It’s been close to a week since we released Fellowstream out as a closed beta.  (And in case you missed it, here’s where you can sign up.)  It has been exciting and scary to release our idea out into the wild.  The folks here at Avalons Labs have a clear vision in our heads of what we want to achieve, but testing it out in the real world is another thing entirely.  I’ve been more quiet on the blog than I usually am as I help with customer support and design issues, but I’m taking a break this afternoon to give everyone a glimpse of what we’re up to.

What We’re Working On

Our biggest priority is to ensure that Fellowstream makes it easy for team members to communicate on projects.  To that end, we have focused the majority of our efforts on making the Workspace, Tickets, and Project spaces more useful.  For example, we had one user who did not see how notifications can help you learn when someone else assigns you a new task.  We have focused a lot of our design time this week on figuring out how to better integrate the notification system into the workflow of Fellowstream.

We also decided this week to change our support system to Tender.  You can find our new forum discussions and bug submissions can be found here and using the blue button inside Fellowstream itself (see pic below).  We did not realize that our old support system forced users to sign up for a service just to send us a bug report, which is pretty ridiculous seeing as you are trying to help us out.  Tender solves that by allowing you to send us private or public bug report messages without the need to sign up for a service.

No matter where you are in Fellowstream, help is just click away on the blue Help & Support button.

Because we’ve received a lot of comments on some new features, we’re also working on implementing the following features into Fellowstream:

• File Uploading:  We would eventually like people to be able to attach all types of files (i.e. pictures, word documents, pdfs, etc) to tickets, projects, and other areas of Fellowstream.
• Fellowstream Avatars:  People who work remotely often don’t get to see each other face-to-face, so being able to see them on Fellowstream brings teams closer together.

We also think it’s extremely important to get feedback directly from our customers.  We will be sending out e-mails to people who use Fellowstream regularly to schedule a phone call to discuss how it’s working for you.  If you would like to participate in a phone call review, please e-mail me directly at deborah@fellowstream.com.  The more input we get earlier on, the better Fellowstream will be in the long run.

Special Thanks

Launching a product, even in its beta form, is an emotional roller coaster ride, to say the least.  We’d like to personally thank some of our very first customers for their input and support:

• Dr. Jennifer Marshall at Northwest Children’s Dentistry: Thanks for sending so many well thought out pages of advice and catching a ton of bugs early on.  You guys are amazing, and I’m glad Fellowstream’s working in your dental offices.
• David Montgomery Blake from Idaho State University:  Thanks for using our support pages to submit bugs.
• Tim Aste and Jeff Tunnell at Push Button Labs: Thanks for giving us a try, and let us know how Fellowstream works with your video game development company.

Thanks for all the support so far.  We’re looking forward to working with you to make Fellowstream as awesome as it can possibly be!

-Deborah Fike

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