You can also edit the schedule from the Gantt chart itself simply by clicking and dragging. We have already been using this new feature in the version of Tree.io we use to run our own business and it is noticeably easier to check the days schedule.

Other features we are working on include support for mobiles. We are in the process of upgrading the Mobile Version to Beta 1.0 (from Alpha 3.0) so hopefully you will soon be able to experience this.

Introducting the Community site

We're really excited to have just opened registration to the brand new Tree.io Community site!

The site is built in the style of the stack exchange sites and gives our users the opportunity to get involved with how things are done and get your thoughts heard.

We hope by having access to a strong community and powerful Question & Answer tools, our customers will have the edge over those using other services without such perks.

New Features and Plan for the Future

Dear Tree.io users,

We've been busy working hard to improve Tree.io and make it a better tool for your business.

We'll be updating Tree.io this evening, bringing you some new features and we'd like to tell you about what's coming and what we have planned for the future.

This update will bring the following features:

New Dashboard

Your dashboard will now have a new, improved layout. No need to fiddle around with your widgets anymore - the new dashboard features two-column layout, simply put more important stuff on the left, keeping not-so-important things on the right. Your widgets will automatically adjust to make the best use of the space available.

Before

Now



New Documents

Documents now allow you to easily work with different types of files and see the first bits of document content right in the front page.

Web links are now clickable right from document lists and you can preview your image files right in Tree.io.

New widgets

Check out the News and Calendar widgets to stay up-to-date with what's going on in your business.

Collaborate and communicate at the next level with the tools everyone knows and loves from social networking, now available to the business world.

Better Messaging

We've changed the way message lists appear, making it easier to use it with email.

Messaging now looks more like an e-mail client allowing you to easily navigate around your business correspondence.

Captcha removed from entry pages.

Thanks to the Kashoo guys for pointing this out.

Whilst we try to ensure the best possible level of security for Tree.io users, captcha was causing more hassle than it did good.

We will continue to monitor Tree.io for any unusual behaviour, but captcha will not appear at the login pages.

This will make it easier and quicker for you to log in, whilst we will add captcha to the form in case of too many unsuccessful log in attempts.

Tree.io Roadmap:

We have a lot of thing planned for the next few weeks and we'd like to share our ideas with you.

Sharing and public links:

Imagine you could easily share a task or an invoice with your client? No need to get PDFs or printouts, and send it out.

We want to let you simply copy a link and give it to your client, Tree.io would take care of security and only allow your client to see what you want them to see. They don't even need to know about Tree.io - just open the link to see what you've shared with them.

New, scalable pricing model and extensible service:

We will change the way we charge for Tree.io, allowing you to pay only for the modules you really need. Simply choose modules that you actually want to use and pay only for those.

We will improve Tree.io itself to give you a nice setup guide to set up the chosen modules in a very quick and easy way. Much improvement here to let you use Tree.io to the full!

New JSON API:

We're completely redesigning our API, enabling de-facto web standard oAuth authentication and giving you a way to easily access any of your data with the use of standard development libraries and tools.

Better Help:

We have to admit it, the current help documents are not perfect. You can always chat with us to get quick support, but we think it's essential to provide a solid, compehensive documentation on all aspects of Tree.io.

We'll be bringing an amazing new Help portal to let you easily find answers to your questions in a fraction of a second.

Tree.io Community:

We'll be releasing a community website for all our users to share their ideas and get answers on all their questions about the service.

You will be able to discuss any existing and upcoming features and we'll be actively participating in the discussions to ensure we bring you the best possible service.

The new features we plan to release will take us some time to polish, but we're should be able to get everything done in just a few weeks, meaning you will get all of that by the end of May.

We're always open to any suggestions or comments! Find us on Facebook, Twitter or share your ideas on the website. We also have a friendly contact form and you can chat with us online or drop us an email.

Tree.io has officially launched!

Head over to tree.io where you can get free access for up to 5 users including tools to help you manage your Projects, Sales, Support, Finances, Contacts including built-in Reports plus Email and Internal-Chat Messaging.

No matter what your work involves Tree.io can help you do things easier, faster and more effectively. So head over to tree.io now and get your hands on this incredibly useful software!