One of our driving ideas while designing Remindo was to give users a completely “own-able” Intranet.

For this we had introduced  personalized URL + company logo branding. I think that going by the sheer number of users that have grabbed this, we are on the right track. (Don’t agree? Tell us)

We also noticed that a whole bunch of people were interacting with clients and partners (as expected) so we felt that to truly make the experience seamless for clients it would be great if users could actually link to this personalized URL from their own company website. 

This means that you can create an easy-to-remember URL like: www.yourcompany.com/intranet or http://intranet.yourcompany.com and share it with your team and clients. When they put this URL in their browser they will be automatically taken to your intranet login page on Remindo. Not only will this carry your company logo prominently, it will also be secured by VeriSign SSL – same as 94% of Fortune 500 companies.

Here’ a general guideline on how to do this, but before you do it, ensure that you have already claimed a URL for your intranet on Remindo, something like https://yourcompany.remindo.com from the Intranet Manager tab from within Remindo

From this  point onwards, its just a two step process. The catch here is that the details of this process vary for every hosting provider and server combination. Your webmaster will know the exact details so its best to rope him in if you haven’t done this kind of thing before.

Step 1: Create a subdomain on your company website

Every domain registrar has its own way to do this. (see examples below) So if you create a subdomain called ‘intranet’ and a URL like intranet.yourcompany.com or a URL like www.yourcompany.com/intranet, a folder called ‘intranet’ will be created in your directory structure.

Step 2: Use a 301 redirect to tell your server to redirect all traffic from this subdomain to your company branded intranet login page on Remindo

The details will again vary depending on what server you are using. For Apache servers, this requires a change to be made to the .htaccess file.

1. Inside the folder that you created for your subdomain in step 1, create a simple text file called .htaccess

2. Add this line to the file: “Redirect 301 http://yourcompany.remindo.com”

Here’s an excellent detailed guide on this subject and here’s a shorter guide.

And that’s all there is to it, really.

Some examples of creating subdomains on specific providers:

GoDaddy (you can do both create and forward the subdomain by this process – no meddling with .htaccess)

1. Log in to your Account Manager.
2. In the My Products section, click Domain Manager.
3. Use the checkbox to select the domain for which you want to create a subdomain.
4. Click Forward, and then select Forward Subdomain.
5. In the Add subdomain field, enter the subdomain – for example, intranet.yourcompany.com
6. Select  http://
7. In the Forward this subdomain to field, enter yourcompany.remindo.com
8. Click OK.

Network Solutions – Creating a subdomain

1. Log into your account manager
2. Go to Web Hosting / Manage Web Hosting
3. Press Assign New button
4. Enter subdomain and select domain and the folder it points to
5. Press Select
6. Now make changes to .htaccess as described above

One last thing, while we are adding to this list everyday, we’ll appreciate if you help us make this post as comprehensive as possible by sharing any tips or tricks with us. Or if you face any difficulties, please drop us a line at remindo[at]remindo[dot]com and we’ll help set you up.

I’m getting these question a lot lately, so I thought I should clear the air.

1. How do I edit or delete tasks/milestones/files/projects/discussions?

Right now, you can only edit milestones. We are building the rest and you can expect to see some of them out by mid January, 2010.

2. So I can’t delete anything but there is still a free 3GB storage cap – is this your evil ploy to trap us into paying for the “premium” service?

Oh c’mon! You will not be charged for any of these additions. These features are not live yet because we prioritized development of other features (like personalized web address/company logo branding) over these. We thought that since there is no limit on the number of projects/files etc, users would not mind waiting for the delete features and no one fills up 3 GB that quickly anyway.

We goofed up in not communicating this clearly to you guys before. We’ll be working through the holidays to ensure that by the time you return from yours, these features will be up and running.

3. What is the schedule for this? I want to be sure before I bring on my clients and partners.

Fair enough. We always had the editing milestones feature, but we fixed the UI so its simpler to find now. By mid-Jan, we expect to bring editing and deleting of tasks so you can change them, prioritize them and track work better. Deletion of files, projects, discussions will follow – and so will a lot more cool stuff – all sourced from user feedback.

If you run out of the 3 GB space before we provide deletion, just let us know and we’ll increase your free storage. Cool?

4. But why not sooner? Editing/deleting seems like an obvious thing. How will I work without it?

Well, can you edit or delete anything in an email after you send it? The problem we face here is that Remindo publishes a lot of information and sends notifications for changes to involved parties, so its a bit more complicated and therefore development takes longer.

