Bug Tracking Banter

BugAware Video Tours

2009-10-23T23:08:00.005+11:00

I'm pleased to announce that we now have 8 videos online showcasing BugAware's features. Some advanced features such as email processing and support queues have also been included.

The videos have been uploaded to YouTube and can be viewed here

Enterprise pricing - now available

2009-10-16T15:19:00.000+11:00

We have recently introduced Enterprise pricing for both the hosted and locally deployed version of BugAware. The new pricing significantly reduces the price of BugAware for organizations with a large number of users. You can now purchase BugAware for your entire organization (unlimited users) for only $2,160 hosted, or $2,375 locally installed.

http://www.bugaware.com/pricing.html

Remember, BugAware can be used for a wide number of implementations across your organization and is extremely effective for general team management and issue tracking as well as tracking development tasks and bugs.

BugAware Multi-Lingual

2009-10-16T00:39:00.008+11:00

BugAware stores all phrases, headings and messages in its database which means different languages can be uploaded and displayed in the user interface. Currently BugAware supports English, Danish, French and more recently simplified Chinese.

It's also very easy to load additional languages. If you would like to translate bugaware into a language that is not currently supported, simply contact us for the language template, translate the English phrases and we'll upload the translation for you!

BugAware 7.0 released !

2009-08-23T22:34:00.002+10:00

BugAware 7.0 has been released and is now available.

Our SAAS instance has been automatically upgraded, and hosted clients can start using the new features immediately.

Highlights of the release include;

Broadcast Message
Administrators can now broadcast a message to all of their users via the My Tasks Homepage.
The Broadcast Message can be set from the Administration -> Configuration menu.

Linked Tasks
Tasks that are linked can now easily be accessed from Task lists and Search results. Simply click on the [+] icon to expand the list of linked tasks and you can navigate to them directly.

Custom List Sorting
Custom lists can now be sorted manually from the Custom Fields screen. Just click on the arrows next to the value in the list to change its sequence in the sort order.

Email Send Method
Installed clients can now toggle between email send methods (SMTP, Pickup).

BugAware Economic Stimulus Package

2009-05-12T00:50:00.006+10:00

The Global Financial Crisis "GFC" has created chaos for businesses world wide. We are indeed in crazy economic times, and in the spirit of madness - we have decided to give BugAware away for free !

BugAware is now completely free to Non-Profit Organisations to download and use for non commercial purposes. Educational Instituations are also entitled to a free version for Academic / Educational purposes.

We are also providing a free 5 user hosted license to commercial organisations !

We hope you enjoy using BugAware, and we look forward to your feedback and the continued development of this now free bug tracking software.

Version 6.1 minor release - custom fields

2008-07-08T23:40:00.003+10:00

Due to popular demand we have increased the limit of custom fields per project / component combination. The original limit was 6 fields and 2 lists, we have increased this to 10 fields and 10 lists.

This change has been pushed to the live ASP Hosted version of BugAware - enjoy !

BugAware 6.0 - Bug Tracking released!

2008-01-02T01:06:00.000+11:00

After many months of late nights, BugAware 6.0 has finally been released. I can now head off to the beach and go camping with my family and give them the attention they deserve! Though it's more like "Dad, can I have a turn on the computer" vs. "Dad will you come play with me" these days :)

I hope you get a chance to try out the new features of BugAware 6.0 and I'm looking forward to feedback on the new look interface, support queues and mailbox features.

v. 6.0 Features at a glance

New look interface with tab navigation
User Groups
Support Queues
Mailbox processing (emails to tasks)
Customizable workflow at the project & component level
Unicode support - Welcome to our Cyrillic & Chinese users!

Happy new year and here's to another great year of bug tracking and help desk support software innovation!

Lets be honest

2007-08-11T12:43:00.000+10:00

OK, I admit it. This is just another stab in the dark at SEO optimisation and a fruitless attempt to increase our Google ranking for our chosen keywords, so it may as well be the topic of my first Blog posting !

It's not easy !

In the good old days of BugAware 1.07, with no attempt what-so-ever at SEO (not even sure if the concept existed back then) - we were consistently in the top 10 of Google search results for various keywords including "bug tracking software", "issue tracking software" etc..

These days, it's a totally different story. You cannot find BugAware on Google for our major keywords, unless you are prepared to navigate past the top 200 search results. Over the last few months I've tried every trick in the "SEO book" and have only just discovered what our major problem was.

Failed Attempt

I totally redesigned our web site, added loads of valuable incoming links, wrote press releases and waited patiently... and waited.... and waited. Although there were minor fluctuations in our rankings - "Oooh we moved from 498 to 475 for 'bug tracking software' " - my hard work had not paid off. We had a great PR of 6, loads of incoming links - what was the problem?

I then resorted to Google AdWords, and although we had some nice targeted traffic, I felt nauseous every time someone clicked on a paid link and a few more dollars topped up the Google coffers. I want organic Google traffic, why did I have to pay for this? We should be ranking well. Bring back the good old days of 2002!

One of the most infuriating things was the fact that we ranked number 7 on Yahoo and number 2! on MSN or Live.com. Sorry Yahoo & MSN, but nobody uses these search engines and I get more traffic from my piteful ranking on Google than being in the top 10 on other search engines.

So - what was my big discovery?

Well, the battle is far from over as we still rank poorly - though I'm hoping over the next few weeks we will see a dramatic improvement. I came across a forum post discussing duplicate content. One poster described exactly the same symptoms that we had, ranking really well once then vanishing out of the top 300 results for no apparent reason. What he discovered was that he was being penalised for duplicate content. He re-wrote all of his content and within a few days he was back to where he was years ago.

Interesting, I thought - though all of my content is original? Why would I be penalised?

I then came across a very valuable tool http://www.copyscape.com/.

You simply put in your web site URLs and it finds all of the other web sites out there with duplicate content to your own, and my content was "all over the place"! The press releases and web site descriptions that I had used when adding links to BugAware.com over the years all came from source content on our web site. I can only assume that at some point Google decided that we were no longer the originator of this content as we were being penalised for having duplicate content. I rewrote all pages that came up as having duplicate content on Copyscape, and a few days later I noticed a massive leap in the hundreds for the ranking of all of our major keywords. Our ranking is improving every day and with fingers crossed here's hoping that we'll be back where we were in the good old days of BugAware 1.07!

Hopefully this tale will help other people out there who have been scratching their heads on why they have dramatically lost ranking over the last few years - refresh your content as you may no longer be considered the original source for your original content.