Stunf

Papyrs Interface updates

Diederik — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:16:37 +0000

Quick update, everybody!

Our old popup dialogs, although functional, weren’t exactly shiny. So we decided to give them a much needed face-lift:

Feedback Dialog

Feedback Dialog Before. Yikes!

Feedback Dialog After. Ahh… much better :)

Media Widget Dialog

Media Widget Dialog Before…

… and after

We changed over a dozen dialogs in total. The dialogs now also work much better on mobile devices (such as the iPad) and Papyrs now looks much better in Internet Explorer 9. And as always, more improvements to come.

Building a scalable real-time search architecture with Sphinx

Diederik — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:06:23 +0000

Intro

People store a lot of documents and other business knowledge on Papyrs and so we wanted to add search functionality so people could get to their documents more quickly. Here we’re going to give the technical explanation of how we got it all to work.

Much to our surprise we couldn’t find any package out there that met our (pretty basic) criteria. We were looking for:

really fast search (so results can be displayed as you type)
real-time indexing of new or changed documents (otherwise people who try our product for the first time won’t find the document they just created)
reliable unicode support (7 bits sure ain’t enough for everybody)
support for infix searches (important for reasons mentioned later)
an indexer and searcher that can scale relatively easily to multiple processes or servers when/if the need arises
stable performance (no segfaults please)
a search engine that lets us change the schema of the documents we’re indexing without breaking anything.
easy integration with a Python web app (using Django)

We looked at a number of search engines:

Lucence, Solr, Sphinx and PostgreSQL Full Text Search. We played with all of them but only Sphinx came close to meeting our criterea above. We’re pretty confident, looking back, that we made the right decision.

General introduction to Sphinx

Sphinx has two parts, an indexer and a search daemon. The search daemon listens for search queries such as “alpha & (delta | gamma)” and goes through the indexes for matches. The indexer reads data from a data source (relational database, XML pipe) and indexes it according to the document schema. When indexing has finished, it rotates (swaps) the index currently used by the search daemon with the new one. The old index is then deleted. This means (re)indexing and searching can happen in parrallel, and even on different physical machines if needed.

Implementation

We have different sorts of documents: Pages, Comments, Attached files, Profiles, and filled out Forms. These documents are non-uniform: different sorts of documents have different attributes. So we don’t want to hard-code the structure of the index in sphinx.conf. Instead we’ll use sphinx XML pipe functionality and generate the schema structure and data from the Django Model as needed. So for each Django Model we create a sphinx index. Then when a user searches we do a search for every document type and combine the results and display them to the user.

We connect Sphinx to Python with the Python library sphinxapi.py included in the Sphinx package. It’s a pretty straightforward mapping of API functions to Python methods. You can set the match mode, how the matches are sorted, which indexes to search through and so on. There are also a number of open source libraries that connect Django and Sphinx. We looked at Django-Sphinx but it hasn’t been maintained in the past couple of years and it doesn’t support XML based data sources (which we want to use). It instead generates a sphinx.conf file with the indexes and schema structures in there.

Generating XML data

So let’s illustrate how XML generation works using an example Comment model. We add a Sphinx metaclass for each Django Model we want to index.

The classes Attr and Field are simple wrapper classes that we use to generate the Sphinx schema from. They also make sure that when the XML data is generated that the data is of the correct type. Sphinx has a very fragile XML parser, so we have to make sure that boolean columns only contain boolean values, that everything is escaped properly and so on.

Using the SphinxSchema definition above we can easily generate the XML schema:

So with the combination of schema and a Django QuerySet we can now generate the XML data for sphinx to index. Pseudocode:

This works but we have to optimize: we don’t want to reindex everything when a single record changes. So we use two indexes for every document type: a main index and a delta index. The main index is the large index that contains everything that hasn’t been touched recently and the delta contains those documents that have been recently created, modified or deleted. The delta index is small and can be re-indexed frequently. The easiest way accomplish this is to give every model an “updated_at” timestamp, and every time a record is changed you update the timestamp.

Then you just partition the indexes into parts: the main index contains all records where [0 <= updated_at <= last_merge_time]. The delta contains all records where [last_merge_time < updated_at <= last_delta_time]. More partitions can be added if needed, but two indexes per document type will probably be good enough unless you have a huge database or documents change very frequently. Anyway, every time a user changes a document the indexer starts and re-indexes the all files that have been changed since last_merge_time and updates last_delta_time to the current time (technically, the time when it *started* delta-indexing, because that’s when the database transaction starts). See the illustration:

After an update the delta partition is completely re-indexed. Then the delta and main indexes are merged into one. During this time a few new documents arrive and the process starts anew.

So how do we start the indexer from django? Easy, we just touch(1) a file whenever a document is saved. Django has a post_save signal which we use to catch all save events. We check if the model that’s being saved has a SphinxRecord metaclass and if so, we wake the indexer. It’s the simplest solution we could think of :).

Abbreviated version of the daemon that spawns the indexer (we left out error checking, logging, etc):

It’s just busy waiting until a process touches the PID file, then starts the sphinx indexer. Note that because we spawn new processes we can easily change the python code for updating/merging without having to restart this daemon. Also note that when multiple people touch the pid file the indexer is still only started once. And this way we also know for sure that the delta index and merge processes will never run at the same time.

Let’s do a quick back of the envelope estimate: Delta indexing typically takes between 2 and 10 seconds, and if we merge least once every 500 delta indexes, then that’s 1 merge roughly every hour. We currently index only a couple million documents and the indexes are only a few gigabytes large. Merging a delta and a main index is essentially the merge step of the merge sort algorithm. The two indexes are just interleaved, so the merge step takes roughly the time needed to copy the files. Copying a few gigabytes worth of indexes every hour is absolutely fine from a performance point of view so this straightforward main+delta solution is good enough for our purposes. And yep, in practice the indexer is running pretty much all day and night, because people are adding documents to Papyrs all the time.

