This has been a tremendous year for us here at Pelotonics. We would like to thank everyone for all of the support and good ideas for the application enhancements we have made over the year. Our Google Documents integration is released and proving invaluable to many businesses. We also upgraded our security protocols to the most stringent in the business, but still maintained a convenient and accessible application. A big thanks goes out to Gina Trapani and many of our customers for your guidance in this regard!

2009 was surely a turbulent year for almost all of our customers, but we made it through. We are looking positively toward the New Year for what it holds in the way of opportunity and expansion.

We would like to take this time to thank our current customers and wish you the best of success and prosperity in 2010.

Thanks and have a Happy New Year!

The Pelotonics Team

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• Pelotonics no longer includes passwords in system messages. Email is an inherently insecure way to transmit information. All the text of your email passes through several servers and networks, in plain text, easily read by anyone with access to those servers or networks. Now, when you sign up for an account at Pelotonics, you’ll receive an activation link via email instead of your password. Click on the link to set your password using a secure SSL connection. Your password will not be included in any system email messages. As always, Pelotonics encrypts your password and credit card details when they get stored in our databases.
• Pelotonics will lock down your account in the event of a brute force attack. A common way to hack into a username/password-based system is to use what’s called a “brute force” login attack, wherein the attacker, armed with a system user name, uses a program that systematically tries thousands of dictionary words as the password to log in one after the other. To defend against such attacks, Pelotonics now locks down your login after a certain number of failed attempts. Pelotonics will automatically unlock your account after a few minutes to try again.
• Pelotonics uses a secure connection when you enter personal information. On all password and profile setup pages, Pelotonics uses a secure, https connection that encrypts the data you’re entering as it’s transmitted over the network.

For more on how we’re working hard to secure your important data, visit our new security response page, and contact us with any security-related questions.

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I just read the newest post from Gina Trapani on the Harvard Business blog. She makes a good point that sometimes it just makes sense to pick up the phone and deal with an issue directly. We are in the business of online project management software. As such, you might expect me to preach that everything should be tracked and maintained through the centralized trusted system for project work – Pelotonics.

There is tremendous utility and long-term efficiency that comes from the proper and frequent use of a system like Pelotonics, but sometimes there is no substitute for a face-to-face conversation or a phone call.

Email is asynchronous; that’s a positive and a negative. I am sure that all of you have been party to the never ending email string where everyone contributes just enough information on each response to push it forward to no conclusion. Some of these endless email strings can be cleared up and clarified in a quick five minute real-time interchange.

Let’s not forget technologies like Skype! The phone is great, but it is not reliable. Skype gives a tremendous view into the availability of coworkers and, if not abused, can provide instant access at appropriate times. It is still quasi asynchronous so it has the benefits of email and none of the draw backs of the phone. I am about to hold a call with a remote worker across the country via Skype. In my mind, this beats a phone call and email at the same time. We get the benefits of a phone conversation injected with file sharing, text-based information and video if we are feeling like it.

Gina’s points are well taken. It is amazing that we live in a world with such amazing technologies that allow us to increase the efficiency of communication. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to get on a Skype call with a team member of mine!

What do you use to communicate with team members?

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First I would like to thank everyone for making this such a great year for Pelotonics. We have been growing like gangbusters and have really enjoyed getting to know our user base more deeply. If you didn’t already notice, we have recently upgraded the look and feel of Pelotonics under the direction of our esteemed advisor, Gina Trapani.

All I can say is, “what a great move!”. We recieved numerous positive comments from you, our users regarding the change. The re-design was focused on making things easier to access and manipulate. Aside from making it look more modern, Daniel added AJAX capabilities to the numerous filters that exist throughout the application. If you want to just see Tasks on the calendar for instance, just click the box and it happens immediately. No clicking on another button to perform that task! I hope you enjoy the new streamlined nature of the application.

Now, with that having been said, we are studying out the possibility of including an enterprise wiki into Pelotonics. This wiki could be used as a standard intranet for a company or organization as well as tie in directly to Pelotonics. Imagine being able to add wiki pages to your projects. This capability would give you the ability to store information and enhance communications with your project members. We want your feedback.

Are you using a wiki today? Do you have your eye on a wiki in the near future? The integration that we are contemplating would provide you with a simple wiki as part of the standard subscription packages with Pelotonics. We would also offer an upgraded wiki option that would provide enterprise features like LDAP connectivity and many other connectors to databases within your organization.

Pelotonics is evolving into a tremendous tool. I was just up at Warner Brothers last week and I was truly amazed at how many projects they are managing on Pelotonics! We feel that migrating to a more enterprise option is something that we would like to explore. I am interested in your take! Let us know what you think…

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Jimmy just asked us on the forums if it is possible to take “notes” on the Pelotonics system without sending out email notification to members of the project. This can come in handy when you want to archive critical project-based information for reference.

There are two ways to accomplish this within Pelotonics. (at least that I can think of right now!) Both of these methods are accomplished in the Messages section.

1. Create a Message Folder called “Notes”. Then create messages that contain the information you want to store as a note. Do not choose anyone on the email distribution.

This method gives you the ability to take notes and filter down to them using the foldering system.

