Accelo Product Roadmap - Q2 2013

As things heat up for our San Francisco team and cool down for our crew down under, we're going to be pushing hard to make some of the biggest improvements to Accelo yet with a focus on a major upgrade to projects, a whole new extranet and making it much much easier to view, schedule and shuffle the work across your team.

• Project Module Upgrade
• API
• Extranet Upgrade
• Multi-User Scheduling & Workload Reallocation

• Gmail Integration/Gadget
• Resources & Attachments Improvements

• Schedule Customizations
• Desktop Timer/Stopwatch
• Automatic Notifications/Reminders
• Requests Upgrade
• What About Mobile?

Project Module Upgrade

Woah, this is a big one. And well overdue.

When we first built the projects module in Accelo, we were fulfilling a fairly narrow kind of project management requirement. Components or tasks would be allocated to individual users, while they could have sub-components they wouldn’t roll-up, and possibly most importantly the scheduling would use a simple business-days duration and dependency calculation to work out when something was supposed to get done.

As Accelo has grown with thousands of users all over the world, we’ve realized that this simplistic view of project management just wasn’t cutting it anymore. The interface we use for project planning - which we currently call workflow editing - is horrible to use, doesn’t provide feedback on deadlines and can’t handle the creation of tasks against a component. Additionally, budgets are very crude, with a very limited ability to consider non-time budgets.

This big rock - the biggest of Q2 - is a major upgrade to the Projects Module. Some of the things we’ve got slated include:

• Improving project scheduling. We want to make it easy to take full control of your schedule - specifying not just durations but also specific dates if you want - and showing the results on gantt chart in real time. We also want to make it really really easy to use, and also allow you to adjust schedules easily even after a project has commenced.
• Improved project budgeting (with non-time entries and costs). Similarly to our emphasis on ease of use and control, we are also going to focus in the overhaul at making the budgeting process a lot easier. We’ll be building on our rates improvements and extending them to also handle the cost-side of budgets, which could be reflective of contractor pay rates or the inclusion of non-time entries like third party licenses or other parts of a project scope.
• Improved project planning/scoping. As our clients have become more sophisticated, their project plans have become more detailed and deliberate. This part of our projects module overhaul/upgrade includes the ability to create more fine-grained tasks within project milestones or components, and being able to set these tasks up against component/milestone types and templates so you can just snap them into a project plan and automatically have a set of tasks like a checklist autocreated.
• Bulk project approval & invoicing. As you and your team work on more and more projects, being able to go through and see a list of all of the projects by client and then approve and invoice for these projects all in one go will save a lot of time and ensure you never forget to bill for the work you’ve done.

These are just some of the things we have in mind for the projects module - feel free to add your own ideas to the Ideas Forum.

API

Drum roll please. We know a lot of our more technical users are going to be excited about this this.

Yep, that's right. In Q1 we'll be releasing a beta of our new API, a RESTful, OAuth driven API that uses JSON as its payload to allow you to get in deep and programmatically with Accelo. We'll initially be focusing on clients, contacts, sales & issues, and we’re excited to see the sorts of integrations that our uber-geek users can come up with.

Keep an eye on our Accelo User's Group for more information on this... it's closer than you think ;-)

Extranet Upgrade

The Extranet that is built into Accelo is best described as rudimentary. Your clients can log in and see their projects, issues, contracts, invoices and create new requests, but it isn’t optimized for collaborating with your clients.

