Arblog » RotaBoard

Rotaboard and beyond …

femi — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:51:39 +0000

We have received a lot of great feedback for Rotaboard, way more than we could ever have hoped for and we thank all the people who have sent us emails (keep doing that).

We have had lots (and lots) of requests for features, upgrades and support but due to the free nature of Rotaboard and commitments to other commmercial projects, we had thus far been unable to allocate much time to Rotaboard.

Hence due to popular request, we are currently working on a commercial successor to Rotaboard that will adhere to the same spirit of Rotaboard with focus on simplicity and ease of use. The plan is to introduce paid supported plans (there will still be a free plan) and iteratively and consistantly evolve the new application so our customers can get the best scheduling tools for their domains.

So stay tuned …

We are still alive!

admin — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:37:01 +0000

This blog has been quiet for way too long! It seems like we have gone into a long hiatus which is far from the the truth but we do apologize for the lack of posts. In the upcoming days we will rectify this, posting some updates on what we have been working on lately and there is some good news on the way to fans of Rota Board

Times They Are A-Changin

Michael — Wed, 09 May 2007 15:43:30 +0000

We have been receiving great feedback from the users of Rota Board, thanks and keep it coming. The things that people have been requesting the most have been the options to change time and day formats. So today we have rolled out the following features:

Set your time zone so the Today Indicator is always right
Change time format to use either 24-hour clock (military time) or 12-hour clock (am/pm)
Change the start day of the week to Sunday, Monday or any other day

The majority of these requests came from our American user base – we hope these changes help you in your usage of Rota Board.

Support Rota Board

Michael — Wed, 09 May 2007 10:10:37 +0000

We are happy to see people use our product and we love the feedback we’ve been getting. We’ve endeavored to make sure Rota Board is staying free of charge but we have a small request if you enjoy using it.

The idea of Rota Board is to keep it as simple and clean as possible and that means we will not put on ads or other annoyances. Instead we have added a small button.

Don’t feel obliged – but if you want feel free to treat us a cup of coffee ($2), a beer ($5) or buy us lunch ($15). We will be very grateful for any kind of donation to keep Rota Board in the clouds.

User invasion Komando style

femi — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 10:02:58 +0000

Two days ago Rotaboard was featured on the Kim Komando Show website. We were pre-warned that it was likely to generate a lot of traffic -and boy were they right. Over the past 2 days we have had nearly 15,000 visitors and about 1,500 new registered users.

I am very happy to report that so far our servers have been able to cope with the jump in traffic fairly comfortably, however its still been a very busy couple of days. We have received a lot of great feedback and suggestions from the many new users to Rotaboard and we were able to roll out a couple of small changes to the user activation and login processes. It became apparent to us that a small percentage were having trouble with our sign-up process so we moved to improve that system and provide some better information feedback during sign-up and activation.

So thanks for all the feedback, good and bad. Its been great hearing the various ways and settings that Rotaboard is being used. Have a great day!

Server maintenance

femi — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 21:59:27 +0000

Greetings Rotaboard users,

Our server’s hosting company are due for a small upgrade. We’ve just been notified that it will take place tomorrow, 8th March 2007 at 3am-5am GMT. Total downtime could be as long as 2 hours but it will likely be much less. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but we trust the server will subsequently perform better.

Thank you for your patience and keep letting us know how Rotaboard is working for you.

1,000 users and 10,000 visits at Rotaboard

Michael — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 09:18:38 +0000

We didn’t really know what to expect when we launched the beta but the numbers sure have surprised us and it’s been intriguing to follow the stats as various blogs made posts about the site. Today we crossed an interesting milestone. User number 1,000 signed up to use Rotaboard for free.

An interesting observation is that it took quite long before American or English language sites picked up Rotaboard. Instead is was tech-blogs from non-english speaking countries that showed us some linklove first.

We submitted the site to HappyCodr and after that things more or less took their own course.
Surprisingly enough the first site to pick it up was the Japanese site 100shiki which we wrote more about here. Subsequently a couple of other Japanese sites also picked it up.
Museum of Modern Beta then came along, and in it’s wake followed:
- The Spanish software blog GenBeta came along and sent hordes of Spanish people to our site
- The Italian geek site Geekissimo
- The German Web 2.0 observer web2null
- The French, Montreal based technologist Benoit Descary
And then finally came two English language big league sites:
- Israeli Orli’s posted it to her Go2Web20 site that keeps a tap on what’s on in online apps.
- The Web 2.0 Workgroup member Emily Chang’s eHub

These are only the sites that have sent a lot of traffic our way. According to Google Analytics, people are coming to Rotaboard from about 200 different domains currently and encouragingly, they are coming back daily.

Keep talking about Rotaboard and keep telling us how we can make it better – have a great day!

Tell us what you think of Rota Board

Michael — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:40:05 +0000

Rota Board has been out in a public beta for two weeks now. So far we have recieved some very useful feedback and we would like to hear more. What you think of it …

What do you miss in the application?
Which of the current features could you do without?
Does it function in your work environment?
What work settings have you been using it in?

We’d love to hear the experiences you have had with Rota Board so far – both good or bad. It is the feedback from you that enables us to improve Rota Board.

Drop a comment here below, use this form or send us an email at info@arbdesign.dk

Don’t want to try? Let Molly show you

Michael — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:00:55 +0000

The good people of Screeniac have a really cool thing going. They do short screencasts of different online tools and they came across RotaBoard the other day. Click the image to see the 3 minute screencast:

Respect and thumbs up from Arb Design to Screeniac, thanks!

Kon’nitiha friends

Michael — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 17:11:32 +0000

So the first site to pick up RotaBoard was from Japan. It gave our site it’s first big spike in visitors and users. We hadn’t really thought about it beforehand but it seems like the system is working fine with Japanese characters.

The Japanese tech site 100 shiki made a post about us and within the next two days we got around 3000 visitors from east asia. Read their review of RotaBoard here.

I gave up pretty quickly and my attempts of using online translation services didn’t help me understand what they writting about us. Luckily enough Katsumi was kind enough to translate it for us – Thanks, Kat!

You know the shift schedule charts that say who is doing what and display your work schedule.

Is there any web based shift schedule program that does that? There is Rota Board! It is AJAX based and you can easily create a shift schedule.

These kind of features are available in regular online calendars, however, they usually have unnecessary features and are not simple enough.

It’s time for people to value simplicity and the benefits of using software that serves one purpose instead of using software that claims it can do anything. People want customized, small software that serves their individual needs.

Their comments: Looking at Rota Board, it seems there are still many convenient features missing.

We have been testing RotaBoard with English and Danish caracters and it works fine but if you use the system with your native keys and experience problems let us know.