ActiveCollab 1.0 was published more than 12 years ago. We have documented a detailed list for nearly all of the changes since then. Despite all this experience and heritage, it has been difficult to map a specific set of changes to a particular release in the last few months. The way these updates are communicated is what has changed.
Instead of choosing between a blog post or a few lines in release notes, we now publish monthly recaps. The December edition was the first. It includes the improvements and changes made to the product in November. This format allows us to go into greater detail about important changes, even if they aren’t big enough to get their own posts. We will use a different release schedule from December 2019 for self-hosted releases. Each new release will be sent immediately after the recap post, which will take place between the 5th-10th of each month. We won’t release new self-hosted builds during the middle of the month. If such releases do occur, there will be a strong cause for them and they will be properly documented on the blog. ActiveCollab Cloud accounts will continue to receive updates as in the past, multiple times per day with rollout schedules and plans that are tailored to stabilize deployed changes. You can read the entire release notes for 10+ years.
Our tradition of publishing detailed release notes is not new. We have details on nearly all releases published and many more. Did you know that ActiveCollab 1.0.2 improved Safari 2 compatibility? ActiveCollab 3.3.5 also introduced the auto-upgrade function. Guess when column and timeline task views were introduced! It was in ActiveCollab 5. When I look back at these documents and put on the Release Manager “hat”, I see two “eras”. The first was when we only had the self-hosted version of the product.
The second period is when the Cloud edition was at the top of the spear with self-hosted lagging behind.
Although there was no clear cut between the two eras of ActiveCollab, there was a noticeable shift between ActiveCollab 4 and ActiveCollab 5. The self-hosted edition remained dominant and controlled the scheduled release for Cloud version 4. The releases were shipped with sequential version numbers. An accompanying Cloud release was also available.
Cloud was the leader in this area, according to release notes for version 5. Although it is better than shipping software on DVD-s, it is difficult to provide a web application that people can download and install. We had to make changes quickly so that people wouldn’t be bothered by frequent updates. Cloud gave us the flexibility we needed to deliver software in a better way. Cloud allowed us to release updates more frequently and target new features in a better way.
