Insightly product blog

The new Calendar and Events system

2011-12-16T16:53:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-02T22:01:00.000-07:00

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

2011-11-01T23:15:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-18T01:01:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-17T21:03:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-17T19:55:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-19T01:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Insightly Contact Sync

2011-08-15T03:34:00.000-07:00

We're introducing a new feature this week for Insightly customers on paid plans - the ability to sync selected Insightly contacts with your personal Google contact list and with Gmail. We've got two options for sync, either one way or two way sync.

One Way Sync

One way sync will copy selected Insightly contacts to your Google Contacts and keep them updated when their details change in Insightly. If you just want a copy of your Insightly contacts available within Gmail or on your phone, we recommend you choose One Way Sync. This option will ensure that changes you make by mistake on your mobile or within Google Contacts will not be replicated back to Insightly and on to other users in your domain.

Two Way Sync

Two way sync will also copy selected Insightly contacts to your Google Contacts, but any changes make to those Google contacts will be saved back to Insightly.

If you sync your mobile device with your Google Contacts and you have Insightly Contact Sync turned on, the selected Insightly contacts will also be available on your mobile device. If you have two way sync enabled, changes made to those contacts on your mobile device will also be replicated back to Insightly.

Insightly will sync selected contacts with your Google Contacts a few times per hour.

How to turn on Contact Sync

Your Insightly administrator has to first enable contact sync for selected users. This can be done by checking the checkbox labelled 'Can sync contacts' for each user under Settings > Users, which can be access via the small silver gear icon in top top right corner (as shown below in Red).

Once sync has been enabled for you, you can choose which sync type you want from the 'My Info' page, which is the small card icon in the top right corner (as shown below in red).

If you want new contacts that are added to Insightly after you have setup the sync (as detailed below) to also be added to your Google Contacts, be sure to check the checkbox below the sync options to include new contacts too.

We always recommend you back up your Google Contacts before you enable sync. You can do this from the 'More' drop down in Gmail Contacts as shown below.

Adding all your Contacts to sync

You can add your entire contact list to the sync in four steps as in the screenshot below. First select "All Contacts" from the contact view, then click on the "All" link in the header to bring up the entire list on one page, then click the checkbox in the header to highlight the whole list, and finally click the "Add to Contact Sync" hyperlink to add all the contacts into the sync.

Adding individual contacts to sync

After you've enabled sync, you can then select which Insightly contacts you want added to your personal Google contact list. To add contacts to be synced in bulk, click the checkbox next to the contact names in the contact list, and choose 'Add to Contact Sync' from the menu that appears at the top of the list (as shown below).

You can also add and remove individual contacts from sync via the Edit menu when viewing a single contact (as shown below).

How to Remove Contacts from sync in bulk

To see the list of which contacts are currently included in the sync, and to remove individual contacts from sync in bulk - select the 'Contacts included in Contact Sync' view from the Contacts list. To remove contacts from sync, select the contacts and click the 'Remove from Sync' link in the menu at the top of this view. Contacts that are synced will have a small sync icon to the right of their names in the list (as shown below).

The Insightly-Contacts group in your Google Contacts

Contacts added to your Google Contacts will be added to a group called "Insightly-Contacts" and also added to the “My Contacts” group. The "Insightly-Contacts" group will be created within your Google contact list by Insightly the first time the sync is run, and it's used to keep track of synced contacts. Do not add contacts to this group yourself or those contacts will be deleted.

If you delete a synced contact from your Google Contacts, it will be added back in on next sync. To remove it from your Google contacts you must remove it from sync within Insightly (as shown above). You can only add additional contacts to be synced from within Insightly too, not from within Google contacts. Any contact that you add yourself to the ‘Insightly-Contacts’ group in your Google Contacts will be deleted from your Google Contacts next sync.

Insightly will sync the contact name, photo, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates to remember, roles and linked organization names, and the background information from the Insightly contact will be synced with the Notes field in the Google Contact.

