Planio Support (english)

We are pleased to announce a few improvements and refinements to Planio across the board, we hope many of you will find something useful in this update!

First of all you can now allow certain users to log time for other users. This is possible when logging time, when editing logged time and even when importing time logs via a CSV import. The ability to log time for other users is subject to a new permission, please make sure to activate this permission for users requiring it.

Furthermore you can now remove the grouping by container in the Files section, sort files by size, creation date and other attributes and filter files by their names. The visibility of files and attachments is as always limited by the permissions of the current user.

Last but not least, users who prefer the reverse chronological order for issue comments, i.e. the newest comments are at the top of the issue history, will find the usage of this mode much improved. Everything needed to edit the current issue and add a new comment is now located near the newest comment, i.e. the menu and edit form will now be located between the issue description and issue history when using the reverse chronological order for issue comments.

We hope these improvements will make using Planio more productive for everyone and would love to hear your feedback. If you have any questions regarding those new features or anything Planio related please get in touch.

While we're currently more focused on infrastructure and backend work we are still trying to make Planio better and easier for your everyday use.

Many of you already know the issue context menu from the issue query lists and the subtasks and related issues lists (if don't know the issue context menu, go right-click on a row in the issue list to try it out!). We have now extended its availability to the Gantt charts (in the left-hand issue list but also on the issue progress bars of the Gantt chart) and the calendar pages. You can now make small changes to issues in the Gantt chart or calendar pages without leaving those pages, which will enable quicker iteration of your project plans.

We're sure all users of the Planio Gantt charts and Planio calendar will find their experience improved by those changes and would love to hear your feedback. If you have any questions regarding those new features or anything Planio related please get in touch.

External Git repositories could be integrated with Planio by means of mirrored repositories and web hooks for a long time already. A recent update now streamlines the process and makes connecting repositories on GitHub and Bitbucket with Planio a matter of just a few clicks.

Here's how it works:

In the project settings' Repositories tab, above your existing repositories, you find two links for connecting Github and Bitbucket repositories. Clicking on either of these links will load a list of potential repositories to connect from the provider.

For each repository there is a Connect to Planio button which will set up the mirrored repository in your Planio project. Any web hooks and deploy keys necessary to keey the repositories in sync will be set up automatically for you.

Please note that the first time you attempt to connect with either Bitbucket or GitHub, you will be prompted to sign in with the provider and / or give Planio permission to access your repositories.

Today, HostedRedmine.com, the first and oldest free Redmine Hosting provider joins Planio.

The good news for all HostedRedmine.com users: All Redmine projects will transition seamlessly to Planio and all existing users get access to Planio features for free.

HostedRedmine.com has moved to the Planio platform. The URL as well as all logins and passwords remained the same. All users will be able to login and use Redmine just as before. They have simply been switched to the new user interface and all projects will get access to the new features. Check out the Apps tab!

If you have been using Subversion at HostedRedmine.com¶

Planio comes with free hosted Git and Subversion repositories. You won't need a third party Subversion hosting provider anymore. However, Planio cannot connect to externally hosted SVN repos.

But you can migrate your external SVN repos to Planio! To make this seamless for you, we have built a free SVN importer. The importer lets you migrate your externally hosted Subversion to Planio in one click and keep using it just as before.

The importer is available in the Repository section in your projects.

As you might know, Planio comes with a powerful REST API which covers almost all aspects of Planio. If you were working with the API before, you know that in order to use it, you had to generate an API key and use that to make authorized API calls.

This approach, while relatively easy to work with, has a few drawbacks:

• Each API key is tied to a single user account, meaning that your application will always act as this user when interacting with Planio.
• There is no way to restrict what an application can do - an API key always grants it's user the same set of permissions that the user it belongs to has.

OAuth 2 introduces a mechanism to restrict applications to a certain scope. Further, users need to explicitly grant access to an application before it may act on their behalf. When doing so, they will be informed about the scope, that is, what data the application is going to have access to. In the same way, a user may later decide to revert this decision and revoke access for an application at any time.

