Small update digest: Event improvements

With summer in full swing, things are busy here at LACRM. In addition to our team of full-time developers, this summer we have three developer interns who have been working hard to improve our product. Here are some of the things we've been working on:

Copying links to events

This doesn't come up every day, but sometimes you might want to reference a specific event on your calendar. For example, maybe you're planning a company event and you want to send it to other members on your team so they can add themselves if they want to attend. Previously the only way to find an event in the CRM was to navigate to it on your calendar. With this update, you can now copy a link to any event so that anyone who has permission to see the event can open it directly from an email, a chat message, etc.

Note: as it explains when you copy the link, this is not an invite. Only people who can already view the event in the CRM will be able to open this link.

Open event locations with one click

We made another tweak to make events even easier to work with: now when there's a location on an event, an icon will appear to the right of the location. Clicking on that icon will open that location in Google Maps so it's easy to navigate to your next appointment.

Better time detection when logging emails

One of the ways to log emails in the CRM is by forwarding them to your email logging address. The problem with this in the past was that we would log the email at whatever time you forwarded it to us which isn't necessarily the same time the original email was actually sent. For example, if a customer of yours sends you an email at night and you wake up the next morning and forward it to the CRM, that email would show in the CRM as having come in during the morning.

We just updated our email logging tool to look at the contents of the email you forwarded to try to figure out when the original was sent, not when you forwarded it to us. Emails will still log in the exact same way, they'll just have more accurate timestamps from now on.

More helpful instructions for new users on your account

For years, our CRM Coaches have reached out to new customers of LACRM to give them helpful tips and offer one-on-one support. Feedback from our users about these emails has been very positive, but we only sent them to the first user on the account (the "owner" of the account). When the owner added more sub-users, those people were left to fend for themselves. As part of our commitment to offering the best customer service in the industry, we're now reaching out to all new users include non-owners. Hopefully this will help each and every person using LACRM make the most of it.

Putting the infrastructure in place for a brand new calendar integration

If you haven't heard, we're in the process of building a direct integration with Outlook calendar! This is probably our most requested feature and we're really excited about it. There's still a lot of work to be done before it's ready for general use, but we have been silently releasing improvements to our integrations infrastructure in preparation for Outlook syncing. Our Google Calendar integration has already been moved to this new infrastructure, so we know it's working!

Bug fixes and minor improvements

In addition to their main projects, the interns have been plowing through our backlog of bugs and minor improvements. There are too many to list them all here, but each intern has already completed more than 15 things that are currently live in our app.

Redesign update

Last but not least, our developers have been making great progress on the new design of LACRM. We've been using the new design internally for a couple of months now and it's starting to take shape. There's still a lot left to do, but we think we're less than a month away from inviting a small group of users to start testing it out. Here's a screenshot of the actual redesign in our internal account:

Notes:

• Click on the image to see it full size
• One of the features in the new design will be the ability to upload your company logo to display at the top left of the page. Here you can see that the logo for our internal account is a picture of Baby Turtle, our company mascot, doing a trick with a miniature skateboard we bought for him.