Working on new landing page for potential customers

Project Hours is always looking for new customers and it is important to provide an easy entry path for interested companies. At the moment the Project Hours landing pages looks like this:

Works reasonably well. Unfortunately many people try out the demo but do not sign up for the free trial. Missed opportunity for both sides. So I am going to combine these buttons to one button that will say 'Try it out now'. User that try out Project Hours will go through a short wizard to setup a demo account. In this way, everybody that tries out the system, basically gets a free trial immediately.

To be continued..

Integration with Google Calendar

On request of customer I am working on integrating Project Hours with Google Calendar. Work has been progressing nicely and a fully functional demo is available on the project hours test site: Google Calendar in Project Hours. What it does is that every time hours are saved in Project Hours via  the web interface or mobile app, an entry is created in a specified Google Calender. Only one (company) calendar per organisation can be specified.

In this way, a dashboard with work items is created that can be used for planning for example.

I am thinking of adding a feature where users can specify their own Google calendar for a per user overview.  Or an integration the other way around: use Google Calendar to register hour entries in Project Hours. I have investigated this and it looks like the only way to do this is to create a Chrome plug-in that adds Project Hours menu items to the Google Calendar web page. But first we are going to do some testing and release this to the Project Hours production environment. To be continued..
Bert-Jan

New Project Hours UI banner and landing page design live!

Today I published the new Project Hours look and feel to the live site. 

For a while I had felt that the design of the web site had become somewhat stale, no colours, only white and gray. To change that, the company banner on every page has been brought in line with the design of the landing pages (see image below). Thanks to Vanessa Lappenschaar-Berg for design tips!

I hope that the new design will lead to a higher conversion rate on the Google Ads.

  

There are no functional changes in this release. I did make a change to the way caching of data is handled, there has been a case of session data mix-up between two users of different organisations (very scary, should never happen again!)

For those interested: I added the setting 'OutputCacheLocation.None' to the MVC outputcache attribute on every MVC controller to make sure no pages are cached server-side that could cause data mix-up between users:

  [OutputCache(NoStore = true, Duration = 0, Location = System.Web.UI.OutputCacheLocation.None, VaryByParam = "*")]

The NoStore = true and Duration is 0 settings were already there, but apparently that was not enough.
More background info : StackOverflow Sessions Mixed ASP.NET and MVC Output cache set to None

Planned for the next release: add an auditing function to all changes to time entries so it is always possible to see what the entire history of a time entry has been. (Currently this must be done by restoring database backups, a lot of hassle).

That's all for now,
Bert-Jan

Moved to Let's Encrypt certificates

Panic. Google Chrome gave certificate errors on https:projecthours.net Turns out Chrome is not accepting certain ssl certificates any longer. See: https://knowledge.digicert.com/alerts/ALERT2562.html

So I updated the Project Hours web site  to use a free Let's Encrypt certificate. Turns out it was quite easy to configure on Azure following this tutorial: https://www.tecklyfe.com/how-to-setup-lets-encrypt-ssl-certificates-for-an-azure-web-app/. And it there is an automated proces to renew the certificate every 90 days, which is great.

Started on a new project: StudentSign

Last year, my son spent a year abroad on a highschool in Canada. We had to sign many documents that were emailed to us, especially because he was 16 at the time he went to Canada, so his parents' consent was needed often, for instance for a weekend trip around Canada, or a school canoeing trip.

Signing documents was a tedious process: print the document, sign on paper, scan the signed document and send an email back. It must be very time-consuming for student exchange organisations in this way, having to deal with all the emails with documents from students, parents and schools. It occured to me that there must be an easier way: digital signatures on documents stored in the cloud!

After a little bit of investigation I decided to build a platform on top of an existing digital signature platform. In this way, it is easier to get started and I can focus on the use case for signing documents for exchange students instead of reinventing the wheel by developing a new digital signature platform.

Current state of the project is that a sandbox experimental environment exists and that I am going to conduct interviews with organisations to validate the idea and find out if organisations really need this solution.  We can use the sandbox to experiment with documents, work flow and signatures.

A landing page with an overview of the project has been created:  https://studentsign.net

Added project costs tracking

On request of a client I added project costs tracking to https://projecthours.net. Administrators can add hourly rates to users. In reports, totals costs per project or activity are displayed, based on hourly rates.  I hope that with this new and easy-to-use feature, Project Hours will be useful to even more companies..

Marketing is important, created improved landing pages

Project Hours has been online for a few years and we have a group of loyal costumers. To attract more customers I realized we must improve our presence on the web. So I created landing pages with an attractive design, a Dutch version and an English version. The Project Hours Google ads will link to the new pages from now on.

Next is to work on a request from a customer: add hourly rates to users so users can calculate project costs. That's it for now, Bert-Jan.