It's about time – the AnnualLeave.com blog

Our spec before the editing starts...

Regular readers of this blog will know that for the last few months, we’ve been designing a new version of AnnualLeave.com for 2012. We’re really excited about it. We’re nearing the end of the design phase, and we’re almost finished the functional specification (all 690 pages of it! – It’ll hit 700 by the time we sign it off, no doubt).

As any developer will tell you, documentation is about as much fun as root canal surgery, however it’s a highly important and ultimately time-saving in the long run. A good rule of thumb is that 1 hour spent on documentation saves 10 hours of development time.

So, what’s going to be in the new version?  Well, all in good time.  We’ve got some fantastic features coming that we know you are going to love. We’re going to release details of all the new features in the coming weeks, along with screens-shots to whet your appetite.

So, even though we’re about the sign off the spec and let the development team loose to start coding, we’re still open for ideas and requests.  Drop us a line for anything you’d like to see in our employee absence planning system and we’ll do our best to incorporate it.

Having said that, with a spec that’s 690 pages, there’s a good chance it might already be in there!

TeamworkPM

Credit where credit is due, we’ve been trialling these guys for a tool to help us track our tasks, priorities, time and progress as we develop the next version of AnnualLeave.com and we think its’ worth sharing with you.   It’s worth a look in our opinion.

When you use AnnualLeave.com to manage your employees’ absences, you can choose your own domain name and login page.

You can direct your employees to an easy-to-remember login page, such as: https://yourcompany.annualleave.com. You can even brand the page with your own logo and colors.

Today we can confirm the launch date for AnnualLeave.com – all systems are go on Tuesday October 27th (about noon…).

We’re really excited about AnnualLeave.com and over the coming weeks we hope that you will be too.

We realise that we’ve been quiet on the blog and twitter (we really threw ourselves into the development to the exclusion of everything else) so we’re going to make up for that by letting you know snippets about what to expect when we open the doors on the 27th. 

Watch this space for the first behind the scenes exclusives in the next few days!

We’re getting along great with the development and testing and we’re getting pretty excited about how good the system is looking. We’ll be launching AnnualLeave.com in October.

If you would like to be one of the first to use the system (for free!) please visit this page and fill out your contact details.

We cannot guarantee that everyone will get to use the system for free, but we are looking for as many different types of people in different places to use the system when we launch in Beta.