Hi Everyone,

This release focuses on enhancing the participant experience when you share your boards - making it faster and more streamlined to join a board and get into the action.

Invited participants now see simplified options - join or just view the board

In addition, the release includes a few other updates:

• Multi-account joining. You can now join boards that are in other accounts without having to leave your current team. If you join another team you can switch between them from the account name in the bottom left.
• Named guests. You can use your profile to join a board as a guest, rather than being logged out and forced to use a temporary guest profile.
• Guests can claim their account. If you join a board as a temporary guest (join without signing in), you can now signup with email and password to claim that account.
• Change to paid plan invites. For paid plans, people are no longer automatically added to the team when you share a board link. Instead, they will use a guest slot, if available. To invite new members to a paid account, you must invite them from the dashboard. Note - free plans still require everyone to join the team account to participate on a board.

Reminder - easier sharing

Lastly, a reminder that since the last release you can make a board instantly editable to anyone by setting "Can be joined by" to "anyone with the link". This disables the waiting room and entry approval process:

Change the join setting to 'anyone with the link' to disable the waiting room.

That's all for now!

Steve & Jamie

Hi Everyone, 

Version 2.52 of Metro Retro is here.  Highlights in this release are Anonymous Mode (beta) and better sharing options for guests:

• Anonymous Mode is here (in beta).  Anonymous mode lets your participants write stickies and vote without it being tracked back to them. You can use this in a variety of scenarios - such as to reveal hidden issues in your next retro, prevent bias while brainstorming, or even to play icebreaker guessing games.
  
  Turn on anonymous mode whenever you need from the meeting controls. From then on, anything written or voted on during anonymous mode stays anonymous, forever. Nothing can ever be tied back to an individual. Turn it off to go back to regular mode.
  
  This feature has been requested multiple times since the launch of Metro Retro.  It was a difficult concept to implement both technically and from a UX perspective. We are feeling good about the way it works, but have labeled it as "beta" because we would like the opportunity to for everyone to try it and feedback on how it works, just so we can be sure it's the right way to do it.

• Boards now have more sharing options.  We've added the ability for you to allow guests to "auto join" a board instead of always requiring an approval via the waiting room. In the sharing menu, choose 'Can be joined by: anyone with the link'.
• We've also removed the 24h expiry on guest access.  Once approved or joined, guests will have access until revoked directly by a team member.

• Gestures widget has moved into the toolbar.  Originally we thought it would be better for the Gestures to be away from the "mutate the board" tools, but in reality it was confusing and for a whole load of reasons just not a good idea.  So, it's now in the toolbar at the bottom.

• Shadows removed on Shapes & Zones.  Until this release all Shapes and Zones were rendered with a slight drop shadow.  Rendering the shadows is relatively expensive and contributes to lag during panning and zooming in complex layouts.  We've taken the decision to permanently remove shadows from Shapes and Zones in order to improve rendering performance of the app.  This should have very little noticable impact on your board designs, though in some cases bounds between shapes may be less visible and require tweaking.
• Disable Shadows setting added.  In addition to the changes on Shapes and Zones, you can now disable all shows on all objects (Stickies, Cards, etc) under Settings > Controls & UI > Disable Object Shadows.  If you are suffering from poor performance when panning and zooming we recommend enabling this setting.
• Festive decorations are now enabled.  A little later than we would have liked - festive decorations are now on.  As usual you can disable these by enabling Scrooge Mode under Settings > Controls & UI.  Don't forget to press the snowman's belly!

Note On Service Stability & Connection Issues:

Over the past month or so we have seen a growing active user base in V2.  This has caused strain on or system that we should have been on top of, but in a few instances we were not and it caused either notable degraded performance or short outages at peak times.  

In the past two weeks we have taken steps to mitigate these problems by upgrading hardware on our primary database, app-servers and web-gateway servers.  We also identified and have patched two bugs that were causing dropped connections to not reconnect properly, which often resulted an "unstable connection" popup while on a board.  These fixes and infrastructure upgrades should prevent further stability problems in the service.  

We will continue to monitor the situation and add capacity where required.  If you or any of your colleagues are seeing service problems, please check the status page at https://status.metroretro.io or contact us at contact@metroretro.io.

That's all for now - cheers all!

