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.

Custom Fields

One of the big features we just launched in Insightly is custom fields. This is a great feature for capturing information that might be specific to your business that you want stored in Insightly and doesn't not quite fit in one of the existing fields.

Examples of custom fields might include a tracking number or an reference order number from another system. Apart from entering and saving data into custom fields, you can also filter by custom fields, and import and export data from those fields too.

Setting up Custom Fields in Insightly


You can find the page for adding and configuring custom fields under the Settings menu, which is the small silver gear icon in the top right. Insightly administrators can configure up to ten custom fields each for contacts, organizations, opportunities and projects. Field types can be either text, dates, or chosen from a list of possible options (in a dropdown).

When on the tab the corresponds to the record type you want to add a field to, click the 'Add New Custom Field' link to add a new field. In this case we're going to add two new custom fields to every contact record in Insightly.

The two new custom fields we're going to add to contacts are a 'Referred By' field that tracks who referred the contact to us, and a 'Referral Date' field that records the date that the contact was referred to us. The 'Referred By' field is going to be a text field so we can type in the name of the person that referred the contact to us, and the 'Referral Date' field is going to be a date field. 

The other option available for the field type is a 'Drop Down' field, which is a good choice if you have a limited number of options to choose from and want the field data saved to be consistent between records (no misspellings of the same choice etc).

You can also add optional help text to explain to your users what this particular field is for or what data to enter. The text you enter in the help section is shown next to the field when displayed in the form.

Entering data into Custom Fields


Now that we have our two custom fields for contacts setup - they will be shown on both the 'Add Contact' and 'Edit Contact' forms, and we can now save data into those fields for any contact. Data saved will be shown on the contact details page too.

You can see our two new custom fields in the 'Add Contact' form screenshot below. The help text appears in a popup when you mouse over the '?' icon to the right of the field name, and if you have a date custom field a date picker will be shown.

When you're viewing a contact that has data entered for our two new custom fields, the information is displayed on the contact details page as shown below.

Filtering by Custom Fields

Custom Fields are also available in the field list for filtering. So we can filter our contacts list for contacts that have a date of referral (our custom field) after the 1st of October 2011. 

Importing and Exporting Custom Fields


Custom Fields are also available in the field list to map to when importing from a CSV file, and they are output when exporting your records to a CSV file for contacts, organization, opportunities and projects.

Custom Fields is one of those features that only a percentage of our customers need, but if you need them you really need them. They add flexibility to Insightly and make it a more customizable product that's adaptable to more businesses. We hope you like 'em !

Viewing organization info within a contact

One of the small improvements we've made to Insightly in the latest release is to provide a convenient way to see a linked organization's phone numbers, addresses, and other details from within the contact record they're linked  to.

When viewing a contact that is linked to an organization (maybe an employee) you can now see the details of that organization by clicking the hyperlink below the contact's details labelled 'Show Linked Organization contact information'. We also show the role that contact has within that organization next to the organization name. The screenshots below illustrate the link and resulting details in red:

You could always see the organizations details by hovering over the organization in the links sidebar on the right of the page, but this is another way to see those same details that might be more convenient for some users. Hope you like it !

Custom Filters for Opportunities and Projects

We're releasing custom filters for Opportunities and Projects this week. We've also improved the list views of Contacts, Organizations, Opportunities and Projects to now remember the last view settings selected - so next time you visit that list page, the filter and sort order you had selected previously remains selected as the default.

Custom Filters for Opportunities

Custom filters allow you to filter the list of opportunities by different criteria that you specify. It's similar to the  custom filters we previously released for the contact list and organization list.

You could filter the opportunity list for something like: "Open opportunities where Anthony is responsible and the bid is over $50k". You can then save that filter and bring it up at any point in the future by selecting it from the list. We'll show you how to create this filter below.

Creating a Custom Opportunity Filter

To create a new filter, select "Create New Filter" from the view menu in the Opportunity list shown below in red.

You can then enter in new criteria on each line to build up your filter. For the example above, we've created a new custom filter for Jim with three criteria. We're going to save it for future reference as "Anthony's big deals", as shown below.

After you have selected each criteria, click the 'Add' button to save that criteria. To delete a criteria you have saved by mistake, click the small trash can icon to the right of the line. When you're happy with the filter, you can enter a name and save it for future recall. (Shown below in red)

The results of the filter will be listed below the filter box in real time as you build up each filter line. You can also order your results by the 'Order By' drop down at the top of the list. You might want to order the list from biggest opportunities by dollar value first, or by deals with a forecast close date in the near future first. (Shown below in red)

Note that for the filter values for "Opportunity Bid Amount" and "Probability of Winning", you can just put in the number  - you don't need to put the $ sign or the % sign.

Exporting your filtered list

To export the list of Opportunities included in the filter, first click the checkbox in the header to highlight all the Opportunities. You can then click the "Export" link that pops up in the blue box to export the entire list as a CSV file, which you can then open up in a tool like Microsoft Excel (as shown below in red).

Project Filters

Project filters are very similar to Opportunity filters but operate within the Projects tab, and have filter criteria options that are applicable to Projects rather than to Opportunities. You can create a new filter by selecting "Create New Filer" from the "View" drop down under the Projects tab as shown below. Entering filter criteria and saving the filter is the same as for Opportunity filters detailed above.