Many businesses, like ours, care about tracking time for various tasks throughout the day. Customer service is no exception. On the support front, these businesses may find it useful to track time on each support ticket and know exactly how much time was spent on each client. This is incredibly useful for making informed decisions about a team’s support resources.

We’ve built an integration with Zendesk for doing just that. Now you can track time from your help desk effortlessly, and understand where the time is going with Harvest for Zendesk.

In case you missed it from the video, here are the highlights:

• One-Click Time Tracking – Start a Harvest timer from your Zendesk ticket in seconds. Ticket numbers appear in your task notes for added context.
• Smart Project and Task Selection – Harvest for Zendesk matches your open ticket with its related project and task automatically. It’s the smarter, faster way to track time.
• Detailed Time Reporting – Simply open a ticket to understand total time spent in resolution. Make informed decisions with insight into how much time your support team logs for each client.

Learn more and get started by visiting our Harvest for Zendesk page. We hope this Harvest integration gives you better insight into your help desk. As always, feel free to reach out to us with any feedback!

Overhauling Six Years of Technology

The Harvest timesheet you use today went through a redesign over two years ago. The code is about six years old (as old as our business), improved and patched up over the years. This time we are building a completely new timesheet from scratch.

There aren’t any major problems with the timesheet today. In fact, the most common feedback we hear from our customers is that they love Harvest’s simple and beautiful design. But we’re not satisfied with it. We, as designers and developers, have evolved over the years, so has the web as a platform, and its technology. We are not improving the timesheet just to make it new. We believe we can create an even simpler and faster experience.

Why Mobile?

For the new timesheet, we decided to start mobile. To us, it’s also the most interesting platform to design against: with its small screen and natural restrictions, we are forced to be more disciplined with what we can show and do on screen. We also believe that timesheet should be mobile; it’s an activity that should not be chained to your desktop, and the information should be simple, succinct and clear, at a glance, on a tiny screen.

Mobile is the least intrusive way to experiment with a new technology without affecting our customers. We’re using a radically different way of building the new mobile timesheet (based on Backbone.js) – Dee, our main developer for the new timesheet, will write a more in-depth article about how the new timesheet is built. There is a lot going on behind the timesheet’s deceptively simple user interface. The goal here is to make it super fast and responsive (by that, I don’t mean being responsive with the layout, but responsive in terms of feedback to the users).

Looking Ahead

The plan is to launch the new mobile beta, to test out the new design and technology. Our hope is that once you start using it, you won’t really notice the difference. It should be smooth and mostly familiar. The changes are subtle: lighter, simpler, clearer, with a couple of tweaks to make time entry even faster. The big changes are all happening behind the scenes. We will be writing a few blog posts to share with you what we did and learned.

We are excited about this project and cannot wait to share it with you.

This feature is especially useful for larger companies looking to increase their efficiency when adding multiple users and assigning a multitude of projects. We’ve streamlined the process so that, going forward, it will be much faster to get users set up to track time.

Assign Projects Faster

Imagine this: After a grueling recruiting process, you hire a few wonderful employees. You add them to Harvest via our quick and simple form, and we drop you right into the Projects section of their profile. With our new feature, you’ll be able to:

• Assign them to multiple projects at once using our home-grown Chosen search.
• Assign them to all existing and future projects. It’s like cruise control, but on Harvest.

Make a mistake? If you accidentally assign the wrong project, you can easily remove it from the list.

This new upgrade is sure to speed up your experience. Don’t just take our word for it — this video shows you exactly how the new profile works:

As we improve Harvest, not only do we want to make time tracking better, but we also want to help you save time. We know this feature will make things speedier and easier, and as always, please send us your feedback!

P.S. Many thanks to Patrick, T.J. and Samara for working so hard on this project.

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Recently Harvest infrastructure has been affected by a Linux kernel bug, which causes poor performance on servers which otherwise are operating optimally. Upgrades have rolled out to all servers which can be updated without any impact to our application traffic. This bug is starting to affect enough servers to introduce risk for our application performance, such as our database servers and the clustering servers which keep the database cluster online.

Because of the number of servers affected by this bug, we are forced to take the unusual step of upgrading our entire database cluster in one go to return to acceptable performance. This unfortunately means we need to take Harvest offline for up to 30 minutes while the servers are upgraded.

During the day today, we’ll be keeping a close eye on server performance and plan to perform this upgrade tonight February 29th at 7pm EST. Harvest will be offline for maintenance for 30 minutes or less at this time. What time is that for you?.

Due to the nature of this issue, we may be forced to perform the upgrade sooner than 7pm EST today, in order to preempt unacceptable performance levels. This issue is not affecting the integrity of our customers’ data in any way, rather producing unacceptable levels of performance for affected servers.

We apologize in advance for this outage and assure you that Harvest performance is our top priority. Thank you for your patience while we upgrade our infrastructure.

We will keep you informed of the progress of the maintenance on HarvestStatus.com and via @harvest on Twitter.

Over the years, we’ve consistently built on top of Harvest to take advantage of the ever-changing technology available to our customers. We started with lightweight desktop widgets for Mac and Windows users. Later, we built mobile versions of Harvest for iPhone and Android as more customers needed to access Harvest on-the-go.

While Harvest began by providing a great web experience, we will continue to evolve as the technology around us evolves. Underpinning our evolution is the belief that you should be able to access Harvest from anywhere and everywhere. In short, we call this Harvest Everywhere.