Turning off contact sync
You can turn off the contact sync from the 'My Info' page accessible via the card icon in top right corner of Insightly (as shown below). Doing so will remove all the synced Insightly contacts from your Google Contacts.

We hope you find the new contact sync feature useful.

Changes to delegated tasks in Insightly

2011-08-15T00:40:00.000-07:00

We've made a couple of small improvements to the tasks system in Insightly this month around delegated tasks. From now on, tasks that you create and delegate to someone else will not show up in your own task list by default. The previous setting was to include those tasks in your own task list as well as the list of the user you assigned the task to, but we had feedback from customers that those tasks were distracting them from the tasks they needed to complete themselves - so we've moved delegated tasks to a separate view.

Adding tasks you've assigned to others to your own Task list

If you still want to add a task that you assign to someone else to your own task list too (to keep an eye on when it gets completed) - you can check a checkbox on the bottom of the task form to make this happen (as shown below in red). This option appears after you change the 'Assigned To' field to another user.

Viewing Tasks you've assigned to others

We've also added a new view to the Tasks tab in Insightly that shows all the tasks you've created and assigned to others, called 'My Delegated Tasks' (as shown below in red).

We've made these small changes to Insightly so your task list is less cluttered with tasks that you're not responsible for. For those important tasks that you do want to keep track of - we've included an option to show them in your list. We hope you like the changes.

Repeating Tasks and Organization Filters

2011-07-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

Two new features in Insightly just launched - Repeating Tasks (also called recurring tasks), and Custom Organization filters.

Repeating Tasks

We're very happy to get this feature into the hands of our customers, as it's been requested often and those that need it really need it. We've added a drop down selection to the bottom of the task form where you can choose if a task is to repeat itself (shown below in red), and how often. There are a few different repeat frequency options to choose from:

Every day (repeat every single day)
Every weekday (repeat every work day - Monday through Friday)
Every week (once a week)
Every two weeks (once a fortnight)
Every month (once a month)
Every 3 months (once a quarter)
Every 6 months (once every half year)
Every year (annually)

The way repeating tasks work in Insightly, is when you mark a task as complete that has this repeat frequency set - Insightly will generate the next occurrence of this task for you automatically, and add it to your task list. Repeating tasks show a small repeat icon next to their names in the task list (as shown below in red).

So all you need to do is fill out the Due Date of the first occurrence of the task and set the repeat frequency, and Insightly will keep generating the next copy of the task for you when you complete the current one. To turn off a task repeating, set the repeat option back to none for the last task copy.

You can also set reminders for a task, and the reminder will repeat too. We will send you a reminder the same number of days before the task is due as when you setup the first repeat task and the reminder for that.

We'll be adding the repeating tasks functionality to tasks defined within Activity Sets shortly too.

Custom Filters for Organizations

We've added custom filters to the Organizations list this week too. They're very similar to the custom filters feature we added to the Contacts List recently, so we won't bother you with a big explanation of how the Organizations version works - it's much the same the it's Contacts counterpart. You can slice, dice and save your Organization list based on criteria like the Organization name, email address, country, zip/post code, or phone number area code.

We hope you like these two new features, and we've got more improvements on the way soon too.

Custom filters for the Contact List

2011-07-04T02:52:00.000-07:00

This week's feature is a new way to slice and dice your contact list using custom filters. Custom filters allow you to filter your contact list by different criteria of your choosing - including country, state, post code, job title, organization, email address or telephone number. You can combine multiple criteria together into one filter, and save the filters you create for easy recall later.

The best way to show this feature off is with an example. Say you wanted to create a list of all the contacts with an address in New York City for an upcoming marketing campaign in that area. First choose to create a new custom filter from the 'View' menu, as shown below in red.