Some of the things you can look forward to with the overhaul will include:

• A whole new interface to make your clients feel more like partners in the work you’re doing together, with the ability to see more (at your discretion), do more (make notes, comment, upload files and sign off on approvals) and share more (inviting their own colleagues into the extranet, in effect building your client database and making your business more entwined in theirs).
• More fine-grained visibility controls. Do you want to show some clients the remaining budget on their monthly support contract, but not others? How about sharing progress on projects and milestones and real-time gantt charts depending on the client or project? With the new extranet module, you’ll be able to do all this, and more.
• A new approvals feature. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could send your client a link to an important design, document or other record and have them approve it right then and there? The new extranet will include this new feature, designed to boost collaboration and make it easier for clients to provide a “sign off” to the work you’re doing for them.
• See what they see. With more fine grained controls, it will be more important than ever to log in and see what your clients are seeing in real-time. With the upgrade, you’ll be able to click on a client, a project, an issue or a contract and see the “client view” - just to make sure you’re not sharing too much!
• Automatic invitations. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could tell your clients to use the extranet to check for updates on a project, issue or contract instead of emailing you all the time? With the new version of the extranet, we’ll also be implementing an automatic invitations feature which will allow an auto-reply email to go back to your clients when they email support, for example, giving them details of their account access to log into the extranet.
• Enhanced visual customizations. The extranet is your presentation of your brand to your clients. That’s why we’ll be supporting custom color schemes as well as the ability to upload your own logo... all designed to help you present your business and brand as professionally as possible.

Multi-User Scheduling & Workload Reallocation

The most common question we get from users of our dynamic scheduling module is: can I see a list of a group of staff (or all my staff) on one screen and move work around between them?

The good news is that we’ve got this coming in Q2, building off the overhaul we’re making to activities and the upgrade of the projects module. This new feature will enable you as a manager to see one or more staff and filter their work down by projects, issues or other places where you can create tasks. You’ll be able to see their comparative workload and easily reassign tasks and components between staff members - ideal if you’re trying to optimize the resource allocations among a team of designers or similarly skilled professionals on your team.

We’re really excited to be bringing this feature to you just as soon as we can get the underlying features of projects and activities improved - if you’ve got any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Gmail Integration/Gadget

While Accelo has a lot of magic for capturing and sharing emails between your team and your clients, it has never tried to replace your main email client; there’s just so much non-client email that still flows into our inboxes it hasn’t made sense to go to the effort and duplicate the awesome features of Gmail just to give you another inbox.

However, this has created another challenge - you can’t easily see the conversations tracked in Accelo while you’re in Gmail. This means it is all too easy to reply to an email to a client that a colleague has already replied to, even more frustrating because Accelo already knew about it, but just couldn’t show it to you.

Well, help is at hand, at least for Gmail users. Later in Q1 we’ll be releasing the first version of what’s known as a Gmail Contextual Gadget. What is it? It is a cool window that loads below an email when you’re reading it in Gmail which can tell you helpful thing:

1. Has someone else on your team has already replied to it, and if so, what did they say?
2. Whether the contact who sent the email is already in Accelo, and if not, give you a simple on-click button to add them.
3. If the email is already captured in Accelo, is it against a project or just against the client account? If it should be against a specific sale, project or issue, you’ll be able to relocate it quickly and easily right from within Gmail.
4. Should you create a task (for you or someone else) so you don’t forget to do some work? Sure thing - just give it a deadline and an estimate of the time you need to complete it, and you’ll see it automatically appear on Accelo’s todo list and schedule.
5. Would you like to log some billable time on this conversation? Cool - you’ll be able to enter a quick note and some hours/minutes and have it automatically log the time in your timesheet - fast, simple and convenient.

Of course, this only works for those users lucky enough to spend their lives in Gmail, but we’ve got plans later in the year to improve the usefulness of Accelo as a parallel inbox, making it faster and easier to do all your client email reading and replying... watch this space for more ;-)

Resources & Attachments Improvements

We’ve actually got some really big improvements for the way we handle Resources and Attachments coming in the first half of this year. In Q1 we’re mainly focusing on improving performance and setting a foundation for future improvements that will allow your resources and attachments to live not just in Accelo, but also in your Box, Dropbox or Google Drive account.

While this one is a big rock for us (there’s a lot of low level infrastructure stuff to change), you should see some improvements in the load speed of the attachments tab as we implement this change over the coming months.

