Notification Preferences & Exchange Updates

It's been a busy couple of weeks for the Accelo team as we work out all the movings parts needed to bring our beta customers on as monthly or annual subscribers to Accelo!

Fortunately we've also found time to prepare a few features that have been sorely missing :-)

Email Notification Preferences

This feature resolves the frustration of receiving too many email notifications from Accelo - especially when you set yourself as a manager of another user but don't want all their diaries sent to your inbox!

As we started planning this feature we quickly knew it was going to be very tricky to build an intuitive interface to configure the plethora of notifications built in to Accelo. So we came up with a plan to allow a user to configure their email notification preferences for all diaries that are created via the "Add Diary" screen. In the future we aim to expand the notification preferences to control a range of other automatic email notifications which are generated from other actions in Accelo.

To view the notification settings, click your username from the top right, then click "Settings".

On the screen that appears, you'll notice we have added a new section called "Notification Settings" which provides a matrix of options. By default all these options will be enabled - as per the current behaviour of Accelo, but using the On/Off buttons you can update your preferences and then click "Save" from the bottom to confirm.

In the image above, I have setup my preferences to be notified about diaries added by other staff when I am the manager of the object (Job, Issue.. but not companies or contacts).

I also care about diaries that are created against Issues, so even if I am the company manager for an issue, I wish to be notified (as per the single ON setting in the 3rd row).

Finally, if any staff I manage add diaries, I only want to be notified if those diaries are against Issues.

Exchange Integration now supports Exchange Web Services and Office365

Once we had access to an Office365 developer system we found we had to re-write a lot of code to get the calendar, contact and task integration with Accelo working smoothly.

After a week of testing we're happy to release this for all to try - remember though, this is our first field test, so it is only for the brave!

To connect your Accelo account to Exchange (2007 SP1 or later) / Office365, simply navigate to the Integrations screen in Accelo and start the connection.

For more instructions, please see this page on our help website.

Invite External Guests to Meetings (schedule diary)

As more users have taken advantage of the calendar integration (Microsoft Exchange and Google Apps) we've heard that not being able to send a meeting invite to the client when creating a meeting diary was quite tedious.

We've now introduced a "Send Invites" tickbox to the schedule area on the Add Diary screen so that if you are scheduling a diary and attentioning a contact, you have the option to send the meeting invitation to them.

If you do, ensure that the diary subject and body have something meaningful to the client contact!

Note that the meeting description will not include the contact details and links back to Accelo (as previously included) - as this could confuse the client!