Weekly Release: Incremental File Retrieval

Well it was a nice Christmas with family and friends, and there was a bit of work getting done as well. I’ve come to realize that starting a company is pretty demanding. This week’s release was a big one, we’ve been saving up all of the features that required database changes for a larger release, and that was this one! Although things didn’t go as smoothly as hoped with the data migration, we got things cleaned up and we’re back in business. With this release we’ll be opening up our beta to a wider audience to give it a try. Here’s a quick run down of the changes we pushed out today:

In the Web Application:

• We’ve begun integrating in the plans and pricing into the overall application. You’ll now need to choose a plan that you want to use for your Basecamp data and file retrieval.
• There are quite a few UI changes that went into this release. It tightens up the overall UI and hopefully makes it more clear as to what is happening.
• By request from some of our beta participants, we added in a detailed status log view. You can access this from the main console page by clicking on the icon to the right of the most recent status message for each job. This will give you all status messages grouped by Job run.
• There is a new status message available in the logs as well that shows a count of the number of files retrieved as well as the total size in bytes of all files retrieved. It was an internal monitor we had that we decided to expose through the status messages. It may be a bit cryptic right now, but we’ll clean it up. It currently reads something like “FileCount=49:TotalSize=208823384”.
• One consistent feedback message we got from our beta users was that there was no way to complete a job if it got partially done and then they had to go get some coffee or something. We knew that going in to the initial release, but chose to cut that feature in favor of releasing. Well, we’ve now added it in. If you have a job that is partially configured it will show a Configure icon next to the status message on the main console. Clicking on this will take you to the next step in the wizard that needs to be configured.
• We added in a number of small security related assertions to better ensure that our applications remains secure.
• Finally, we added in a page that gives details about how your job will be scheduled and when you can expect your first retrieval to happen.

In the Core Engine:

• Of course the big feature that we released today is the ability to do incremental file retrievals from Basecamp. This is a feature we’ve been working on for some time. Now all jobs will run a full retrieval on a limited schedule and an incremental retrieval on the runs in between.

There’s still more coming as we ramp up to our initial public release in the beginning of the new year.