Ghosting

Ghosting is when you delete a document but it still shows up in the search results for a while after. Suppose the main index contains document ids {1, 2, 3} and delta is {4, 5}. Then you change the title of document 2 and as a result it goes to the delta index. So main: {1, 2, 3}, delta: {2, 4, 5}. When you search for the document’s new title it shows up exactly as expected. Because document 2 has the same primary key in the main and delta index Sphinx knows only to return the result from the delta index, so you don’t get duplicate results. Perfect. Now you delete document 2 and you’re left with: main: {1, 2, 3}, delta: {4, 5}. And when you search for the old document title it suddenly shows up, because the document is still in the main index. That’s called ghosting and we want to keep it from happening.

The solution: we give every document type an attribute is_deleted. We then search with a sphinx filter is_deleted=False. Sphinx doesn’t let us change fields (variable length text) but sphinx does allow us to update boolean values, integers and timestamps in a search index. So, whenever a document is modified we set is_deleted=True in the main index and in the delta index. This ensures that the old document doesn’t show up in the search results at all anymore. Then, a few seconds later the new delta index will be ready that contains the updated document.

Permissions

With Papyrs different people in a group have different permissions. So we have to make sure that we display documents to a user if and only if the user has sufficient permissions to at least view that document. So after Sphinx comes up with a list of documents that match what the user searched for, we simply filter out those documents that the user can’t access.

Indexing attachments

We index inside attachments, such as PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and so on. This means we have to extract the text content of these different document formats. For this we just use the packages out there: ps2text for PDF files, antiword for MS Word documents. However, many of these text extraction tools mangle the text somewhat. Newlines and punctuation go missing, lines are concatenated without spaces between them, and garbage characters end up in the middle of words. We clean up the output by simply removing all suspicious looking characters and stripping all HTML tags from it.

If all content is really clean then you rarely have to search for only part of a word. But when some of the content is a bit messy then infix search becomes really valuable. Half the spaces in a document may be missing and you’re still going to find matches with perfect accuracy.

Tips

make sure you bind the search daemon to localhost otherwise everybody can connect to it. If you have a dedicated sphinx server, set up an SSH tunnel (i.e. ssh -f -N remote_server -L[remote_port]:localhost:[local_port]) because sphinx doesn’t have any built-in authentication or encryption.
if sphinx segfaults for unclear reasons it’s probably because of the forking model you configured in sphinx.conf.
we tried Sphinx’ alpha real-time index support, but it was still very unstable (segfault gallore) and it doesn’t support infix searching. It’s in active development though, so that might be much better soon!
compile Sphinx from source with at least libexpat and iconv support.

Conclusion

We’ve had this setup in production for almost 3 months now and it all works works great. Searches typically take just a few milliseconds and new results are added to the index within 5 seconds on average. We’ve spent a lot of time to make sure that search “just works”. So we thought we might as well document what decisions we made and why. This is the document I wish existed when I started working on Papyrs search.

Phew, that’s it. This turned out a lot longer than I had anticipated, but as I’m proofreading this there isn’t much I can leave out. Thanks for reading this far. If you found this interesting, please spread the word or leave a comment!

PS: I could open up the source (it’s few hundred lines of Python) and throw it on github. I’d have to spend an afternoon refactoring it though, so let me know if you’re interested.

More Google Apps Integration

Diederik — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:33:36 +0000

Two weeks ago we added integration with Google Mail to easily handle workflows. Today we’re launching two new features for our Google Apps users: integration with Google Docs & Google Calendar!

Google Calendar Integration

First, Google Calendar support:

Google Calendar events on a Papyrs Page.

You can create as many Google Calendars as you need. You can create Calendars for upcoming milestones, meetings, travel schedule, and so forth. Then you can simply drag a Media Widget on a Papyrs page and pick the Google Calendar of your choosing. People you share the Papyrs page with will then be able to view the events on the calendar.

The old Google Calendar widget (which doesn’t work so well) is still available. It’s now called “Classic Calendar Widget”.

Tip: Papyrs + Thymer

As many of you know already, you can place your Thymer tasks and deadlines on a Google Calendar using iCal (read more). So the next logical step is to put Thymer deadlines and milestones on a Papyrs page. So now you can. Next to each Thymer calendar event you’ll find a small link directly back to the Thymer task. Pretty handy!

Google Docs Integration

Google has some great applications. An online word processor (Google Docs), an online presentation builder (Google Spreadsheets) and so on. And if you want to effectively work together with your colleagues it helps if you can keep related Google Files on a page. With the new Google Docs integration in Papyrs, files from Google Docs can now be added easily to a Papyrs page, just like any other attachment. Simply add an attachment and use the Google Apps tab, where you can browse or search for your Google documents you want to attach:

Browse Google Docs files.

You click on the files and you finally get a list on your page that looks like this:

Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations attached to a Papyrs Page.

This makes it easy to create pages to get an overview, organize, and discuss all relevant documents, whether you stored them on your PC, in Google Docs, or already have them on Papyrs. You can take advantage of these features as a Google Apps user or you can attach Google documents from your personal GMail account. Both works, so use whatever suits you best.

Reorder attachments

You can now change the order of attachments with drag and drop. Only a small change, but apparently something quite a few of you wanted!

Note for Google Apps users

The features outlined above won’t work until you grant Papyrs access to your Google Apps account. To grant Papyrs access navigate to
https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/YOURDOMAIN.COM/Dashboard
and then click on the Papyrs logo on the bottom of the page. Then, under Data access you’ll see an option to grant access to Papyrs.

If you have trouble getting these features to work, just drop us a line at team@stunf.com and we’ll figure out what’s wrong.

Also, Google Apps for Business is free for up to 10 users (Google Apps signup).

Little stuff

The Papyrs logo (or the Logo of your organization) in the upper left corner of every page is now clickable. It takes you back to your homepage.
Image Galleries now work better on mobile devices.
Attachment links are now clickable in the notification emails we send out.

More to come…?

We improved the integration of Papyrs with Google Apps by popular demand. So if you’d like to see even more Google Apps integration, let us know. Or maybe you have other ideas for Papyrs. Feature suggestions or perhaps you found a bug. Just shoot us an email.

We’ve been working hard on a lot of things we can’t reveal just yet. Some big, some small. More soon!

Manage your Form Workflows from your Inbox!

wim — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:44:23 +0000

Today we’re announcing more integration for Papyrs with Google Apps! (available for Papyrs for Google Apps users).

If you’re someone who needs to spend a lot of time in your Google Mail Inbox, you probably already use the Notifications in Papyrs to stay up to date of new page changes and form submissions.

