While 13 is an unlucky number in many cultures, 2013 was a very big and successful year here at Accelo. We doubled the business and released many major upgrades to the product, including the new Contracts & Retainers Module, upgraded Activities & Tasks, a new Email Campaigns Module, Client Portal and an all-new Requests Module to round out the year.
And while we’re only two weeks into January 2013 is a distant memory for our team - we’re moving harder and faster than ever before. Here’s an outline of our priorities in Q1, and a sneak peek over the horizon to the areas we’re planning on focusing our efforts in Q2 this year.
While the Projects Module was a priority and focus throughout Q4 of 2013, the scope and scale of this upgrade means we’re still working our butts off through January 2014 to get this new upgrade live.
Our engineering teams have finished all of the major work in project planning, project viewing, the upgrade to a new milestones model and more. They’re now working on upgrades to the approvals and invoicing sections of the product, which means we’re getting very close!
We ran a Sneak Peek session at the end of 2013; if you missed it and would like to see what we’ve got in store for you in the first half of Q1, check out the video below.
Another area with major progress made in Q4 of 2013 (and continuing apace this quarter) is in our mobile apps. The initial release is going to be focused on helping you search and work with your client database while you’re on the road, see your tasks and log time.
As any of you who’ve developed mobile apps will know, there’s a lot of foundational work that needs to happen (around security, authentication, access) - our engineering team has now completed most of these (critical but not sexy) tasks and we’re working on getting you mobile apps for iOS and Android late in Q1.
Want to get an early look? Become a beta tester.
What we didn’t get a chance to ship in 2013 was one area of the Requests Module - the triggers & notifications system. This system allows a user to configure rules which will trigger a business process automatically - whether it be sending an email escalating the request or converting it into an issue. The rules can include things like the client’s status, subject/body text matching (like “URGENT” or perhaps a curse word or two), whether a request has had activity on it and time delays between other key steps (like the time a request was created, for example).
Based on some great user feedback at the time of our Requests Sneak Peek, we’ve decided to extend the Triggers & Notifications functionality more broadly across the product, so that users will be able to set rules like “Send an email to the sales manager if the salesperson hasn’t replied to an email from a prospective client in 3 days” or “Send an email to the project manager if a milestone goes over 90% of budget” or “Alert the client that their retainer has been almost completely exhausted this quarter”. I’m sure you’re getting the picture (and hopefully getting excited) about the power that automated Triggers & Notifications can provide alongside Accelo’s custom business processes.
To get a sense of the power of what’s coming, check out this demo of the feature from our Sneak Peek session for the Requests module upgrade from late last year:
This will be a Premium only feature (since it relates to the custom business processes and is controlled in the same section), so for our users who’ve adopted Premium for the power of its business automation, you’ll now be able to benefit from automation even while you’re sleeping!
While this isn’t an obvious product feature enhancement, we think that this upgrade is going to provide a lot of exciting opportunities going forward for all of our users. After spending the last few years on a private cloud managed by external contractors, we’re making the switch across to Amazon Web Services, the biggest name in true cloud infrastructure.
If we do a good job with this project (and we’ve been doing a lot of research and preparation work to take the guess work out of this) we’ll be moving all of our live infrastructure over to Amazon in February. This will provide a number of immediate benefits in scalability, and a number of medium term benefits to our clients, including:
We’ll be in touch with more details as the migration gets closer; watch our blog for updates too.
One of our final product priorities for Q1, and one that is unlikely to hit your Accelo accounts until early Q2, is a new interface and approach to timesheet entry. This was #4 on our list of top user suggestions. While we haven’t finalized the details here, the areas we’re going to be focusing on are:
We’re aiming to have an integration with GFI Max (and potentially a couple of the other leading RMM vendors) released into a beta late in Q1. What's an RMM? It is a cool tool that Managed Service Providers (MSPs, the kinds of contract IT professionals that service companies without their own IT departments) use to keep tabs on whether their client's workstations, servers, networks, printers and more are performing properly, have their anti-virus up to date, etc.
The objective of this work will be to allow MSPs to connect Accelo with their RMM and have new alerts (like hard drive full or back not completed) for their clients come into the new Requests module. When Requests are “closed”, it will also clear flags in the RMM system. Combined with our notification work in Q1 (which allows for SLAs and escalation rules), we’re excited about what this beta will enable for our growing number of MSP clients.
We’ve got a number of priorities we’re targeting in Q2; we haven’t gone through the detailed planning process yet to be sure whether these will all ship in Q2 or whether some will end up dropping in Q3, but nonetheless, here are the priorities we’ll be focusing on in Q2.
We're gearing up for a big and exciting year ahead! If you have any questions or would like to learn more about Accelo and what it can do for your business, contact us now.
