Archive for April, 2010|Monthly archive page
Lighter, faster Teamwork (release 4.4.16000)
This release (4.4.16000) includes fixes and refinements on memory usage that make Teamwork lighter and faster – thanks to the great Lambda Probe tool for help (we are not associated with them). Both absolute memory usage and memory usage by logged user has been significantly reduced.
A few features included: custom pages can be disabled, possibility to speed up the “my assignments” web part.
The release includes also some bugfixes:
- fix in task list search when you search for code and name
- better logging for scheduler exceptions
- faster task print list
- fixed a rare key incompatibility with certain versions of MySQL
- custom pages can be disabled
- safer schema update procedure
You can download this release here. It is a free upgrade for all users of version 4. This release does not include database schema changes.
A critical moment: choosing or changing a project management tool
Filed under: project management, work management | Tags: reselling Teamwork
Comments (2) Healthy companies, groups which are self-critical tend to periodically reorganize themselves. It is an opportunity to improve both productivity and quality of work. In these moments, software surveys are done to select new software for project and more in general work management. It is in these phases that sometimes Teamwork is chosen. In the choice what most matters is how the software can “unobtrusively” map to the new organizational practices, and Teamwork in this can be great, because of its flexibility, scope, and the wide fit to the IT infrastructure. All this is explained in detail in the user guide.
Now it frequently happens that some software houses (which are about 8% of the companies that use Teamwork) like Teamwork so much that they consider distributing Teamwork themselves to customers, and contact us for that; we always say “fine”, but none has been very successful, and this is quite easily explained: if you have say 20 companies to which you provide software services, what is the chance that that very company will want to buy Teamwork?
About 2% of the companies that visit Teamwork site get to try it; and about 2% of those that try it get to buy it. And consider that all those companies are already in the critical situation of choosing a PM tool. So calling a company at random, what are the chances that they will be searching right then a PM tool? Slim, very slim. And the chances that Teamwork will fit them? 2% of 2%. So how many companies will you have to contact in order to have a good chance of making one sale? Many. Too many.
All this because in this scenario we are not using the power if internet of being found, instead of contacting known ones. If someone wants to offer software like Teamwork to customers, the best idea is to get a good presence on the web, maybe in a localized / specialized part, so that companies in search of PM solutions can get competent help. Just my two cents.