Don’t agree with this? or are we still going wrong somewhere? Tell us: remindo[at]remindo[dot]com

One of the biggest features (see tour!) that has gone live with the new Remindo 1.0 release is the power of branding your free intranet with your company logo and getting a custom URL for your business. Since both of these are sensitive for any business, we thought it would be a good idea to allow only one person in an intranet to be able to do this. We call this guy the ‘domain administrator’.

A domain administrator is a super-admin user that gets to:

• Upload and edit your company’s logo
• Get a custom URL for your free intranet like https://yourcompanyname.remindo.com
• Remove users from the intranet
• Make somebody else a domain administrator

Typically, the best person to have these privileges would be a C-level exec (like a CIO/CEO) or a system admin. Nevertheless, we let this decision lie with you and your team. You just need to place a request with the domain owner and upon his approval, you can become the administrator. There can only be one domain administrator at a time.

If you want even more personalization and want a URL like http://intranet.yourcompany.com or http://www.yourcompany.com/intranet  just get in touch with us here or simply email us at remindo[at]remindo[dot]com. We’d love to help you with the process.

This post is long overdue;

Internet Explorer 6 has given us hell and we know that we are not alone. There has been so much furore over IE6 that Microsoft had to explain their position on it. Nevertheless, there is a sizable 12.1% of internet users that still used IE6 in September, 2009.

So where does that leave us? Remindo is heavy on browsers and there is really no way for us to support something as antiquated as IE6. Thankfully, Google gave us some hope with Chrome Frame.

The way it works right now is that users will need to install the plugin and add a cf: in front of URL’s in the addressbar.

So if you are running IE6 and have chrome frame installed, you need to enter a URL like this:

cf:https://www.remindo.com.

This will make Remindo load within the chrome frame and bypass most restrictions that web developers hate about IE6.

Also, if you are feeling especially savvy, here’s a detailed guide by Google that talks about registry changes that you can do to load pages through chrome frame by default – and fix IE6 for good.

Of course, Chrome Frame right now is just a developers’ baby but we really, really hope that it catches on with the masses to solve the world’s IE6 problem!

As always, BarCamp delivered. Between Kunal (in-house PHP guru) and me, I think we were able to catch most of what was going on. There were excellent sessions on client side optimizations (we plan to give some ideas a spin soon), upcoming web standards and surprisingly numerous sessions on SEO.

The place was swimming with fanboys, evangelists, bloggers and barely-out-of-school hackers and of course, web developers and teams from indian startups. Here are some photos.There were puzzle sessions and some very informative stuff on how big brands are creating content exclusively for the web – we even got treated to some sneak peeks into content made specially for advertising festivals.

In short, a Sunday spent very, very well.

PS: We are so going to talk about Remindo in BarCamp 7!

One of the most common queries that we get about Remindo is about our pricing plans. So we’re setting the record straight.

Like so many SaaS and web based project management apps out there, it would make sense for us to go with what is described as freemium pricing. Enough has been written about it, but in 3 simple steps:

• Give out your service for free.
• Develop a user base.
• Offer premium value added service to people who wish to upgrade.

This has been hailed by some as a great business model for startups and also criticized by others. Anyone who provides a free service on the internet must have grappled with the question of what to give away for free and what to charge for. Here’s our take on this.

Remindo is a free and simple project management service and we have been growing (and retaining) a user base so step 1&2 are taken care of. It is step 3 that we have a fundamental problem with.

We dislike the idea of having a paid “enhanced” service vs a free basic service. Why? it implies that we are holding back on a part of our user base who have helped us get to step no 3. We don’t think its wrong (someone’s gotta pay the bills after all!) but we think it is avoidable. And we sure as hell will try!

Why do we feel this way? That’s because we have a whole bunch of users who work in small teams but have given us tremendous amounts of feedback/feature requests and bug reports (some even suggest fixes!). They have been patient when bugs have cropped up or their feature requests were not included (because they were not in sync with our broader plans). In short, they have helped us get where we are and we hope they will be with us when we go forward.

Fred Wilson wrote:

Free gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid

Sure, but we don’t want these guys to pay. Surely there has to be a way to give back to these wonderful folks, right? And we think that the least we can do is to let these guys use for free, what they have helped create.

So here’s the deal, Remindo will be free to use with its entire feature set (unlimited projects, unlimited users -and all the rest) available to people who are helping us build, test and improve Remindo. There will of course be a paid subscription model coming up soon, but not for this group of people.

How do you become part of this group? Just sign up, use Remindo for a project or two and start a conversation with us – let us know what you think, what you like, what you hate and what you wish we had.

