We've been getting a bunch of love lately on the Internet.

First off Web Design Ledger featured the Grove logo in it's Showcase of Creative Startup Logos.

Marieke Guy wrote up a great piece titled Meet me at the Watercooler about how her team uses Grove both for day-to-day business chat as well as a virtual water cooler.

Then AppTuts included us in their list of 10 chat tools for better communication on team projects along with all of the other usual suspects.

Finally, PriceIntelligently included us in a post about personalizing your pricing strategy. Discussing our pricing page and how we name our plans after trees.

Maintenance Window for Fixes and New Features

As you might have noticed we've been able to devote more resources to Grove these last few months. While the vast majority of the work is behind the scenes boring techie stuff, these changes lay foundations for our future plans of new features.

Unfortunately part of that requires a brief maintenance window this Sunday, April 13th, 2014. We will begin maintenance around noon US Central time. There should only be a few intermittent interruptions to the web UI and IRC interfaces, however search will be down for a few hours as we correct some deficiencies that have been plaguing a few of our users.

While most of our work is still behind the scenes infrastructure some changes are visible to the end user, for example last week we rolled out desktop notifications to the web UI a highly requested feature. A few days later we rolled out an overhauled web app that cut the access and display times of the dashboard and initial channel loading by half.

During this Sunday's maintenance, along with fixing those search issues, we will be fixing an SSL certificate issue that generates errors on some IRC clients and doesn't allow for example Hubot to work when using SSL. No this isn't related to the recent outbreak of Heartbleed, we actually weren't vulnerable to that (yay!). It was a misinterpretation of how SSL wildcard certificates validate.

We're also release an updated channel export feature. We've revamped the JSON export format to be more compact and useful, not a direct copy of our standard API, but one designed for export/import purposes. This vastly cuts down on the file sizes involved and makes it more developer friendly to work with. In the past we only had an option to download a day of chat at a time, after Sunday all active Organizations will have the ability to generate and download the entire history of a channel whenever they desire.

Why Sunday you might be asking yourself? Well our metrics indicate that Sunday around noon US time is the quietest portion of the week so we'll impact the least number of customers. While it may seem odd that we're not doing this in the middle of the night, you have to remember we do have many international customers. We think it's great that Sundays are slow at Grove, it means all of our customers seem to have a pretty decent work life balance!

If you have any questions please reach out to us at team@grove.io and thanks for using Grove!