Here’s my list of favorite new features in OnTime 2007:

1. New AJAX-Based OnTime Web Interface
   This one feature actually sums up more than 100 improvements in the OnTime 2007 Web UI. When we set out to create OnTime 2007, we wanted to make sure we deliver a similar user experience both on the web and on the Windows desktop client. The results have been absolutely amazing. Far better than even we could have expected. Take a look at the OnTime 2006 Web vs. OnTime 2007 Web main page:
   
   
   OnTime 2006 for Web
   
   OnTime 2007 for Web
   And of course, that’s just one screen. Whether it’s looking at the details of an item, adding a new item, managing filters or security, the OnTime 2007 Web UI blows away the OnTime 2006 Web UI and it does it faster than ever before.
2. New Incident Tracking for Help Desk users
   Once a software development team ships their product, the next natural step is for them or a support team to support the users. Many software development teams using OnTime have been using OnTime to track such support incidents. Of course, since OnTime was previously designed to just track defects, requirements and tasks, it left a lot to be desired for incident tracking. With OnTime 2007, we’ve made tremendous improvements for support teams. Specifically, we’ve added:
   
   
   • A new Incidents Tab (renamable like other tabs) to track support related issues:
     
   • Customers are Central to Incidents to make it easier than ever to associate an incident with a customer. You can even create a new customer from the new incident window:
     
   • Custom Incident Numbers allow administrators to define an alphanumeric starting point for incidents that allows for a prefix and fixed digit numbering like so:
     
   • Incident Escalation Levels allow support users to easily track issues that need special attention and combined with the new alerts feature, you can use escalation levels to cause alert notifications to be generated and sent to the appropriate people.
     
   • All the Other Goodness that you’ve come to expect from OnTime are also available for incidents. Workflows, history, attachments, email conversations, alerts, work logs, related items and more.
     
3. A New Customers Tab
   Whether you’re trying to find that super-important bug or feature-request that came from a premier customer or a customer’s support call history, the new Customers tab makes it extremely easy. Just type part of the customer or contact name into the search, hit enter and the customer list immediately returns a list of customers matching your search criteria. Click on a customer or contact and all the Defects, Feature Requests and Incidents associated with that customer (or that particular contact) are shown in the right:
   
   
4. A New Users Tab
   Like the new Customers tab, the new Users tab is great for project managers who want to analyze the load of a particular user without having to setup filters for each user. From this tab, you can also quickly see all the unassigned items, search for a particular user or add and edit users:
   
   
5. New Alerts Capability
   One of the coolest new features in OnTime 2007 is the ability to setup alerts that will notify you or anyone else of a particular event. Events can include the changing of one or more fields from one specific value to another. You can even setup events that will monitor a given filter result and notify you if the results change.
   
   
   Alerts allow users to manage larger amounts of data using “manage by exception” methods, where they are only notified of things when something doesn’t meet predetermined criteria.
   
6. New Startup Wizard for Easier Configuration
   OnTime has hundreds of powerful customization features. For some who haven’t yet used OnTime, this can be a little intimidating and can lead to the view that “OnTime is overkill for our needs.” Nothing could be further from the real user experience. Users who actually use the product report that they can’t believe how easy and intuitive OnTime is and the further they look, they’re amazed by its power and flexibility to accommodate users.
   
   So to make things even easier than before, we’ve also added a new Startup Wizard that allows users to customize which item types they’d like to track in OnTime and what wording they use for such item types:
   
   This Startup Wizard makes it easier than ever before to customize OnTime in less than 30 seconds.
   
7. New Customer Portal UI & Features
   Like its big brother, the OnTime Web client, the OnTime Customer Portal has also been re-written from scratch to take full advantage of AJAX-based UI improvements. One of the most requested features for the customer portal was easier customer-facing filtering capabilities, which has also been added.
   
8. Improved Security Management
   With the list of features continuing to grow, managing security privileges was starting to become a bigger challenge. So in OnTime 2007, we’ve reorganized security privileges by category to make them easier to identify and assign to the appropriate roles:
   
   
   
9. Ability to Send Emails Through a Queuing Service
   In OnTime 2006 for Windows, email notifications, as well as emails sent for discussing a feature, defect, etc. were sent directly from the OnTime 2006 Windows client. That meant that each OnTime 2006 Windows user’s machine would need access to an SMTP server. Although this isn’t usually a problem, it can lead to some challenges for ensuring that email notifications are sent.
   
   New to OnTime 2007 is the option of using a centralized OnTime Email Queuing Service to send emails. So now OnTime clients can simply queue emails in the OnTime database and allow the OnTime Email Queuing Service to send the email. This eliminates the need for each client to have access to an SMTP server and improves the reliability of email notifications and conversations.
   
   
   
10. Improvements to Performance, Stability & Other Under-the-Hood Changes
    My favorite set of new features, which isn’t easily visible while using OnTime, is all the behind the scenes optimizations we’ve made to make the product better than ever. If this (everything under the hood) was OnTime 2007’s only new feature, it would be worth the upgrade! Let’s take a look:
    
    
    • SQL Server-side Filtering, Searching, Sorting & Paging – In OnTime 2006 when you turned on a new filter or searched for a particular phrase, the filter or search would be applied on the client side. That means OnTime would retrieve all the items for the currently selected project from SQL Server, then perform the filter or search and show you the result. This meant that if the currently selected project had 1,000 active (non-archived) items in it, all those 1,000 items would be retrieved from SQL Server, only to show you the 18 items that matched your filter. For smaller databases and high-bandwidth scenarios, this was a non-issue. But for larger systems that had 10s of thousands or 100s of thousands of items, this was a potentially big bottleneck.
      
      In OnTime 2007, all the filtering and searching is done on the SQL Server. For OnTime 2007 Web, even the paging is done on SQL, meaning that if your results (based on your search or filter) contain more than 1 page worth of data, only the currently displayed page is retrieved from SQL Server.
      
      This performance improvement alone is huge for large databases, especially those with more than 10,000 items.
    • Improved Memory Management – In OnTime 2007 for Windows, we’ve made a number of improvements that help with memory management, including load-on-demand so that OnTime controls for different items types are only loaded into memory when the user requests to see that information.
    • Updated Toolbars, Menu Bars & ListView – OnTime 2007 for Windows users will also notice the new ListView with a very cool group selection feature that allows users to select an entire group by simply clicking on the group header:
      
      
    • More Features, Less Fat – My internal mantra for OnTime 2007 is “more features, less fat.” The first evidence of this accomplishment is in our setup files. When comparing OnTime 2007 with OnTime 2006 setup files, you’ll find that most of the setup files are less than ½ the size they used to be. This is a direct result of our focus on more features, less fat.

OnTime 2007 is simpler, more powerful, faster and slimmer than ever before. But what does it really mean? We believe all of this is going to translate into helping software development teams Ship Software OnTime! Our goal, as always, is to stay out of the development team’s way by streamlining and automating the process, allowing them to focus on writing great code and shipping great software. If you’ve liked the OnTime product line up to this point, you’re going to absolutely LOVE OnTime 2007. And it’s only getting better. Wait till Beta 2!