TeamLab: the history of one startup project

7th day of the 7th month of this year, 7 pm. It was on this magical date that the release of the new version of the TeamLab project - www.teamlab.com was scheduled .

TeamLab is a system for project management and communication within the company. The primary goal of any startup is to create something meaningful. And even if the idea is not new, it can always be improved, thereby making the world a little better. And so we were eager to introduce something new, to present our vision of modern collaboration systems.

Did we manage to bring our own zest? - It is up to you, dear Khabrovites.

Background or what we should build our intranet portal.

In 2008, the company worked on successful and already profitable IT projects, as well as new ones that are still at the development and design stage. Naturally, the need arose regularly to discuss new ideas, share links to interesting web resources, document the development process, etc. It was decided to write a system that includes functionality for creating blogs, forums, polls, Wiki and, of course, photo albums (where without this;)) Since the system was written to fit your needs, it took root among the employees very quickly. This was followed by a completely understandable desire to share the project with the public: if we like the portal so much, why can't someone else like it? And this desire was realized. At the end of 2009, a platform distribution called TeamLab was released.

Sociality is great! But what about project management?

The distribution package was downloaded, installed, but not used ... Probably blogs, forums and photo galleries were not quite what most users needed. Communication is communication, but projects are still more important. It is necessary to distribute tasks, monitor their progress, share files, create reports. The need for a project management tool has matured in our company, so the rejection of the community option only accelerated the development of new functionality. And so, this summer a new version of TeamLab was released. I will not describe in detail all of his tools, since they are quite standard. Tasks, milestones, discussions, files, reports, online chat - most of the services similar to ours provide similar functionality. The only difference is how this functionality is implemented, in the convenience and usability of the interface. As the saying goes,

Moving to Amazon Clouds

By that time, we had also joined Amazon Web Services and moved our corporate portal to Amazon servers. Accordingly, they began to offer our users not the distribution kit, but the SaaS version. In addition, we released the portal image (AMI) for Amazon EC2 . Thus, users who already have an AWS account can use this alternative and work with TeamLab on their own virtual server. SaaS service , like AMI , is provided free of charge without any restrictions.

Open-source: if you share, so truly

We also made TeamLab source code publicly available on SourceForge. Yes, yes, we are developers who have opened the source code of their product. It was not so easy to decide on this. But how else could you draw the attention of colleagues to the new service?

With TeamLab code, you can do everything that fits into the framework of the GPLv3 license. First of all, of course, you can compile the code and install the portal on your own server. If you wish, you can also remake for yourself: to remove something, to fix something, - in general, it is convenient to use. Before you follow this linkand download the source, I’ll say a few words about the technologies used. TeamLab is written in ASP.NET and works with MySQL and SQLite databases. Of course, this is a kind of minus, since the vast majority have Linux hosting. It just so happened, we specialize in providing, and there is nothing we can do about it. There is good news, though. Next year we plan to port the project to Mono.

What is the result?

The new version of TeamLab found a warm response not only in the hearts of our company employees, but also for many other users. Less than a month after the launch of the service, as we noted the thousandth registered user. Today, TeamLab is often compared with the popular online service for project management (you know which one;)) The magic of three sevens, not otherwise :)

But seriously, the service is really functional and in its capabilities is not inferior to paid analogues. You can see for yourself by trying TeamLab in action.

To be continued…

We provide all TeamLab solutions for free. Anticipating possible questions, I’ll say right away that we are not altruists. And of course we are going to monetize our product in the future. In the meantime, we are preparing for the next release and are working on a new interesting functionality, which I will tell you about later.

Since now we are developing a service not only for ourselves, but also for our users, we will be very grateful for any of your feedback and suggestions for improving it. We will also be happy to chat with you on twitter @ teamlabdotcom or on the facebook fan page .