Creately Blog

New Creately Team Plans

Today we’re very happy to announce the new Creately Team plans. We have seen that many of you use Creately in your own project teams already. But it has not been easy to manage who is in your team, who is being billed and for which plan or even which plan a team member requires. Creately Team plans solve these issues.

The Team plans are perfect for cross-functional Business, Design and Development Teams. If you run a consulting business, a design house or a development team - in fact if you are part of any team where visual communication and collaboration is key, the Creately Team Plan is designed for you.

Better Team Management

Creately Team plans start from just $8.95/user/month with a minimum of 3 users in a plan. We think you’ll agree that this is excellent value with the entire team receiving all the capabilities of our Pro plan ($9.95/month) plus enhancements to project sharing. As the team owner you also have access to the team management portal which allows you to easily add and remove team members, assign new roles and dynamically increase or decrease your team size. The beauty of this is you only ever pay for the number of team members in your team. We don’t pigeon hole you by team size.

At-a-Glance

Here’s a quick look at exactly what you’ll get on the new Team Plan:

We’re confident the Creately Team plans will suit you and your project team.

Click here to upgrade to a Creately Team plan right away.

Creately on Google Apps Marketplace

Google Apps Integration

If you are a user of Google Apps then it just got better with the addition of Creately into the Google Apps Marketplace.

Today, we’re adding the Creately - Online Diagramming Editor to Google Apps, so now the best online diagramming software is available to the millions of small businesses around the world who have come to rely on the Google Apps suite.

With a few simple clicks, you can add Creately to your Apps setup and start creating diagrams immediately. We’re working hard to make Creately the best choice for the Fortune 5,000,000 companies that need an easy to use and powerful visual collaboration platform to get their projects done right.

Add It now!

We’d love for you to Add Creately to your Google Apps account*. Once added you can access Creately straight away using the Open Id built into Google Apps. And if you are already a Creately user and use the same account for Google Apps you’ll have access to all your previous diagrams instantly. Once you’re subscribed you can choose from our selection of Creately Premium Plans (starting at $4.95 a month) or opt for a Creately Free account which only allows public diagrams.

Once you’ve used Creately in your Google Apps setup please remember to leave us a review on the Google Marketplace.

Want Deeper Google Integration?

We’re taking a phased approach with our Creately for Google Apps offering. We’re exploring the possibility of allowing Users to save and view their Creately diagrams directly from within the Google Documents interface. We’d love you to tell us how you use Creately with Google Apps and if you’d like to see further integration like this. We’ll play it by your feedback - so tell us if you want deeper Apps integration.

Click here to add Creately to your Google Apps setup* right now.

Until next time - Happy Diagramming & Remember to tell a friend.

*If you’re not the administrator of your account - simply send this link to your administrator - http://bit.ly/createlyGApps

The @Creately Team

Scheduled Downtime & New Team Plans

Welcome back to Creately - we’ve got a brand new release on the way  and we’re very excited to give you a lil glimpse into our plans.

Scheduled Downtime

Before we can release the new plans we’ll be doing some internal housekeeping this weekend. Our Creately.com service will be shut down for 3 hours on Saturday Night (PST)/Sunday Early Morning (EST). This will allow us to set up the internal infrastructure to introduce these great new updates over the coming week.

Downtime Schedule

Australia - Sun 24 Jan 2010 5:00 - 8:00 PM
United Kingdom - Sun 24 Jan 2010 6:00 - 9:00 AM
US (EST) - Sun 24 Jan 2010 1:00 - 4:00 AM
US (PST) - Sat 23 Jan 2010 10:00 PM - 1:00 AM

Upcoming Features

Over the coming week, we will be announcing a new Team Plan - that will make it simpler for you to collaborate with your team and clients.

Along with the Plus and Pro plans, the new Team Plans will come with advanced user and administrator management, unlimited project sharing and billing management capabilities.

Also All users will get better project and diagram management features - including the ability to move diagrams between Projects, better support for PDF exports on Linux and a new Profile page to manage your account.

We’ll have more here next week - so subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up to date with Creately’s Visual Collaboration platform.

@charanjit

Image by - Leo Reynolds / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Making the Creately Experience Better

What a glorious month its been… We received fantastic news just a couple of days ago that Creately (and Cinergix) have been named in the Top 50 Coolest Company awards by Anthill Magazine, then we moved into our brand spanking new offices in Sri Lanka and now we have a Creately release packed with features you’ve been asking for.

New Release Highlights

This week’s release is focused on making your experience with Creately a whole lot better. We’ve now made it possible to use your own local machine fonts in all diagrams, made significant performance improvements, fixed many UML bugs as well as introduced new templates for project managers and business users.

