Last week I was interviewed by Ramon Ray, the editor for an excellent small business resource called SmallBizTechnology. While the interview was mostly about what business owners should look for when choosing a technology product, I managed to sneak in a couple of lines about some new features that we were building at Remindo 

I’m happy to announce that those features are now available and if you log in to your company intranet, here’s what you’ll find:

1. You can now delete milestones, task lists, tasks, comments and files. So if your intranet was getting too cluttered, you can now clean up. And if this IKEA survey is to be believed, you might really like the cleaning.

2. You can now comment on pretty much everything on your intranet dashboard and this includes comments on milestones, task lists, tasks and files. This can completely change the way you work. Imagine, hundreds of back-and-forth emails replaced by neat comment threads that you can attach large 200 MB files to! Since this is such an important feature, I’ve written more about it here.

So go ahead, give these new features a spin and as always, don’t forget to let us know what you think.

PS:  In the next few weeks we will make these features even more richer by letting you do all of this on the calendar itself. Also, the UX for accessing milestones and tasks gets a facelift.

If you ask me, if there’s one trait that unites the Web 2.0 world, it’s the love for posting comments. So one day we thought to ourselves, why not let people work, the way they like to play? Now it’s not entirely the most original of thoughts but we figured that if we apply it to Remindo’s User Experience, people might find their company Intranets more useful, and more fun. It was our ‘what an idea, Sergei!’ moment.

Without further ado, presenting, the ability to comment on everything inside Remindo!

This means that you can now comment on milestones, task lists, tasks and of course, files.  And it gets better, you can attach files of up to 200 MB each as attachments to these comments.

You will find this feature especially useful if multiple people are working on a common activity. By commenting on the milestone/task itself, you will be able to keep all communication and files related to that event in one tidy thread that everyone can see.  Doing this via comments will ensure that everyone stays in the loop and the team knows exactly what the status of the work is.

Contrast this to the hundreds of emails that your team would otherwise send to each other to plan work and later to frantically follow up to ensure that everything’s on schedule. It will save you hours worth of productive time every day.

So now if you need to ask a question related to a milestone, just post it as a comment. If you want to keep a record of how much time you spent on a task, just post it there. If you want to brainstorm around a deadline, just spark it off as a comment. If a bunch of you are working on a document, just attach updated version to your comments.  If you want to get feedback on some design that you have been working on, just post the file and ask for comments.

The possibilities are endless!

PS: We’ve even been told of a web development company that’s using Remindo as a replacement for bugzilla. Apparently every time they make a release, they post the release notes on their intranet. The bugs are logged as comments and assigned to the development team as tasks. True story.

The last couple of months have been crazy, and its about time you folks heard from us! 

We’ve made a LOT of changes to Remindo based on user feedback. We hit the design board and realized that apart from some frequently requested features (like file deletion – which is available now, btw) there were certain usability chokes that were hiding some very useful features from people (did you know that you can reply to email notifications to post comments – even attach files?)

We made a series of releases over the last two months that addressed feature requests, UI enhancements and backend optimizations. Here’s what we added:

1. You can now (finally  )delete files, discussion threads, tweets and comments – before the paid plans come in April,  as promised! Deletion of tasks and milestones is coming next with a BIG feature addition that left us thinking, why didn’t we think of that before!? More on this in another post.

2. Things will be simpler with a whole bunch of UI enhancements.

• The mailers now read better, with clear call-to-actions
• Progress bars on file uploads.
• Removal of “moderator” privileges. Now you are either a project manager or a user.
• Simpler and streamlined invitation processes.
• Creation of sub-projects straight from the dashboard.
• The ‘more projects’ tab will also give you a list of all projects that you manage.

3. The chat will now behave! We kept getting complaints about the chat. After much heartburn with Jabber we found out that it doesn’t function well when a system resumes from idle or standby modes. It’s now been fixed and we are continuously monitoring its performance. If you still face problems, please let us know.

4. Optimizations. We noticed that certain parts of Remindo, like the week-view in the calendar were acting sluggish under stress conditions. While it was heartening to see that people were putting so much data on it – sure sign of it being useful – we immediately started work on super-optimizing the code and database. We did this before we started work on the new features and now that its out of the way, we are going full steam ahead.

Some people ask us why we were giving away so much for free? Here’s what one of our users Karishma Dorai from MAA Communications had to say:

“ … Love Remindo by the way, it’s simplified our processes to a great extent. Great job! … we’d be more than happy to pay a nominal fee when you officially release it. “

Now how often do you hear that? We are convinced and are being repeatedly told by users that Remindo is adding a lot of value to their organizations by saving them time,  creating painless workflows and keeping things together.  Remindo -as a  SaaS Intranet – was a compelling idea that we are turning into a real product. We are not worried 

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.

Well we have made several upgrades since I wrote this post. You can now delete everything inside your intranet – milestones, task lists, tasks, discussions and comments. More on this here.

Good news!

We were listed in ReadWriteWeb’s list of 10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2010. And not just listed, Remindo was placed next to the likes of Jive, BlueKiwi and Sharepoint. Not bad for a month old service! 

