A Glimpse of What’s New in Everhour 2

Everhour 2 Beta (not winter) is coming. I know we have promised it to come up a little earlier and we are very sorry to miss the target, but we are killing it every day to make the app look awesome.

We start sending early access invites from the 3d week of August. We will divide early adopters into groups and send invitation group by group to make it easier to analyze your feedback and keep in touch very personally.

Heads up, we would like and prepare to run some webinars in order to present how Everhour 2 works, what’s the main difference between it and the old version, etc. Will keep you posted on that.

Anyway, we have already started with updates, so it’s time to give a deeper insight into the progress and highlight the main features of the product that you are sure, not familiar with.

1 – Automatic sync: Don’t lose your time ever again to add projects manually

The most desirable feature of those who work with external management systems and dread the idea to add new projects to Everhour again and again. Now, if you create a new project in your management tool, it automatically syncs with Everhour. The same applies if you change the name of your project and task, i.e. we reflect these changes too.

Also, integration is far stronger and reduces the number of errors that were common in the old version.

2 – Time tracking into projects and tasks: Сlear and simple structure to save your time

We’ve removed such a thing as @mention. It was slightly unclear how to use it and resulted in reported entries, not visible to admins; it was causing sometimes chaos when it came to reporting. We wanted to stop it. From now on you could track time only in existing projects and only in existing tasks.

Speaking about changes on the admin side, now admins could view what a team reports in any project regardless they were invited to these projects or not.

We also remove the History page and let a user edit time right in reports. Admins could also now change the reported time of a team member in reports.

3 – Estimates per user: Stay informed about everybody’s efficiency in the team

The old version allowed us to estimate the whole task, so it was difficult to figure out a personal estimate in case there were several assignees.

The new version allows to set general task estimates for all assignees as well as everybody could give an estimate to their piece of task and see if they met it.

4 – Task activity log: Be secured with a full history of activity for each task

First, when the task time was tracked, who did it, whether the entry was changed manually or somebody ran the timer.

Second, you can view task and individual estimates, when and by whom they were set or changed. Also, admin edits to members’ entries become visible to other members.

As you may see, you get a good way to stay tuned with task activity changes to make sure everything was tracked and reported correctly.

5 – Very flexible reports: Make your data work for you

Some found our old fixed reports to be uncomfortable. Well, we heard your voice and transformed this feature into a fully customized beast.

New reports can be private not to confuse your teammates with whatever you want to see, or you can share them and bootstrap your team onboarding.

Moreover, you’ve got the power to decide what columns you want to see and in which order. Remember I said a fully customized beast? We wanted to make it easy to use regardless you have 5 members or 50.

6 – Internal Projects / Tasks: Don’t stick to external systems if you don’t need them

Let’s imagine your company doesn’t use any of the external systems to manage tasks (and we know we have such users). You just want a tool that specifically shows how much time you spent on your tasks.

Now, let’s imagine another situation when your company uses Github, but you have (a) non-technical staff like accounting, for example, I don’t believe they will need Github profile to track their tasks, (b) internal projects and tasks that are not worth creating issues.

For such cases, we want to make it possible to create projects and tasks internally and track time inside Everhour. We are working on our own simple to-do management system which, in our humble opinion, should be easy-to-use with basic features.

7 – Responsive version: Track your time when away from desktop

We all know that mobile outruns desktop sooner or later and, therefore, mobile version could be not just a nice, but a necessary  bonus.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the technical ability to add a timer to native apps of external management tools, but a new website is going to be fully mobile responsive, that’s why you can easily track time through the Time Tracking page while you are away from your desktop.

As always, we welcome your comments under this post and are happy to answer questions you might have got after reading it.

P.S. Just in case if you want to jump on the list, please do it here.