Planbox is proud to announce the release of a brand new feature: GitHub integration.
This feature lets you integrate Planbox with source control tools, and allows you to interconnect them through the use of issues.
With the GitHub integration you can now:
You can check out the documentation, and download our Chrome plugin.
Here is a preview of the feature:
Zendesk has done major changes in the last few months to their app, including the way they integrate with other apps. In consequence, we’ve updated and improved the Planbox integration with Zendesk, so that you can seamlessly use both applications together.
The old Planbox integration (known as the Planbox Widget) will continue to work in the Classic version of Zendesk, until Zendesk stops supporting its classic version. However, on the Planbox side, we’ve stopped updating the old widget, since we’ve launched the new Planbox App in the new Zendesk.
Once you switch to the new Zendesk, all your tickets previously linked with Planbox items will continue to function normally. no worries! So why wait? Switch to the new Zendesk now to starting using the integration with all the new functionalities.
If you are new to Zendesk, you will first need to create a Zendesk account for your organization. Once logged into your Zendesk account, you can install the Planbox app from the Zendesk Apps Marketplace located in the Manage Cog.
From your Planbox account, you will need to go to your initiative’s Manage Page. Under the Features section, make sure that you have the Zendesk integration enabled.
For detailed instructions, please consult the Zendesk Integration Support section.
Making sure that your customers get the best of your attention will help you create a delightful experience for them with your company. Zendesk is a online help desk application that will help you manage all that by shortening your response time, automating your workflows and providing you with reports.
Zendesk had already received a lot of love for their classic version, but last year, they made their application even more awesome by redesigning its interface. According to them, here’s why you should love the new Zendesk even more. It has:
If you are still using the classic version of Zendesk, you should seriously consider switching to their new version to benefit from the improved functionalities. If you are not convinced, read their FAQ here.
The redesigned Zendesk business integrations platform is where Planbox comes in. Whether you mainly work in Planbox or in Zendesk, with the integration, you can now manage your customers and your projects together.
If you used the old Planbox widget in the classic Zendesk, once you switch to the new interface, be sure to check out the new Planbox integration with Zendesk for even more functionalities. It is now available in the Zendesk app marketplace.
If you’re new to all this, simply activate the Zendesk integration with Planbox to start creating Planbox items from Zendesk tickets.
The 4th edition of Agile Tour Montreal is coming up this weekend. As a member of the agile community in Montreal, Planbox is proudly supporting this annual event to learn and to share knowledge about agile methodologies.
Agile Tour is a series of non-profit events that is held around the world. Some recent Agile Tours happened in Lausanne (Switzerland), Guangzhou (China), Toulouse (France), Chennai (India), and much more. To see when an Agile Tour is coming to a city near you, visit their website.
Our team is excited the various conferences; we’re especially looking forward to the 2 keynote presentations by Philippe Kruchten and Rémi Tremblay.
Philippe Kruchten’s presentation, titled “Games Software Folks Play”, will address how knowledge and critical thinking will allow people to make wise decisions, and how political games within organizations is nuisance to the process.
Rémi Tremblay’s presentation, titled “Peace and performance”, is about finding a balance between inner peace and performance. He will take us on a journey to explore our inner self, and to reflect upon 3 great human qualities: bravery, modesty and love.
The Planbox team will be at the event filming and interviewing; if you’ll be there, please don’t be shy and come say hi to us!
To the rest of you, do you have questions you would like to ask guest speakers? Let us know in the comments below and we’ll go interview them for you.
XLN Business Services, the small business specialist from the UK, recently listed 20 of the best apps for streamlining operations. Planbox is honored to be featured in the project management category. Check out their beautiful infographic to discover even more apps in various categories, such as accounting and recruitment.
With many businesses feeling the pinch, XLN Business Services has listed 20 of best apps to streamline operations. View more details here
On Tuesday, I went to the 24th monthly meeting of JS-Montreal, which took place at CakeMail’s office. There were around 20 people in the room. Having previously attended HelsinkiJS in Finland, I was expecting to greet a similar crowd of developers with many years of experience under their belts. To my great surprise, I had the chance to meet many young developers like myself at JS-Montreal. In fact, for a good third of the attendees, it was their first time assisting the JS-Montreal monthly meetup. To me, it highlights the dynamism of Montreal’s JavaScript community, and the attractiveness of the language.
Alex Seville, developer at Nurun, did a presentation on Blanket.JS.
There were two presentations: one by Alex Seville about Blanket.JS, and the other by Olafur Arason about Enyo 2.0.
Blanket.JS is a code coverage library working on both the browser and Node.js. It is pluggable into unit Mocha or QUnit. Enyo 2.0 is a lightweight user interface library sponsored by HP. It works on normal screens, mobiles, and tablets. It brings an interesting concept of a component based architecture. These tools may not even meet your stability requirements, or they may still be too underground for serious adoption currently; but, they still bring a fresh breath of innovation to the JavaScript world.
