Weekly Release

Happy New Year! One of the big items that we’ve been hearing from our beta participants is that FTP is a nice way to get their files to them, or at least it would be if they had an FTP server…. FTP is sort of an antiquated technology that is still around and used all over the place, but not everyone just has access to a FTP server to store hordes of files on whenever they want to. They have FTP servers for their websites or some other specific purpose, but they don’t want their backups going there. We knew it was going to have limited appeal, but we felt strongly that it was most important to be able to give your data and files to you as opposed to storing them somewhere else in the cloud. Many people have questioned the value of storing their backups on yet another cloud storage system and we wanted to make sure that you get what you want.

So we’ve spent quite a bit of time investigating other options that meet the criteria of giving you your data in a way that doesn’t require custom FTP servers to be setup. There are surprisingly a ton of options out there. We’ll be building out many of them in the near future, and with this weeks release we have already implemented one of them. The current  release that is at https://beta.centripetalsoftware.com now provides you with the choice of having your Basecamp files and data delivered to you via Dropbox using your own Dropbox account. We still provide the ability to use FTP if you still want to. We love this feature for our own backups! When the backup is running you actually see the files getting synced to your computer via the Dropbox client and you can also access all of the files through the Dropbox website using your account. We then add our Dropbox folder to the formal backup process we have running and all of our Basecamp files and data are stored on secure backups! Give it a try and let us know what you think.

That was the main feature we worked on, but there was other stuff in this release. Here’s a quick run down of the changes we pushed out today:

In the Web Application:

• We did another test run with UTest which found a number of bugs in the validations on our data entry screens. These all got fixed.
• There were a number of broken links that got fixed. These were due to the new website we rolled out last week.
• We added in the new Dropbox choice and configuration screens so that you can get going with Dropbox.

In the Core Engine:

• FTP is a little frustrating on our side as well, there are a million different FTP servers out there that all seem to have little nuances that cause problems with our system. We discovered some issues with the DriveHQ FTP servers, we got that fixed up so that you can use the free and paid accounts with DriveHQ.
• Then the big feature mentioned above, most of the work happened in the core engine to store the data to Dropbox. Check it out.

Stay tuned for more big changes up in the next week or so.