All the Fonts you can Eat

A few months ago, we added 10 open-source fonts to Creately to let you create professional looking diagrams. But guess what? Once our users tasted the forbidden fruit, everyone was clamoring for more. So as our legal team (read Founders) tried to figure out a way to get around the copyright issues of embedding fonts in Creately, the Dev team came up with a beautiful solution.

Why not let users load and use their local machine fonts in their diagrams! Hmm… sounds great but what happens when someone uses a font in a shared diagram that another user does not have installed on their computer? That’s where font notifications and substitution come in. We’ve devised a method of notifying users when there’s a missing font in a diagram and automatically providing a substitute font.

We think this is a excellent solution that will make many of you very happy! Try your hand at a diagram with fancy fonts and let us know what you think.

UI Performance Improvements

Unresponsive software sucks. Nobody wants to use software that freezes up or slows down. So here at Creately, we’ve kept a close eye on the performance of the application to make sure it exceeds your expectations. Lately though, as our customers have started working on very large and complex diagrams, some users have reported a degradation in UI performance. We decided we’ll have none of that and neither will our customers, so the team set about analyzing the issues and have made significant improvements to the codebase to improve the ‘feel’ of the User Interface. We’re not through yet, but are pleased with the improvements we’ve made this week.

Here’s a short list of what you can expect:

• Selecting Multiple Objects and Select All (Ctrl-A) is much faster making Copy-and-Paste much smoother.
• Significantly less lag when moving Container Objects or other objects into Containers.
• Faster cursor and mouse response as we’ve optimized all the redraws that happen when you move your mouse cursor over the drawing canvas.
• No more waiting to download fonts (which can be upto 2MB in size) cos we’ll automatically load the fonts installed on your computer.
• Watch this space, we’ll be doing more performance related improved over the coming weeks. Let us know, if there’s anything else troubling you.

Resizable Drawing Canvas - ‘Cos you asked for it

We’ve gone from a fixed canvas size, to a customizable size in the last 3 months. But you said that wasn’t enough - You wanted to be able to change the size of the Canvas as your diagram grew - making this the 2nd most requested feature on our Community Support Site.

So we’re gone and done it. Now you can click on the Page Properties tab (click on the Canvas, then open the Properties Tab on the right-side) to change the size of your diagram page anytime. Simple.

Better UML designs with Creately

We’ve had a renewed focus on the UML modeling and design space. We’ve found that our users love Creately for UML. This week, we revisited all our UML shapes and have fixed many little issues in the UML KObject shape sets for Class, Object, Collaboration and Deployment diagrams. More info on these UML fixes can be found in this blog post.

New Business Templates

We are always adding new Templates to Creately. This week, you’ll find new templates for Work Breakdown Structures, Ansoff Matrix, Value Stream Maps and more.

@charanjit

Easy UML diagrams with Creately

We’ve had support for UML designs and diagrams for a while here at Creately. And we’ve found that many of our users really like collaborating on UML designs with their Teams through Creately. With built-in commenting, easy embeds for your project wiki and PDF exports, Creately is perfectly suited for almost all types of software and design documentation.

Little Niggly Issues

Unfortunately, there were a few issues and limitations with our UML support. Little niggly things that were marring your experience with Creately. So we’re spent the last forth-night going through all the reported issues with a fine tooth comb to make Creately for UML an easy to use and perfectly functional UML modelling software. This is just the beginning. Expect a whole lot more from Creately for UML in the coming weeks.

What have we Improved?

Without going into too much detail, I’ll list out some of the fixes we’re included in this release of Creately UML.

1. Resizing UML shapes - Previously, when you resize a UML shape like a Class or Package, the new size is not correctly saved, resulting in diagrams getting a little messy when they are re-opened later. This fix was particularly challenging for UML objects, as they support Filtering data properties in the diagram - making them dynamic shapes that resized as you added more Attributes and Members. Issue Fixed.
2. Copy & Pasting a UML shape resulted in the copied shape being resized to its default size. This has been fixed, so the next time you make a copy of any UML object, you’ll get an exact copy. Issue Fixed.
3. Limit on the size of the Attributes and Operations you can enter into a Class and Object Shape. We’ve removed this now, so you can model large classes with no problems. Issue Fixed.
4. Adding more attributes and operations to UML shapes, didn’t always automatically resize the shapes, resulting in a muddled image. Now all UML objects will automatically resize to fit all visible data properties. Issue Fixed.

   

5. When working with Filters on UML shapes, turning on the attributes or properties in a small shape would cause the text to spill out of the shape. Now all shapes automatically re-size to accommodate filtered text. Issue Fixed.

We’re working very hard to make Creately an ideal solution for all you software and design teams out there. So watch this space as we introduce new features and fixes that will make your team’s life a whole lot easier when it comes to working on UML designs, Mockups, Wireframes and Sitemaps.

@charanjit