Question for you:
Have you heard of Blanket.JS or of Enyo.JS before? Do you know some web sites that make heavy use of either one? Please share with us in the comments below.
| This article originally appeared on Leading Agile and has been republished with permission. It was written by Derek Huether on Tuesday, 28 August 2012 10:41 AM.
About Derek Huether
|
Regardless of where I coach or teach, there is always someone who approaches me and says something like, “Agile is great for software projects but what about projects that aren’t software related?” When asked the question, I usually give examples like a U.S. Marine fire team or air crew or a home construction site. (I’ll save those stories for another time). I now have a new story to tell about a cross-functional, highly collaborative team, which competed for the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize.
While I was at Agile 2012, I met Joe Justice of Team WIKISPEED and had a chance to actually touch a car that was designed and built using Agile methods. (see cool photo enclosed)
Here is some back story from a 2011 press release: Based in Seattle and led by Joe Justice, WIKISPEED is a collaborative team of over 50 experts and volunteers dedicated to offering ultra-efficient, ultra low-cost, mass-production road-legal vehicles. In 2010 the team’s SGT01 prototype placed in the top 10 in their class out of 136 cars overall in the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize.
Joe was able to build his first functional prototype in just three months. The car that competed in the X Prize got 114 MPG (Highway). Compare that to the Toyota Prius which currently gets 51 MPG (Highway) and was introduced in 1995. The reason auto manufacturers are so slow to “better” their products is because change is very expensive for them. It is not uncommon for auto manufacturers to operate on 10 to 25 year development cycles. Before Object-oriented programming methods were introduced, software teams used to operate much the same way.
By modularizing how we build software, we’re able to shorten our development cycles down to days. By shortening our development cycles down to days, we give ourselves the opportunity to get feedback from our customers and create things that they really want, not things that we think they want. We save ourselves and our organizations countless dollars in wasted development, due to waiting too long to get feedback from our customers or by operating in functional silos. My breaking our teams down into small, cross-functional, empowered teams, we shorted feedback cycles as much as we can.
Being Joe is a client facing software consultant, building Agile teams and practices, why would he limit the benefits of Agile to just his customers? Joe and his team have a car that has a development cycle of seven days. They do this by modularizing the car. They can switch the gasoline engine to an electric one in about the same time it takes to change a tire. They could change the car body from a convertible to a pickup truck. All of this allows them to make changes and develop quickly.
The car is safe (passes road safety standards), because Team WIKISPEED developed safety tests before building the actual parts. This helps them lower waste (Lean). Next time you say you can’t afford to do test-driven development, think about that. They do all of their work in pairs, avoiding time training that is not productive. (XP Practices) Again, the next time you say you cannot afford to pair people, think about that. Pairing also helps lower the need for most types of documentation. If everyone has a shared understanding, you have less need for it. They visualize their workflow to help identify hidden delays and deliver something every seven days (Scrum).
So, do you still think Agile is only for software projects? The fact that they use 7 days sprints on hardware, when I hear people say they can’t do anything less than 30-days on software, just goes to show you where there is the will there is a way.
Join us for a free live webinar on agile adoption. Based on their recently published study on product team development, Greg Geracie, President of Actuation Consulting and author of Take Charge of Product Management, and Steven Starke, author of S.T.O.P The Project Management Survival Plan, will explore with you the recent trends of agile methodologies adoption in organizations.
This webinar will cover:
If you have questions for Greg and Steven, feel free to send them to us in advance to increase your chance of getting answers in the live Questions & Answers period at the end of the webinar. Be sure to follow #AgileAdoption on Twitter, on October 11 at 12 PM EDT!
Back in August, we threw a contest to give out three 10-users Planbox accounts, free for life, to 3 lucky winners. Yes, that’s right. FOR LIFE! To enter the draw, all you had to do was participate in Planbox’s social media channels. To not miss out on future cool contests, like us Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
Congratulations to our 3 lucky winners:
Hector Rios
Tia Whitaker
J. Schricker
If you lucked out on this contest, don’t worry! We’re cooking up a sweet Fall 2012 deal for you guys. Stay tuned!
But… if you’re a startup, we’ve always got sweet deals for you! Tell us more about your startup and see how we can help you.
Planbox has been growing a lot in the past few months not only with the many new features we’ve released, but also with a constantly growing community of users! To accommodate to all this progress, we are dedicating a bit of time this weekend to make a few major improvements to our infrastructure.
These upgrades will be done in the back-end of Planbox, so you won’t really notice any differences. But! We like to keep you in the loop, so here’s in a nutshell what will happen. To make data security and redundancy even stronge,r and to continue with the reliability of our systems, we are upgrading software and hardware.
For all this to happen, please note that Planbox will not be available this coming Saturday night for up to 1 hour:
Saturday September 1st, 2012
from 9 PM to 10 PM Eastern Daylight Time
