Product Updates: June 16 - July 6

If you read these updates then you're probably already part of the beta for Accelo's new navigation! And if you haven't given us any feedback - good or bad - please don't hesitate to do so using that handy lightbulb button! 

It has been a few weeks since we updated you on the smaller - but still important - fixes and improvements, with a particular focus on better performance:

Sync contact changes from Accelo when any user is connected to Microsoft 365

Previously, we were only pushing changes when the current user -  making the edits - was connected to Microsoft 365. Of course, it's possible that a user without the integration could edit a contact which another user is syncing with/to Microsoft 365. In the vast majority of situations, you want those updates to go through as well, so we've rolled out that improvement.

Improve performance of converting external events to meetings

Particularly on the Daily Timesheet screen, several users were encountering 20-30 second delays when turning external events into meetings in Accelo. We've improved the backend processes in this conversion feature to reduce the lag time by 90%.

HubSpot - Improve sync performance

When data in HubSpot changes, Accelo gets a "callback" for every field that is updated. This is pretty normal, but because we were trying to pull the updated contact from HubSpot for each individual change, our system was working a little harder than it needed to. We've since optimized the sync utilities to ignore the duplicated/noisy callbacks, making the sync process significantly quicker.

Faster loading for the Activity Templates sidebar

When composing an email in Accelo, you can open the Activity Templates sidebar to insert a canned message. If you had a high number of templates and categories created, the sidebar might have taken 10 seconds plus to load templates. After making some adjustments under-the-hood, this wait time has been cut down by 80%. 

Xero - Erroneous "Failed to push" notifications

When adding a payment to an invoice in Accelo which is linked with Xero, the payment will sync over but not allow other updates to the invoice even if it was already approved/authorized on Xero's side. This is why you might receive a failure to push notification email - which is somewhat confusing - because the payment sync worked. From now on, we'll suppress those notifications (only as part of a payment sync) to curb any future confusion!

Microsoft 365 - Warning pop-up if you've lost connection

Just like our integrations with Google and Exchange Server, we'll now display a warning pop-up if we've lost connection with your Microsoft 365 account.. This warning prompts the user to check the Integration Summary page and to reconnect the integration so syncing can continue. There are a few ways that an account could get into this state but the main example is if a user changes their Microsoft password.

Images missing from Email signature when you send a Quotet

It's common for users to have images in their email signature in Accelo. However, these weren't working if you used the Quotes module to create and send a PDF quote. Our team has now fixed this issue. 

Division override rate not applying properly on ticket create

Our team also fixed a problem with billable override rates not applying correctly when creating a ticket. If the customer was involved in a special client division, then you might have a different set of rates in place for those clients. These rates should override any rate that was preset from the type of ticket you were creating - an oversight that has now been corrected.

Fix for meetings with reports appearing unreported when updated remotely

A handful of users have noticed some meetings in Accelo continuing to appear in their schedules as bright yellow, unattended meetings. This was despite the user having logged their meeting report. We discovered a probable source for this bug (changing the event in your Outlook calendar) and have blocked it from happening in the future.

Trigger feature update: Close oldest open period

The Retainer/Contract module in Accelo offers a special process action ‘Close oldest open period’ for both Triggers and Status progressions. This action was designed to help you close expired periods. However, this also closed the current/active period even if it was the only open period. To prevent this undesired behaviour from happening, our users used a variety of extra rules in their Trigger setup, which wasn't 100% effective.

To make this feature work more in line with user expectations, we have now made a change so we no longer close the current/active period. So if the current period is the only one the trigger can detect, it will skip it. We have also renamed it to "Close oldest expired period."

JIRA Integration: Limiting the Issues that can sync with Accelo

To address some performance problems with very large sets of issues being imported and synchronized into Accelo, we are working on a limit to the number of issues you can sync with Accelo. Currently we're looking to set the limit at 1,000 - which means a project in Accelo can only have 1,000 tasks linked to it from JIRA. Beyond that, you would need to create a new project in Accelo for the remaining issues to be brought across as tasks.

We're doing this because as more and more issues from JIRA sync with a single Accelo project, the continual flow of issue edits, comments, worklogs and more from JIRA into tasks within the same Accelo project causes a slow-down as our Projects system recalculates the task time to schedule out for the users involved, as well as forecasting the changes in project dates. As these processes can queue up, it impacts all users of the JIRA integration. Breaking JIRA epics into smaller ones and using several Accelo projects to synchronize them results in better performance, not just for the sync of data but also the usability of those projects inside Accelo.

We are certainly exploring other steps to mitigate these slow-downs, but the best-practice for working with projects in Accelo is to split into separate projects as you approach the 1,000 task mark.

Fix for Tags list in admin

If you wanted to clean out all the tags in your Accelo account - which you can do from the Admin Navigation > Users & Groups > List Tags screen - and then add new tags from that page, you were unable to due to a hiccup with the buttons no longer responding. That's been fixed.