Our calendar just got less annoying

When we first started Less Annoying CRM back in 2009, our goal was to make a simple contact manager. We stored contacts and notes, and that was about it. A year and a half after launching, we decided to add a calendar so that our customers could track their events and tasks without having to switch between systems. At the time, we didn't think the calendar was a very high priority, and so it didn't get much attention. The result was, to be perfectly honest, a pretty mediocre calendar product.

Since then, we've been amazed by how much our customers use the calendar feature. Even though there were much better calendars out there, the simplicity of being able to manage everything within one app proved to be incredibly useful to thousands of businesses. Now, the calendar is one of the most used features in our product, and it's time for us to give it the attention it deserves.

Starting today, we will be rolling out the first of two major improvements to the calendar. To start off, only some users will have access to the new features, but we hope to get it rolled out to everyone over the next few weeks. If you'd rather not wait, let us know and we can move you to the front of the line.

So what's new?

As I mentioned above, this is the first of two major improvements. The second phase will include some most requested features such as recurring events, and all-day events. This first phase is all about building a solid foundation that will support all of the cool features coming in phase 2. Having said that, we did include some goodies for you in phase 1:

• Speed - The new calendar is fast. Like, really fast. You can say goodbye to the days of waiting for the page to load after every single change to the calendar. We achieved this lightning-fast speed by switching over to an entirely new technology framework, and we'll be moving other parts of the app over to that in the future.
• Improved event layout - If you have multiple events scheduled at the same time, the old calendar made it kind of hard to see them all clearly. The new calendar has a much better layout which is particularly helpful for larger teams that share calendars with each other.
• Current time of day - This one might seem small, but it comes in really handy! When you're looking at the calendar in week or day view, a small red line will show you what time it currently is, so it's even easier to see what you have coming up.
• Easier event creation - From the day and week views, you can now click-and-drag to create new events. So let's say you have a 3 hour event starting at 10:00am. Just click on 10:00am and drag down to 1:00pm. It's that simple!
• ...and much more - There are too many improvements to name them all, but you should notice several other small improvements that make the calendar easier to use.

We hope you enjoy the new calendar, but keep in mind that this is just the beginning. Later in 2015 we'll be releasing stage 2 of the calendar improvements, and that will include recurring events, all-day events, much better Google Calendar sync, and tons of other new features. So stay tuned!