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License upgrade discount ends December! Only $749!

Posted by admin on December 30, 2009 in News, Project Management Software Leave a comment

If you have a Corporate 2008 or Standard 2008 or earlier server license, take advantage of our special upgrade price of $749 for the very latest v4 codebase. A huge step up from previous versions, click here to purchase

– Ben Prendergast

A message from a long-term customer

Posted by admin on November 27, 2009 in Project Management Software, Testimonials Leave a comment

This is why we love building and refining Copper. What other job would offer the honour of being privvy to hundreds of different business models across the globe, all with a single purpose, to better manage their businesses and add value to their customers in turn.

This is from W. Ross Wells, from ZenFilm in Texas.

We started our company in September of 2005 in the living room of our house… after years of operating much larger production facilities… the paradigm for production was changing and we saw that smaller, lower overhead, aggressive little shops might have the staying power in the changing media climate.

4 years later… we have 9 employees and we have experienced exponential client and revenue growth.. Copper has been with us ever since we added our first employee… it has grown with us and honestly it is part of the family.

You made an extremely high end management system available to us when we had no cash to spend… and now that things are better… we have a really high performance platform to run our company with.
It means a lot that you are doing well… sometimes we dont stop to think how far we’ve come… we have come a long way and you have helped us do it.

Sincere thanks and best wishes for many more years of partnership.

Thanks Ross, as discussed we’ll beer it up next time I’m State-side.

– Ben Prendergast

New Standard v4, Single Codebase, Changelog.

Posted by admin on November 26, 2009 in News, Project Management Software Leave a comment

We’re excited to announce that all of our plans are now under a single build, for the first time in Copper history!

This means that from our Standard product at $29/mth, you now have access to the web’s best project management and collaboration tool. Standard offers the best 5-user PM tool, with interactive gantt charts, resource time management, stopwatches and task comments that drive automated timesheets, billings, and our improved file upload function.

In addition, we’ve been super busy, adding a new file upload feature, improving UI workflows, and have even more planned over the coming weeks.

4.03 Tweaks/Fixes (rolled out 2nd Dec 2009):
- Fixed Projects/Contacts Tab
- Language Token fixes in Projects
- Removed Est/Act/Comp column to declutter project view
- Fixed issue with Springboard Activity Tab not filtering by year
- Now sections remember how a user had them (open/close them, they stay open closed!)
- Fixed New Event on Calendar
- Fixes to Multilanguage in Gantt (Finally! Copper is about 99.999% Translatable now)
More to come in 4.04 – in dev now.

Now there’s no excuse! Come on board and see how Copper can improve your studio/business productivity instantly. If you have any questions or queries, please get in touch!

– Ben Prendergast

Follow us on Twitter!

Posted by admin on October 15, 2009 in News, Project Management Software Leave a comment

Follow us on Twitter for updates, new releases, and other Copper news. Click here: @copperproject

– Ben Prendergast

We’re Hiring! Talented PHP/MySQL/CSS/AJAX Developer Wanted

Posted by admin on September 30, 2009 in News Leave a comment

First released in 2002 by Australian-based Element Software, Copper is a web-based project management software tool used by creative teams across the globe to manage their clients, tasks, projects, contacts and files.

With a loyal client base, Copper is utilized by leading organizations such as Sony Pictures, Apple, Mercedes Benz USA, Novell and Redken to name a few.

As the business moves in to an exciting new phase of growth, the opportunity has arisen for an experienced and talented Web 2.0 Software Developer to join this independent company on a contract basis.

Working from the comfort of your own home or studio, this role will see you, the successful candidate, taking technical briefs from clientele in order to diligently and effectively develop & self-test intuitive solutions.

As the successful candidate you must possess:

  • High level proficiency with PHP, MySQL, AJAX and CSS
  • Experience with Actionscript / Flash / Rails a bonus
  • A strong focus on usability and user interface
  • An active interest in web 2.0 products, web sites & technologies
  • A sense of urgency about your work
  • A very strong focus on providing long-term solutions
  • A pro-active and disciplined approach to your work

This is your opportunity to work with a leading Australian Web 2.0 product with offices in Melbourne & San Francisco without leaving your home!

Daily/hourly rate commensurate with technical expertise & experience.

To apply, please forward your current resume and covering letter for consideration to info@copperproject.com.

