What's new

Introducing the Produce8 Desktop Extension for Windows and MacOS.

A Desktop Extension for All of the Rest of Your Apps!

Boom! We have now launched a desktop extension for users that want to subscribe to their app ‘views’ on their local machines. We currently offer support for MacOS and Windows. The desktop extension is being released in ‘beta’ and we are looking forward to your feedback on design and usability.

Free Account Sign Up is Now Available!

Big news! We have now launched the free version of Produce8. Please note, new features that have not received sufficient feedback from end-users, or where design is still being refined, may display a ‘beta’ tag.

Free Account License Limits

We have set the license limits for free accounts at five users, one shared (team) workspace, ten apps and up to three weeks of data history. We have also released the ConnectWise PSA integration in beta and it will be available to IT Service Providers for free as long as it is in beta. Please contact success to get the CW license added to your free account. Also reach out should you like to request more users or apps added to your account between now and the launch of our paid version.

Our Support Desk is Now Live!

We now offer both live and self-serve support. Submit a request via the Contact Support link in the app to log an issue, ask a question, request a feature, or deliver some feedback. We're typically online Monday-Friday between 8am-4pm Pacific time and aim to get back to you in less than 1 business day.

You can also access the self-serve knowledge base on our Help Center 24/7. We also have opened up a feature request form on the Produce8 website.

In addition, we welcome you to connect with us and other Produce8 customers on the Produce8 Customer Community on Slack. Request access by emailing us at support@produce8.com.

Desktop Extension for Windows and MacOS ‘Beta’!

We know that desktop-native apps represent 25-75% of our customers’ workloads, so as you add new desktop app subscriptions you can expect to see a pretty significant uptick in the data flowing into your team and private feeds.

We will now display the new desktop app subscription ‘view’ type when users add, create and remove subscriptions from their workspaces. We will also combine desktop and browser based views into single metrics to help customers understand time spent in each app.

App creation is a little different than with browser based apps, as the service that users subscribe to will have a different name depending on OS release number and app vendor.

Over the Air Automatic Updates for the Desktop Extension

Updates to the desktop extensions will happen automatically ‘over the air’ so users should not have to maintain them. They will still be required to authenticate against them to build and maintain the connection between their desktop machines and their instance of Produce8.

Offline Data Synching

The desktop extension also offers offline logging, so if you are working away on your machine and lose connection to the Internet, or have unplugged intentionally, we can still synch your activity upon reconnection.

Desktop Extension App Catalog

As alluded to previously, creation, sharing and use of app subscriptions is a little different on the desktop. We have decided to offer an app catalog so that users don’t have to do the work of determining what the app service is called on their machine. We intend to add to and improve this feature over time and are certainly looking for user input.

Desktop App Discovery

If you don’t see the desktop app subscription you want in our catalog, you can use our discovery feature to listen in and list the apps you have recently used. You can then select the ones you want to add to your account.

This release will allow our users to have their own Private workspaces.

This release will empower our users to have their own private workspace. They can add apps that interests them, isn’t full of activities of team members, and whose data won’t appear in any other activity stream.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS:

• Every user will get a private workspace.
• Activities, Timeline, Metrics and App Subscriptions data will be available under your workspace.
• This data is exclusive to the user and will not be shared with anyone.
• The Private workspace tab is available on the homepage, right next to home.

Private workspace of user

This is the most significant release yet for Produce8. It includes a significant redesign of the application’s architecture to allow it to be more performant under complex subscription, authorization, and event filtration.

Enhanced personal activity feed detail

You can now see the exact app URL you visited for each event that appears in your timeline. You cannot see this same detail for other users. This is one of the first new ‘personalization’ features we plan to roll out.

You can see the exact URL you visited in an app. Others can't.

Personal subscriptions ‘for my eyes only’

Users have the option to create subscriptions to apps that only they are interested in keeping track of. Events will display in their feed but not in their teams’.

When creating new subscriptions, you can choose to be the only one to see it.

Sharing subscriptions between teams

If users want to add the same app subscription to more than one team, they can now add it to multiple teams. This avoids having to create multiple copies of the same subscription. Users can also view and add app subscriptions already used by other teams in their account from the Manage Apps page.

Using subscriptions other teams have created is faster than making a new one.

