The first HighGear production task (then known as JobTraQ) was created on December 3rd, 2001 at 12:26 PM. This means that HighGear will be ten years old tomorrow! I can’t believe it’s been ten years now since we launched HighGear for the first time.
The first HighGear “customer” was a small manufacturing plant who wanted to track their repair work. Because HighGear was working so well for us, we gave them a free copy to play with. It wasn’t until several months later that we realized that we had something worth selling. We began to sell it to small businesses in our local area: accountants, plumbers, real estate agents and others. Those customers pushed us to grow HighGear into the powerful task and process management tool that it is today. Now, it is used around the world by organizations in many different spaces: insurance, education, finance, energy, government, and more.
I found one of our old V1 installation CDs and installed the demo on a test server. Some things I noticed were that V1 didn’t allow administrators to create workflow rules or task types, and the options for custom fields were very limited. Also, administrators had to log out and log back in to a separate web site if they wanted to switch from administration to working on tasks. The task list did not let users choose columns, group by fields, use saved views, or drag-and-drop tasks into projects. There were no calendar views, no time log, no BI module, and no reminders or checkpoints. However, it did allow attached files and recurring tasks, and there were some basic reports.
It’s been a privilege to help our team grow over the years and to watch them become experts at meeting our customers’ needs. I want to thank all of them, and all our customers, for helping us reach this milestone. Here’s to another 10 years of happy customers, interesting work, and a great team.
– Josh Yeager