TeamLab, what’s on your roadmap?

Our today’s post is an answer to the most popular question we have received from you so far, the one outlined in the title. Today I’d like to answer it and share our plans for the future releases. Our development process is moving along in high gear. During the recent 3 months we’ve implemented both noticeable updates (multiple languages support, backup restore utility, AMI) and minor functionality improvements. Till the end of this year we’ve scheduled two releases. So, what can you expect from them?

Interim Mid-November release

The most interesting updates are as follows:

• Branded portal URL. Have you ever wanted to customize your portal URL to look like http://mycompany.com ? It will be possible to edit your portal address whatever you like.
• Basecamp import. This will allow you to make a seamless move to TeamLab if you are not at all happy with basecamp service.
• Notifications via IM. You will be able to customize your portal notifications delivery method and get notified via instant messenger or email.
• Time tracking. It will be an optional feature within Projects in case you need to track employees work time and get specific reports.

Apart from that there will be several other improvements that will simplify your daily work with the portal. The largest number of them will be introduced within the Projects module:

• Categories, tags and sorting will help easily organize your projects, tasks & files.
• Enhanced reporting functionality will provide you with a greater level of work progress analysis.

Major December release

It’s by no coincidence that the release is called Major. We are going to introduce a totally new as well as some long-awaited functionality. And here is a quick overview:

• Documents. A separate module allowing you to store, share and co-author files. Also, it will be possible to create and edit text files right from your portal. There will be NO Google Docs integration. It’s not because we don’t like Google 🙂 We are using our own technology based on virtualization.
• Group Chat. Conference functionality will be finally available to you. It’s been requested by many of you and I think further comments here are unnecessary 🙂

In the end, I would like to anticipate possible questions regarding pricing. All these new features will remain free for you. Paid functionality will be introduced in the Q1’11. And there will be a separate post about our monetization strategy.

So, I hope, now you have a pretty clear vision of our plans for the nearest future. Do they meet your expectations? Share your opinion! You know we take your feedback seriously when improving TeamLab 😉

Update: Since it became necessary to test out the new technology more thoroughly, we’ve decided to postpone our major release till the beginning of the new year. We will post a message in our blog when the new functionality goes live. Please follow our news!