Account app metrics

Have you ever wondered how heavily a SaaS app you manage is being used? We now roll up anonymized metrics at the app level so users can see how teams are leveraging their tools. This is particularly helpful data for SaaS admins, so once you start adding subscriptions to apps, add the admins for those apps too. App ultilization is data that is pretty hard to come by.

How much is that app getting used across the company?

Redesigned timeline events and zoom in/out

Previously, we displayed each event in timelines as a bubble. We decided to use variable-width straight lines to help users better differentiate between events and also better reflect the timescale of the events.

Activities in the timeline view are now easier to differentiate from one another with the introduction of a zoomable and scrollable timeline.

Redesigned timelines with zoom in and out

Performance improvements

It now takes less time for your activity feeds and team metrics to be populated. We’ll continue to invest in UI performance improvements in successive releases.

Scalability improvements

The limit on the number of URL subscriptions a user can create has been increased. Previously, some users were blocked from creating additional subscriptions through the browser plugin or would stop receiving data entirely due to subscription quantity overwhelming caching in the extensions.

Improved account and user onboarding

The onboarding flow has been streamlined to get new accounts up and running quickly. We made changes for both the first user and subsequent invitees.

Set team role with invitations

Team owners can now set newly invited users to the desired team role when sending the invitation.

Browser extension design changes

Subscriptions now roll-up under apps. We also introduced a cleaner look and feel for the extension.

Subscription changes

Users now have the ability to choose what activity data they share with their Produce8 account on a per-app basis.

Notifications on account activity

An expanded array of actions that occur in the account (ex. inviting a user to a team, editing an app, etc.) will now be reported to relevant users through their notifications tray, personal activity feed, and emails.

Email preferences

We provide the option for users to opt in or out on particular email notification types.

Deprecated Feature - 'Activity this week' metric (temporary)

The graph that maps out each team members’ activity to the subscribed apps on a weekly basis is currently undergoing performance and design improvements.

Deprecated Feature - ConnectWise Manage integration (temporary)

Our beta integration with ConnectWise accounts is currently undergoing improvements.

Deprecated Feature - Microsoft Office 365 and Teams integrations (temporary)

Our beta integration with O365 is currently undergoing redesign.

Bug Fixes

Adjusting filters in quick succession sometimes causes the wrong activities to show up (PRO 1099)

An “apply this filter” button has been introduced when filtering on activities in the activity feeds. Now we do not update timelines and feeds in the UI until the filter is 'applied' or 'saved' by the user.

Activities aren't showing up in a logical location on the timeline (PRO 1058)

Activity placement in the timeline view is now more accurate.

Inaccurate activities with long durations are being generated

Long duration activities that would be generated due to automatic Chrome window refreshes will no longer occur.

Known Issues

Chrome profile switches on windows generating inaccurate long duration events

Switching between Chrome profiles on Microsoft Windows is generating web app activities with inaccurate durations. We are artificially truncating these activities’ durations to a maximum of 30 minutes while we look at a better solution for this edge case. We believe this is a cause for some of the inaccurate long-duration events experienced by some beta users.

This major release introduces data filtering, a new timeline view and a new metrics view. There is an update coming for a bug that's causing missing and shortened events.

New team timeline view

We've finally launched the side-by-side team timelines! We've been talking about this one for a while, but first had to build out some better filtering to make it possible.

This new way of viewing user timelines enables side-by-side comparisons to get a better sense of how your co-workers work and to help them understand the same thing about you.

TIP: Our team has found this very helpful for multiple time zones as it gives a sense of the hours in the day where collaboration can occur.

Metrics pie charts

This is a completely new view of app metrics. When we first started talking about what Produce8 metrics could be, this was the very first chicken scratch founders' wireframe.

From a team perspective, this is a great way to understand your most valuable apps. When looking at others or yourself, this helps you understand your power apps and where most of the day is spent.

Metrics applications summary dashboard

We've replaced the tiled app utilization metrics with a table view. It consumes less space in the UI and summarizes the data in a way that's easier for users to interpret.

You can expand and collapse each app to view the subscriptions that drive them.

Metrics trend charts

The first version of trend data is out and it looks slick. This offers a better way to visually display app usage over time. You can view the chart based on:

• time per day
• interactions per day, and
• average duration.

We're looking for feedback on this feature, so please reach out and comment. We're currently working on a lot of performance improvements to make rendering elements like this faster.

