A lot of people have been asking me about a product roadmap for the OnTime Project Management system. I wanted to give you guys a quick preview of some of the new features under development in V5.1:

• Paste as Attachment - This cool new feature allows the OnTime Windows and VS.NET clients to easily capture and paste an image from the clipboard directly into OnTime as a file attachment. But the best part is that the new paste as attachment tool allows images to be manipulated directly in OnTime so you can easily crop and highlight or free-hand draw on the image prior to saving it.  This is by far my favorite new feature.
• New Archiving Feature - The new archiving feature in OnTime will allow administrators to archive older defects and features so they don't slow-down your system.  For example, you'll be able to easily archive all closed items that are more than 3 months old or all the items that belong to a project that's no longer active.  When such items are archived, the system no longer needs to pull them down to the client and therefore performance is signifantly enhanced.  Best of all, you can still easily see all archived items by enabling the “view archived items” feature from the toolbar.
• HTML or Text Based Details - In OnTime 2005 we introduced the ability to save detail information about a defect or feature as HTML.  However, some customers wanted the simpler text-based input fields which can be a little snapier and easier to use. In V5.1, we'll give the system administrator the option to use either text-based or HTML-based fields.
• Custom Fields for Tasks - A lot of customers have been asking for the ability to create custom fields for tasks. In V5.1, you'll have it!
• Email Notifications for Tasks - I have to admit, not having email notifications for tasks was an oversight in V5.0.  We'll address this issue with the release of V5.1
• Huge Performance Improvements - With the release of V5.1, performance is no longer a back-burner activity.  We've made a special point to improve the overall performance of the OnTime system significantly.  There are tons of performance improvements including better caching, archiving and the re-architecture of certain parts of the system to respond much faster.  You'll notice these improvements in performance from all 3 client types: Windows, Web and VS.NET.

The above improvements were all for the OnTime clients, but there are some major improvements in the OnTime Customer Portal too:

• Attach Files in Customer Portal - With V5.1, your cusotmers will also be able to attach files to the defects and features they submit.
• Edit Submissions - Now your customers will be able to optionally edit their own submissions if you enable that feature in the OnTime Customer Portal Admin.

There are a lot of other small enhancements, but the above list is a great start if you're wondering what's coming down the pipeline.

So when is it going to be out?

We expect the V5.1 release to be available sometime in early May.  Stay tuned...