Insightly Mobile Website

We're introducing a mobile version of Insightly that is designed for the smaller screens of mobile phones and tablets, and for touch navigation. It's browser based just like it's big brother, but we've taken care to make sure that it is easy to use while on the go. To use it, fire up the mobile browser on your phone or tablet and go to:

 http://m.insight.ly

Insightly mobile has been tested on a range of different Android phones, iPhones, and on Windows Phone and Blackberry. We also tested it out on several tablets including the iPad. 

Insightly Mobile is designed as a companion app to the Insightly web app, and you can do most things on the mobile version like add, edit, manage your tasks, contacts and organizations, opportunities, projects and view emails already saved to Insightly.

Just type in your Google Apps domain to log in as you normally would in the Insightly web app, and the first time you log in you will be taken to a Google login page to enter your Google Apps credentials. After that you will be presented with the Mobile main menu (as shown below).

Tap any of the menu entries to go to that section or use the dark tool bar at the bottom to navigate between sections. When you add or update items in Insightly mobile, they will be saved back to Insightly immediately and the changes will be visible to all other users of Insightly or Insightly Mobile.

In a couple of weeks time, if you access the main Insightly website from your phone or tablet, it will redirect to the new Insightly Mobile website instead, but you will always have the option to view the standard Insightly on your mobile device too. We're also building native iPhone and Android apps that you  will be able to install from the Android Marketplace or the iPhone App Store. These apps will be faster if you have a lot of data in Insightly, but will be very similar to the Insightly Mobile web app in feature set and appearance. They'll arrive later this year. Thanks !

Note: If you're a Google Apps Paid Business customer and receive an Secure Sign On (SSO) error message when logging into the Mobile app, you will need to enable Federated Login in order to use  our mobile app. 

Get your Google Apps domain admin to enable Federated Login by doing the following:

1. From Google Apps, click "Manage this domain".
2. In the blue bar, click on "Advanced tools".
3. Under "Authentication", click "Federated Login using OpenID"
4. Make sure the checkbox labelled "Allow users to sign in to third party websites using OpenID" is checked.
5. Click "Save changes".

For further support, please email support at insight.ly

Introduction to Insightly webcast

Last week in conjunction with the Cloud Alliance for Google Apps we hosted an introductory webcast going over some of the basics of Insightly. We recorded it and have put it on YouTube at the link below for those who missed it. Some of the things we covered were:

• Installation through Google Apps Marketplace
• How to access Insightly
• Tour of user interface
• Importing
• Insightly Gmail Gadget
• Pipelines and Activity Sets
• Custom Fields
• Custom Filters
• Exporting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcAhyvRzhW8

Improved Opportunity value tracking

New to Insightly this week is the ability to see and track the number of opportunities you have open at any time, and their total worth. We've added a small info bar to the top of the opportunity list that calculates the number and total worth of all the opportunities in the list, and displays them by currency.

The totals in the bar change dynamically depending upon which opportunities are in the list, so it works great with our custom filters, or the built in ones. You can quickly see at a glance how many open opportunities you have, and how much they're worth. Or create a custom filter to see how many opportunities you have with a close date in the next 30 days, and the total worth of those opportunities. You might also track the total outstanding value of all open opportunities for a specific user.

You can also click on a tag in the sidebar to see the total number and value of opportunities with a specific tag. It's a small change but a big improvement to the opportunities list and we hope you like it.

The new Calendar and Events system

We've just introduced a couple of new features into Insightly, a built in calendar and an event system.

Events

Events in Insightly have a specific start date and time, and an end date and time. Examples of events are things like appointments, meetings, or conferences, and they can be linked to contacts, organizations, opportunities or projects in Insightly, or you can create them just for yourself.

You can set an event to private to have it only visible to yourself and Insightly administrators, or make it public so other users can see. Events can also have a location, and we added a large text block for you to enter any further details too.

There are a few ways to create a new event:

• From the 'Quick Add' menu at the top of every screen, select 'Add New Event'. 
• From within a contact, organization, opportunity, or project - open the Actions menu and click 'Add New Event' which will automatically link the new event to that item.
• From within the Events sub-tab for a contact, organization, opportunity, project, click the 'Add new Event' hyperlink.
• Click the calendar icon in the top right corner, and then click the 'Add New Event' button.

Linking an event to other items in Insightly will cause the event to show under the Events sub-tab for that linked item. When editing or viewing an event, the links sidebar on the right hand side of the page can be used to link the event to other items. Click the 'Add Link' hyperlink in the top right and type in the name of the item to link it to the event. The links sidebar works the same way for other items in Insightly too.

All events in Insightly are displayed specific to your timezone - so make sure you have the correct timezone set under 'My Info' > 'Regional Settings'. The 'My Info' page is accessible via the small card icon in the top right corner.

The Calendar

We added an integrated calendar into Insightly too. It's accessible by clicking the calendar icon in the top right corner. By default it shows all your events, but you can also show your tasks and any milestones you're responsible for too, or public events from other Insightly users. 

There are views for showing the entire month like a wall calendar, or for showing a week, or a single day. You can move between the weeks or months by clicking on the arrow buttons to the left and right of the current month in the header. To get back to today, click the 'Today' button in the header.