Steve & Jamie

Hey everyone,

We've been super busy over the last few weeks, and we're excited to share the latest updates! There's a variety of changes across Metro Retro, starting with improved confetti...

The Headlines

• The confetti has new streamers - go try it!
• Simplified team dashboard
• Changes to the Template Library
• Personalize your profile - add your picture, choose handwriting & colors
• Users can leave an Organization account
• Admins can delete the Organization account
• Streamlined help & added tours for new users
• Super powers for consultants with the new 'Host' plan

New Confetti

With the official launch of v2 around the corner, we decided it was time to update the confetti. Have a pop and check out the new streamers!

We thoroughly road-test each feature

We're also now counting each piece of confetti fired as a metric. On the first day of counting there were 261,576 individual pieces of confetti burst, but the second day had 1.16 MILLION! It would be an ecological disaster if this were real confetti. We'll find a fun way to share this useless metric regularly.

As it's firework season here in the UK, you can try this: add a black rectangle to your board's background, zoom in and fire your confetti. Voilà, you've got fireworks!

Simplified Dashboard

Your dashboard got easier to navigate - we've slimmed it down and replaced Recent Boards with All Boards, giving you a better view of the boards you have visited and have access to across your workspaces. There's also buttons to quick-create boards.

You can now scroll back through your entire board history in one place!

Updated Template Library

The Template Library now includes all standard templates as well as your custom templates. From here you can preview a template in full without needing to create it first.

Tip: how you add & edit custom templates has changed. Check out the Help article for a guide.

Personalize your user profile

You can now change your picture, name, email address, handwriting font and user icon color from the Preferences options in the top right (cog icon).

You can also now leave your Organization without needing an Admin to remove you. Reminder, you will lose access to all the boards and content you created & visited.

Delete Organization Account

An Admin can now delete their Organization Account from the Danger Zone in the Admin settings. This deletes the entire Account and all content inside it, for all your team members. Be warned - this is permanent.

Return of the Rubik font

We’ve updated the font in your dashboards from Inter to Rubik. We think it looks better and suits Metro Retro's personality!

Better Help & Guidance

We streamlined the Help and Guidance - there are new tours on the dashboard and inside a board, and we’ve removed the ‘Getting Started’ page from the dashboard.

Consultants get super powers with the new Host Plan

There is a new Host plan designed to help individuals, like consultants, to host brilliant meetings and workshops with their varying clients and groups. See the Pricing page for what's included in the plan. You can start a free 30 day trial of the Host plan from inside the Billing section if you are the Owner of your space (no credit card needed).

Your feedback and testimonials

Please let us know what you think of the updates, but more importantly tell us what you would love to see in Metro Retro next!

Lastly, if you've got this far and love Metro Retro, please consider writing a short testimonial - it helps us immensely. It takes just 2 minutes and there are simple prompts so you won't be stuck for what to write. If you need inspiration, you can read what other people have said here.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Jamie & Steve

Hi everyone

Version 2.50 of Metro Retro is now live.  Highlights in this release are Big Stickies, Polls, Ready Check, Hats and more!  The release notes video with all the changes is below:

Or if you prefer text, here is all key changes in this release:

• Stickies can be made big!
• Index Cards can be resized vertically.
• Task Cards are now available in the UI properly.
• Inserting objects has been improved via a new element drawer for Stickies, Cards, Tokens, Shapes and Text.
• Shapes how auto select a color based on background.
• Text sizes now include presets (e.g. S, M, L, XL).
• Pressing TAB while editing an object will create another object next to it with empty text.
  Pressing CTRL+ENTER does the same as TAB but creates it below.
• CTRL+D now duplicates and will repeat the last clone operation.
• When text editing an object, arrow keys move the object if there is no text in the input.
• Facilitator menu has been updated with new UI.
• Polls function added (create various polls to run with your team).
• Ready Check function added (allow your team to indicate they are ready to move on)
• Everyone To Me function available behind your user icon in the top right (facilitator only).
• You can wear a hat (via the your user icon in the top right).
• Confetti moved to the new gestures menu.
• Vanishing pen added to gestures menu (for temporary full screen annotations).
• Ping tool added to gestures menu (same as old ping but dedicated tool).
• Pings improved so they show off screen properly and are clickable.
• You can throw your hat.

