Bringing Activities to your Smartphone!

Activities are at the heart of Accelo - they're how people communicate, make notes, log time, send emails, track appointments and more. Until now, however, the ubiquity and flexibility of activities has meant their support in our mobile apps has been limited to just logging time - the cool stuff, like seeing activity streams, viewing detailed conversations and even replying and making notes has been frustratingly absent - until now. Introducing Activities for our smartphone apps - the ability to see (and interact with) the activity stream, view conversation threads and reply or create new activities, all from our smartphone app.

The Mobile Activity Stream

One of the most popular features in Accelo is the ability to see the stream of all of the activities going on across the business, against a client or against a sale, project, ticket or retainer. Like a Facebook news feed, it makes it easy to scan through what's going on, be they emails sent to (or received from) clients, notes and time being logged on projects, tickets or other work and even updates to key records.

Until now you've been limited to seeing this powerful real-time stream of information through your desktop browser, which means that down-time we all get waiting for a bus, train or the kids to come out of their after school activities can be used checking in and scanning through the latest interesting stuff at work. And similar to "Liking" in Facebook, the Accelo activity stream makes it easy to reply to the author of an activity or internal team members - cutting down the friction on collaboration and joining in on the discussion!

Filtering is also possible by tapping the funnel in the top right corner:

• • Filter activities by date range

  • Filter by staff involved

  • Toggle between conversations involving client contacts, staff-only activity, or both

As you'd expect, we've also made sure you and your teammates can only see the activities they have permission to see; private activities are completely hidden from others, and confidential conversations remain under wraps too.

Viewing Activity Threads 

When you click through on any activity, you can now also see not only that activity, but also all of the other activities that have been part of that conversation thread. Click through from the stream to get a better view of the activity, plus easy access to the conversation around it, and if you want to see details on another activity in the conversation, simply click on the collapsed row to expand it out.

With the use of avatars and colors to make it easy to see who's written what, and smart timestamps that show how long ago people created their activities, the new view for activity threads makes it easy to see what's been going on - and then reply to make your own contribution by tapping on Reply or Reply All!

On the off chance you need to check the extra details of an activity - like the time logged, the class of the activity or any tags entered by the user, they’re just a tap away too!

Improved Create Activity

The ability to log time through a quick ”note” activity has been in the app for a while as "Log work", but now we've upgraded the experience to mirror that of the web app. With this upgrade, we've improved the UI (a LOT), and added in functionality for composing emails, logging the details of a phone call and, of course, creating a meeting complete with location and invitation options which will then push through to your Google, Office365 or Outlook calendar (which you just need to connect once in Accelo).

We’ve also introduced a new “Reply Team” feature that is like Reply All but helpfully excludes clients contacts - great for a shotgun response to your colleagues where you want to tap out something quick and unpolished without worrying about it also going to clients.

How can I join the Beta?

iOS Users
While Apple have changed a few things since acquiring TestFlight, the process is still pretty much the same: just read through this earlier post and fill in the form. Note: If you signed up to our previous beta, you'll automatically have access to this one, so no need to sign up twice! We'll be pushing the Beta out through Apple later today, so register your interest on the form and we'll get you in ASAP!

Android Users
Our Android release is still a few days away, but you can still join the beta channel and get the latest and greatest functionality updated into your Accelo app as soon as it is ready: follow the instructions for getting into the beta via this post. Similarly, if you've joined our Android Beta group previously, you'll automatically be part of this beta program too!

Windows Phone Users
Since we know there'll be a small handful of folks who ask, unfortunately we're still not working on a Windows Phone app. Microsoft has made some noises about providing cross-compilers "that just work" to convert apps for the popular platforms to run on Windows Phone devices, and we're waiting to see how these play out before having a closer look.

What's coming next?

Now that we've got the stream working, we'll soon be porting it into the view screens for a client, sale, project or another objects in the app - so before you walk into that client for a meeting you can quickly scan through the stream in the elevator or waiting room and get yourself up to date. We know this is a bit overdue - being able to scroll back through all previous conversations with a client and anyone on your team before stepping into a meeting would be invaluable - and so we'll keep pushing to make this available!

Our next main projects for mobile will include:

• Notifications to push real-time updates to you based on your notification preferences in Accelo.
• Android Wear and Apple Watch apps to make it easy to start timers on the fly!

We'll keep you posted on progress with these future updates our team are currently working on!