Starting today, Planio now supports OAuth 2. Check out our Guide and the API Documentation to learn more about using Planio's API with OAuth 2.

Updated project picker with autocomplete¶

We have revamped the global project picker to make navigating large numbers of projects easier. The project picker now has an autocomplete field you can use to narrow down on the project you would like to jump to. The project picker still has a scrollable list of results, and heavy keyboard users will be happy to know the new project picker also still supports keyboard navigation.

The new project picker also sports 2 power-user features: recently used and bookmarked projects. Recently used projects will show up at the top of the project picker just below the autocomplete box, this way you will be able to quickly jump to projects you already have been working on recently. Last but not least you can now bookmark projects on the Overview page of a project using the  icon in the top right contextual menu. Your bookmarked projects will then appear at the top of the projects listed in your project picker.

Global tabs¶

We have brought the tabs you already know from projects to global views, making it easier to access for example the global issue or time entry list. Going to the global issue list now doesn't involve selecting the project list from your user menu and clicking the "view all issues" button, you can now directly jump to the global issue list from the Planio start page.

The global tabs also feature the same +-menu than the project tabs which allows you to quickly enter an issue and then select which project it should go to or to quickly access the various import functions of Planio.

Many more small improvements¶

This version of Planio also brings lots of smaller improvements, like some new filters in the issues query or refinements to some UI elements.

There are 2 additions to custom fields that we would like to highlight. First is the new File type for custom fields. If there's a type of document that should be attached in a structured way to certain issues, you can now define a File type custom field for those issues! Second is a UI option for Long Text type custom fields, which can now be configured to be displayed as full width, which will improve the experience of entering and reading really long texts in custom fields.

Last but not least is a great improvement to Time Entry Queries some of you have requested: Time Entry Queries can now be saved with mostly the same experience as for saving Issue Queries. This will allow frequent users of Time Entry Queries to save queries they use often and speed up this part of their Planio usage.

We're sure every user will find their Planio experience improved by those changes and would love to hear your feedback. If you have any questions regarding those new features or anything Planio related please get in touch.

Download History of Files in Planio Storage¶

We added a new Downloads tab to the Storage file details page, showing all downloads of the file in the last 30 days (by default, you may however change this for each project, as outlined below). This allows you to keep track of who downloaded what and when, and whether downloads were made through WebDAV, the Planio API or by using a Web browser.

New Project Level Settings for Planio Storage¶

With this update, we also introduced three new project level settings for Planio Storage.

Maximum number of file versions¶

As you might have noticed, Planio Storage creates a new Version every time a file is updated, and you can download previous versions of any file from the History tab. This setting allows to configure how many versions for each file should be kept around. Leave this field blank in order to keep an unlimited history for each file. However keep in mind that old versions of files count against the storage quota of your account. The default value for this setting is 15, meaning that, for each file, it's current, and the most recent 14 previous versions, are kept.

Download history retention time¶

Complementing the Download History feature introduced above, here you may choose how many days of download logs should be kept. An empty value means Keep history forever, a value of 0 configures Planio Storage to not store download history at all in this project.

Lowering this setting, i.e. from 3 to 1 day, will lead to immediate deletion of log entries that do not match the new setting.

Purge deleted files from trash after¶

The recently introduced Trashcan automatically purges entries older than three days. You can now adapt this to your needs by setting a different number of days here. In order to never automatically purge files, set this to a blank value. A value of 0, on the contrary, will effectively disable the trashcan and delete files immediately. Any changes you make to this value will only apply to files deleted in the future and do not affect current contents of the Trashcan.

Trashcan contents (and their versions) count against your global Storage quota until they are finally purged.

Since going into self-isolation four weeks ago, our team here at Planio has been working relentlessly on something we haven’t had in Planio so far: Video Conferencing.