Okay, that's your lot! 

As always any feedback please either use the in-app form or catch us on Intercom.

Cheers!

P.S. If you want to try these new features, just create a free team space.

Greetings all,

Metro Retro v2.49 lands today and brings external guest support & improved board sharing, as well as a set of new templates for your retros and meetings!

The Headlines

• Share boards with people outside of your organization (no login required)
• Unlimited external viewers (read-only)
• Grant editing rights to external guests
• Free guest slots per board that scales with your team size
• New board sharing settings
• The participant list is now displayed in the board (similar to V1)

Note for Free Plans

Guest support and board privacy are premium features and therefore not available to accounts on our Free Plan.  Boards created under Free will be always open to anyone who has the board link, as they were in Metro Retro V1.

Upgrade your plan to get access to guests and security features.

Sharing Boards

See the help guide for the full updates to sharing boards.

You can now share your boards securely with anyone inside and outside your organization, giving them the appropriate permissions for their access level.

You can choose from three levels of sharing options, meaning you can protect the board from being viewed by people outside your workspace or organization, or you can make the board visible to anyone with the link - they do not need to sign in.

Visitors with the link will view a board in a read-only state by default. They then have to ask for permission to edit the board - either as a team member, or (new in this release) as an external guest.

External Guests

A Guest is an external collaborator who is granted editing rights by the board host:

A guest only has access to the board they're invited to and can perform all functions of the tool except for starting meetings.  Their access lasts 24 hours or can be removed at any point.

Guests are available on paid plans, and are free of charge. You get an allocation of guest slots on your boards that scales with the amount of paid team members in your plan.

New Templates

There's a range of new templates to power your retrospectives and meetings: ESVP Icebreaker, KALM Retro, Boxing Ring Retro, The Awards Ceremony, Joy / Fear / Excitement, Incident Post Mortem, RACI Matrix, Pre-meeting Questions.

Bug Fixes & Other Changes

• We've moved the participant list back into the board. This makes it easier to see who is online, and easier to use the collaborative features.
• Fixed not able to import V1 boards to your private workspace
• Fixed issues with the right-click menu causing a white screen (crash).
• Added a menu button in the top right for help, contact and sign out.

What's Next?

• Improved "ping" function and more presentation gestures
• More powers for facilitators 
• Probably bugs and stuff

Hi everyone,

Metro Retro v2.48 is here and brings self-serve billing support and payment integration.   With this update you can now start a trial, subscribe to a plan and manage your subscription all from within the new Billing section of the admin area.

We've also made some performance improvements to the dashboard, some minor bug fixes and UI tweaks as well as some architectural updates to help with system stability.  Ironically, some of these updates have caused a few teething issues at the start of the week - apologies if you were affected by any of these.  They should help us provide a more reliable service as we move towards ending our Early Access program.

Read on for more detail, as well as a look at what we are doing next!

Billing Management - found in your Admin area!

Plan & Subscription Management

Teams on paid plans can now:

• View their subscription and plan information.
• Make changes to their subscription.
• View payment history and access receipts.
• View changes to their organization account that affected billing.

Monthly vs Annual

With the billing integration, we have support for either monthly or annual subscriptions.  Aside from a 2 month discount for annual plans, there are some differences in behavior:

• Monthly plans are "flex" plans.  As you add or remove people from your organization, your subscription will be updated pro rata to reflect the changes.  You can apply a "seat limit" in the subscription settings to cap your flex allocation from going too high (and costing over your budget).
• Annual plans are "fixed" plans.  Due to the upfront payment, we don't automatically increase seats as people join - you'll need to do this manually from within the billing UI.  Annual plans come with a sizeable discount of 2 months free per seat.

Account Viewers (Read-only Members)

We now have support for Account Viewers.  Viewers are not billed for and you can add as many as you like.  They can join workspaces and access boards, but cannot make any updates to any part of the system.  They are not strictly guests, as they must be registered, but they could be used as a form of guest.  We will be adding proper guest support hopefully in the next update.

When people are added to an account at the seat limit is reached, they will be automatically allocated as Account Viewers.  

You can set existing members to viewers via the people management screen (if you are an admin).