Then in the 'Filter by' drop down you can choose one of the contacts fields to filter by - in this case we're going to choose the 'Contact Address City' field. This field relates to any address on file for a contact, and allows you to find matches to the city part of that address.

You can choose to find exact matches by using the equals sign in the drop down, or just find matches that contain your criteria somewhere in the field by choosing the 'contains' option in the drop down. Searching in filters is not case sensitive, so it does not matter if you type in 'New York' or 'new york' as your value. See the screenshot below for our first filter criteria.

Click the 'Add' button to the right to add this first filter criteria. Results that match will be shown below the filter box immediately.

We'll also add another filter to match those addresses that have the abbreviation for New York City - 'NYC'. You can choose to add the second filter with an 'AND' or an 'OR' - meaning that it's going to find only those contact records that match both filter criteria for an 'AND', or those records that match either one of the two filter criteria for an 'OR' - we want either criteria so we're going to choose 'OR' option in the screenshot below.

To delete a filter criteria you have just added, click the trash can icon to the right of that filter line. After you add filter criteria, Insightly will show you the resulting matches in the list below immediately, so you can build up or delete criteria and experiment until you are satisfied with the results. When you're happy with the filter, you can save it for easy access later by typing in a name and clicking the 'Save Filter' button.

We've saved our filter as 'Contacts in NYC' in the screenshot below, and it can be accessed at any time by choosing that filter from the View list. The filter will rerun itself every time so it's always up to date with the correct matching contacts.

Click on the 'Close' hyperlink to exit the filter and return to showing all your contacts. To delete a filter you have previously saved, click on the trash can icon to the right of the filter name.

Handy hints for Filters

When you run a filter, the results will be shown in lots of up to 50 results per page, but to see all matches on a single page - choose the 'All' hyperlink to the left of the alphabet letters just under the search box in the header.

Using the Contact Tags sidebar lets you choose to show contacts that match multiple tags - but each contact has to have ALL the tags you choose in the sidebar. But you can use the new Contact Filter feature to see all contacts that match either one tag OR another tag. First choose the 'Contact Tag' field in a new filter, and add a filter criteria for each tag you want, but remember to choose the 'OR' option in the drop down.

To export all contacts returned for a filter: first select or create your filter, then click on the 'All' hyperlink in the header to show all the results on one page, then click on the checkbox in the header to highlight the entire list, then finally click the 'Export' link in the blue selected items box that pops up to export your entire filtered list.

Custom filters can be a powerful way to create and save smaller contact lists within your full contact list, and we know you'll find them a powerful addition to Insightly. We'll be rolling out custom filters for the other tabs in the next few weeks too.

Custom Logo and Branding

2011-06-15T22:28:00.000-07:00

We're introducing a new feature this week for those customers on our new paid plans - the option to brand Insightly to suit your business.

We're adding the ability to replace the Insightly logo in the top left corner with your own logo - and replace the background color with your own color or a picture - across all Insightly users within your domain.

It's very easy to do. If you are an administrator of Insightly and on a paid plan, under the Settings menu (small gear icon in the top right corner) will be a new link called 'Logo and Background' (shown below in red). From within this page you can choose a replacement logo, and a background color and image.

The logo image should be up to 36 pixels high, and up to 250 pixels wide, and it can be a JPEG, GIF or PNG image. If the logo image is larger than those dimensions Insightly will scale it down to fit automatically. The custom background image can be as large as you wish.

If you choose to set a logo and background for your domain, it will apply to all Insightly users within your domain. If any users have previously customized Insightly with their own theme or colors, those will be replaced with the logo and background image you set here for a consistent branding experience for all users.

Launching Insightly paid plans

2011-05-29T07:18:00.000-07:00

Today we're proud to be launching the paid plans that we first announced back in February on this blog. We received a lot of valuable feedback and support from customers and we have taken that into account with the plan limits and levels.

As a big thank you to all our current customers we are doubling storage space offered in our free plan to 200MB, and more than doubling the contacts you can store to 2,500. Current customers also get an extra user on the free plan over and above the three users we're offering to new signups starting today.