PS: In fact, if you have your own service or product that you want us to have a look at or you just want to bounce some ideas off of us – because we have picked up a thing or two – we would be more than happy to pick your brains and let you pick ours! Just drop us a line.

When we started work on Remindo last year, we spent a lot of time on the design, because design is just so important to us. Yet, within a year and even before our 1.0 release we seem to have outgrown the design we started with. This happened mainly due to the way we found ourselves interacting with the design as our features came to life. We felt the design did not have enough space and gave the feel of a crowded screen.

The design you see here is based largely on internal and user feedback received. It gives a feeling of space, without compromising on convenient functionality and it’s more contemporary in the use of colors and graphics. We are now busy turning this design into code for the upcoming 1.0 release in October. We hope you like what you see and would love to hear your view.

We are very excited to release a great new way of getting deadlines done by giving users the ability to add & edit milestones & tasks by clicking on a date in the calendar. This easy to enter, easy to edit and easy to mark as complete, makes project management a breeze. Check out the video we’ve created to show you how to do this.

We have also added a new “Resource” view to the calendar, which gives you a Week by Week overview of who is working on what. This way you can see what your colleagues are working on this week, next week or any other week. This simple yet extremely powerful view will keep everyone in a team in sync with what their colleagues are doing; and will also help managers move things along. We’re betting you’ll be as excited about this as we are.

If that was not enough, this week we released 100s of small tweaks and large improvements to Remindo, from a Live Feed that brings everything to you, to graphical improvements, to a whole new intelligent alerts system, all to numerous to mention. A team of 12 engineers, 2 testers, 2 product designers, 2 artists and 2 content producers have worked 4 months on this! With this release, we are now officially in Beta.

We are now working hard to get Remindo to the big 1.0 release in October. This will include substantial improvements to the look and feel of Remindo, ensuring its a delight on the eyes; small tweaks like the ability to reply to messages from emails; and the ability to set-up a private URL to run Remindo in your company. Plus a few surprises.

We’d love to hear from you, do leave us comments and your thoughts.

When they log on, they’ll find that they already have IM set up, they’re already in their proper grouping on the contacts list, they already have everyone in the company on the list, and they even have non-company people like clients and partners on their contact list if those people have registered with the company on Remindo. And since Remindo is web-based, they didn’t have to load anything on their computer.

Social media platforms offer new ways to create a productive and organized office. The platforms, like Remindo.com, can be used to share files, delegate assignments, share milestones and keep track of teammates via a joined calendar. This helps eliminate time spent searching for people or material, and it keeps everyone connected through a shared community.

Krishna De, Founder and CEO at Biz Growth News, says “I’ve found deploying social media platforms in my own business and with organizations I work with has enhanced productivity.”

Using social media platforms are also a way for employees to get to know one other better. Even though they may share the office and talk over coffee, they do not necessarily know each other. But add in a platform where employees can communicate instantly, and they are now more free to build closer relationships. A tight organization where everyone knows one another will work better together and feel comfortable around each other.

When you are organized it is also easier to let your work force grow. New employees can easily catch up by logging on to the platform where they gain access to all the shared material, reducing the need for introductions and educations. And they can also access and read about previous project and gain understanding about company. They know whom they represent before starting their first assignment.

Another benefit with social media platforms is that they can be accessed from anywhere. Even if you go on a business trip, you can still access the company network and files. Maybe that will help close a few sales that you otherwise would not have gotten. Or, if you are using contract employees, you can engage them in conversations and groups that they would otherwise have a hard time joining.

So, if social productivity platforms bring all these advantages, why haven’t they been adopted more?

Many companies use the excuse that it will take too much time exporting all their work from current storage. This is not a very legitimate excuse, however, since there is no real need to move all storage at once. It is best to transfer the files gradually anyway.

Another reason seems to be that they are afraid of the security – or lack thereof. Most people do all their banking online and aren’t worried, so your files should be as safe. If you trust you dollars online, why not your intellectual property?

Finally, there’s cost. Platforms cost money, right? Well, in the modern SAAS and cloud-computing environment, this isn’t always the case. Platforms like Remindo.com are actually free for most users and uses, so there’s really no excuse to use budget as a deciding factor.

Listen: Now is the time. And you have a choice. Either quit making excuses and let your company evolve, or don’t take action and let your employees continue to chat around the water cooler.

Fortune favors the bold, someone once said. Are you bold?

Here at Remindo.com, we’ve recently launched a bunch of new features that we think really help businesses be more productive and organized. Check it out now it’s FREE @ http://www.remindo.com/