HarvestApp.com Impresses Me Again

I’ve been using Harvest for a few years now, and as a customer have been a big fan of their product. A couple months ago they made a change to their plans and impressed me again. This time though, it wasn’t as a customer, it was as a developer and business owner.

It wasn’t the details of the change that caught my eye, it was that prior to the announcement, they sent me an email regarding how the change affected an open source library I maintain.

Here’s the email, posted with permission from Harvest:

Hi Zach

I’m reaching out early, before the official notification about this, to ask a question about your Harvest client: http://simplechatter.com/2010/04/harvested-a-new-ruby-api-wrapper/

In a couple of weeks Harvest will be implementing SSL across the board for all Harvest accounts. Accounts can opt-out of SSL (through Harvest support) but HTTPS will become the default for all Harvest access.

The net effect for accounts currently using non-SSL HTTP will be an HTTP 301 redirect from http://subdomain.harvestapp.com to https://subdomain.harvestapp.com when this change goes into effect for everyone.

Does your client support this 301 redirect, and SSL in general? If not, we’d like to work with you to support this, to avoid any issues for your access, or for anyone using your client.

Please let me know and feel free to contact me for any details, or if I can help in any way.

Thanks!

The fact that the company not only keeps tabs on the current software community around their product, and intentionally reaches out to them for potential issues, and offers to help out to fix those issues speaks volumes. Fostering a community and enabling evangelists around your product is often overlooked and under-prioritized.

Kudos guys, and keep up the good work.

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