New Feature: Get CCed or BCCed on things you Favorite or Bookmark

Whether you're working on a sale, a project, a ticket or doing ongoing retainer work for clients, there's often times to prove the adage that two heads are better than one. While there's no shortage of ways to collaborate with team members to get the best results for clients - including of course in Accelo! - it is also true that there's plenty of times when we'd be able to help our colleagues out if only we knew what was going on!

One of the challenges with Accelo until now has been that we only support a single manager for sales, projects, tickets and retainers. The logic behind this - if everyone is responsible, no-one is responsible - makes a lot of sense, but what about the situations where you want to bring together a team and make sure any time work is done for something they can - and should be able to - contribute to, they get notified?

Today we launched a new feature which combines two of our most popular features to make this easier than ever, and shortly we'll be improving it even further to make keeping in the loop easier than ever.

Bringing together Favoriting and Notifications

Accelo has long had two popular features:

1. The ability to Favorite a Client, Sale, Project, Ticket or Retainer. While this feature might be named differently in your account (common ways people rename it include "Bookmark" or "Follow" or "Like" or "Watch"), the main benefit of this feature so far has been to make something you care about quickly accessible in the "Saved" menu in Accelo.

2. The ability to automatically get a email when someone creates an activity when you're the manager. This includes getting an email when someone does work on something you manage, as well as getting a CC or BCC automatically when someone does work on a sale, project, ticket or retainer for a client you manage.

Today's enhancement now means you'll automatically get a CC (or if it is a note or against an affiliation, a BCC) of the activity email that comes out of Accelo if you've chosen to Favorite (or Bookmark, Follow, Like or whatever it is called in your account) that object.

Bringing Together Teams!

There's two big benefits of this new functionality. The first is that anyone in the company who's a professional (or admin) user can now choose to pay attention to work going on in Accelo with a single click, and while there's always one nominated manager for an object, this allows many more people in the team to play an active part in collaborating via email.

The second big benefit is that you can ask your project (or other) team members to favorite some work and they'll now be treated just like managers when it comes to notifications and getting a heads up. While this will mean more email, it also means less meetings and time spent "bringing everyone up to speed".

What about Sensitive (private or confidential) stuff?

Of course, there's times when including your team in emails on sales, projects and the rest is not at all what you want. Fortunately this new feature continues to respect the existing privacy options and preferences:

• If you’re recording some notes against a ticket which are for your eyes only, you can still use the “Viewable” privacy options in the Create Activity modal to handle this. This ensures the activity remains private to you and won’t be cc’d (or bcc’d) to those who have “favorited” the project or client the project is against.

- Note that if you specifically attention other users, they will be notified by email.
- If you do adjust the “Viewable” setting for an activity/email, you only have to do this once per conversation; replies will automatically take on the privacy setting of the previous email/activity.
- Of course, if you start a new thread, that activity will go back to your default privacy setting.

• If you’ve configured a private relationship with a contact, rest assured that emails you send to them will continue to stay private even if someone has favorited the object where you created the email.

What if I don't want the noise?

If you’re not heavily using the “Favorite” feature then you may not notice much of a change in the email notifications coming from Accelo. But if you are, the good news is that you have the flexibility of choosing which modules (like Sales, Projects & Tickets) you want to receive “Favorite” notifications for, as well as another set of controls for clients that you have favorited. For example you could configure these scenarios:

• Only notify me for activities/emails on Projects and Sales that I favorite.

• For clients that I have favorited, only notify me for activities/emails on their Tickets and Retainers.

The new notification controls for things you have favorited can be found in your preferences screen:

To configure your notification settings, just mouse-over your avatar (in the top right corner of Accelo) and select Preferences from the menu. On the User Preferences page, scroll down to Notification Settings and expand this section. At the bottom of the first Notification table are the controls for the new Favorite notification.

Future Plans

When it comes to working together as a team even easier, we've got a future plans in the pipeline.

Email Relaying

While the functionality of Accelo now is to send these magical auto notifications when an activity is created in Accelo through the web or mobile apps, in the near future we'll be adding a feature which will take the reply emails - which don't get created by Accelo but by a client replying, for example, and will forward or relay them onto the same managers and following team members - this way, if a client replies to an email sent by a team member from Accelo, all of the folks who are part of the team who's favorited (or for that matter, who's a manager) of the sale/project/ticket/retainer will also get a copy sent onto them - attachments, formatting and all.

To help make sure things that are meant to be private remain private, we'll also be sure to mark any email that contains "Private" or "Confidential" as secret and not relay those emails on to anyone the person sending the email didn't explicitly include.

Favoriting for other people

Sometimes - especially if you're a project manager - you might not want to rely on people doing what you ask them, and instead you want to make them a part of a project team yourself. In the future we'll add the ability for you to favorite people yourself, and also see who's watching or favoriting a sale, project, ticket or retainer.

If you've got any questions, email [email protected] or put it in the comments below!