– Ben Prendergast

Roundup: Solar Panels, Wireless Electricity, Honda Segway, Minimal Cam.

Posted by admin on September 28, 2009 in Off Beat Leave a comment

This week I thought I’d blog about some of the tech that’s floating my boat at the moment.

Solar Panel Roof Tiles

Let’s kick off with this from Springwise: Solar panels build right into roof tiling, just genius, and a truly interconnected grid of power generation is something sorely lacking in Australia.

http://springwise.com/weekly/2009-09-16.htm#solepowertile
Link: http://www.srsenergy.com/

Wireless Electricity

Witricity uses magnetic coupling to transfer power safely and wirelessly. Check out this demo where Eric Giler demos a wirelessly powered iPhone and TV. The tech is still at 45-50% efficiency (a few thousand time more efficient than a battery), but coupled with solar tiles above, we may just have ourselves some awesomeness!

http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electricity.html

Honda unveils a Segway thingy

Minimallisimo, the sexy one-shot minimal digi camera

Just because it brings back the surprise element of not knowing how your shot is going to come out until you develop it.

Link: http://minimalissimo.com/2009/09/oneshot-camera/

– Ben Prendergast

How does Copper compare to MS Project?

Posted by admin on September 23, 2009 in News, Project Management Software Leave a comment

I received this question today via email, and thought I’d post up my response:

Q. How does copper compare to MS project software? Why use copper, what are the costs and how does it work better than MS project?

A. The biggest issue with MS Project is that it is simple a single user repository and having come from a PM background I often found that it dictated how I work. I also found when I did use it within a team environment that MS Project did nothing to assist in the management of the politics of a project, and tended to make me focus more on the technical side of the timeline than actually getting things done (and the more I focussed on that, the less work that got done, and the more I’d have to update my schedule!)

With Copper, we turned that on its head. We still provide great project setup tools like the flash gantt timeline view and drag and drop subtasks in the project creation screen, but the real power of Copper comes with its multi-user platform, which assists in the collaboration component of all your projects.

Once you’ve allocated your users to tasks (or even gone the extra step of committing their available time, if you want finite resourcing), they then go ahead and provide a running commentary of the work they do along with how long it takes them and their subjective impression of how complete a task is. This is an easy process for them, and provides a natural update mechanism, removing the pain associated with timesheet tracking, and ensuring if one member is away for whatever reason your team can pick up where they left off. This is to say nothing of the other areas of Copper like the document management module, contacts module, reports, and group calendar functions within Copper. Being available anywhere anytime, I don’t hear of may customers going back to MS Project once they’re on board with Copper

The net result is that over time you can review how your projects have tracked and we’ve found teams become more cohesive the more they use Copper. In a recent survey we found that over 80% of our customers save between 10-20 hours per week, and 20% save more than 20 hours a week just by using Copper.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any specific questions on functionality, or anything else for that matter!

– Ben Prendergast

New features & removing features, let us know!

Posted by admin on May 15, 2008 in News, Project Management Software Leave a comment

This week we continue with design and development of the next version, and we’ve also started on a minor update for the current version.

However, a few opportunities have come up to simplify the next version by potentially removing features. Well, not so much removing features, rather removing redundancies that exist within the software.

So, we have a few questions that we wanted to throw out there to the customer base so that we can make better decisions about these key changes. We’re really looking for an economy of movement/function in this version.

So here are seven quick questions, you can reply via the comments here, or by emailing info@copperproject.com

  1. How does your company use Files? Do you view the files tab in clients? Do you view it in Projects? Do you only upload files that relate to tasks?
  2. How does your company use Contacts? Are you using the related contact feature in the task commentary?
  3. Would you prefer the Project and Task % complete to be automatically based on hours Estimated vs Logged, or continue as a subjective % estimation on each update?
  4. How many resources would you typically have on a task? and what’s your max resources on any task?
  5. Do you have a single charge rate, charge rate for each client, charge rate for each role, charge rate for each user, or charge rate for each project?
  6. Describe your ultimate report, think laterally, what would you most like to know about your business?
  7. In general, what is the most time consuming thing you do with Copper? Don’t solve the problem with ‘it would be nice if’, rather, just tell us in words what you spend the most time doing.

Please shoot through your thoughts via email or by commenting on this post, it all helps. Version 4.0 is shaping up to be an amazing piece of software, we know you’re going to love it. And yes, if you’re keen on contributing or want an amazing discount there are still spots available in the Inner Circle.