Timeline and activity stream filters

If your team is using a lot of apps and has a large number of subscriptions, you'll want to use the new filters to isolate the items you really want to see.

From either tab, select the filter button and de-select the items you don't want to see. You don't need to save as they are applied right away.

Filters can be also now be saved to persist your view preferences so that you can eliminate the noise from team subscriptions that you, personally, don't really care about. The next time you log in, the saved filters will still be applied.

Finally, filter out users if you want to remove them from the team view.

Metrics - filter selection for user or team

We introduced a drop-down to allow you to toggle the metrics for individual users or the whole team.

Prompt user to add a data source used by the team

We want to help users understand if and where their data is being shared and what to do if it isn't. We now show a prompt in the Team Data Sources for anyone who has an app to authorize.

High frequency of inaccurate or missing events (PRO 1069)

During production testing, we noticed a high-priority bug that has been causing events to go missing (around 15%) or to display shorter durations (similar % of events).

We have decided to roll back to a previous code version that will effectively address this issue in the short term, but will cap app events to 60 per user per hour. A longer-term fix is coming in the next month with a very significant architecture upgrade.

Some activities aren't showing up in a logical location on the timeline (PRO 1058)

For weekly views of a team or user's timeline, some activities aren't showing up in logical places on the timeline.

This minor release introduces a tab to help all users see which data sources each team subscribes to.

Allow all team users to see which data sources the team is subscribed to

Prior to this release, you needed access to the team settings page to view the team's subscriptions. This access requires team owner permission.

We now show all members of the team a list of the team's subscriptions. For each team member, we also identify whether or not they are connected to those.

A "Team Data Sources" tab has been added to the team page, next to the metrics tab.

This major release introduced:

• updates to the user timeline
• updates to metrics
• changes to licensing to add higher usage limits for free accounts
• changes to the app pages, and
• minor UX improvements.

The release also addressed a large number of outstanding bugs.

A page for individual users within the context of a team

When clicking on a team member, Produce8 was previously displaying all of that individual's data, regardless of whether the team was subscribed or not.

Now when you click on a team member in that context, we only display the individual's data that's shared with that team. So if you're on two or more teams with the same person, you'll see different data about that user in each team.

Account tier and feature licensing limits

We've introduced license limits in preparation for releasing both free and paid version of Produce8. You'll find the license information in the account page.

We've added notifications, errors and in-context messaging about license limits where appropriate.

App color picker

We introduced colors for each of your apps to make it easier to interpret timelines. Colors can be selected when creating or editing apps.

Redesigned app page

We added a completely new app page with redesigned tiles to make the best use of the space. We also added search so you don't create redundant apps, and we now sort them alphabetically.

Improved UX on app creation

We've had to do a better job of guiding users through the app creation process—no matter where they're starting from in their understanding of the product—as the concept of apps has evolved. Accordingly, we've put some work into two- and three-step app creation workflows.

Timeline is windowed (PRO-816, PRO-897)

This is a partial resolution to the issue that expanded the number of events that would display in the timeline to 1,000 events. A longer-term fix is coming in a future release.

We've also decided to separate the fetch of the timeline visual data from the details.

This release introduced some minor features and addressed minor bugs in the UI.

Team emojis

We've given users the option to choose an emoji to represent their team to help distinguish teams from one another.

Page requiring refresh for interaction

Each screen/page needs to be refreshed before any of the interactive elements on the screen are clickable. Buttons and text boxes aren't clickable until users refresh the page.

UI stutters when selecting 'Configuring Integrations' during onboarding

Various UI bugs on small resolution screen sizes.

This was a minor release addressing profile editing and bug fixes including the following:

• Verify ConnectWise subscription status
• Updating team name
• Email change confirmation

Use new ConnectWise subscription

The ability to verify if a ConnectWise connection is valid.

This was a minor release addressing some bug fixes, including an update to deactivating users.

This was a major release addressing some new features, bug fixes and improved integration health for ConnectWise Manage.

ConnectWise integration

Validate company ID, public and private keys for ConnectWise Manage integration and subscribe to events.

O365 integration

Users can connect to O365 to enable subscriptions. Subscriptions haven't yet been released, so there's currently no data displayed in the activity stream or timeline.

IT Glue integration

The initial integration to IT Glue was enabled to allow users to display daily user-activity metrics in Produce8.

Activity stream

The activity stream is the feed of user activity from applications in a chronological display. User actions, such as creates, updates and deletes are displayed.