To help you weather the COVID-19 storm and stay productive while working from home, we’re introducing today–after just 4 weeks of development–a very early alpha version of Planio Meet, a video conferencing solution fully integrated in Planio.

Planio Meet is a Pro Feature available entirely for free in all Planio plans for the time being.

Built on the outstanding open source project Jitsi, Planio Meet adds simple one-click video conferencing to all your Planio projects: Simply click on the Video conference tab in any project and you’ll see and hear your team mates live and in real time.

As you can imagine, 4 weeks aren’t nearly enough to release a mature product. However, given the circumstances, we decided to release our very first proof-of-concept to all customers. As we continue development of Planio Meet over the coming weeks and months, we will deploy early and often and let you follow the development very closely.

This means, that things may break and that Planio Meet won’t work perfectly for everyone from the start, but it’s a first step. A step that we feel was needed now–not in a few months.

In our own tests, we were having a lot of success with using Planio Meet in Firefox. Some colleagues say Google Chrome is working great, too. Your mileage may vary. Please feel free to experiment a little and don’t hesitate to get in touch with any questions or requests.

We hope this helps. Stay healthy and stay inside!

Your friends at Planio

You can now define Custom Fields for files and folders in Planio Storage. As with other kinds of custom fields, you have fine grained control over field format, visibility and what fields are available in which projects. Planio Storage custom fields may also be declared Searchable, which, for example, could be used with a Keywords field to improve search result relevance:

Custom field data can be edited using the standard Edit action from the file / folder details screen. The custom field values are rendered in the collapsible sidebar:

In light of the recent global developments around the COVID-19 pandemic I wanted to give you an update about the situation here at Planio.

TL;DR: Everything is fine, we're used to working remotely. And we want to help you help your colleagues and friends adapt to remote work.

As a team, we decided last weekend to go into self-isolation and work from home, both to help slow down the spread of the virus and to give our staff members with families the flexibility they need to adapt to the new situation.

The change doesn't affect us much as many of our team had already been working remotely and geographically distributed. We are all in good health and we don't expect any unforeseen disruptions.

Of course, we're all using Planio to collaborate online which really helped us making the transision to being fully remote as seamless as possible.

The recent migration of all Planio servers to our new data center further increases our redundancy and resilience on that level. In the new data center, we increased our server capacity by 50% and are supported by a much larger professional on-site team with rotating schedules providing 24/7 availability.

COVID-19 assistance

Over the coming weeks, our team will do their best to help you keep the impact of COVID-19 on your business as low as possible. In order to achieve that, we now offer the following programs:

1. During 2020, all additional data migrations into Planio performed by our engineers will be free of charge even for existing customers and even if you’ve had a free import already. This way, more teams at your company can join you in using Planio and you can use the situation as an opportunity to replace more legacy or locally hosted tools.
2. If you upgrade your Planio account to a higher plan, you will receive 1 month of usage for free. So, if you’re using Planio with your team but other teams within your company don’t yet, you can onboard them starting today without having to get additional budget approved immediately.
3. If you help other companies start working remotely with Planio, we will waive the monthly charges for their account for the first 2 months and add a 3 month's free usage credit to yours. This situation can be a three-way win: Your friends at other companies will move their work online, giving more flexibility to their staff, and be forever grateful to you. Your company will benefit from savings and can invest a little more elsewhere to lessen the impact of the pandemic on your business. And we at Planio will have one more happy customer joining our little crowd of 1,500 companies making their work more productive and fun online.
4. Update: We’ve launched Planio Meet, a video conferencing platform integrated in Planio, a feature that has been requested by many users.

This way, we hope to support both our existing users and make it easier for new customers to adapt to working from home during self-isolation.

If you would like to use any of these offers or if you need any other assistance or have a specific situation you would like to discuss, please get in touch. My team and I will be happy to help.

All the best,

Jan Schulz-Hofen
Founder and Managing Director