Some updates might require you to take some action, especially when someone submits a new request that needs to be reviewed. To reduce the time you have to spend switching between apps, we’re now introducing a Papyrs Widget for Google Mail to help with that!

Everytime a form is submitted with a status field, and you’re an administrator for the form page, a widget automatically appears below your mail. Just by pressing a button, you can change the status of the form directly from your Inbox!

As an example, consider a form page in your Papyrs intranet for requesting Paid Time Off. When someone in your team submits a request, a widget is automatically shown below the notification email in Google Mail:

If we want to change status (e.g. we want to Approve the request), just select the new status and click Change Status. That’s it, the status of the form request will be updated, without having to leave your Inbox!

Here’s another example, for a form to submit new Client Project Proposals:

We hope you like the new feature, which is now available to all Papyrs for Google Apps users!

Note: if your Google Apps domain is already using Papyrs, your domain administrator needs to approve access to this new Papyrs feature on the Google Apps Control Panel first (http://www.google.com/a/).

We’ll be back with more news about further Google Apps integration, and other features, soon!

Want to read more about workflows? You can find more information in our documentation about Form Workflow options.

New Papyrs Feature: Custom Widgets

Diederik — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:00:49 +0000

Custom Widgets

We added this feature by popular request. Papyrs supports a lot of widgets out of the box but sometimes you want to add something to a page that suits your personal needs completely. This is where Custom Widgets come in. With Custom Widgets you can add pretty much any 3rd party widget to Papyrs. Social media widgets (for example: Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn), RSS news, polls, maps, and much more. The list is endless!

For most custom widgets, you can simply copy-paste the embed code from the 3rd party’s website into the Custom Widget in Papyrs. If you happen to know how to use some HTML code yourself, you can also use a Custom Widget to customize a Papyrs page even more, and add elements that look exactly the way you want to. Custom widgets can use any HTML or Javascript code, so custom widgets give you complete flexibility. This flexibility does not compromise the security of Papyrs, as we’ve made sure that custom widgets can be safely contained within a page.

So how do you add a custom widget? It’s easy:

Add a custom widget in 3 easy steps.

Below are some ideas of what you can use Custom Widgets for.

Examples

An RSS widget shows the news from the NYTimes (powered by webrss.com)

A poll widget from widgetbox.com

A basic table

Add a LinkedIn profile or company widget to a page

That’s it

We’ve also made a lot of changes behind the scenes and made Papyrs a bit faster. More news next week!

Papyrs Launches!

wim — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:00:51 +0000

After more than a year of developing, designing, discussing all the beta feedback with you (thanks everyone!), even more coffee and even shorter nights, we are thrilled to finally drop the beta label and announce the launch of Papyrs!

What is Papyrs?
Papyrs is a web application which anyone can use to build their own personalized intranet for their company or team. No technical knowledge is required: just use drag & drop. Nothing to host or to install. Super easy. You can create pages to share news, information, files, images, and more with your colleagues and clients. You can even add custom online forms, which you can use to collect data and process requests. Social features such as the activity stream help you to improve communication and work better together. With the powerful search bar you can find back all your information, discussions and documents instantly.

Since we started the beta in the summer of last year, we have added a lot of features and improvements (powerful instant search, activity stream, visual version history, updated design, Google Apps integration, just to name a few). As always we will continue to add more functionality, and we always appreciate your feedback! We really love working on this and we have big plans to take Papyrs further in the future!

Subscription Plans
With the end of the beta we’re also introducing the subscription plans today. We decided to keep it really simple: $5 (€4) per user per month, that’s it. No page, form, or file limit! People you invite via email to share a page, but are not in your team, do not count towards the number of users. For the very small teams or one man shops out there, we also have a Free plan for up to two users.
If you sign up within the next 7 days you’ll get a 10% life-time discount with the coupon LAUNCH10!

You can find updates information on Papyrs and the subscription plans at www.papyrs.com/signup/. The documentation and support pages are also updated.

What happens to us beta users?
You will receive an email today and a notice bar will be displayed in Papyrs. Your account will be converted to a free trial, so you will get an extra fully-featured 30 days to either pick a subscription or a Free account. As a thank you for all our beta users, if you subscribe within 7 days you get an extra beta discount on your Papyrs subscription – for life!

We hope you enjoy using Papyrs and we’ll keep you updated on this blog about the big plans we have in store for Papyrs in the future!

New Papyrs Feature: Show changes between versions of pages

Diederik — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 09:11:42 +0000

View changes between versions of pages

Today we added a feature to Papyrs that makes it really easy to see how a page has changed over time. It will show you a visual comparison that highlights exactly what has changed.

See at a glance which text has changed (click for a larger screenshot)

Deleted text is in red, newly added text in green. Changes to image galleries, forms, and other widgets are also highlighted for easy comparison.

Select which two versions you wish to compare

Compare pages with a click of a button. That’s it. Have a nice weekend everybody!

Search for Papyrs & more

Diederik — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:57:48 +0000

Today we’re launching a few new features for Papyrs. Let’s start with the biggest one:

Search

With Papyrs it is now possible to search within all your pages, comments, contacts and profiles, attachments, and submitted forms. Just start typing in the search bar and Papyrs returns the results nearly instantaneously. It has find-as-you-type. Never again waste more than a few seconds to find back that document, that attachment to a certain form, or a discussion with your co-worker. Of course Papyrs will only show items in the search results for which you have the necessary permissions.

Search your entrie Papyrs intranet in milliseconds: Papyrs finds your pages, comments, contacts, files, and submitted forms (click for larger screenshot)

Searches within attachments

Papyrs will also searche within attachments. You can find text contained in PDF files, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Do you want us to search within other types of documents as well? Just drop us a line at team@stunf.com and let us know.

Advanced Search

There are also a number of advanced search options:

Command Result

Keyword Finds all pages, files, etc, that contain that keyword.

Keyword AnotherKeyword Finds all pages, files, etc, that contain both keywords.

Keyword -AnotherKeyword Finds all pages, files, etc, that contain Keyword but not AnotherKeyword.

Keyword | Anotherkeyword Finds all pages, files, etc, that contain either of the keywords.

(One & Keyword) | Anotherkeyword Use braces for more complex queries…

“exact match” Use quotes to search for an exact sequence of keywords.

