Improvements to your email dropbox

This week we've made some improvements to the dropbox feature that allows you to send emails to Insightly.

We've redesigned the system to speed it up and get your emails into Insightly faster. Under the old system, it could take a few minutes for an email you sent to appear under the email tab in Insightly, but the new system should be able to do it in under 30 seconds for emails without large file attachments.

We also made improvements to the algorithm that detects the actual sender on blind carbon copied emails. And  we also removed all the problems with emails being detected as spam by upstream email servers. These changes have resulted in a dropbox service that is faster, more reliable, and scales better to support increased workloads in the future.

Your new dropbox has a slightly different email address to the old system, so it's now yourdropbox@dropbox.insight.ly instead of the old address of yourdropbox@insight.ly (we added a '.dropbox' in the middle). You can see your new dropbox address in full in the grey section at the bottom of the page under the emails tab.

The new system is up and running now, and we'll keep the old system working for a week before turning it off, but you should change any references or address book entries to your new dropbox address now.

Export your contact list to Google

One of the most requested features in Insightly is to be able to export your Insightly contact list back into your personal Google Apps contact list (accessible via Gmail). Today we've added just that functionality, and you can conveniently export all your contacts to Google in just a couple of clicks.

The new feature is under the Export menu on the right when viewing your contact list. When you export your contacts, Insightly will add those contacts not currently in your Google contact list, and for those that are already there we will check to make sure any additional phone numbers, email addresses, websites and postal addresses are copied over. It may take a minute to complete, so Insightly will send you an email once it's all finished.

So now it's much much easier to keep your Gmail contact list in sync with your Insightly contact list.

1. From the contacts list choose "Export Contacts" in the right hand sidebar.

2. From the Contact Exports page choose "Export Contacts to Google".

Two small changes to Insightly this week

In this weeks update to Insightly we added a couple of things:

• Formatting is now preserved when adding and editing descriptions for contacts, organisations, projects and opportunities. Links are now turned into clickable hyperlinks in text fields too.
• We added a new user setting to allow for contacts ordered and displayed by first name then last name, or last name then first name.

Dates on Emails

We changed the way we record the date an email was received in Insightly today. Previously we tried to determine what date the email was actually sent or received by the Insightly user in their own email inbox, rather than the date and time that it was forwarded, CC'ed or BCC'ed to Insightly.

That proved difficult to do, and sometimes Insightly miss-interpreted the date and what was saved was incorrect by up to about 11 hours due to timezones.

Today we switched to just recording the date and time that Insightly actually received the email in the Insightly email system. We can accurately record this, and all pages within Insightly now show that date and time. Unfortunately we cannot retroactively correct previous emails to show the correct time, so they may or may not be correct and may be out by a few hours, but rest assured all future emails will have the date that Insightly received the email shown.

Navigating and finding things faster

In this week's update we've concentrated on navigating and finding the information you need in Insightly faster, no matter how many items you have stored.

Some Insightly clients have over 20,000 contacts in their database, so finding the one you're looking for can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. The old Insightly list header bar (below) was functional, but far from perfect. When you clicked on the Contacts tab, we displayed every contact you had permission to view, which could be a very long list for some users, slowing down the responsiveness of the browser. Also the 'Select All' and 'None'  hyperlinks were on the far right, and not directly above the checkboxes they were associated with.

Our new list header bar is less cluttered, more functional, and more easily understood.

The biggest change is to search. Insightly now performs a super fast search in memory on the server, and returns the results back to you as soon as you start typing. And the focus is now automatically in the search box when you click on a tab - which means to find a contact you can just click 'Contacts' and then start typing in the name. Insightly will filter the list in real time while you're typing. This dramatically speeds up finding the information you need.

We also implemented paging for lists, so Insightly only loads the first 50 items in a list, and you can click the next and previous buttons at the bottom to navigate between pages, just like Google search. This decreases the page size and increases overall speed.

We reduced the 'Select All' and 'None' hyperlinks to a checkbox too, and moved it to directly above the list item checkboxes it's associated with, so it's intended purpose is clearer.

We also now support searching within the view you've got currently selected too. So for example on the contacts screen, if you change from the default view of 'All Contacts' to 'Contacts added in the last 30 Days' - and then start typing in the search field - we only search contacts added in the last 30 days.

Finally, we also included an alphabet filter for good measure, so clicking on a letter will filter all the items in the list down to just those starting with the letter you clicked. If you need every item to be displayed on the one page, just click the "All' link in the alphabet list.

If you're an administrator, under the Insightly Settings page we've included a user administration section that allows you to promote other users to administrators, which was an often requested feature. 

We've also been in contact with the Google Apps team this week, and they've informed us that installing apps for only a subset of users is one of their top priorities. This will mean that you will soon be able to "install" Insightly for only those users of your domain that need project management and CRM, and not automatically for every user in the domain - if you so choose.

Coming up in the development schedule we've got syncing your Insightly contacts with Google's contact list, and a redesign of the Insightly task system.

Thanks for using Insightly !

Tags in Exports and Imports, and new tagging options

Tags are now exported along with the subject data for Opportunities, Projects, Contacts and Organisations.

You can now import tags for Contacts too. When importing from a CSV, from Outlook, or from Act! - there are new options in the field mapping drop down for Contact Tags 1 to 9. Match these up with your tags for each contact and they will be imported into Insightly. If the tag does not exist it will be created for you automatically.

See below for the field picker with the new tag options.

You can now rename  delete a tag from inside the list screen for Contacts, Organisations, Projects and Opportunities too. Just click a tag on the left hand side pane, then choose either the 'Rename Tag' hyperlink, or the' Delete Tag' hyperlink.

See below for a screenshot.

Finally, we added an option to remove a tag from selected items in a list. If one tag is selected, checking the check box next to items in the list will bring up the blue selected items box. The new option in that box allows for removing the selected tag from the checked items. See below for a screenshot.

Insightly introduces themes

In this weeks update we introduced a new feature around customizing the look of Insightly, called themes. You can choose from one of the twelve themes we've created, or you can make your own. We allow the background picture and color to be changed, which can make a big difference to how the product looks.

Configuration options are under the "My Info" section in the top right of the page.

Check out some of our favorites below.