To show public events for other Insightly users, click the checkbox next to the name to display them in the calendar. If you wish to change the color of any calendar items so you can better distinguish them from others, click the small color square next to the name and choose another color.

Clicking on an item in the calendar will display a small popup with the details of the event, milestone or task, and from there you can jump to the page for that item, edit the details, or delete the item.

Subscribe via iCalendar

If you use another calendar tool like Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Mozilla Calendar, the calendar on your mobile phone, iPad or Android tablet, or just about any other calendar that supports the iCalendar standard - you can easily subscribe to your Insightly calendar in just one click to see your events, tasks and any milestones you are responsible for on that calendar. The link to subscribe to your Insightly Calendar is at the bottom left of the page.

Project Calendar

We added a project calendar to Insightly too for any projects that use milestones. It's accessible via the Milestones sub-tab, then by clicking on the 'Calendar View' link. That calendar will show milestones for the project, and you can also subscribe to the iCalendar feed for the project by clicking on the subscription link in the bottom left of the project calendar.

Disabling the Insightly Gmail Gadget for select users

Google has just introduced some new fine grain controls to the Google Apps admin dashboard that allows you to disable/remove the Insightly Gmail gadget and Insightly link in the top navbar for a subset of your users. This is useful if not all the users in your organization use Insightly, or if some do not wish to have the gadget appear within Gmail.

Only a user from your domain with administration privileges can make the changes below.

First an administrator from your domain has to log into the Google Apps administration panel located at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/your-domain.com  - where you can substitute in your own Google Apps domain at the end of the URL.

Under the 'Organizations and users' tab, add a new sub-organization called "Insightly Users" or a similar name.

Go back to the list of all your users and move only the users of Insightly into the new sub-organization. You can do this by clicking the checkbox to the left of the user names, then click the 'Move To' button and choose the 'Insightly Users' option.

Now you can turn on/off the specific services that users in that sub-organization require. Turn on Insightly and any other services they may require.

Finally in the parent Organization turn off access to Insightly to disable the gadget and quick link for all other users in your domain.

Note these settings do not affect which users can log into Insightly itself (which is controlled within Insightly) - but only the display of the gadget and the Insightly link in Google navbar quick link (under the "More" option). Once you have changed these settings - it may take up to 24 hours for your changes to take effect within Gmail.

Google also has a blog post on how to do this.

Announcing the Cloud Alliance for Google Apps

Today Insightly is joining with Cloud Sherpas, Expensify, Okta, RunMyProcess, Smartsheet and Spanning to simplify application selection and implementation for Google Apps users.

The partnership network — a first among Google Apps Marketplace vendors — is known as the Cloud Alliance for Google Apps.  The founding members, each vetted according to their reputations within Google, Marketplace rankings, product reviews and more, are of course Insightly, Cloud Sherpas (with its SherpaTools application), Expensify, Okta, RunMyProcess, SmartSheet and Spanning.  More information about the Cloud Alliance can be found at www.cloudallianceforgoogleapps.com

Cloud Alliance members are capitalizing on Google Apps’ considerable momentum in the enterprise. The platform is used today by over four million companies worldwide, and Gartner recently recognized Gmail, a centerpiece Google Apps application, as being enterprise ready.

Still, it is a challenge for Google Apps users to determine which add-on applications are the best.  Cloud Alliance solves this problem by uniting the top Marketplace applications for IT administration, CRM, security and compliance, workflow and integration, expense management, identity management, and project collaboration.  Users can now more easily identify the best-of-breed applications, easing their selection burden and speeding application deployment.

On February 29 we'll be running a free webinar entitled “Manage Your Customer Databases” for users signed up on the alliance website, and other alliance members are also releasing free white papers, best practices, and valuable training materials. Head over to www.cloudallianceforgoogleapps.com and sign up for more information.

Drag & Drop and Multi-file Uploads

We made an improvement to Insightly recently to make it easier to upload files into your projects, opportunities, contacts and organizations. Previously in Insightly you could only upload one file at a time, but with modern browsers now supporting drag and drop file operations and multi-file uploads - we've re-engineered our upload system to make uploading easier.

Drag and drop uploading works in Google Chrome, Firefox 4+, and Safari 5+. IE does not support this feature, but like the others browsers it does support multi-file uploads also described below.

Drag and drop file uploads

You can now drag files to your computer onto the page of individual contacts, organizations, opportunities or projects in Insightly, and you will be asked if you wish to upload these files. If you click the OK button, your browser will start uploading the files to Insightly and a small indicator will be shown until the files have finished uploading and are displayed under the files tab.

Drag files from your computer onto any contact, organization, opportunity or project.

You will be asked if you wish to upload the files.

Your browser will upload the files to Insightly.

Your files will be automatically uploaded to Insightly.

Multi-file Uploads

Insightly now also supports multi-file uploads, allowing you to select multiple files at once to upload all in one batch, rather than having to upload each file individually.

To upload multiple files at once, just click on the 'Add New Files' link under the Files tab, and you can now select multiple files using your mouse of keyboard. These files will then be uploaded to Insightly in one batch, saving you time.