From the team
Longer reads about what we build and how. Feature deep dives from the product team, and now and then a look inside the lab from engineering.
Control and manage your entire business with ActiveCollab Self-Hosted 8
What’s new since the 8.0 releaseTwo updates have landed for self-hosted installs since this post first went out.Two-factor authentication. Your team can now switch on a second step at login. ActiveCollab emails a one-time code, and each person also gets a set of backup codes for the times they cannot ...
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Workload just got smarter: plan work and organize your team with confidence
In a perfect world, your team would have unlimited time and resources to take on every exciting project that comes your way.In reality? You’re juggling shifting priorities, last-minute changes, scope creep, and sick days—all while trying to keep projects moving.That’s where smart planning makes ...
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Stay on top of your projects with ActiveCollab Project Progress Menu
While ActiveCollab Assignments Dashboard and Reports can give you a lot of information about your projects, time, team performance, and budgets, we understand that you don’t always have time to create and analyze specific reports.We implemented the Project Progress Menu to make project progress tracking ...
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Better capacity planning and workload management with ActiveCollab Calendar Events
Did you know that an average employee spends 11.3 hours in meetings each week? There are also other events, like webinars, online training, all-day conferences..We often overlook these, the same way we ignore the fact it takes us about 23 minutes to recover and regain focus after a distraction. This ...
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Improve your business with ActiveCollab Reports
To boost team productivity, optimize capacity utilization rates, and master time management, you need data.Yet, gathering data can be overwhelming, especially if it’s all over the place. Scattered, inconsistent information makes reporting tedious and unreliable.On the other hand, if you have a single ...
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EU-compliant eInvoices now available in ActiveCollab
eInvoicing is becoming mandatory for businesses registered and operating in the European Union. Germany, Romania, Belgium, Poland, and France have so far introduced eInvoicing regulations, requiring B2B invoices to be created and distributed in compliance with the EN 16931 standard.Even if your agency ...
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Set your team up for success with ActiveCollab 8
Say hello to ActiveCollab version 8!Over the past couple of years, we've challenged ourselves to turn ActiveCollab into something more than a project management tool. We aimed to create a space where service businesses would manage all their work, people, clients, financials, and more.So we listened ...
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Onboarding made easier with ActiveCollab Virtual Users
Almost every collaboration platform lets you invite people to your workspace in seconds.What happens when you need more time to prepare for onboarding?Say you’re having a new team member joining you in a couple of weeks or a client under contract starting in a month.No matter which platform you’re ...
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How To Join ActiveCollab 8 Early Access Program?
After years of development, ActiveCollab 8 is almost ready for the public. But before we make it the only version for all our current and future users, we wanted to provide some of you the opportunity to be among the first to try it.To join our Early Access Program, get in touch with our customer care ...
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Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) in ActiveCollab
ActiveCollab, as a project management software, plays a central role in a company and has access to sensitive data. One of the most important measures in the world today is keeping data and accounts safe, as teams rely on data to keep the wheels turning. This is where methods like two-factor authentication ...
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Setting Time Tracking Limits in ActiveCollab
Time tracking is a vital feature for companies and freelancers that charge by the hour, but also for those who need an accurate assessment of the activity’s duration. In ActiveCollab, your teams can track time on tasks and projects and choose the job type they’re working on.We’re introducing many ...
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New Recurring Tasks Options
Automating work has been a dream for managers worldwide for decades. Getting rid of tedious assignments such as creating the same assignments repeatedly, rescheduling them according to unpredictable circumstances, and fitting together regular activities with occasional ones is ActiveCollab's goal. We've ...
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Budget Intervals for Enhanced Budget Management
We have great news for all those agencies and freelancers working on a retainer. As the title says, ActiveCollab now has a new feature in the project budget area!Retainer DefinitionBefore we get started, let's pause for a moment and define what's a retainer. Sometimes, service providers find clients ...
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More Flexibility With Project Templates
If you chose ActiveCollab to manage your projects, we bet you've done a great job organizing your team's tasks. Dishing out assignments and setting up due dates should come as easy as losing track of time while watching video clips of sassy huskies.We're sure you're already familiar with some tricks ...
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The In-app Chat Is Now Available on Mobile!
We are thrilled to announce that our in-app Chat feature is now available on mobile! Great news for those who have warmed up to our Chat and are in the process of ditching all the other apps. Instead of collaborating across many different apps, now you can use one app only for all the communication with ...
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New Project Filtering and Sorting
Have you noticed anything different about your projects page? If the answer is no, go to your account and find out! If you did see the changes we've made, let's explore them together in this article.A huge improvementBefore this update, templates and completed projects were kind of hard to find. Also ...
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Say Hello to Our in-App Chat!
For ActiveCollab, 2021 has been marked by two significant additions: the brand new mobile app and the built-in Chat app. We'd like to talk about the reasons behind its development as well as how it works in detail. Let's go!The why, the who & the whenVideo calls through one app, switch to another to ...
