project management

How to write an ideal service notification

Editor's note: Service interruption notifications are the unloved sibling of newsletters and welcome emails. They just don't get enough love—and for the most part are fairly terrible, anonymous, vague and menacing messages, often from a no-reply address. There is a better way.

While software is our main business now, we have some hosting clients for special services. Every once in a while of course there is either expected or unexpected downtime. We strive to let our clients know about these issues in advance (planned) and in real time (unplanned). We don't try the tricky move that many hosts do of just trying to hide downtime.

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How Observer Status in Teamwork.com project management allows Foliovision to handle more projects

Many of you may know that Foliovision began as a client service agency and not a software company. Our first big service was migration from Typepad to WordPress. We were literally doing dozens of migrations a month at one point. Project management in bulk was essential to the premium client experience we wishes to offer.

We started with Basecamp but eventually outgrew it (there's a long post about our Basecamp to Teamwork migration) and moved to Teamwork (back then TeamworkPM). Teamwork Projects at the time had a much worse design than Basecamp (latest version looks pretty good and even allows CSS customisation) but lots more tools (recurring tasks was a big one for us) at the time. As happy as the upgrade in features made us at the time, there was still one key feature missing. Later we called this feature Observer Status.

Keep reading How Observer Status in Teamwork.com project management allows Foliovision to handle more projects

How Teamwork’s new Observer Status can almost double productivity and triple profitability in a busy agency

Christmas came early in 2015 for Foliovision. On St Patrick's Day actually. I got the email from Teamwork to tell me Observer Status had gone into beta. Believe it or not, Observer Status is finally here in Teamwork and it's awesome.

Observer Status will change the lives of smaller service driven agencies growing into larger agencies.

Let me start by telling you why we want Observer Status.

Keep reading How Teamwork's new Observer Status can almost double productivity and triple profitability in a busy agency

Intelligent Defaults vs TeamworkPM’s Management of Message Subscriptions

Our main project management tool is Teamwork as you may know. Teamwork is a great tool with all kinds of advanced functionality. Alas often the basics don't work. In this case Message subscription management.

I've written to TeamworkPM about five or six times about their incompetent management of message subscriptions. In the bad old days (pre-thrashing by Foliovision), TeamworkPM tried to make everyone subscribe to every message. It was hell. Clients emailed our entire team (up to 35 people at a time) for the smallest issue. We couldn't get any work done.

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Marvellous Secrets of the TeamworkPM API

We've been doing a lot of work with the TeamworkPM API for our project supervision SAAS AscentList (there's been a beta available for Basecamp before we switched to Teamwork but we're now ready to release for Teamwork). Sign up here. Here's a quick preview:

Here's a list of tips to help you get the most out of the TeamworkPM API:

Just like Basecamp (Classic)

The first cool thing about the TeamworkPM API is that it's a lot like Basecamp Classic's API which means developers with a good Basecamp helper app should be able to port their technology over relatively easily.

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Why we moved from Basecamp to TeamworkPM

37signals don't do client work anymore and live in a bubble. If you face clients and billing, TeamworkPM is a much stronger solution.