Our latest testimonial comes from a small marketing company called The Village Marketing Group, Knoxville, TN:
"I normally don't sell myself out to a particular product or brand, but every now and again
something comes along that is so profound, so useful, that I can't help myself. Project
Bubble is one of those things.
My business partner and I started a marketing and design firm over a year ago. No big
deal except that we live in different states...and he's deaf. Being on the phone isn't an
option, which makes it terribly difficult to manage projects at times, particularly when
the workload is intense, as it has been for some time now.
Project Bubble allows us to manage client information, projects, timelines, estimates, invoices, everything. We can remotely take a project from start to finish, keeping all the important info in one place for easy reference, with a suite that is laid out so intuitively that my 6 year old could figure it out.
And, as if that wasn't enough, the customer service is over the top, write your mother and let her know you're in love, good. No kidding. Never in my over 10 years in my field have I encountered a company that has it so together; brilliant product, brilliant service, brilliant company."
Ben Hubbard, The Village Marketing Group
If you want your testimonial to be featured on our blog with a link to your website, just email us.
We've just created a whole new set of in-depth tutorial videos to help you get the basics of Project Bubble. Learn how to use our easy project management system in under 10 minutes.
We're confident that most people will learn Project Bubble without any help from us at all (and 80% of the time this is the case), however some of you like to watch a few tutorials beforehand and get the basics down. Others of you may want to learn some advanced tips and tricks that you hadn't discovered before such as Project Templates and the Add to Invoice feature.
Check out our videos and learn the four main aspects of Project Bubble in under 10 minutes.
We've embedded one of the tutorials below. To get to the others go to our tutorial videos page.
You can now add text formatting to your project and task descriptions using our new editor and Markdown formatting syntax.
When we first started Project Bubble we often had requests for a WYSIWYG editor for formatting descriptions. At first we were very against them (and to a degree we still are), however recently a customer said that she just wanted to put bullets in to her descriptions and comments, and perhaps a few bold highlights.
We decided it was time to add a formatting system for the descriptions and comments, and a healthy compromise between a full-on WYSIWYG editor (which can really slow things down) and the simple text box we had before is our new text formatting system which uses Markdown - a text formatting syntax which is easy to understand and read. Read their guide for a full description of the formatting options.
The helper buttons you'll see when you add projects, tasks and comments allow you to add this syntax in to your descriptions and comments allowing for much prettier project pages and much more helpful communication between teams and clients.
We've added a new Role called 'Task Manager' for those who need something in between Project Manager and Collaborator.
The new role allows you to bring in users who need to have full access to the project they are assigned including the ability to add tasks, but not the ability to create their own projects and not the ability to see anything relating to billing. We thought this new role would be helpful to those who need something in between Project Manager and Collaborator.
We've added the ability to add descriptions to your time entries. This is really useful for those wanting to track exactly what they did on a particular day and build it into reports.
We're excited about this feature because although it's pretty simple it adds a lot of power to the time tracking system. Your team can now describe the actions they performed on a particular day when adding a time entry. Useful for freelancers who want to know what they did on a certain day, also useful for large teams where administrators need to see what their collaborators have been working on each day.
Simply click the Add Entry button from the top right
Select a date
Enter your hours (e.g. '2 hours')
Then enter your description in the box below
Click Save
Your new time entry will have a green border and when you hover over the entry you will see the description. Please note that you can only have one entry per day, so if you want to edit the description just set the amount of time to zero, click the Add Entry button again, then enter your new description.
Your descriptions will also show up in Project and Task reports.
You can now lock users to multiple clients (or departments) by simply ticking the the client you want to lock to from the Edit User page.
Previously you could only lock a user to one client. This is because we built the system with the intention that the invited user would be a client who wants to log in and view their projects, therefore you would assume they should only be locked to one client - them.
However some of you requested that the user have the ability to be locked to multiple clients, instead of just one, so we added this ability for you.
There are various reasons why you might want to do this.
Your 'client' could actually be a department within the organization and the user needs to be locked to multiple departments.