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Our New Mobile App Is Out!
- Knock knock!- Who's there?- The ActiveCollab Team.- The ActiveCollab Team who?- The ActiveCollab Team who is thrilled to announce the new Mobile App is officially out! We know many of you have been waiting for a way to collaborate with your team when you're on the go. So our developers made sure to ...
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A Brand New Look of My Work!
For those of you new to ActiveCollab, a page within the app is dedicated to tasks assigned to you, your time records, and your activity - it's called My Work. You can use it to organize your day-to-day, and get a full insight into what you've been doing and what needs to be done. For those who have been ...
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Here's What ActiveCollab 7.0 Brings To Our Self-Hosted Users
Two weeks ago, we released ActiveCollab 7.0 to our Self-Hosted users. Back in July, we announced the system changes required for this update. But let's get down to business and check out what you're getting with it.New column viewThe column view, also known as Kanban, is something we've put a lot of ...
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ActiveCollab Budget Alerts
One of our teams has been intensely focused on budgets and all their aspects, for months now. In April, we released new budgeting types. If you can't be bothered to read the full post, here's a quick recap: you can now choose between three budgeting types when creating a project. Fixed price - set up ...
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Self-Hosted System Requirements Update, Summer 2020
Hello everyone,Two and a half years ago, we announced ActiveCollab 5.14, which specified new requirements needed to run ActiveCollab on your server. At the time, we switched from PHP 5.6 to 7.1 and started requiring MySQL 5.7.Today we are announcing upcoming requirement changes that will affect ActiveCollab ...
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Roadmap Like It's the Age of Empires
For a long time, I used to think about roadmaps as lists of features that are to be built at a reasonable timeframe. Once published, I felt committed to pursuing that plan. Combine that with our limited capacity in the early years (less than ten people working on the product), and you'll understand why ...
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Not So New, but Definitely Much Improved - Column View
The Column View rework was one of the most anticipated feature updates for many of our users. The whole user interface was rebuilt from the ground up with loads of aesthetic improvements and performance upgrades. Our goal with this update was to maintain a similar look and feel for all those who loved ...
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New Project Budgeting Types
They’re finally here! New budgeting types have been released to everyone, and we know some of you have been eagerly expecting them. Time is money, so we won’t waste any of it, but rather get down to business right away.Three is the magic numberBefore: no budgeting types, you could only choose whether ...
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Billable or Not? Set as Default!
We’ve been keeping you updated on every step we take, month after month, in our monthly recaps. The latest features we’ve been working on required a lot of sweeping up, or as we like to call it, “spring-cleaning”. The team made many changes to the time tracking process, with a particular goal ...
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ActiveCollab Personal Timesheet
Have you heard? We’ve been working on Timesheets! In our previous posts, we’ve been talking about the (Team) Timesheet, while we’d like to get on a more Personal note now.It’s important to know where your team’s time goes, but it’s crucial to be aware of your own whereabouts in a time continuum ...
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The Future of ActiveCollab Release Notes
ActiveCollab 1.0 was released more than twelve years ago, and we have documented a detailed list of changes for almost all releases since then. Despite that heritage and experience, it has become tough to map a particular set of changes to a particular version in the past couple of months.Our development ...
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ActiveCollab Stopwatch, the Built-In Time Tracker
September is an exciting month this year for ActiveCollab! We haven’t been sitting on our ears. Instead, we’ve listened to your needs and requests carefully, and tidied up. Maybe you’ve been using our timer so far to track your billable and non-billable hours. We’ve got some news for you! Now ...
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Neon Theme
Tl;dr we have a dark theme now.For you who enjoy reading, worry not.As the Cambridge Dictionary defines it, neon stands for a chemical element that is a gas with no smell or color, does not react with other chemicals, and shines red when an electric current goes through it.Here at ActiveCollab, we define ...
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Task Dependencies With Automatic Rescheduling
Oh, no!Your Lead Dev just won an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas.Your Project Manager finished an Ironman (the triathlon, not the movie trilogy) and won’t show up at work for a week.The ground starts shaking, your hands start sweating.It sure feels like all hell broke loose.Fortunately, those ...
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New ActiveCollab is here!
A brand-new ActiveCollab is finally here! Bigger and better in just about every way possible, with a whole slew of awesome new and enhanced features.It’s been over a decade since the first version of ActiveCollab came out. What began as a humble two-person venture, soon grew beyond our wildest dreams ...
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A Great Day for Collaboration
For those of you who’ve been looking to collaboration, this is going to be a great day. The Reactions are up and running in ActiveCollab 5.15.0! We are bringing you a new way to make your day-to-day communication more expressive and engaging.Not all comments are created equal. More often than not ...
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Self-Hosted vs Cloud-Based Project Management Tool
Is it better to use self-hosted or cloud version of ActiveCollab? They both have the same features so the decision depends on the structure of your company.Self-hosting is great if you plan on using ActiveCollab for more than a year and/or have a lot of team members.If on the other hand you don't want ...