Upgrading to a paid plan

Current and new customers are automatically assigned the free 'Gratis' plan. If you wish to upgrade to a paying plan with more storage, users, and contacts you can do so under the Settings menu in the 'Account and Plan' page (shown below) accessible via the small gear icon in the top right corner. Only the designated account owner for your Insightly instance can access this page, but that user can also change the account owner to another user from this page too.

Upgrading to a new plan is simply a matter of clicking the Upgrade button to the right of the plan of your choice (as shown below), then entering in your credit card details. You will be billed monthly for the service, and Insightly accepts MasterCard and Visa payments at this time. You will receive an invoice every month to the email address you specify when you're charged. After entering your billing details, you will be immediately subscribed to the new plan and all your quota limits will increase. On this page you can also access and reprint previous invoices and change your billing details at any time (as shown below).

You can also see the number of users and amount of storage you are currently using at the top of the page.

You can cancel your plan subscription at any time via a link at the bottom of this page and you will not be billed again after cancelling. You can also downgrade to a lesser plan at any time as long as you fit within the storage and user limits of the lower plan.

If you are on the free plan and exceed the limits of that plan, Insightly will continue to operate as it always has but starting in two weeks you will need to upgrade to a higher plan in order to add additional files, emails, contacts, or new users to your Insightly instance. You can of course still add new organizations, opportunities, projects and tasks at any time.

If you have any questions about the plans please email support@insight.ly and we'll be happy to answer them for you.

Insightly awarded TRUSTed Apps Data Privacy Certification

2011-05-25T18:18:00.000-07:00

Insightly is proud to be one of the first apps in the world to be awarded the 'TRUSTed Apps Data Privacy Certification for Google Apps', resulting in a qualification badge now being displayed on our Apps Marketplace listing page.

Insightly data management practices were audited by TRUSTe and verified that they meet the program's rigorous standards in regards to the collection, storing, use and sharing of its users’ data.

TRUSTe’s program standards are based upon a combination of privacy frameworks such as the US-EU Safe Harbor, regulatory guidelines such as the Fair Information Practice Principles, industry standards and reports, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology privacy and security report, and client and expert review.

You can read more about the TRUSTe certification at http://www.truste.com/google-apps/buyer-faq.php

New navigation improvements in Insightly

2011-05-04T02:18:00.000-07:00

Here at Insightly we're hard at work on our new billing system for our upcoming paid plans, and the new Insightly mobile app, but we wanted to offer our customers some great improvements to the navigation system in the mean time to tide you over.

These two improvements were designed to allow you to work faster with fewer clicks by keeping some of the more common links you might need closer at hand.

Adding items to Insightly

Previously, when you wanted to add an item like a contact, you would first need to click on the contacts tab to load up the contacts list page, then click on the 'Add Contact' button to show the new contacts page. We created a short cut so you can now get to that link to add a new contact, opportunity, project, task, or organization from any page in Insightly without clicking at all. We added this little gem to the left of the search box at the top (as shown below), and labelled it with a plus icon. It's triggered by moving your mouse over it so you don't even need to click at all to bring up the menu, making it a more direct way to add a new item.

Accessing recent items in Insightly

The second improvement we made was to remember the last ten items you viewed in Insightly, and to create a list of those items so you can quickly jump between them, or jump back to them and continue where you left off between sessions. You can access the new list on the right side of the central search box at the top of the page (as shown below). Just rest your mouse over the blue pin icon and the list will popup. Initially it won't be populated, but as you view items like contacts, projects, opportunities, organizations, tasks or emails - the list will add those items in.

Hopefully these two improvements will save you many clicks in the future and boost your productivity by making Insightly faster to use and easier get around.