Free Trials

We offer a 30 day free trial of the Team Plan to all accounts.  Trials can be started from within the billing area or via the widget in the top right of the UI when on the Free Plan.  Teams on a trial can see how long is left in their trial (days remaining are displayed in the header), and upgrade at any time. When the trial expires, the space is returned to the Free Plan.

Free Plan

Newly registered accounts (or those choosing not to upgrade) will now be allocated our Free Plan.  This plan allows you full access to the main functions of the tool, but with the following restrictions:

1. Maximum object count.

There is a maximum limit for board objects. These are everything you place on a board: sticky notes, images, text, index cards... You can see your object count at the top of your workspaces and boards. The limit is a total across all users and boards in your space. Once you hit the limit, all your members are prevented from creating any more objects however you can delete old objects to reduce the count. Of course you can upgrade to a paid plan for unlimited objects. 

2. Access Control is disabled.

The organization space is open for anyone with a link to join. You cannot restrict access to the organization on the free plan.  For improved account security, please consider upgrading. Single Sign on is also available 

Upgrade your Plan now!

You can subscribe to the Early Adopter plan right now. The Early Adopter plan is the best value plan we'll offer to Teams, so don't miss out before it ends!

The regular Team and Enterprise Plans will be available when Early Access finishes. 

Monthly and Annual options are available on any plan. If you prefer to pay by invoice, please contact us.

As part of this release, every organization without a paid plan has been placed on a trial of the Early Adopter Plan. After the trial ends the organization space will be downgraded to the Free Plan.

Bug Fixes & Tweaks

Sometimes getting stuck "Joining Pod"

In some cases, connecting clients would receive board updates too early (before they had initialized) and it would cause the loading process to crash.  The result would be a message saying "joining pod" that would never go away.  This issue should now be resolved - if it is continuing to happen to anyone please do let us know!

Dashboard Performance Improvement

Some of you may have noticed degraded performance when accessing workspaces within the last few weeks.  As we have brought more new customers into the Early Access program it's started to highlight performance bottlenecks that were previously hiding out of sight.  

One such bottleneck was in our permissions lookup, which affects every API call.  In some extreme cases, this was causing up to 10 or 15 seconds delay on queries.  Release 42 has an optimized permission lookup routine, which has sped things up a lot.  

For those who are interested, the graph below shows a breakdown of execution time per API call type.  On the left you can see the state of things before the update and on the right how things have improved.  

As you can see, a big improvement!  There is still more to be done though. Performance of the application both in terms of the backend and the in-board editor experience are going to be a big area of focus for us in the coming months.

Team Members removed from Private Boards and Template Library

You can't add or remove people from your Private Boards or Template Library, so we've hidden that panel.  If you think it looks different when you go in there - that is why!

Coming Up

We will be working with our paying customers to test out 'Guest' options - how to include external or occasional collaborators to your boards.

After that we're looking at rolling some usability updates into the boards. We're also going to be undertaking a board performance update, so both small and large boards feel snappy to use!

Welcome to Metro Retro in 2022! Whether you're a Metro Retro pro or you've just joined us, here's some tips and hidden features that will feel like a new release.

There's something useful here for everyone, whether that's bulk-creating stickies from a CSV file or slapping your colleagues. Yep, you read that correctly.

Some of these features are in their early stages and don't have dedicated buttons yet. We'll be adding the most-used features to your boards.

Drop an arrow to say: 'Look here!'

Draw attention by pressing the Tab key to drop an arrow on the board. Or, hold the Tab key while dragging the mouse to highlight an area.

Drop an arrow with the Tab key

Keep time with a stopwatch

You can put stopwatches anywhere on your board - perfect for keeping a team on track! Follow these steps to enable:

1. Open up the Command Palette with Ctrl + Space
2. Search for 'Create: Stopwatch' and select it
3. Set your time and start the clock. Wait for the countdown surprise...!

Create a draggable stopwatch

Import your v1 boards

To use your v1 boards in v2, just select 'Import Legacy Boards' from the dropdown at the top of any workspace.

A new object - Task Cards

Create multiple sticky notes with the ⇧ Shift key

You can create multiple of a sticky note if you hold the ⇧ Shift key when creating. This works for other objects too. Hold Shift before creating the first sticky note and you can add as many as you need of the same color:

Make multiple sticky notes

Sort selected objects into organized lines

If you have a bunch of items selected, press the 1 or 2 key on your keyboard to arrange the items in a neat horizontal or vertical line.