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Everything You Need to Know About Self-Hosted ActiveCollab
What is self-hostingSelf-hosting is when you download some software, install it on your own server, and access it from the URL and the server that you own.There are desktop apps, mobile apps, web apps, and hybrid apps:Desktop app is installed on a computer and only the person using the computer can access ...
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ActiveCollab Now Integrates With Over 750 Apps (Via Zapier)
New Zapier integration in ActiveCollab 5.13The biggest time waster in every company is moving data between apps and updating records manually. But there's an easy solution: automate the boring stuff with Zapier, a service that lets your apps talk to each other.ActiveCollab is now integrated with Zapier.ActiveCollab ...
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New in 5.11: Notifications and Cloud Files
New update Brings Less Email Notifications and Better File ManagementNow everyone can choose how much email they want to receive from ActiveCollab, plus preview files inside ActiveCollab and attach documents from Google Drive and Dropbox.Notification SettingsAre you receiving too much email from ActiveCollab ...
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How to Develop the Right Features With Limited Resources
Everyone in software development keeps a long list of suggestions and feature requests in a file. Or two. But there are not enough hours in a day or a number of developers on a team to get them all done. That's why we need to know where to focus and which features to develop. But there's a much deeper ...
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How We Took on Gantt and Lost (Sort Of)
Our relationship with Gantt is a turbulent one. Looking back, it shows us more than just how to design a feature. It’s a tale of trial and error, evolution, and ultimately, success on our own terms.Powerful Enough to Plan a WarThe story of the Gantt chart started in the early 20th century, the army ...
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ActiveCollab Api Wrapper 3.0
Easier token issuing and authenticationWe're happy to announce that ActiveCollab API wrapper for PHP is hitting version 3.0, bringing easier token issuing and authentication. Token issuingThere are now two authenticators that make the authentication a lot easier. To grab a token for one of your ActiveCollab ...
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Activecollab Blog Is Coming Back Home
Why you shouldn't move your company blog to MediumWe moved our whole blog to Medium in July 2015. Now we're moving it back where it belongs - on our website. The reasons we're moving are strictly business related.Don't get us wrong, we love Medium and we'll continue to publish there. But here’s why ...
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Automate Everything
How a small, two-hour investment can save hundreds of hoursIt took me a couple of hours, but I managed to automate two big processes:Migrating extremely big ActiveCollab accounts (which can take more than 24 hours);Integrating with translation services.Before the automation, I had to manually migrate ...
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Debugging JavaScript Events With Chrome and Its Extensions
I was refactoring ActiveCollab’s datepicker and came across a problem: to close the popover, I’d always have to trigger one extra keypress event.Chrome’s debuggerCommonly, you’d use JavaScript to attach an event handler to do something when you click a button on a web page. You’d create a button ...
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Integration With Testlodge
We’re happy to announce the integration with TestLodge, an online test case management tool that helps you:create test plansinput requirements,create and manage test cases and suites,perform multiple test runs,generate reports.If you track bugs and issues with ActiveCollab, this integration will save ...
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Getting Ready for PHP7
PHP7 has a release date set: it’s November 12. As always, some of our users will stick to PHP5 for a while before upgrading and others will switch to v7 as soon as it becomes available. To make sure that ActiveCollab is not broken on v7, we started playing with it a bit earlier.For performance and ...
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Auto-Upgrade Is Back!
The auto-upgrade feature that we introduced in ActiveCollab 3.3 changed the way people manage their self-hosted installations.It also gave us the means to ship improvements and bug fixes without overwhelming our customers with excess maintenance work. Thanks to auto-upgrade we shipped a lot of releases ...
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How to Use ActiveCollab in Your Language
You can use ActiveCollab in 21 languages! English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, Hungarian, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, Lithuanian, Romanian.Changing language is easy. Once you're in ActiveCollab ...
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How We Built the New ActiveCollab
We rebuilt ActiveCollab Project Management Software (codename Feather) to make it more user-friendly.Here’s the technology we used on backend, frontend, our infrastructure and everything else.Front-EndWe use Angular as a basis for Feather front-end. The choice wasn’t random, and we did a lot of experimenting ...
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API, Webhooks, Extensions
In broad strokes, the interaction with web and data on the web evolved in three stages. First, there were HTML files (hyper)linking to one another. Then came the tempting age - a user sends a request, web applications processes it and sends out the rendered page based on a template filled with data fetched ...
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New Labels
ActiveCollab 4 has several ways of categorizing and organizing tasks: milestones, labels, categories, and up to three custom fields.After milestones were renamed to task lists and promoted to the primary way of task categorization, it was time to think how we can make tracking the extra bits of task ...
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Breaking up With a Term
Naming features may seem trivial, but it's definitely not an easy task. Getting the right name is hard but once you name a feature a certain way you end up with something that guides you in the future and affects your development decisions.What we learned is that you should keep the name as generic as ...