The user could actually be a freelancer or collaborator who needs to fully access multiple clients, not just one.
The client could be an actual client (as the system intended) but might themselves be attached to multiple companies and only want one login.
We've just finished our brand new API (v.2.0) which lays the foundation for some amazing new developments in the land of Project Bubble. Read on to see what this all means.
It doesn't matter if you even understand what an 'API' is, this new update is going to be the beginning of an exciting future for Project Bubble. Why? Because it means that developers can now build applications (or add-ons) which mean that you'll be able to do things like:
Import and export data for backup purposes
Integrate with 3rd parties like Freshbooks, Basecamp, Highrise, Xero, Salesforce etc
Integrate with Google Apps, allowing for Calendar and Docs synchronization
Use mobile apps (e.g. iPhone and Android apps) to access and update your projects/invoices
Integrate with your own platform, e.g. feed tasks to your website
Develop a custom add-on, e.g. 'Email a Project' or a 'Desktop Time Tracker' app.
To make all this happen we are gathering together a community of developers on our Facebook Page and encouraging developers to build applications such as the above. We are hoping that within a few months a lot of add-ons will be available for you and we'll upload links to them from our website.
The Techie Bit
If you are a developer please like our Facebook Page and engage in the discussion. Perhaps even email us to tell us if you are working on an app. We want to focus on providing you with all the tools that you need to build kick-ass apps and if you need further resources than what is already there please let us know and we'll do our best to accommodate this.
The Documentation
The docs are all available here or click on the Developers link at the bottom of the page. We've tried to organize everything as tidily as possible and also tried to provide all the resources you'll need for some pretty cool apps. However we're aware that there will still need to be some more resources so we'll be releasing version 2.1 over the next few months.
In the next version we'd like to add the ability to upload custom file paths to comments, which will allow for things like DropBox integration.
To get access to the API just use your subdomain (you need to have one set up) and also your API key (from the My Account page). Further details on authentication are on the documentation page.
The API is still in the final stages of beta so let us know if you discover any bugs and we'll get them fixed right away.
In an effort to improve your workflow and make running your business even easier, we've added a simple but powerful feature to convert estimates to projects
We had a few suggestions for this feature because a lot of you said that the first thing you would often do when you had a new project was create a proposal first, and then once approved you would then set up a project. However the only way to do that previously was creating the project first and then building the estimate off of the project, however this wasn't optimal workflow for a lot of you, so we went ahead and improved it.
Now you can create the estimate, and when your client approves it click the options button and then click "Convert to Project". Your project will be created with tasks based off the line items within the Estimate. The project name will get carried over from the Estimate, along with the description, currency, hourly rate and so on. All you'll need to do is invite your users and then get time tracking!
"Where did that project go? Where on earth did I upload that file to?" Never lose anything again with our new global search feature.
To be honest, we're pretty proud of this one. Not only does our new global search look through all of your projects, tasks, comments, files, estimates and invoices, but it even tells you where abouts they are by highlighting them on the page! You'll never lose anything in your Bubble again!
We'll keep it short and sweet so you can get on with using it and being productive!
We've just updated the Dashboard adding new charts and graphs for easy project visualization. The Dashboard is now tidier, faster and more useful.
The value of being able to get an overview of what's been happening with your projects and invoices over the year can't be overstated. It seems that any web application that has charts or graphs gets loads of press and happy customers, so we wanted to jump on this ship and be a part of it. We also know that it's something we probably should have added a long time ago. So here it is.
Your Dashboard is now much tidier. We've gone through each item that was on there and taken out what we thought was causing unnecessary clutter. Now the Dashboard serves as your project (and financial) overview.
The new dashboard tells you:
What's been going on this year
What projects, tasks and invoices are due today or overdue
Recent activity in the team (including comments and files)
How your time is being spent across open projects
Breakdown of open/closed projects
Amount collected this financial year
Amount outstanding
Storage
Tip: You can change your financial year by going to the Preferences section in the My Company page.
Ben Hubbard, The Village Marketing Group