Happy 1st Birthday Google Apps Marketplace

2011-03-08T23:34:00.000-08:00

Everyone at Insightly would like to wish Google and the Google Apps Marketplace team a very happy first birthday. It's hard to image that the marketplace debuted only 12 short months ago, and Insightly listed and launched in the marketplace a short time after that.

Since then Insightly had grown to become the #1 CRM application in the marketplace, and more than 50,000 customers have installed Insightly through the Apps Marketplace. Over 450 reviews have been written by our users, and we've launched over a dozen new features based on customer feedback. We would not be as successful as we are today without the Marketplace, and the popularity of Insightly is a testament to how well the marketplace works as a powerful tool for customer acquisition.

We especially love the Google API's that allow Insightly and other marketplace apps to harness the power of Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs to make our customers more effective and efficient in their work every day.

Hats off to the Google team for such a brilliant platform, and happy first birthday !

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/03/google-apps-marketplace-1-year-and-300.html

Several small improvements to Insightly

2011-02-27T21:00:00.000-08:00

This week we made some small improvements to Insightly from users requests that we thought we'd highlight below. A couple of the changes are exposed via the user interface, and a couple are changes to how Insightly works under the covers.

Pick any color for Categories

The first small change we made this week was to Categories. Previously all categories within Insightly for tasks, opportunities, projects and files were shown with white text on a black background. The human brain can discern and process colors faster than text, so we thought it would be great if users could set the background for a category to any color they like. Categories like 'overdue' might have a red background, or administrators might even choose a different color for each user to make visually sorting tasks easier. We even engineering the system to analyse the background color chosen, in order to display white text on dark backgrounds and black text on lightly colored backgrounds. Colors for categories can be changed under the Categories section within Settings.

Search by ID for Contacts, Opportunities, Projects and Organizations

Several users have noticed that each contact, organization, opportunity and project within Insightly is automatically given a special reference number for identification within the database. You can see the ID number each item is given by looking in the URL for that item (it's the number at the end, as shown below). Some of our clients use standards like ISO9001 internally within their workplace, which operate best when each item has a reference number that can be easily found. We already had the reference number, but we just made it a lot easier to search for and find an item within Insightly given that number. Searching using either the top search box, or within the list for contacts, organizations, opportunities, or projects for a given ID will now find that item with the corresponding ID in a flash.

Task Delegation and Activity Set Task Editing

Previously in Insightly a task could only be delegated once. That is - someone could create a task and delegate it to someone else, but they in turn could not re-delegate it on. We've changed Insightly so tasks can now be re-delegated multiple times, and upon delegation Insightly will now display who delegated the task to the current user responsible (as shown below).

We've also made a change to tasks in Activity Sets in response to user requests. Previously if a user added an activity set to an item like a project or opportunity - that user could not then go ahead and edit those tasks just created (those tasks were only editable by the user the task was assigned to). From now on, the user who adds the activity set can now also edit the resulting tasks created (and reassign them to others if required).

Rather use a .com than a .ly for Insightly ?

We've had some customers come to us to ask if we have an alternate domain name to our '.ly' domain that they can use. Some firms block .ly domains, and some just prefer the good old fashioned .com - so for those users we have: http://googleapps.insightlyapp.com It's the same as the normal Insightly in everything other than the address.

Account Owner control extended to all data stored in Insightly

We also made a change to Insightly to extend what items the account owner can see and delete. We've had a few instances in the past where account owners have come to us and identified emails in Insightly that they thought were inappropriate to store in the system. Previously only the user who sent the email to Insightly had the permission to delete the email, but we now allow the account owner to do so too. We also made it possible for account owners to view and delete all notes and tasks, even when the permissions were set to 'Only Me' for those items.

