It's hard to believe it's been one whole year already, but today (May 15th, 2009) marks the one year anniversary that we pushed OnePlace out of the nest and let it fly away into cyberspace.

A year ago at this time, we had just completed a big push to get OnePlace ready for beta users. Although the official "Release" launch of OnePlace was in September of 2008, 5/15/08 marks a significant milestone for OnePlace and Riverock Technologies, because it really meant the start of accepting new users via self-service signup, and providing support for them. We also moved OnePlace off our internal servers and onto our present hosting provider at that time.

So for those reasons, we say "Happy 1st Birthday" to OnePlace today!

At the end of last December, we took a look back at 2008, which included reviewing the beta launch and the official launch. Here's a quick run down on what's happened with OnePlace since that review:

Improved User Education

One of the things we've worked very hard on (and still are working on) is helping users understand how to get the most from OnePlace. To the end, we introduced a "Welcome to OnePlace" page that all new users see when they sign into OnePlace for the first time. This page contains loads of helpful information and videos to get a new user up and running.

We also spent quite a bit of time creating feature-level videos for OnePlace. These videos are embedded within OnePlace in the appropriate locations, and greet new users who are exploring different areas of OnePlace upon signing in for the first time. We also made the videos available permanently in the Videos section of the online Help.

Provided Top-Notch Customer Service

We pride ourselves at the level of customer service we provide our users. We've all used software on the web that was poorly supported, and wanted to do better than that for our users. Most of the best ideas for improving OnePlace come from our users, and we do our best to make sure those ideas get back into the product as quickly as possible. We've also come to realize that good customer service is something you have to work hard at every day, and doesn't happen by accident.

Added/Enhanced Features

Just off the top of my head, here are some of the things that we added to OnePlace in '09:

• File Versioning
• Comments
• Daily Update Email
• Participate in discussions via email
• Workplace Report
• The OnePlace Dashboard (allows users to collaborate with each other via Team Pulse)
• Ability to specify which system notifications you want to receive and which ones you don't
• Loads of new stuff in the Inbasket (Sent Items, bulk actions, etc.)

There were tons of smaller enhancements added as well, which if you're interested can be seen in the Recent Changes section of the online Help.

We're very happy to have reached this one year milestone for OnePlace, and look forward to the next twelve months (and beyond) as we continue to improve the way that our users collaborate with each other and manage their work.