2. On the front end of a message, append the words: “Note:”. This will identify all notes within your system. You can then use the search feature to filter down to your notes.

Special note: in these examples and per Jimmy’s question, there is no need to send out an email when you are creating a note. Your team will be able to see new notes in the Messages section, on the Dashboard, or on the Project Summary screens. It boils down to making sure that your team is following a consistent and agreed upon workflow!

Thanks for the question Jimmy. I hope this answers it!

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We are constantly thinking about what the future holds for Project Management. It is clear that groups are changing the way they manage projects. New highly available tools like Pelotonics are helping groups and organzations get a handle on what needs to be done and where things are at.

A friend of my mother contacted me on Facebook recently and stated that she had a funny picture of my mom that she was going to send to me. Now, if this was just an email or phone-based promise, the chances of me seeing that picture go waaaay down. In my view, because she COMMITTED to send me the picture on a semi-public forum like Facebook, it happened like clock work! She scanned in the picture from the 80’s and sent it to me via email. A scant two years ago this same individual would have most likely not have done this citing it was too complicated or most likely she would have forgotten and moved on to other priorities.

It is my observation that a promise or committment made in public is much more likely to get done as stated. Leaving a Milestone or Task in Pelotonics assigned to a specific individual is a highly efficient way of getting things done; because they actually get done!

Do an experiment. Delegate something via email only and pay attention to the timelyness and accuracy of the output. Then delegate something in a public forum that has some legacy like Pelotonics, a Wiki or Facebook. You will notice that those tasks and deliverables made and agreed to in a public setting are much more likely to get finished on time and with more accuracy.

It is in everyone’s best interest to make Project Management a public and social endeavor. Over the next few months be looking for more social aspects to the Pelotonics platform!

Give delegation in a public forum a try! I would love to hear the outcome of your experiments.

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Just this week Google took their new to-do list application, Gmail Tasks, out of its experimental Labs area and made it available to all users. Gmail Tasks offers two key features: email and calendar integration (for Gmail and Google Calendar users). However, beyond that and hierarchical subtasks, it’s pretty sparse in the features department. In my review yesterday at Lifehacker, I said it was too simple for power users. Several readers in the comments and on Twitter disagreed with me, saying that Gmail Tasks’ simplicity was exactly what they liked about it.

After years of reviewing task managers (and even building one of my own), it’s clear to me that you can’t please everyone all the time, especially when it comes to task managers. For example, Pelotonics offers a to-do list feature that Basecamp does not (in the name of simplicity): due dates. Beyond that, we’ve been discussing how to make Pelotonics’ in-app to-do lists easier and more fun to use. Gmail Tasks’ slick interface and keyboard shortcuts is something we’d do well to study closely, as is their hierarchical task support. If Google makes a Gmail Tasks API available, integration with Pelotonics is a strong possibility.

What’s your make-or-break task manager feature? Tell us in the comments here or in our community forum.

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In June, Prem Sundaram of TSG Consulting came up with a simple (we love that!) yet very helpful feature related to our Evernote integration. As many of you know, Evernote is a great tool for taking web clippings. These web pages display rather nicely in Evernote, but the API does not give us the ability to duplicate the display correctly on the Pelotonics side.

As a result, if you take a clip of a web page in Evernote and then transfer it over to Pelotonics, we will take the text from the clipping and process it indepent of the images. The images are all attached to the element within Pelotonics that you are creating. ie. Task, message, etc.

If you clip a page that includes 50 images for instance, you will create a message within Pelotonics that includes 50 attachments! That’s not a good thing and adds to clutter and distraction within Pelotonics.

Until we can get more API functionality that will help us with this issue, we are now giving you the ability to include or not include the images from webpages. This was a recommenation that Prem made to us in June. It is now implemented and ready for you! Try it out and let us know what you think.

Thanks Prem for such a great suggestion. Simple, yet solves a big problem.

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According to the Sitelinks help page,

“At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.”

I thought that answer was ridiculous; and since I’m a programmer by trade, I realized if I reverse engineer top tiered websites that have sitelinks, I’ll find a pattern and do the same for Pelotonics. This is what I found…

THE FIRST OR SECOND THING ON YOUR WEBSITE, HAVE A <UL><LI> LIST OF THE TOP LEVEL LINKS FOR YOUR WEBSITE.

That’s what I did, and within 2 weeks, we had sitelinks! Take that Google for not hiring me 5 years ago! haha, just playing…

I think Google should at least give webmasters a best practices guide so the Google Bot can read your site better.

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In the 3rd Quarter of the year, we’re going to be focused on the usability and reliability of Pelotonics. Right now Pelotonics is a good application, we are going to turn it into a GREAT application. Once you use Pelotonics, you’ll realize that it’s a necessary tool in your day-to-day life when managing your business or organization. Though, we want you to be excited every time you log into Pelotonics! We’ve started to introduce jQuery into the application, we’re going to be making things faster (less page refreshes with AJAX calls), removing ALL of the bugs, and we’re going to to be giving the application a “face lift”! Here’s a rough mock-up…







Remember, we love our customers!!! So pipe-in on the forums, watch PeloTV and interact with us LIVE, or email us at support@pelotonics.com.

Happy 4th of July this weekend!

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