Improved email management in Insightly

2011-02-11T18:29:00.000-08:00

In this weeks update to Insightly we improved the how emails are displayed in managed within the Emails tabs. The email list had not seen any improvements for some time, and consequently did not have any of the advanced features that the lists for other items like contacts and organisation did. In fact it only had one thing you could do with an email after selecting it - delete it. The new version of the emails list allows you to do much more - and brings it up to parity with the feature set of the other lists within Insightly. (Old emails list shown below for prosperity)

Speed Improvements

If you store a lot of emails within Insightly, the old email tab used to chug along a bit before displaying the initial list of emails. The engineering team worked on this and the list now displays much faster (105% speed increase) than the old version. Moving between pages in the list is now super snappy - even for huge email archives.

Searching Emails

Searching your emails or emails shared by others is now super easy. We've included an email search box so you can start searching as soon as you hit the tab. Just start typing and Insightly will search the senders name, senders email address, subject and body of the message in real time for your search criteria. It brings back results and conveniently highlights matches, in a similar fashion to how search works within the other tabs.

Display Enhancements

We took a leaf out of Gmail's book for this one. Gmail displays emails one per line like Insightly including the senders name, the subject, and the date of the email in each line. But Gmail also subtly includes a snippet of the email body in the line too, grayed out so it does not conflict with the subject. That helps with being able to discern between similar emails at a glance, and provides more information about each email in the list in an unobtrusive way. We thought it was a neat feature so we decided to employ it for the email list within Insightly too (underlined in red below).

Managing Tags for Emails

You've been able to tag emails within Insightly for quite some time, but our tool set around bulk tagging of emails had been limited. With the new version, you can select multiple emails using the check box to the left of the sender name, then click on the 'Add Tag' link from the blue 'Selected Items' box that pops up at the top of the list - allowing you to tag multiple items at once. Insightly also displays a small tag icon next to each tagged email in the list, and hovering over that icon displays the tags assigned to that email as shown below.

Clicking on a tag in the right hand sidebar also bring up some extra options. You can rename or delete a tag entirely, and you can also select individual items and remove the currently selected tag from those items, or add another tag to just that subset (as shown below in red).

Linking multiple emails at once

One frequently requested feature from our customers that we've added is the ability to select multiple emails from the list and add a link to all those emails at once. So for instance, you can select all the emails that relate to a specific project, and link all those emails to that project in just one step. Just select the related emails, then click on the 'Add Link' hyperlink from the blue 'Selected Items' box that pops up at the top of the list (as shown below in red).

Index Listing

The last feature we added is the ability to list emails by the first letter of the senders name. This is a feature that exists on the other tabs, so we decided to include it here too. Click on a letter of the alphabet in the list header to see emails displayed from senders names starting with that letter (as shown below in red).

Along with the improvements to the new Gmail gadget a couple of weeks ago, we've beefed up the email handling capabilities of Insightly and increased the efficiency with which emails can be added, tagged, linked, and managed. Hope you like the changes.

Introducing paid plans

2011-02-02T04:58:00.000-08:00

Insightly has grown up a lot over the short 10 months since we launched, and we've added a ton of new features and capabilities to the product. We've grown from a small business tool that a select few users knew and loved, to one of the most popular apps in the marketplace used by tens of thousands of businesses around the world. We've upgraded and expanded our server farm twice and had to move to a bigger data center in that short period, we'll probably have to do it again in the next year.

We've heard a lot of feedback from users and customers that they would like to have the option of paying for the service. Insightly has become a critical business tool for them, and they would like the reassurance that comes with paying for a quality service, and knowing the future cost so they can budget appropriately. So starting later this year we're going to introduce paid plans for new organizations that join the service, based around the number of users required.

We're huge supporters of small business, and we're focused on being the best Google Apps customer and project management tool for small businesses around the world. We realize that when a business is small and still growing, they don't have a lot of cash to splash around on fancy software, so we will continue to offer Insightly for free for up to four users. With that, new customers get unlimited tasks, organizations, projects and opportunities, the ability to store up to 1000 contacts, and up to 100MB of storage for files and emails, all for free.