Prettier URLs

In the previous version of Papyrs links looked pretty complex. A typical page would have a link that looked like https://yoursite.papyrs.com/page/5441/This-is-title-of-the-page. Hard to remember and hard to type! Also, if you shared the page with others by email or if you made the page open to the public the link would change. It would start with https://yoursite-public instead). That just wasn’t very convenient, so we’ve changed it. Links to your papyrs pages now look like this: https://yoursite.papyrs.com/Your-Page. Simple and easy to type! If the page is shared or public, people you share the page with can access the page with the same link.

When you go to the document’s settings page you can change the location (URL):

Change the location of the page

Smaller changes

1. You can now share profile pages by email address and make profile pages public.

2. You can now link to conversations on pages and on the Activity Feed. Easy if you want to send a link to a conversation via Instant Message or by email.

Link to conversations on the Activity Feed

That’s it

We’re really thrilled to start the year with these new additions, and we think the Search is going to save everybody a lot of time! More new features coming soon!

New in Papyrs: Keep everybody on the same page with the Activity Stream

wim — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:09:17 +0000

Hi everyone,

Over the past few months we have been adding many new features to Papyrs. This week we launched a design update and the Activity Stream.

With a lot of different information going back and forth between team members, the Activity Stream is a great way to stay up to date with everything that’s happening in your team. You can find all the latest actions, post or view comments and status updates for everyone in your team or in a specific subgroup.

Streams have been an important part of many modern social networks, and are also becoming an important way to communicate within businesses and organizations. It’s an easy way to get your announcements or questions & answers out to entire teams, without spamming and cluttering their Inbox. This also makes it easier for other people to reply on activity items, participate in discussions and keep people up to date about their progress. Because inactive discussions automatically ‘sink’ to the bottom of the stream, the stream is good central place for both having active discussions as well as posting about updates (like micro blogging social networks).

Example of the Activity Stream (click for larger screenshot)

Because the Activity Stream is fully integrated with the other functionality in Papyrs, any updates to pages and forms are automatically posted to the stream, and visible only to people with permission to view this type of activity. For example, when Mary submits an Expense Reimbursement form and Mark from Accounting denies the request, it will be visible for her in the Activity Stream and she can directly access the form to add that missing receipt.

The Stream also supports sharing with and subscribing to items only within certain sub groups. It’s also possible to add a summary of recent activity to your pages using the Navigation widget, e.g. on your homepage. Finally, discussions on pages now also support replies on comments (threading), and new posts appear in the Stream as well.

UI Design Updates

Screenshot showing the new design – Editing a page

We also made some updates to the UI design of Papyrs, and added new buttons to the top of the page to quickly switch between the main parts of Papyrs (home page, page navigation, activity stream, people directory and settings).

We hope you like the new look and features!

Papyrs available in Google Apps Marketplace

wim — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 21:43:01 +0000

We’re glad to announce that Papyrs is also available in the Google Apps Marketplace! If you are a Google Apps user, you can now add Papyrs to your Google Apps domain directly from the marketplace.

With Papyrs you can easily build an intranet for your team using drag & drop, and use it to collaborate better with colleagues and clients. Easily create pages with rich notes, documents, images and much more to share all your information. Add custom online forms to collect data and process requests. It’s all very easy to use, so there’s no technical knowledge required!

Papyrs integrates seamlessly with Google Apps. After adding Papyrs you can:

Start using Papyrs with your existing Google account (Single Sign On); no extra log in or account required!

Navigate between Papyrs and your other Google apps using Google’s universal navigation.

Invite other users from your apps domain to start collaborating with Papyrs. Start sharing information and collecting data within minutes. (inviting users outside your domain is also supported!)

We’re happy to add Papyrs to the large family of useful apps in the Marketplace, and hope it helps Google Apps users to be even more productive. Already added Papyrs to your domain? As always, we’d love to hear what you think: comments, suggestions and questions are always welcome!

New Thymer feature – “In” box

wim — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 15:43:17 +0000

For people interested in the Getting Things Done (GTD) method, the In-box is probably already a familiar concept. The inbox is a place where you collect all your “stuff”: thoughts and tasks which need further processing.

When we designed Thymer, we made sure adding new items to your list is fast and easy. This also makes it easy to dump your thoughts onto your task list. Some of those are not actionable tasks yet. For example, you might have added some items you need more information about, forwarded some emails into your Thymer account, or entered items you don’t know yet when to do (if at all).

If you are used to getting things out of your head this way, you might have run into the problem where your Today section becomes cluttered with thoughts or non-actionable items. For our users who prefer to collect their stuff before organizing it further, we have added the Inbox feature to Thymer.

The Inbox works like any other separator (like Today or Week), which divide your task list into different sections. Once enabled, all items you add, through the Add bar or by email, are automatically added to the Inbox. Items with a deadline, however, are still automatically added to the corresponding date section of your task list. Like any other separator you can also collapse the Inbox section. This way, you can add as many thoughts and unorganized items without cluttering your schedule of actionable tasks.

Once you have collected “stuff” in the Inbox, you can process the items further. Either:

Do – GTD suggests to do tasks that take less than two minutes immediately

Defer – Drag your item somewhere on your schedule (e.g. Today, Monday, or Someday)

Delete – The easiest way to get rid of a task!

Delegate – Click the edit icon and re-assign the task to a team member

You can add the Inbox separator by clicking on the + icon on a separator, select the Inbox option in the menu, and click Apply (see the screenshots below).

We hope you find it useful!

Why we created Papyrs

wim — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:28:37 +0000

For those curious why we build Papyrs and not some other product, here’s our reasoning:

The problem

Collecting, sharing and finding back all your information is painful. Even with our little startup we already bumped into this problem. First we only had some notes with ideas (e.g. for new features), screenshots, drafts, discussions and design documents. Then, feedback from users, press clippings, etc. As we got more users we got more business data: instructions, receipts, invoices, that sort of thing. The more data we needed to share and keep track of, the more time it took to file them and find them back.

We figure every company must run into this problem, so we decided to check out the software packages out there.

Enter Wikis & Intranets

We tried some wiki-like software. Wikis can be light-weight but they don’t really fit our style of working. We don’t want to use those weird markup languages just to write a document. It’s too difficult to add a bunch of files or an image gallery. You spend too much time messing around with the Wiki itself and it’s all a huge distraction.