Press the 1 or 2 key to arrange stickies

Pick up multiple stickies at once

You can pick up multiple sticky notes at once using the right mouse button while holding left-click down. This works for other objects too.

Pick up multiple stickies with left and right-click combination

Import CSV data to your board

You can represent any CSV data with Metro Retro's objects. For example, import your backlog to sticky notes and group them automatically by release version and priority. 

Just drag and drop a CSV file on to your board, or copy/paste from the file. Then map the data to sticky notes or other objects and their properties, like content and color.

For more details and instructions, see the Help Guide (How to import data).

Drag a CSV file onto your board and choose your options

Slapping

This is a little Easter egg that we couldn't help but include! To slap your colleagues, just hold the Space bar and whip your mouse through their avatar. You will slap them across the screen!

You can disable this in the Settings if your colleagues get slap-happy.

Jamie shows how to slap

Time Machine

The Time Machine lets you replay all of the actions on your board - it's pretty cool to see the board build up from the beginning!

You can also copy any objects out of the time machine, so you can retrieve deleted items!

Here's the Time Machine in action after a team-drawing retro:

Replaying a drawing session

We're now coming to the end of 2021 and the end of our Early Access phase. Thank you to all you early adopters who subscribed this year to support the development of Metro Retro, and welcome to everyone who started an Early Access trial!

This release has a range of updates across the tool, not least the Christmas decorations. We're not sure if we're more excited for Christmas or the official launch of Metro Retro v2 early next year! Until then, here's the updates in full:

Christmas Mode!

Christmas decorations have been applied to everyone's boards. This can be turned off from the Settings - enable 'Scrooge Mode' to hide them. There is also a three-part Christmas retrospective template for you to use with your team:

New templates

We've been adding new templates to the tool in the last month, and plan to add many more soon. Use the comment box to let us know what templates you would like to see in Metro Retro!

Picture templates:

• Big Christmas Retro
• The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
• Three Little Pigs
• Ishikawa (Fishbone) diagram

Other retro formats:

• Wishes, Risks, Appreciation, Puzzles
• Keep, Problems, Try
• I Like, I Wish, What If

Other collaboration templates:

• Crazy 8's sketching
• Collaborative Drawing icebreakers
• MoSCoW prioritization
• Monthly Calendar

Tutorials And Guides

There are 4 new tutorial boards to learn from - from the basics through to advanced facilitation. Find these in the Help Menu or in Templates.

Invite team members by email

You can now invite team members to your Organization Account by email, from inside a workspace or in the Admin area.

Admin Approvals

If there is an invite made to new people whose email address doesn't match your security settings, an Admin will need to approve the invite request. They will be notified by email.

Usability updates to the Dashboard

1. Recent Boards now shows when you last visited a board, and the workspace it is in.
2. Workspace lists are collapsible.
3. When cloning a board, you can now move it to another workspace in one action.

Object manipulation updates

A few updates to make editing the board layout easier:

1. Hold shift when rotating a shape for easier alignment.
2. Hold shift when moving a shape to move it along its horizontal or vertical axis only.
3. Hold the Alt key and drag from an object to create a clone.
4. Press the 1 or 2 number keys when you have multiple items selected to arrange them vertically or horizontally.
5. Shapes and images can now be set to ‘contain’ other items, or not. This setting means they can either contain either objects or be a flat shape.
6. Resizing shapes no longer affects the objects inside them

Embed Videos in boards

Embed videos into boards by pasting the link directly into the board. This works for YouTube videos and videos hosted elsewhere. You can see examples of embedded videos in the Tutorial boards.

Emoticons in shapes

Shapes can now have emoticons in them - this is the same mechanism as tokens. Double click a shape and type one of the 50 custom emoticons. Try typing <:-) in a shape.

Adjust thickness of marker pen with number keys

Using number keys 1-8 will adjust the marker pen thickness when it is equipped.

Hot on the heels of last week's sneak-preview, here's some features we're excited about and can't wait for you to try!

The star of this release is the first ever iteration of the Planning Poker and T-shirt Sizing workshops, decked out with real playing cards!

