Product Updates: Nov 3 - Dec 1

Over the course of November we've enhanced our Forms API to be more useful and continued to roll-out updates for our Redesigned Lists Screens Beta, so this post is a little bigger than usual! If you do get through it, you'll spot a couple of tidy performance tweaks too.

Forms API - New Features & Fixes!

We know that sometimes your work takes shape in another system before being scoped out in Accelo. This might be a quote or opportunity from Salesforce, leads from LinkedIn or a form on your website. Taking the initial details of that work and getting it into Accelo quickly and accurately is possible with our Forms API, and now, even more types of work can be automatically set-up:

• New endpoint for Projects: Now you can tell Accelo to create a job (project) for a new company/contact, or existing company/contact. You can specify the project template (milestones & tasks) to start with, plus define specific/custom milestones to add onto the project plan. Check out the help guide for more.
• New endpoint for Assets: So you can quickly add new Assets against an existing company/contact (or new ones) and prefill as many custom fields for that asset as you need. See the help article for more.
• Asserting IDs: By default, Accelo tries to match the submitted data (name, email address) to an existing company & contact. However if your form already knows the company or contact ID to use, and you were supplying it, our API may have still been trying to validate that the company name or contact names were supplied. You can avoid this by doing an assert on the company_id, contact_id or affiliation_id. 
• Key Based Authentication - Zapier support: Until now, our Forms API wasn't easy to use with Zapier because of the reCAPTCHA requirement on our side. Now, we support a "key" parameter which can bypass the reCAPTCHA. For more info on this Server to Server Asserted Authentication option, visit the updated security page
  

Beta Update: New List Screens

We've just released several new columns and filters for the list screens included in the beta. In-case you missed the announcement about this open beta from mid November, here's all the details :-), and here's some highlights on the new stuff:

• Company list: Columns added: Comments, Division, Phone. Filters added: Division.
• Contact list: No new filters or columns... but Coming soon: Company Name, Company Status and more related company fields.
• Sale list: No new filters or columns at this time.
• Project list: Profiles fields and Custom fields are now available as columns AND filters. Plus plenty more fields, especially budget related ones, coming soon.
• Issue list: No new filters or columns just yet.
• Task list: Columns added: Related Company Name, Related Sale/Project/Ticket/Retainer Title (that is, the title of the main body of work the task relates to), and Related Milestone Title.
  Filters added: Company Name, Related Sale/Project/Ticket/Retainer Status.

Updated Text Editor for Invoice Templates

For a more modern experience, and for consistency with other parts of Accelo, we've replaced the older style of rich-text editor with the newer TinyMCE editor which you'll already find throughout most of Accelo (such as when creating an activity). This should make updating the look and feel of your invoice templates just a little bit easier!

Fix for the Integrations page sometimes not loading

Early in November a handful of users noticed that the content of the Integrations page in Accelo - where you manage your personal and system wide integrations - was often not appearing. Some of the products we integrate with are very strict on the way their logos and "Connect" buttons behave from within our app, which means we have to dynamically retrieve content from these 3rd party sites. Some of these assets went offline - we're not sure why - but the fact it stopped our page from loading was a problem we were able to work around.

Request & Inbox badge counters: Performance fix

Assuming you have these counters/badges turned on from your User Preferences page... you might have experienced times where the count numbers were slow to appear. We were feeling this too, and digging into it, we were able to significantly improve the performance there so you see the updated count as each page finishes loading.

Microsoft 365 Contact Sync: Performance fix

In some cases our Address Book system was falsely detecting changes to contacts and continually attempting to process these "ghost" changes into Accelo, impacting performance. We've improved our sync to avoid looping over contacts from Microsoft 365 which think they've been changed when there's no tangible change for Accelo to recognize.

Create Activity/Email - Fix validation for New Contact

When you're composing an email and try to enter an email address that Accelo doesn't recognize (there's no contact in Accelo with that email) then you might have spotted the option to add as a new contact on-the-fly. This feature had a bug whereby a company name was not a mandatory field, yet your account might have been configured to ensure all new contacts have a company set. If so, you'd hit a miscellaneous error and potentially give up. We've fixed this by properly validating the form before saving.

Gusto - Fix link from Accelo's View User page

When your users are connected with Gusto, there's a handy button on their View User page to see their profile in Gusto - except that link was not going to the right place. It was trying to open the Gusto Demo site, instead of the Gusto account that your team are linked with. This is now fixed!