Schedule Customizations

The dynamic schedule - found in Accelo Premium - is a powerful, adaptive tool for forecasting resource load and demand. However, currently it assumes that everyone in the business is working a 5 day week from Monday to Friday, which isn’t necessarily true.

In Q2 we’ll be introducing an improvement to the Scheduling module which will allow individual users, as well as the business as a whole, to have their work schedule days customized. That way, public holidays, part time workers and locations where weekends fall on different days will all be automatically accommodated in the scheduling view.

Desktop Timer/Stopwatch

While we’re remaining an avowed cross-platform, browser-based and cloud technology company, upcoming improvements in technology are enabling us to move closer and closer to the desktop.

During Q2 we’ll be releasing a feature built on Google’s new Chrome App functionality that will allow you to have an installable, desktop based and automatically loading timekeeper. You’ll be able to see a list of the tasks you have in Accelo and be able to run a timer and toggle between tasks as you’re working, all on the desktop, and all in the background.

What’s really exciting about this is that it is still 100% browser-based (meaning no security issues), cross-platform and still cloud-based (even though it works offline!). With more than 2 in 3 of our users already using Chrome to work with Accelo, we’re confident you’ll love this feature too.

Automatic Notifications/Reminders

Wouldn’t it be nice to harness Accelo’s powerful business processes and custom fields to make sure you don’t forget a deadline, let a project stagnate or forget to follow up on a sale?

This is what we envision with a new automatic notifications/reminders feature. These notifications will allow you to specify specific rules based on progression statuses, dates and custom field values to remind users that they need to take action if certain conditions are met.

An example would be to send an automatic email 24 hours before an issue’s deadline occurs, particularly useful for situations like hitting client SLAs. You could also have a notification get triggered to a sales person if there hasn’t been a note made in three days if the status on the deal if “quote sent” - that way they’re reminded to keep following up.

The uses and benefits are almost endless - we’re excited to see what you come up with!

Requests Upgrade

Another module which has become more important and heavily used than we originally expected is the requests module. Designed originally to be a simple queue of requests that would be either be dismissed or quickly converted into sales or issues, the requests module has now become an important place where users actually collaborate and manage their reactive client service work.

A few of the improvements slated for the upgrade to the requests module include:

• Improvement in the user interface. The listing format with expanding rows was a good start, but we think we can do much better now, particularly making the interface more useful for keeping an eye on requests that have a bit of interaction and history behind them.
• Auto-conversion to issues & sales. One request we get regularly is the desire to automatically convert a request to an issue or a sale of a specific type and with a specific status and even custom fields set. This way, requests that come into a special address - such as [email protected] - can be automatically converted to a high priority, a short deadline and with an email re-sent to the critical response team letting them know something really important just came in.
• More conversion options - while converting to an issue or a sale is nice, we want to extend the ways you can migrate a request from the queue and turn it into work that needs to be follow up on. With this improvement, you’ll be able to convert a request to become a new project, a new component on an existing project, or merge the request in with an existing project, sale, issue or contract/retainer, keeping all the conversation history, attachments and more in tact as you do.
• Requests from non-contacts in Accelo. One request we also get a lot is the ability to capture requests from addresses and contacts not already stored in Accelo. Because support@ and info@ email addresses are some of the most common targets for spammers, managing this queue in a way that takes into account spam risks and headaches isn’t going to be easy, but since quality of service and support matters so much to many of our clients, we’re going to tackle this challenge anyway in the upgrade.

What about mobile?

Some people might have noticed that we don’t have a specific slot on this schedule for an iPhone and Android specific application. We’ve deliberately left them off our slated schedule because we’re in the early stages of scoping these applications out, and wanted to get the APIs in place which could allow us to build and experiment with them internally before locking them down. That doesn’t mean they’re being ignored - they’re not, and we’ve just hired two new mobile app developers - but we’re not quite ready yet to share more details on them.