Watch just the first 10 seconds of this tutorial to see why we're excited:

We've added tutorial videos inside the templates to show you how to use them (oh that's another new feature - embedding YouTube videos into boards).

The two templates can be found in the Planning and Estimation category. Go try them out and tell us what you think:

Improved Drawing

We've upgraded the marker pen, so you can now draw on zones and shapes of any size, adjust the size of the marker, and there's an eraser for when it all goes wrong:

Embed Youtube videos

This is a beta feature, but if you paste a YouTube link onto a board, it will embed the video in the board. We're classing this as beta because the controls are limited to play/stop for now 🤦‍♂️.

If you need to move or adjust the size of an embedded YouTube video, hold the SHIFT key and click on it to get the selection/transform controls.

'Apply zone settings' command

We had a request this week: 

"When we move stickies out of a zone, we lose the context of the color that it was previously - is there any way to 'burn' the color on to those sticky notes?"

So there is now a command that you can run through the the Command Palette to do just this (Ctrl + Space to open):

Your Feature Requests...

If you have any feature requests, please do send them in! We're heading into a busy November and December, and have these things on the horizon:

Community-contributed templates

We're experimenting with opening up template contributions to the community. Talk to us if you'd like to contribute the first templates to Metro Retro.

Picture templates

We've got some more picture templates coming down the line. Tell us if there's any template or meeting formats that you would love to see in Metro Retro.

Stability Improvements

Not very sexy, but entirely necessary.  We're going to be dedicating some time in the next few months to improving reliability and stability of the tool.

Release #45 of Metro Retro Early Access has landed.  The landing was a little rough, apologies if you got caught in the small period where the board was not clickable or show/hide was missing... Messing with z-layers at the last minute was a mistake!

Our team retrospective this week will probably include "release smaller updates" somewhere in the notes.  We got a bit carried away with this one.  So much so that we have decided to split the usual video into two, with the second video focusing on the beta/experimental features.  Anyway, without further ado, the notes video and notes:

Waiting Room & Organization Access Control

We've done a few things that will streamline getting people into your organization spaces and boards:

1. People can now automatically join your organization when you share a link to a board with them.  This works off an email domain whitelist available in the new Access Control section of the admin screen.  
2. If a person is not whitelisted they will see a "Request Access" option that will email administrators requesting permission to join the orgnanization.
3. Once in, if a person does not have access to a board, they can now "Ask to join" which will notify anyone on the board that they want permission to join and show their information in the new waiting room widget.

Organization Template Library

There is now a shared template library for the entire organization. Add boards to the template library and everyone in the organisation can use them. Useful if you have branded boards or sets of templates you want everyone to use.

Live Now

I actually forgot to mention this one in the video...  The waiting room functionality required an extension to our collaboration system that means that we can share which users are on which boards with members of the organization even if they are themselves not on the board.  

This means we can add the participant indicators to the dashboard previews, showing who is online, but also powers the Live Now view.  Originally, this was just for me and Jamie to test and debug, however it was so useful for us day to day that we have decided to keep it.  Our plan is to eventually roll it into a more useful Home screen (merging with Recent Boards), but for now if you want to use it to find your colleagues, it's there.  

Any private boards will show up as private (no title or preview) so that your protected information is still safe.  Anyone trying to join will go via the waiting room functionality.

Improved Board Create UI

The template browser and board/folder creation buttons have been overhauled to make them easier to use and more pleasing to look at.  The new template browser also automatically includes any boards you add to the Template Library mentioned above.

Time Machine [beta]

You can now step back through the history of each of your boards using the Time Machine function in the bottom left of the board view.  This feature is functional but not polished, so expect bugs.  In it's current form it's possible to scrub through the timeline and pull out objects that were deleted or lost by selecting them and using the copy/paste functionality to bring them into your present board.  In the future we will add more explicit restoration functionality.

Note: this should be compatible with all your existing boards.  We would be grateful if you could report any errors you happen upon.

Hands Concept & Planning Poker [beta]

This release includes a new board function called "hands".  It's inspired by mechanics from digital board games and basically lets you virtually "hold" board objects in front of you as if you were holding a hand of cards.  You can hold anything on the board at the moment, but large items will cause erratic behaviour.  For now we have added a planning poker template with the function enabled.  Check out the video for information on how it works: