Spread the word, share the love. Urban Turtle 4.9 is out!

If there's one thing we've learned these past few years, it's that our customers love Urban Turtle. It can get so popular within an organisation that more people than originally expected start using it and end up relying on it. Some call this addiction but we prefer to call it turtle love.

Exceeding the number of users allowed by your Urban Turtle license has always had little in the way of consequences. A soft warning displayed across the top of each add-on was the only thing reminding everyone of this fact. We trust our customers to do the right thing, which is to enable us to deliver even more awesome software every month. Unfortunately, until now, extending the number of users allowed by a license was not a smooth process. It involved manual intervention and maddening calculations around expiry dates. The splitting of the Urban Turtle offering into distinct add-ons simply exacerbated that.

Today, we are releasing a revamped end-to-end solution giving our customers a simple, and fast, way to add users to their license. In mere minutes, without any manual intervention on our part, you can request, purchase and receive a new license allowing everyone who loves the turtle to continue using it.

Add Users

We think that starting with Urban Turtle 4.9, adding users to a license could not be any simpler. As always, the About tab is the starting point for anything that revolves around licenses. From there, you'll now see green buttons inviting you to add users to your license. Clicking this button will lead you to our website where you will be able to select the number of users you wish to add and complete the purchase in a few minutes. Just have your credit card ready!

Should the interest in Urban Turtle rise quicker than you expected, users who cannot gain access to the product will be greeted by a page asking them to extend the existing license to allow for more users to enjoy all the benefits the Turtle brings to Team Foundation Server. Should they require immediate access to Urban Turtle, they will also have the opportunity to take over an unused license linked to another user account. This will effectively lock the other person out of the product so we recommend that this feature be only used to free a license linked to a user account that is no longer in use.

Product Management

We have received early feedback regarding the new Product Management add-on and we have already started to make some improvements. The major complaint was about the screen real estate occupied by the Description and Acceptance Criteria fields. First of all, the size of these fields was fixed and we have changed this to make it automatically adjust to the content. We have also added a quick way to hide the section altogether using a toggle arrow.

Finally, the Product Management add-on was the only add-on that did not feature the new Change State quick action introduced in version 4.8. We are fairly certain that you have quickly become accustomed to this new feature and you'll be glad to know that it has been ported to the Product Management. It now effectively replaces the State label displayed on backlog items linked to product features. Changing the state of a work item can now be achieved with a few clicks without requiring a round trip to the work item editor window.

Hour Burndown on the Custom Boards

A small change but one that is to sure be welcome is the addition of the Hour Burndown link at the top of the Custom Boards. You'll probably agree that it should have been there from the beginning!

Support for TFS 2013 Preview

Yesterday, we blogged about the release of Urban Turtle 2013 for Team Foundation Server 2013. While being separate versions, the 2012 and the 2013 releases of Urban Turtle 4.9 share the same feature set. So, for the time being, no matter your platform of choice, you'll enjoy everything Urban Turtle has to offer!

Out now!

So, by now you surely know the drill. Grab your copy of Urban Turtle 4.9, install it on your server (you know it only takes a few seconds!) and send your feedback our way! We're always looking forward to your comments and work has already started on our next release. Now's the best time to try and get us to implement your change requests. We're listening! What will it be?