A couple months passed since I started the development of my team/client collaboration platform Collabd, and some pretty good features have seen the light since them. Here’s my first follow-up blog post, to let you know how everything is falling into place. To keep an eye on my progress and my day-to-day tasks, I use a simple physical Kanban board (AKA Scrum board), in conjunction with the Todoist app, just to remind me to get things done. I have to act as the Product Owner, the Scrum Master and the developer at the same time after all! 😅

The app is currently my main focus since without any alpha version, I naturally can’t showcase anything. The main ideas, current sprint and upcoming sprints are all figured out, I just need to put my coding skills into work. The app will mainly be running on the MERN Stack (Mongo, Express, React and Node.js) for now, and it might be ported to React Native somewhere after initial launch. I’ll keep you updated on that.

1.1 - Subscriptions and accounts

I have been working on account creation for a while now. Users will be able to register natively on the app, or use third-party logins like Google, GitHub, Facebook or Twitter. Using third-party authentication is an important portion of the app, since I don’t want to force users who received an invite to access a specific project on Collabd to add all their credentials just to create an account. I might add other third parties in the future, but that will be the options for now. As for the payments for the recurring paying tier clients, the payments will be processed in Stripe.

1.2 - General UI

Coding the components is a thing, but I also have to style them. So that’s why I created a generic style guide for all my interface needs. I started from Google’s Material Design and build on top of that. Can’t show anything yet, since it has not been finalized, but I can’t wait to show you sneak peeks of how the app will look like. Follow the project’s Twitter account to be updated!

1.3 - Trello Link-up

Since the goal of Collabd is to centralize the information without forcing your client to use another app than the one that they currently use, we have to add tools so you can link all these other apps to ours. Trello is a powerful project management tool, and we just want to make a better collaboration between teams who are actively using it and those who prefer another Kanban tool. The Trello link-up will work in two ways. First, it will let you easily push Collabd tasks to Trello, and last it will let you send tasks to Collabd directly from Trello, using a Power-up.

1.4 - Calendar & Events creation

Like you might know already, Collabd will allow users to create events within the app and then sync them to their own calendar app of choice. I have been working on the Google, Apple, Outlook and Yahoo calendars sync options. I might add some more over time, like the Samsung S Planner who has a small share of the mobile calendar market.

1.5 - The Landing Page

In parallel of the app, we have to work on a landing page to gather information about Collabd and allow users to subscribe to be part of the beta when the time has come. Like stated earlier, you can’t showcase a product if the product isn’t a minimum tangible. Minus the features section who will explain the main selling points of the app, the landing page is almost completed. It will be uploaded on https://collabdapp.com as soon as it is done.

Wrap up

So here was the first Kanban Update for the Collabd App. Basic features are going well, and the landing page explaining the app will soon be online. A lot of high-level tasks have been done on the last few weeks so I can focus more on the app itself. I’ll keep you updated as much as I can in the following months, until I can show you a viable product. Hope you enjoyed, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter! Let’s end this week with a good Scrum Board IPA! ✌️

Scrum Board IPA 1