Read it here.

So to both Ravit Lichtenberg of Ustrategy and Chris Heuer, thanks for picking us out. It’ll only make us work harder.

It’s been about 3 weeks since we publicly released Remindo and truth be told, we’re kinda overwhelmed (in a very heart-warming way) by the reviews, the news but most importantly – user FEEDBACK.

It all started when Christina Warren from Mashable reviewed Remindo and gave us a thumbs up. The best part, was that even she couldn’t put us into any category and drew comparisons with Facebook, Twitter and Google Wave. For us, it was an affirmation that we are actually creating something new and useful. In Christina’s words:

“Remindo has a solid, streamlined interface and a variety of tools to make communication and project management easy and more efficient”

And this just got validated over the last one week by the tsunami of user feedback we received from all over the world. At least on first impressions, people have seen merit in our baby and it feels awesome. After all, like every other business, we also had a lean time during the recession – insecurity, budget cuts, insane work hours and little family time. You know this story well; just glad that things are getting better!

Apart from the warm gooey feelings that the feedback induced in us it helped us get our priorities straight. We were so involved with building new features that we were overlooking some simpler things that our users wanted first- like editing and deleting stuff. We’ve redrawn our must-build list based on it so you’ll see these features out in a couple of weeks. More on this later.

By the way, at the moment of writing this post we are in the top10 startups on killerstartups.com for this month. Neat, eh?

Well, till we can put up a buzz page, thought it would be a good idea to share what the media has been saying about Remindo in a single post.

As expected, no one really has been able to categorize us into a slot. We like it 

The big one was the Mashable review of Remindo that drew comparisons from Facebook, Twitter and Google Wave!

Remindo has a solid, streamlined interface and a variety of tools to make communication and project management easy and more efficient

ReadWriteWeb listed Remindo in 10 ways social media will change in 2010. In just one of month of being live, we were placed next to Jive, BlueKiwi and Sharepoint!

One of our users, Tony Sarcone from Solveris then blogged about us and said something that we hold dear:

I’ve been shocked how fast, nice and accommodating the support has been. Think that’s everywhere? Read the full text here

Killerstartups then reviewed us saying:

Remindo is cost-efficient as well as practical
Last time I checked, Remindo was one of their top 10 startups for this month. If you like Remindo, please do vote for us here!

Closer home, HindustanTimes.com noted:

(Remindo) can help small businesses and freelancers appear established and professional

While Hindustan Times is one of India’s oldest and most respected media houses, we were eagerly waiting for reviews from tech bloggers because they were better placed to compare us with the rest and criticize/praise.

Ashish from pluGGd.in had this to say about us:

(Remindo interface is) the most apt way to get started when it comes to building social software for (the) enterprise market

It was interesting how he insisted that we are more project management than intranet. Read the full review here.

IndianWebStartups.com found the 3 GB of free storage “quite an exciting offer”. You can read it here.

Alootechie.com wrote about our personalization features and SiliconIndia.com found us to be a great way to stay connected in the office.

There was also a short note from Gajeebo.com that found Remindo well rounded.

All in all, a lot of (good) attention in a short time. But the parts that we really love is what our users are saying about us. Will be posting it soon!

5 things you should know about Remindo’s pricing plans

1. Remindo is completely free to use for up to 3 GB of storage – unlimited users, unlimited projects, unlimited clients, unlimited files… you get the idea. Bring in your entire office and your clients. No fear!

2. Detailed pricing plans will be released in April, 2010
We hope to price Remindo on a reasonable, no-bs metric. While we have our own ideas, you can help us find the right brew. Let us know what kind of pricing will work best for your organization here. As always we’ll try our best to get back to you within an hour, 365×24×7

3. So there’s a storage cap but no delete option yet. What’s happening?
We’ve written about this here. Briefly, we’re building the edit and delete feature and if you run out of your free 3GB before we provide it, let us know and we’ll give you more free storage. Fair? You can now delete files, discussion threads, comments and tweets.

4. Are you saying that even when you release the premium version, I can still continue using my Intranet on Remindo  for free as as long as I stay under 3 GB storage cap?
Yes! But why so surprised? We sure as hell don’t pay for our Gmail, Facebook,Twitter, uTorrent (ahem) and a hundred other awesome apps. The best things on the web come for free. When the premium version is introduced, we will build on top of what you have, nothing will be taken away. We, the people at Remindo cross our collective hearts 

5. Are you looking for partners, resellers, affiliates etc?
Our efforts are focused on making Remindo useful right now, but if you are interested, please get in touch with us here. Also, if you make software that you think will integrate well with Remindo, please drop us a line.

This just in, again!

pluGGd.in, a great showcase for startups wrote about Remindo today.

While Ashish gave us a thumbs up in the interface department saying:

(Remindo interface is) the most apt way to get started when it comes to building social software for (the) enterprise market

In an interesting turn of events, he insists that we are more about project management than an intranet!

Now this is a great affirmation that the project management and collaboration features that we have built in are useful, he has also given us some valuable advice on how to take things forward as an intranet.

As expected, a fair and intelligent review from pluGGd.in. Read the full text here