Stream Upgrades: Boost Insights & Streamline Operations

Accelo's Stream - the real-time list of notes, emails, meetings, calls and other activities related to clients, sales, projects, ticket, retainers and more - has always been a popular feature with our users. Freed of isolated inboxes, and organized chronologically against the relevant client or work for that client, the Stream makes it easy to quickly drop in and see what's been happening in an account you care about.

While the data in the stream has always been great, we've been wanting to make improvements to how we display it for some time. We wanted to make it easier to scan down the list and see what actions - like opening an email or clicking on a link - people, especially clients, might have done right from the Stream. We wanted to make it easier to show you what activities you were involved with were secret or confidential (so you didn't worry that what you could see in Accelo could be seen by your colleagues). We also wanted to make it easier to do the things we do all the time, like reply, relocate and convert activities into other work (such as a new sales opportunity).

The great news is, with this upgrade, we're now making all of these things possible. See below for all the details!

See who's Received, Opened, and Clicked on Emails from the Stream

Probably the most visual change. We've now made it possible in Accelo to see whether the recipient of an activity (whether an email to a client or note sent to a colleague as an email notification) has been received, opened or clicked on, all without leaving the stream!

The different colors around the name of a recipient mean different things:

• Delivered (grey): this tells you that an email sent from Accelo was delivered to the email server of the recipient. It doesn't necessarily mean it landed in their "inbox" - they might have a rule that puts it in a different folder, or potentially put it into spam - but you can be sure that the email did make it to the mail server of the recipient at that date and time.
• Opened (blue): this tells you that an email was opened by that recipient. We show the timestamp of the first time the email was opened; while it would be nice to know if the client was going back and continually opening your email, the fact that email programs include the previous message whenever they reply means the additional opens are often when you (or a colleague) open the reply the recipient sends you, so the first open is really the only date you can trust.
• Clicked (green): this is when someone clicks on a link inside your email. We show this in place of the Opened timestamp and color because clicking is a lot more interactive/important than just opening and also because you can't click on a link in an email without first opening it (making open something you can confidently imply).

Quickly Reply (and Reply-All) in the Stream

When you're looking at a stream of activities, it is common that you'll want to jump in and comment - whether to help, clarify or simply follow up. This has always been possible with the Accelo Stream, but it wasn't as easy to do as it should have been - you'd have to fully expand the activity inside the Stream to access the reply buttons, which made for an extra step that was often unnecessary (since you could see the first line of content without expanding).

With this upgrade, you can now always have the Reply and Reply-All buttons at your fingertips. You've also got the "three dot" menu always available, making more advanced actions easy to access as well.

Instant Confidence around Confidential and Secret Activities

While liberating email from inboxes is powerful, the fact that most of us are used to our inbox being a 100% private space means you need to have control and confidence over who can see the emails that Accelo automatically indexes.

As a result, Accelo has always had the ability to set the visibility of activities (including not just emails, but also meetings, notes, etc), using two settings:

• Confidential activities are where the content - subject and body copy - of the email is hidden from your colleagues unless they were a part of the conversation (sender or a recipient). Your colleagues can still see that something happened, and who was involved, so if they are not included but need to get an update (say, because they're an account manager), they know which colleagues they can ask ("Hey, Tony, I saw you had a confidential activity with Sally at Acme Corp; anything I should know before I call Sally to do my monthly check-in call?").
• Secret activities are where the activity is completely hidden from colleagues who weren't part of it (as a sender or a recipient).

Given the importance of having this confidence, we wanted to make it a lot easier to show you as you look in the stream if an Activity you're looking at is Confidential or Secret. The Confidential activities will have a Purple "Confidential" description in them, and the Secret activities will have a Red "Secret" in them.

There are a few ways to set the visibility by default; for more information, see the following help guides:

• Setting default visibility for clients & contacts with relationships
• Setting visibility based on email content & keywords
• Setting default visibility for all of your activities (user preference)

Faster Relocate

When Accelo automatically captures an email sent to or received from a client, we often have to guess what the email is about. While we recommend that our users use Accelo to send (at least) the first email of a thread from Accelo (so that it, and its replies, are located against the sale, project, ticket, retainer or other work that the conversation is about), we know that this isn't always possible - and in the case of clients sending you an email, is never possible!

Since we don't know what work the email (or meeting) is about, we store the activity in the only place we are sure it is about - against that client's record.

To make it easier for you and your colleagues to make sure conversations are against the right sale, project, ticket, retainer or other work, we've always enabled you to relocate a thread - however, the process was more arduous than it needed to be.

With this upgrade, you can now easily access the Relocate option - either under the three-dot menu on the Stream, or with a dedicated button on the Activity View screen - and perform the relocation without leaving the stream. We hope you find this much faster and easier!

Easily Convert Activities to New Work

Finally, we know that the activities Accelo captures are often the beginning of a new work journey: an email from a prospect you just met could turn into a sale opportunity, or an email from an existing client could turn into a new ticket, for example.

To make it easier for you to use the Stream and these emails to initiate new work, we've made it easy for you to convert the emails you see in the stream into this work.