We tried some other apps that promise to address these problems but they turn out to be too limited in functionality or every task takes a dozen clicks.

Finally we tried some bigger intranet software. They offer all of the features we need (and then some), but unfortunately “enterprise” software takes ages to install and it costs and arm and a leg. Besides, because those enterprise solutions try to do everything they don’t do anything well. The user experience is lousy, and sometimes even requires programming to get something done! For software you need to use on a daily basis we want something that makes us happy using it.

Not only did we need a solution for ourselves, but we knew from experience other businesses and teams also waste time (and money) by inefficiently managing their information and documents. Not just documents but they also manually collect data in Excel (for example time sheets, customer surveys, expense reimbursements and leave of absence requests). Works fine for the first week, but as time passes those Excel files become more and more cluttered and unusable.

We couldn’t find any solution that would solve all these problems in a friendly manner and without requiring technical knowledge. This seemed like a perfect opportunity for us to build an app that would solve these problems for good!

Making Intranets cool again

When we see the word “intranet” big companies come to mind, armed with an army of consultants hired to install and customize the intranet. But after we put further thought into it we realized that an intranet is exactly what we were looking for after all: we want to build up a knowledge base, share documents, files, add forms, discuss ideas and collaborate with team members and clients. We just want it to be user friendly. No markup languages, no programming. Just drag & drop. That’s why we developed Papyrs.

We have been using Papyrs internally for the last couple of months and it has completely transformed the way we work. We get email updates whenever pages are updated, we can now find the information we’re looking for in seconds instead of minutes, we no longer have to email Word documents back and forth or copy/paste data in Excel, and we can access everything from anywhere. Our hope is that it’s going to have a similar positive effect on the companies of our customers. It’s going to be exciting!

Announcing our new product! — Papyrs

wim — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 21:17:12 +0000

Hi everyone, big news today for our little company!

For the last months we’ve been working very hard on the development of a new product and we’re happy to finally announce it today! Of course we’re working on the finishing touches, but we’re almost ready for the private beta. So what we’re showing today is a first glimpse of the new product. So, here goes:

An intranet to keep your business information organized.

At www.papyrs.com you can read all about Papyrs and sign up to receive a beta invite once we launch. We’re really curious about your feedback! (be honest :). If you have any questions or comments, feel free to shout out your thoughts on Twitter (@stunf) or in the comments below. We hope you find Papyrs interesting, and we look forward to the beta! We’ll keep you updated on any Papyrs news on this blog and via twitter.

Status & New Feature: File Attachments!

wim — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 20:38:16 +0000

It has been a while since our last blog post in June (!). So what have we been up to since then? First of all, we have been making a lot of changes ‘behind the scenes’. We have upgraded our server architecture, so we hope Thymer feels even snappier. We have also added a lot of small improvements and fixes, such as:

- Time Tracking on the Mobile Version
- Improved print view
- Small improvements to the web version to work better with the iPad
- New tag selection screen when editing a task
- Pagination for the activity feed
- Improvements to email notifications

Today we’re also releasing another feature we’ve been working on:

File Attachments

It’s now possible to share files in your team by attaching files to comments on tasks. See the following screenshots for an overview:

Add attachments to comments in the discussion on tasks.

Attachments also show up in the recent activity feed.

Just like creating new tasks and comments by sending an email to addtask@thymer.com, you can now also send file attachments directly to Thymer! Links to attachments will also show up in email notifications you receive from Thymer.

All existing accounts will receive some storage space for free:

Free accounts: 100MB
Professional: 512MB
Small Team: between 1 and 5 gigabyte
Business Team: between 5 and 15 gigabyte

You can find your storage quota and how much space you’ve used on the settings page.

Last, but not least…
Finally, we’re also working on a new product! We’re very excited about it and we’re going to make an announcement soon!

New reporting features

wim — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:35:30 +0000

In order to track the time and costs of projects and people, Reports can be created from change log entries at the Reports page. In the Create Report dialog, a project, a member from your team, and some additional options can be selected. The report then shows the changes made by that person in that project, during the selected date range. To make it even easier to find out how much time was spent where and by whom, we now introduce an additional reporting feature: grouping by projects or persons.

When creating a report for “All” projects, or “All” users, a new option appears: “Group by project”, or “Group by user”. For example, to see how much time Emily spent on which project in June, we can now select “Emily”, 6/1 through 6/30, “All” projects, and “Group by projects”. The report will still be grouped by date, but first by project, showing sub totals per project.

Example of a report of time spent by Peter in May&June. Grouped by project.

Extra notification, import and export options

wim — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:54:47 +0000

Some more small feature news today. If you’ve been using the Settings page recently you might have noticed some additional options. Here’s an overview of what’s new:

More notification settings
For those of you who like to receive email updates about changes and comments made by team members, you can enable email notifications under Settings > Email me at team activity. One option is to receive email for all updates. If you only want to track tasks you delegated to others, select “On, only for tasks I delegated to others”. A new option, “only for tasks for which I’m responsible” can be used to only get email notifications about your own tasks.

Export
Some users asked us if we could add an option to export the task list. This can be useful for various reasons, whether you want to have an offline copy or maybe keep old versions of your task list for administrative purposes. We now added this feature, which you can access under Settings > Account.

Import from external iCal feed
Another request was to make it easier to import tasks from other services. We now added preliminary support for importing tasks from services which offer iCal export, such as Remember the Milk. This option, too, can be found under Settings > Account.

What’s next
The last few weeks we’ve also been working on an API, which we plan to release soon. Stay tuned!

Planning and calendar improvements

Diederik — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:14:10 +0000

New: Start and end times for tasks

To give tasks a start and end time you can use tags like these:

Tag Effect

@2pm-4pm Creates a task that lasts from 2pm to 4pm, in your timezone.

@2pm Creates a task that starts at 2pm. Will show up on your calendar as a one hour event.

