Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Jetpack, is introducing a suit of productivity tools for work.
Calling it 'Happy Tools', Automattic's product lead for Happy Tools, Matt Wondra, said that the idea of launching this kind of tools has been around at the company for years.
"When we started building Happy Schedule a year ago we realized that designing a tool for our own scheduling needs also filled a clear gap in the [workforce management] landscape."
"No other product out there gave us the flexibility and visibility we needed to comfortably schedule a globally distributed team. Since it was a greenfield internal project, we could engineer it from the ground up with public release in mind. And it just made sense to launch Happy Tools first into an industry we know so well — customer support."
The first tool in Happy Tools, is called 'Happy Schedule', an automatic scheduling service that Automattic has been using to deliver its 24/7 customer service.
"We know Happy Schedule is a good tool because we use it every day. We built it for ourselves here at Automattic, to help us tackle a problem that plagues companies like ours—scheduling in a modern, distributed work environment," said Automattic on the Happy Tools website.
Taking the form of a modern web app, Happy Schedule feels a lot more like Google Calendar, rather than SAP products, with features like click-and-drag, for example.
Happy Schedule is just a start.
Automattic plans to launch more Happy Tools products over time, so users can work more efficiently in a remote team.
"It’s only the beginning. We’ve got more tools in the works. Try out this one while we refine the others, you’ll be happy you did," said Automattic.
What this means, when that time arrives, Happy Tools users should be able to access and use multiple products that work together.
This is similar to Google's approach with its G Suite subscription that allows users to access Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive and so forth.
The company is offering Happy Tools as a software-as-a-service, with a 30-day free trial, with no credit card required.
After that, monthly pricing starts at $60, which includes the users' first 12 members. After that, it's $5 per user.