We're going to introduce four paid plans. A 'starter' plan for up to 6 users for USD $29 per month that includes unlimited tasks, organizations, opportunities and projects, up to 5000 contacts and up to 6GB of storage for files and emails.

A 'plus' plan for up to 15 users for $49 per month will offer unlimited tasks, organizations, opportunities and projects, up to 20,000 contacts, and a huge 15GB of storage space.

A 'deluxe' plan for up to 40 users for $99 per month will include a massive 30GB of storage space for files and emails, unlimited tasks, organizations, opportunities and projects, and up to 50,000 contacts.

Finally we'll offer a 'max' plan for $199 per month for up to 99 users, including 75 GB of storage space and unlimited everything - contacts, tasks, organizations, opportunities and projects.

As a huge thank you to all our early adopters already using Insightly - you won't have to move to a paid plan if you don't want to when we introduce them and you can continue to use Insightly for free. You'll be able to keep all the users you already have on the free plan (even if it's way more than four), all the data, emails, files and storage, and all the contacts and organizations you've built up without having to pay anything at all. You might want to consider a paid plan in the future if you think you'll be adding more users, or need more storage space - but for the next four weeks or so we'll have no limits in place at all.

We think these plans are fair and represent great value for money and we hope you, our customers, do to.

Thanks for using Insightly.

Adding a link to selected items in a list

2011-01-30T21:56:00.000-08:00

We added a nifty little feature to Insightly recently - the ability to add a link to selected items in a list. This helps if you have to add a new link to a whole bunch of contacts, opportunities, projects or organizations.

First - in the list view, select the items you want to add the link to by clicking the check box to the left of the corresponding item name. The items will be highlighted in yellow, and a small blue 'Selected Items' box will pop up at the top of the list. This works for contacts, organizations, opportunities and projects. Illustrated below in red:

The last step is to click on the 'Add Link' hyperlink in the blue section, then to search for the item you wish to link to, and finally click on the 'Add This Link' button to add a new link between the item you searched for and all the selected items. You can define a role and details for the link too if you wish - just as you would do if you were linking each one separately.

Improved Insightly Gmail gadget

2011-01-30T21:34:00.000-08:00

We've just launched a new version of the Insightly Gmail gadget with some cool new features, including being able to save an email to Insightly from within Gmail itself (without having to use your dropbox).

Data Access Approval

This new version of the gadget uses more of the capabilities of Google Apps integration API's than the previous version. As such, you'll need to grant these new permissions to Insightly within your Google Apps admin dashboard. If you're seeing the text "Message ID from Gmail could not be determined" this is the cause. Under the dashboard will be an icon for Insightly, you need to grant data access in order to use the new gadget features. Screenshots illustrating this are below with highlights in red:

Saving Emails to Insightly

Once data access is approved, saving a new email to Insightly takes just one click, and no need to send anything to your dropbox. The gadget will show a 'Save to Insightly' button if the email is not already in Insightly. If the sender is in your Insightly database, the gadget will also show a 'Sender Info' hyperlink on the right, and clicking that will show you all the details of the sender. When you save the email to Insightly - it will automatically add the sender to Insightly too if they don't already have an entry.

If the email has already been saved to Insightly, you'll see a 'Saved to Insightly' button instead.

Linking your saved email to other items in Insightly

Once you've saved your email to Insightly, you can link it to existing items in Insightly that it relates to - like projects, opportunities, or other contacts and organizations. To add links to other items, click on the 'Email Links' hyperlink and search for other items in Insightly to link the email to. Click the 'Add This Link' button to save the new associated links after selecting them. You can delete links by clicking on the small trash can icon next to any link too, or to see the email within Insightly itself, you can click on the "View in Insightly" hyperlink.

Adding new Tasks, Opportunities, and Projects to a Saved Email

The 'Add Task', 'Add Opportunity', and 'Add Project' buttons work the same way as in the old version of the Gadget - but if you have saved the email to Insightly before clicking one of these buttons, the email will now be linked to the new task, opportunity, or project too.