@16:00-17:30 You can also use a 24h clock

@8-11am Shorthand is allowed

If you want to specify the start and end time for a task you also have to give the task a due date. So “Attend sales seminar @4-6pm” will not work (4pm on what day?) but “Attend sales seminar @tomorrow @4-6pm” will work.
Calendar improvements

- The start and end times also show up on your calendar.
- You can now use “only show tasks with a deadline” to keep the clutter from your calendar

Now you can see when events start on your iPhone, and you can get alerts as well

Tip: Free SMS/text notifications

If you synchronize your Thymer appointments with Google Calendar you can get text notifications for free.

Google Calendar

SMS notifications have saved us on more than one occasion, and you can’t beat the price! Thanks Google!

Minor search improvements

A few of our users requested a few more special tags to make it easier to find their tasks, so now you can also use the following tags:

Tag Effect

@notags Find all tasks without tags

@noproject Find all tasks that are not part of a project

@nodue Tasks without a due date

@norepeat Tasks that do not recur

That’s it for today. More news coming soon!

Thymer for iPhone

Diederik — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:46:14 +0000

3 minute screencast

A quick 3 minute introduction to Thymer for the iPhone!

Project list

After you log in you get to the project tab. Here you can switch between accounts, select whose task list you want to view and navigate to the recent activity feed. At the very bottom you’ll find a search box, which works just like search in the regular version of Thymer.

Task Details

When you select a task you go to the task details tab. Here you can assign the task to somebody else, mark it complete, toggle flags (discuss/billable/important/waiting for) and add tags. Tags you’ve used before are recommended automatically to save you some typing. Add or remove tags with just a tap of your finger. At the bottom of the page you can discuss the task with your team members or add some notes for yourself.

Recent Activity Feed

Want to keep track of your team on the road? That’s where the Recent Activity Feed comes in. Here you can follow discussions, see which tasks have been completed and so on.

Offline Use (experimental)

When you’re not connected to the internet (or if you’re using an iPod touch) the web app will automatically start in offline mode. In Offline Mode you can access your tasks and projects (providing you’ve accessed them before) and check the recent activity feed. However, you cannot make changes to tasks, nor can you search for them.

How to get it

Go to http://m.thymer.com with your mobile browser and log in. Check the box “iPhone version” or “Android version” on the login page. For the best experience with the iPhone, add the app to your home screen after you’ve logged in. You can do this by clicking on the + icon on the bottom of the mobile Safari window. Then select “Add to Home Screen” to turn Thymer into a one-click app with support for offline use.

Short feature news: New add task menu

wim — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:37:04 +0000

Another small new feature today, a new menu for adding tasks.

One of Thymer’s main features is the ability to quickly add new data without having to go trough countless menus and confirmation buttons. That’s why tasks can be added by just typing in what comes up, like “do groceries @tomorrow @john”. All kinds of information can be entered this way: tags, projects, delegation, etc. If you don’t feel like typing or learning these shortcuts, that’s fine too. Although assigning tasks to projects and users without shortcuts was already possible, we’re now introducing a new task menu that brings all possible task options in one convenient option bar. This way you can set all the advanced options with just a few clicks.

You can find the menu by clicking Options -> Advanced Add. If you want to use this menu by default, go to Settings -> Lists & Menus and select “Show “Advanced Add” menu by default.”

The new project selection menu is now also available in the Edit menu.

Archive projects, iCal support, Task Colors & Project Titles

wim — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:37:21 +0000

Feature news! Today we’re releasing the following new features (available for all plans, paid and free):

Archive Projects

If a project is finished, on hold or rarely accessed, you can now archive the project and all its tasks. The most recent changes and reports will still be visible, but the project will no longer appear in your project list. As long as the project is archived, adding or editing tasks for this project is not possible. In case you have a limited projects plan: archived projects do not count against your total number of projects.

To restore the project, click + (Add Project) -> Show archived projects…

.. and select the project you wish to restore.

Task Colors

Like assigning colors to projects, it’s now also possible to assign colors to tasks. If you select a color for a task, the row in your task list will be highlighted with that color. This way you can mark special kinds of events and tasks.

Select a color from the Edit Dialog. To create a task with a color, use one of the following keywords: @colorgreen, @colorred, @colorblue, @colorcyan, @coloryellow.

Example of task with red highlighting

Project Titles

In Thymer, projects have a short name (‘project tag’), and a longer (optional) description. The short name is used to keep the project list and task list shorter, and to quickly add new tasks to a project by typing in the project tag. As the description can provide some important details to a project, this description is now shown when you hover over the project in the project bar.

iCalendar support

Viewing your Thymer task list with dates in your favorite calendar application is now possible! If you use calendar software with support for the iCal format (such as Google Calendar, Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook), you can subscribe to an iCal feed of your Thymer task list. You can either subscribe to an iCal feed of a specific project, or to the tasks of all projects. Select the project you wish to get an iCal feed for, and click Options -> Subscribe to iCal.

If you use week day sections in Thymer, tasks in your calendar will be shown on the day they are scheduled in Thymer. For all other date sections, tasks are shown according to their deadline. Tasks that aren’t scheduled on a specific date yet, or have no deadline, are excluded from the iCal feed.

iCal on the iPhone

and in Outlook

That’s it for now. Hope you enjoy these new features! More news next week!

Export of Reports (CSV, HTML & MoneyBird), Project bar update, New permission level

wim — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:19:53 +0000

Hi everyone, time for some more feature news! Last week we reported about improved time tracking & hourly rates. With those features, it’s possible to create reports that include – not only the spent time – but also the price, depending on the hourly rates. As the reports can now also be used for billing purposes, we’re now announcing a new feature that makes it easier to extract this data and use it for invoicing.

Export of Reports to Excel

Reports can now be exported to Excel, using either the CSV (Comma Separated Values) or HTML format. For our European users that write numbers like “1.000,50″, rather than “1,000.50″, we added the option ;CSV, which stands for Semicolon Separated Values (as the comma is used to decimal values).

Although CSV is the more traditional way of importing data into Excel, the advantage of HTML is that all character sets are supported. This means you shouldn’t have any problems with non-English languages.

To export, simply create or open a Report, click ‘Export’ and select the format. To import the file in Excel (or any other spreadsheet program), just click Open and select the file.

Note: in Business Teams, only people with the ‘Billing’ permission are allowed to Export reports.

New Export menu

Excel HTML output. Simply Open in Excel to import.