Until next week.

– Ben Prendergast

Copper v4.0 Development, Sneak Peak

Posted by admin on May 6, 2008 in Project Management Software Leave a comment

Ok, last time I talked about our overarching requirements for the next version of Copper, here they are recapped:

  1. We’re going to reduce pages/clicks by 40%
  2. It needs to be something that I personally will use every single day
  3. We’re going to add 100% of the features in our specification document

Simple, right? However where do you start? From the end, of course. We usually have a running document which outlines all of the features that customers want. It’s usually 20 pages in length, and the idea is that we work on adding the most popular features, within the context of our philosophy of building beautifully simple efficiency systems for creative teams.

The problem with this kind of specification process is that Customer A is often unaware that what they think is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to their business is actually at odds with what Customer B is saying is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to theirs. If I had a dollar for every time someone said we’d be ‘barking mad’ not to add feature ‘xyz’, I’d have around $12,803. Not much, but still a hefty amount of accused insanity.

So, internally I like to think about ‘Feature Fractals’. A feature fractal is this: Customer A/B/C all talk about a required function using different terminology, and in some cases even different requirements. While most developers would set about adding 10-15 new features, we like to use our experience and distill these requirements into a single feature that will suit the 80% majority.

In our v4.0 spec, we have around 10 phases of development, and roughly 168 new features planned, most of these based on this feature fractal thinking, based on 20 pages, six years of emails, survey responses, conversations, meetings, and gut instinct. There’s a lot in here, yet check out Requirement 1 above!

So far we have around 20% of this next build funded, so if you think your organization might be interested in coming on board to sponsor this latest development, we still have plenty of spots left and they represent amazing value, click here for more information.

For now though here are three untitled screens.

We’re probably 3 weeks on from when these are taken, but you can see that even before we start coding there is some serious consideration around the product. Next week I might provide a little more of a look at the early screens and/or spec, but the in-depth stuff I’ll be keeping for the inner circle.

Feel free to comment, cheer us on, or just tell us we’re mad not to add feature ‘xyz’ ($12,803 isn’t enough to retire on).

– Ben Prendergast

Copper Project Version 4, kick-off!

Posted by admin on April 29, 2008 in News, Project Management Software Leave a comment

I always get really excited when we kick off development of a new version. It begins after years of customer feedback, and even though we regularly add minor features, a major development like v4.0 means we get to add all of the goodies that we (and our customers) have always wanted.

Of course this is easier said than done!

I need to ensure that the new product doesn’t disadvantage anyone, it needs to be more efficient than its predecessor, yet we want to continue leading the pack with great new features. So for me the process is like a 6-month game of chess. Every small move has repercussions, there are risks, happy accidents, and opportunities.

I’m also a songwriter, and this process is so similar, starting with a theme/idea/rationale, or even a set of principles, and driving your obsession to create a new form. So, this time around I thought I’d share the process with you all. while I won’t be divulging too much I hope you find the journey as fascinating as I know I will. Let’s begin!

The process for me has become refined over the years. It used to be that we’d add one big feature (e.g. Our flash-based dynamic gantt chart, a web-based PM first), and I’d plant myself in a local cafe (e.g. My current fav, A Minor Place, on Albion St, Brunswick, if you’re ever in town!) with a 20-page wish-list document from customers, seven latte’s, and choose five features that would make the most impact for our customers within our limited budget.

Five years on the process is a little more refined (as is Copper these days), however, despite the available technology it still starts with a table full of printouts, three principles and a spec document.


The three very simple principles for Version 4.0 are:

  1. We’re going to reduce pages/clicks by 40%
  2. It needs to be something that I personally will use every single day
  3. We’re going to add 100% of the features in our specification document

These might seem like relatively simple goals, but they’re anything but! Reducing pages/clicks by 40% (point 1) whilst adding over 165 features (point 3)?! Thanks to the Inner Circle program (which is filling fast, click here if you want to secure a spot) all three principles are certainly achievable. We’re about a month on since those above shots were taken.

Next week, I’ll post back with a sneak-peek at the spec doc, maybe a screen or two, and talk about how the mock layouts work hand in hand with the spec doc to arrive a development-ready brief. As always thanks for your continued support!

– Ben Prendergast