Introducing Harvest for Mac

Today, we are pleased to announce the newest component to our Harvest Everywhere vision: Introducing Harvest for Mac, a lightweight, desktop companion for your Harvest account. We built Harvest for Mac with three goals in mind:

• Lightning Fast Time Tracking – Time tracking is a pain only when it’s inconvenient. We know our users just want to focus on their work and not on time tracking, so we’ve made things super fast. With global hot-keys, Harvest for Mac users will be able to quickly start timers or enter notes and get back to work in seconds.
• High Visibility - Harvest for Mac sits on your menu bar, keeping you updated on exactly how many minutes you’ve been spending on your current task and helping you focus. Additionally, stopping a timer is as easy as clicking on the “stop” icon in the menubar.
• Idle Time Detection – Ever rush off to a meeting only to forget to stop your timer? Now when you return to your computer, Harvest for Mac will ask you if you want to keep the time tracked while your computer was idle, or if you want to correct it.

Watch the video to learn more:

Since our entire team tracks time internally, we can say with confidence that Harvest for Mac is a tremendous time saver for those who track time as they work. We hope our Mac users will find tracking hours to be easier than ever with Harvest for Mac.

Download Harvest for Mac (for free)

Tighter Password Security

The way we handle passwords is safe and secure every step of the way.

Secure set-up
The Harvest Welcome Email includes a link to a secure password set-up screen. We’ll walk new users through a super-simple process that leaves no guesswork as to whether their password makes the grade.

Safe reset
If you forget your password, we’ll email you a link to reset it.  Your Harvest password is never visible in your account, and it is never sent over email.

Strong requirements
We’ve tightened the belt on what you need – all new passwords must be at least 8 characters and receive a “Good” or “Strong” rating from our new strength indicator (you can try to save a weak password, but we won’t let you). Due for a new one? There’s no better time than now to update your password! Just head to the new Password section of your profile and take a few seconds to make yours more secure.

We know you’ve got a lot on your mind, but you can rest easy knowing that your Harvest account is safer than ever before. Stay tuned for more information on the ins-and-outs of password security, and don’t hesitate to send any feedback our way!

In the coming weeks, we will be releasing a brand-new, smarter, and sharper profile. In our first release, we’ll be updating the overall design and organization:

Looking ahead, we’ll also be bringing new functionality to the user profile. As PMs or administrators, you will easily be able to add people to projects from the projects tab — an invaluable tool that’s been highly requested by you, our customers.

We’ll update you with a complete breakdown of the new features as they’re released. Stay tuned!

In 2011, we made over 800 updates to Harvest. We had countless conversations with our customers, added new features, refined old features and fixed issues. The constant evolution is a part of who we are as a cloud-based software company. A new update can be deployed to our customers in over 100 countries in an instant and we love that.

It’s About the Team

Behind the scenes, we’ve focused on growing our team. By December of 2011, we added 8 brilliant Harvesters to round out the team at 19. We’ve learned new ways to work together, whether it’s creating Delta Force teams for support, thinking through feature requests, or getting face time with our customers.

With every new team member we add to Harvest, we’re adding one more mind that’s completely focused on making the Harvest experience better for our customers. Updates are done faster, problems are solved more efficiently and our customer service gets even better (send our support team an email during business hours and you’ll hear back from us within 15 minutes).

It’s been a tremendously educational year for us as a team. If you’d like to learn with us, we’re hiring. :)

Turning 5 Years Old

2011 also marked the 5th year we’re in business as Harvest. Harvest was first created to meet the time tracking needs that Shawn and I had during our days as a design studio.

Since the beginning, we’ve taken the approach of building things one step at a time. At first, it was out of necessity of being bootstrapped, but later, it was because we wanted to keep things simple. Year after year, more and more people adopted Harvest to power their businesses. In the process, we’re honored to have picked up the best kind of funding possible for a company: paying customers. Without the distractions of fundraising, we are free to focus on just making Harvest better.

We couldn’t have done it without the support of our amazing community and customers, so when we turned 5 in April, we launched our Giving Back program. As our users tracked time, we allocated donations towards important causes addressed by Doctors Without Borders, Room to Read and charity: water.

The first 5 years was just the beginning.

A Better Harvest

Our business philosophy is simple: create a great product and tell people about it. There are no gimmicks and no shortcuts. We simply love creating something useful and we’re happiest when our customers tell us how we’ve saved them time and hassle.

Our team proudly stands behind what Harvest offers and we’ve prepared a little something to look back on the major updates last year: Harvest 2011 Year In Review.

Thank you for a great 2011. We can’t wait to share the goodness with you in 2012.

Santa and his elves are hard at work -- mostly focused on the "Nice List" project, although the naughty list has seen some time logged.

Whether you’re planning on tracking your time against that very important project with a December 26th deadline, or on the relaxing by the fire with a book task, we’ve got you covered! Although I’m sure I won’t be the last to say it, thank you all for using Harvest in 2011.  Have a great (and safe) holiday season, and we’re looking forward to working with you through 2012 and beyond!

Today we’re announcing a significant update for our Free official Harvest Android app, version 1.3. This update brings improved reliability with your Android phone syncing to your online Harvest account.

We launched our Android app in March of this year. This summer we overhauled the entire syncing engine in our iPhone app with brand new API calls, and now we’ve brought these new API calls to our Android app. They are a much more efficient and reliable way to sync time and expenses on your phone, even on-the-go!

Along with the reliability updates, this version also includes some new features and other improvements, including:

• Sync button added to Pending tab
• Project Codes are now displayed
• ‘Report Issues’ directly from the options menu
• Various bug fixes
• New icon

Enjoy, and let us know how the Harvest Android app is working for you. If you’re running into any phone-specific issues, let us know by writing into support.

Visit Android time tracker to learn more and download this companion app for free.