Export of Reports to MoneyBird

This feature is mainly for our Dutch users, that are using MoneyBird. MoneyBird is a nice web application from another Dutch company, for easily organizing, managing and sending invoices. You can now directly convert your Thymer Report into a MoneyBird invoice, simply by clicking ‘Export’ and selecting the ‘MoneyBird’ option. You will be forwarded to MoneyBird where you can login and authorize Thymer to create a new invoice for you.

An invoice in MoneyBird, as exported by Thymer

Updated ‘More..’ Projects Dialog

We also refreshed the design of the More projects dialog. As before, Thymer displays as many projects on top as fit on your screen. All other projects go in the “More” dropdown. You can turn on or off the dropdown in Settings -> Lists & Menus. Here you can also change the order of your projects, so that the projects you access most are always shown on top. Depending on how many projects you have, and the resolution of your screen, the More projects dialog now shows your projects in one, two or three columns. We hope this gives a much better overview. It also completely colors the project titles. To make it easier to select a project from the dropdown menu, you can use the full width of a project row to click on it.

Just a few more projects. Shown in one column.

Some more projects, in two column mode. With three columns, you can easily choose between 50 or more projects.

New permissions

We received some feedback of users who wanted to use Thymer as a tool for issue management. Some users should be allowed to report new issues, but not change their status and edit them. We therefore added a new permission level to projects, between “View & Comment” and “Full Access” – “View, Comment & Add”.

We hope you like the new additions!

New Features: Improved Time Tracking & Reports, Hourly Rates, Feed Summary

wim — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:39:17 +0000

More feature news! Today we are releasing quite a few new features.

Hourly Rates
When tracking time, it’s now possible to use hourly rates for billable tasks. You can create as many different rates as needed. When opening the time track pane, a drop down appears with the various rates (if the task is billable). It’s also possible to assign a default rate to a certain project. This rate will then be selected by default. As one of our goals is to keep Thymer as simple as possible, using hourly rates is entirely optional. If, on the other hand, you work a lot with billable tasks, we also made things a bit easier: you can now make projects billable by default. Every new task added to this project is made billable by default.

You can set Billing options for a project by clicking ‘More options’

The rates only specify the amount per hour, not the currency. A default can be set per project, as well as globablly. You can add as many different kinds of currencies as needed. A currency is simply a label, so if for some reason you find it convenient to use kilometers or miles as a currency, go ahead.

Set currency, default rate, and project billable flag.

Specify as many rates as needed.

We also introduced a new permission: Billing. Only users with the Billing permission can add, edit and remove hourly rates. Users without the permission can only select which rate to use for their time tracking entries, and they won’t be able to see the actual rates, only the descriptions. (Billing permission is always enabled for users with a Small Team or Professional account).

New Billing settings tab, accessible by users with Billing permission.

Improved Time Tracking
Besides selecting an hourly rate for billable changes, we introduced some other improvements to the time tracking dialog. Next to using a timer, or manually typing in the number of spent hours, it’s now possible to enter the amount of hours by selecting a begin and end time. “Previous entry” selects the end time of the previous change entry. Also new is the ability to toggle the billable flag from inside the time tracking pane. Furthermore, the timer can now be paused! If you click the ‘pause’ button under the timer, the timer is paused and the dialog is hidden. When you click the “play” button for this task again, the timer resumes. The timer is also automatically paused if you click the “play” button for another task. This way, if you’re working on a task, but you’re interrupted by another task, you can simply switch back and forth. Another new option is to track time for past dates, by using the new calendar control in the time track pane.

Improved Time Tracking: Rates, Pause/Resume Timer, Toggle Billable flag, Begin/end time.

New Reports

The reports feature has been updated to use the new hourly rates. Reports now show prices for billable tasks and projects. This way you can keep track of project budgets, or use it to bill clients or as a template for invoices. Reports created by users without the billing permission do not include the price, only the rate descriptions.

A report of different projects with different rates and currencies is also possible.

Feed Preview

To make it easier to keep track of recent changes by other team members, we introduced a Feed summary on the Task List page.

Other fixes and changes

- If you use the Notification Email feature, you’ll notice that we changed the format of these emails a bit. It shows more useful information in the subject line and name now, and you can jump right into comments.

- It’s now possible to collapse and expand the date separators of other team members (this will not affect their preferences)

- Some users reported problems with the project tabs under Webkit browsers (Safari / Chrome) under Snow Leopard. It showed some weird black lines, and only in these browsers and only in Snow Leopard. This was a really strange bug (a problem with the PNG image format). Thanks everyone for the feedback.

- Date separators now show both the begin and the end date of the date section.

- If no end date is selected for a Report, “Today” is used as default.

Hope you enjoy the new features. We’ll be back soon with more feature news!

2010

wim — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:31:24 +0000

It’s been a few weeks since our last post, as we’ve mainly been making some changes under the hood. Amongst the many small fixes, one of the changes you might notice most is that we optimized the search function. New tasks and changes are now searchable immediately.

Of course we’ve also been working on new features. Rather than looking back on last year, we’d like to give you a hint of some things to come in the first few months of 2010!

Improved Time Tracking & Billing

The time tracking control will make it even easier to keep track of your time: the timer can be paused, and resumed as you switch between tasks. We’re also adding support for (hourly) rates so you can use reports to keep track of your project budgets. We expect to launch this feature within the next few weeks.

iPhone version
We all want to access Thymer on the go, so an iPhone optimized version is in development.

Team improvements
Currently, two major improvements are planned. First of all, we’re going to add a way for people with professional accounts to work together. Secondly, we’re going to add an additional restricted user level. The users will have very limited rights and will not count as full team members (meaning they also won’t count for your team’s user limit). This account type can be used to invite clients to comment on and keep track of projects they are involved in.

API
We’re still working out the details but we’re quite excited about the possibilities of linking Thymer to other applications and vice versa.

.. and much more
We have many more plans and we’re really happy with the support so far. That’s why one of our activities this month was sending you a thank you!

Coffee, ink and cards

Pile 1 of many ;)
Happy holidays and a happy new year everybody!

New Feature: Improved Date Separators make planning easier

wim — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:15:51 +0000

We’re glad to announce a new feature today. A little while back we put up a poll to ask your opinion on what this feature should look like. The outcome was pretty clear, so we got to work. This feature will make it easier to create a more detailed schedule for your tasks, and allows you to focus on the most important parts on the list. It’s now available for all plans, free and paid.