Metrics

Simple tabular metrics are displayed in the user and team metrics tab.

Team role management

The ability for team owners to be able to assign roles to users, edit those roles and see those changes take effect.

Integration user mapping

User login error

Some users were experiencing login issues after account creation.

This is a minor release for bug fixes and back-end infrastructure. It doesn't include user-facing features.

This release has enabled ConnectWise ticket activities and metrics as well as IT Glue daily user-summaries.

Enable the activity stream for ConnectWise tickets

Support for ConnectWise tickets in the activity stream was delivered in a prior release. We've toggled on this feature and are now returning richer data

Enable metrics for ConnectWise ticket 'close' events

When tickets assigned to a user are closed, they'll show up in the metrics tab as tickets closed. Future releases will add more ConnectWise metrics.

Activity stream pagination to display up to 50 results at a time

When viewing the activity stream, we want to limit the requests to a reasonably small number and allow the users to load more results when they reach the bottom of that set.

Calendar and time ranges for event filtering

We wanted to make it easy for users to select specific dates and data ranges to filter results in the application.

IT Glue integration

The new version of our integration for IT Glue will pass through daily IT Glue summary metrics. It will show these in the metrics view of a Produce8 user.

The IT Glue metric tile will appear under the ConnectWise tickets closed metric. If there's no data available, it will appear as N/A. If there's an error, it will show up in red with an error icon.

Show activity time stamp in user's local time zone

Fix metrics error when no data is available

The V1.40 release is a minor update with changes to ConnectWise events and KPIs, but we're still hiding the goods for the time being.

Watch this space!

• The 'Activity Stream' for ConnectWise ticket events
• KPI for ConnctWise ticket close
• Minor UI updates

• Set maximum length of name
• Add loading animation on all transitions
• Invitation code can be verified from sign-up page
• Team editing menu closes when selecting an option
• Other minor fixes

This is the first release of Produce8 to display the activity stream feature, though the feature has been hidden in 1.3.0.

It will be enabled along with simple ConnectWise ticket KPIs in a future release.

• Store user theme preferences in AppSync
• 'Team Roles' - display and manage team roles
• 'Expiry on Invitations' - invitations to new team members will expire and can be re-sent.
• Allow users to select their identity in IT Glue
• 'Leave Team' 1.0

• Old invite expires gracefully when new invite has been sent
• Intro line of invite reminder email uses the same intro line as new-user invitation email
• Added padding to some UI elements
• Buttons have been moved to show up behind header when scrolling up
• Owner of a team not allowed to be remove unless another owner exists
• 'Change Email' communication now uses right wording
• App no longer gets stuck on loading screen after accepting invitation
• System admins won't see an error screen after accepting invitation
• Invited users now show up in 'Manage Account' view after invite
• Right wording is used when user is not a part of existing teams
• 'Verify My Code' option on sign up is functional
• Users are redirected to desired page on sign in

(This is not an exhaustive list, all bugs related to enabled features are priority)

This release is a precursor to launching the activity stream feature, which enabled a DB to be used to store user activities. Additionally, user enhancements around team management and invitations are included.

This release enables server-side rendering for improved user-experience and load time.

• Replace Production Warehouse bucket with aurora DB
• DB migrations (manual)
• Roles in team
• 'Resend Invitation'
• Work toggled off for
  • integrate ITG and CW data to warehouse
• Move web app to use SSR functionality

• Cannot invite team members in app
• New email not reflected after change email
• Non-ConnectWise user can't get past invitee onboarding
• Progress indicators on subscriptions

Produce8 helps teams improve performance by bringing together the activities taking place in their business applications into one place so everyone can see how the work is going.

You are part of an invitation-only evaluation of Produce8.

In the alpha version of Produce8, our focus is on getting one team set up, starting with an admin. A Service Delivery Manager will then be invited to enable the integration to ConnectWise and O365, sending invites to the team members and onboarding those new users into the app.

You won't see a lot of features or data in here yet and the application will appear quite raw from a design standpoint.

Thanks for taking part. We look forward to collecting your ideas for our next set of features.

• 'Create New Company Account'
• 'Select Team Name'
• 'Invite System Administrator'
• Connect O365 to get team members
• Connect ConnectWise and 'Select Subscriptions' - no data will be displayed
• 'Invite Team Members'
• 'Team Member Sign Up'