TeamLab: the story of a startup project

The 7th of the 7th month of this year, 7 pm. The release of the new version of the TeamLab project - www.teamlab.com was assigned to this magical date.

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

Did we manage to bring our own flavor? - You decide, dear habrovchane.
')

Background or that we should build our intranet portal.

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

Sociality is great! But what about project management?

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

Moving to the clouds of Amazon

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

Open-source: if you share, so truly

We also posted TeamLab source code in open source on SourceForge. Yes, yes, we are developers who have opened the source code of their product. Deciding it was not so easy. But how else was it possible to attract the attention of colleagues to a new service?

With the TeamLab code, you can do everything that fits into the framework of the allowed GPLv3 license. First of all, of course, you can compile the code and install the portal on your own server. If desired, you can redo it for yourself: remove something, correct something, in general, use as convenient. Before you follow this link and download the source code, I’ll say a few words about the technologies used. TeamLab is written in ASP.NET and works with MySQL and SQLite databases. Of course, this is a kind of minus, since the vast majority have Linux hosting. So it happened, we specialize in dotnet, and there's nothing to be done about it. Good news is still there. Next year we plan to port the project to Mono.

What is the result?

The new version of TeamLab has found a warm response, not only in the hearts of our company's employees, but also of many other users. Less than a month after the launch of the service, as we noted the thousandth registered user. To date, TeamLab is quite often compared to a popular online project management service (you know how;)) the magic of three sevens, no other :)

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

To be continued…

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

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