Viewing the saved email in Insightly

Finally, if you've saved an email to Insightly using the new gadget - Insightly will have two extra options in the 'Actions' menu when viewing the email: you can view the email in Gmail, or reply to the email in Gmail.

We think these additions to the Insightly Gmail Gadget make it more convenient to keep track of communications, and make using both Gmail and Insightly that little bit more productive.

Full XML backups of all your data

2011-01-17T17:57:00.000-08:00

We introduced a new feature this week that some users have been asking for - the ability to generate an export with a complete set of all data records from Insightly. We chose the XML standard to export the data because it's popular and widely used and it provides a way to be able to capture and save all the valuable links and relationships between entities within Insightly. We also compress the XML files and bundle them all up into a convenient zip package so it's quicker to download. When you click the link to export your data, Insightly generates the extract right then and there so it's always up to date and includes the latest records.

The XML Export feature is under Settings > Account > Full Data Export, and can be accessed by the account owner. Screenshots are below with navigation links highlighted in red:

Insightly downtime this weekend

2011-01-04T16:47:00.000-08:00

Insightly has been growing in popularity over the past year, and this weekend we are moving to a bigger data center and a new bigger faster server cluster to serve you better.

We expect 6 hours of downtime during which Insightly will not be accessible. We're conducting the move this Sunday (West Australian Time) but to see when that is in your neck of the woods please check here.

Looking back on 2010 & hello 2011 !

2011-01-03T17:30:00.000-08:00

Thanks to our fantastic user base, Insightly had a great year in 2010. We debuted on the Google App Marketplace a few weeks after it opened with our little CRM tool and have been hard at work ever since - making improvements and enhancements driven by user feedback. We managed to finish our first year on top, as the #1 CRM package in the Google App Store, and the #2 application in the entire marketplace, just behind ManyMoon.

We had a great finish to the year too, debuting Pipelines and Activity Sets, a Gmail gadget, and Google Docs integration - all in the last two months! Some of the other improvements we made in 2010 were:

Of course we're not going to rest now, and we have a massive 2011 planned. A few of the enhancements we hope to debut in the future include:

MailChimp integration for email lists
Mobile clients for Android and iPhone
a Data API (REST and XML)
Custom fields
Domain customization and corporate branding
External user logins for project collaboration
Better filtering of lists
More importers for data

Thanks everyone for a great 2010, as we look forward to an awesome 2011.

Changes to User Management

2011-01-01T16:28:00.000-08:00

Administrators can now choose who can log into Insightly

Up until now, Insightly allowed any user from your domain to log in and use the product. All they had to do was hit the link in the quick launch bar at the top of their Gmail, or type the web address in directly. If they were not a user, they were added automatically upon first login. Of course we always had permissions within the product to limit who can see what, but previously we did not limit who can login.

This week we made a change to Insightly to allow Administrators to choose which specific users from your domain can log in and use the product. If a user has not been added explicitly to the users list by an Administrator, Insightly will block them from logging in, and provide an informative help message telling them who their administrators are if they wish to be added in.

We made this change to increase security around your data. We appreciate that not every user from your Organization or domain should have access to vital contact, partner and project information under all circumstances. Sometimes, only the sales team or select users should have use of that information, so we changed Insightly to accommodate these scenarios. We think this change makes for better data protection and safeguarding of important corporate information.

Administrators can now add new users to their Insightly from the Users option under Settings (small gear icon in top right of screen). Screenshots below with actions highlighted in red:

Later this year Google will add similar functionality into the Google Apps administration console, but we thought it was important enough to write this feature into Insightly itself before then. When Google releases it's user management upgrade, allowing domain admins to control which users within their domains can see and use which Marketplace Apps they have installed (including Gmail gadget display and quick-launch visibility for select users) we will divert user management to Google's control.