Calendar meets task list
The poll question was about the order in which the date separators and tasks are shown. Should we first display the date separator, followed by the tasks planned for this day/period, or, should we leave the order untouched and first show the tasks and then the separator. It turned out the majority preferred the date to be displayed first, like a regular calendar.

More date separators (Weekdays, Within two weeks, Month and Someday)
Before there were two “date separators” – Today & This Week – that could be dragged up and down, thereby creating a schedule for your tasks. We are now adding the option to add more of these separators: one for every day of the week, within two weeks, within 30 days and “someday”. This will allow you to create a more detailed planning for the upcoming week. It also enables you to put tasks that require no immediate action further back, into the new Someday section. Which separators you want to show can be changed easily. If simply dividing your tasks between today, this week or someday is enough, and the rest just feels unnecessary to you, then you can leave your settings untouched. If you’d prefer to make a more detailed schedule, you can simply select the separators you want to add, using the new Add Date Separator menu.

Collapse and expand sections

Usually not all tasks require immediate action. Some might have a deadline, but not until a few weeks from now, so the tasks are not of immediate concern. You’ll probably also have a bunch of tasks that you want to do eventually, but you have no idea when. You can now place those tasks in the “someday” section and forget about them. In that case you may want to a weekly review of those tasks, and see which have become more important or urgent, and drag those up.

Most Thymer users add more tasks to Thymer than they complete (and we’re no exception), so every week the task list grows longer and longer. That’s why we’re now introducing an option to collapse and expand the different date sections on your task list, as marked by the date separators. If you click on the black triangle next to Today, Someday or any other separator, that section will be collapsed. Just toggle the triangle to show that part of your list again. As before, tasks with due dates are moved up to their corresponding date section every night, so even if you leave your Someday section collapsed, the tasks that are due soon will eventually float to the top of your list. Thymer will remember which parts of the list you’ve collapsed.

@someday
To quickly add a task to the bottom of the list, we already introduced the @last tag before (e.g “Some task @last”). We’re now introducing the @someday tag. It is similar to @last, but instead of adding the task to the bottom of the list, it will put the task at the top of your Someday section.

What’s next
As announced earlier, we’re currently finishing a first iPhone version of Thymer. We’re also working on many new other features, ranging from managing project time budgets to collaborating with clients, but more about that later. For now, hope you’ll enjoy the new features and have a nice weekend.

New feature design – your opinion needed!

wim — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:09:20 +0000

Today we’re announcing improved date separators for Thymer. Every day when we work on Thymer we make dozens of small decisions about the interface. Where to place buttons, what colors to pick, and much more. Every once in a while we have to make bigger decisions about the interface, decisions that have no obvious “right” solution. So today we thought: why not ask our users what they think?

So that’s what this blog post is going to be about. First we explain what the new feature is about, and then we’d like to hear which of the alternatives you like best.

The Feature
To plan your tasks, two date separators are currently visible in your task list: “Today” and “Week”. Right now, all tasks placed above the today separator are today’s work, all tasks placed between the Today and Week separators are due this week, and all tasks below the week separator are tasks you want to do eventually.

We’re now going to add more separators: one for every day of the week, one for tasks within 14 days, within 30 days and “Someday” (something GTD’ers should be familiar with). You can turn these separators on and off at any time in a new “Edit Date Separators” pane. Also new is the ability to collapse or expand sections of your task list. For example, collapsing the Someday section keeps your list short and lets you focus on your next actions.

Task list with an additional Someday separator.

The same task list, with the Someday section collapsed.

The Alternatives
So, what about the alternatives? Currently, the tasks planned for a certain date appear above the separator (e.g. all tasks planned for today appear above the “Today” pointer, all tasks planned for Tuesday above the Tuesday pointer, etc.). If a section is collapsed, the items above are hidden. The options:

Alternative 1

Tasks planned for a certain date are above the separator. “Someday” will always be at the bottom of the list. Clicking the up arrow collapses the tasks in the section right above the separator. This approach makes Thymer more like a timeline where the Today separator marks the end of the list of tasks you want to do today, and marks the start of the tasks you want to do the rest of the week.

Alternative 2

Tasks planned for a certain date are below the separator. “Today” will always be at the top of the list. An extra “Someday” separator will mark the end of the planning for this “Week”. Clicking the down arrow collapses the tasks below the separator. This approach makes Thymer more like a calendar, where you find the tasks you want to do today under Today, the tasks you want to do this week under the Week separator and so on.

So what do you think?

I strongly prefer tasks show above the separator (Alternative 1)
I slightly prefer tasks show above the separator (Alternative 1)
I strongly prefer tasks show below the separator (Alternative 2)
I slightly prefer tasks show below the separator (Alternative 2)
I don’t care

The easiest way to vote is to twitter us, email us or just leave a comment here: just send 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 to @stunf, team@stunf.com or post it as a comment below. Thanks!

If you want to explain why you think one solution is superior, or if you have a completely different idea, let us know!

Available soon – Let us know which you like best!
This feature should make organizing your tasks even easier, and close the gap between a calendar and a task list even further. Let us know what you think, and we’ll launch this soon! (available for all plans, free & paid)

Command	Result
Keyword	Finds all pages, files, etc, that contain that keyword.
Keyword AnotherKeyword	Finds all pages, files, etc, that contain both keywords.
Keyword -AnotherKeyword	Finds all pages, files, etc, that contain Keyword but not AnotherKeyword.
Keyword \| Anotherkeyword	Finds all pages, files, etc, that contain either of the keywords.
(One & Keyword) \| Anotherkeyword	Use braces for more complex queries…
“exact match”	Use quotes to search for an exact sequence of keywords.

Tag	Effect
@2pm-4pm	Creates a task that lasts from 2pm to 4pm, in your timezone.
@2pm	Creates a task that starts at 2pm. Will show up on your calendar as a one hour event.
@16:00-17:30	You can also use a 24h clock
@8-11am	Shorthand is allowed

Tag	Effect
@notags	Find all tasks without tags
@noproject	Find all tasks that are not part of a project
@nodue	Tasks without a due date
@norepeat	Tasks that do not recur