Best Practical

What's new and exciting in the world of Best Practical

Things seem to be getting busier and busier here at Best Practical Total World Domination World Headquarters (BPS TWDWHQ). 

We're very close to releasing Hiveminder Pro, an optional upgrade that will get you better reporting, saved task lists, attachments and some other incredibly nifty features we're not quite yet ready to roll out.

As everyone in the blogosphere likely already knows, Apple released Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) today. We're particularly excited because of one specific new feature. We've heard rumors that Leopard ships with SVK, our distributed version control system which also works as a super-smart client for your existing Subversion server.

We're nearly ready to make the first 'beta' release of RT 3.8, the next version of our enterprise-strong issue tracking and workflow system. RT 3.8 comes with dozens of new user-visible features, as well as really huge improvements to the testing infrastructure we use to make sure it stays rock-solid.

Oh. and I'd be remiss in my duties as a 'business person' if I forgot to mention that we're running a special on new support contracts.  If you're interested in support for RT or SVK but haven't yet bought a support contract, we're offering discounts of up to 20% on new support contracts if you sign up before the end of the year.   This is a great way to spend any budget surplus you've got kicking around while supporting  future development of RT and SVK (as well as the rest of the stuff we make ;)  Drop us a line at sales@bestpractical.com and we'll get you set up.

Hiveminder in the news

So, we've seen a bit more press and blogger notice of Hiveminder than usual and we're pretty excited:

Hiveminder got written up in the Austin American Statesman.

I found out becase we've been seeing a little bit more in the way of the "what are these tag things?" feedback than is usual and I went Googling.  The writeup itself makes me want to blush.

Is it wrong to love a Web site? To be happy to see it every day? To feel lost without it?

I am crazy about Hiveminder. I started using the online to-do list a little more than a year ago, and we're very content together. I had been lost, adrift — trying different ways to track my stuff, but never settling down. Hiveminder made me less flaky, less absent-minded, less likely to wake up at 3 a.m. realizing I had forgotten something important. Hiveminder, you complete me.

Of course, with great publicity, comes great responsibility. We've been deluged with feedback, lots of it really good. Even the complaints are friendly and helpful. We're working hard to get all the feedback answered and improve our online help based on what we've heard.

Paul Fenwick put together a great slidecast about how he uses Hiveminder to be more productive.

Paul talks about his basic productivity hacking with Hiveminder as well as some of the most advanced poweruser features hidden away in our IM interface. 

Thanks, Paul. This is great stuff.

Zak Greant presented Hiveminder on The Lab with Leo Laporte.

I'm bummed out because this (from all accounts glowing) presentation is only available to those of you in Canada and Australia for the time being. It will end up at the link above eventually, but for now those of us in the US need to sit tight.

RTFM 2.2 now available

Best Practical is pleased to announce a new release of the Request
Tracker FAQ Manager (RTFM).  This release encompasses more than 3 years
of development and bug fixes.  Major highlights of this development include:

    * Complete restructuring of articles to use RT's standard Custom
      Fields.  This allows you greater control over the format of your
      articles.
    * There are now multiple ways of organizing articles using Topics
      and Classes
    * Better control over how articles are included in replies
    * UI improvements for Admins and Users

A full changelog is included below.

Download is available here
http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/release/RTFM-2.2.1.tar.gz

Please report bugs to rtfm-bugs@bestpractical.com