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In technology circles, "Dog Fooding" means to test new products and technology on yourself extensively before releasing it to clients. The benefits include not just improved quality, but insights that you can only get from using a product in the way it was intended, but real people.

Sometimes, however, things go wrong, and today was one of those days.

We sent out our regular monthly newsletter to our users, but to do it we used our new Campaigns module. When released, it will allow AffinityLive users to run email and offline (direct mail, etc) campaigns using the data in AffinityLive, and our first integration partner are the great guys at Campaign Monitor.

Unfortunately, a mistake on our part meant we accidentally sent another version of the campaign to all of our active users. Doh.

We hope the picture of a cute dog helps make things better, and apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced by the mistake. We promise to be even more careful and make sure we only send you the occasional email that is relevant to you as a user of AffinityLive.

More Time Reports

After the release of our new Timesheet report a couple of weeks ago, we've been amazed by how much our users loved it. Of course, this is a double-edged sword - the more something is loved, the more ideas and new features people suggest!

Our first improvement is the ability to see a breakdown of the time not just by staff member, but also depending on the type of work being done. Later this month, when you go to the timesheet report screen, you'll have the option to change from looking at a staff timesheet to looking at a timesheet broken down by Company (so you can see all the work you're doing for a client), by Project (pictured) or by Issue. 

Automated contact sharing 

One of the most popular features, particularly for new users, is our ability to synchronize between address books of different AffinityLive users. This way, you can create a contact in AffinityLive, and then a bunch of your users could push it to your Google or Outlook contact list/address book, and whenever changes are made in one address book they'd be reflected back in AffinityLive and sync'ed to the other address books too.

While this functionality is awesome, it depends on each user personally choosing to push a contact to their address book from AffinityLive for the first time. We've had a number of users tell us they'd much rather have it so that contacts are automatically synchronized with both their own address book, as well as a defined list of other users. The way this will work is:

• Auto push to own address book: a new contact added by Tom is automatically pushed to his address book, and will appear in his Google Contacts or Outlook Contacts, as well as his linked smartphone, within a few minutes. Then, if Tom makes a change to the email address of the contact in Outlook, for example, the change will be imported back into AffinityLive, automatically.
• Auto push to multiple users: Tom could choose that all contacts he creates should also be pushed to not only his address book, but those of colleagues Sally and Richard. In this way, when Tom creates a contact, Sally and Richard would also have it pushed automatically to their address books (including their mobile phones), and any changes made by Sally, for example, would be imported back into AffinityLive and then synchronized to Tom and Richard's address books within minutes.

Fetching existing emails on contact creation (Gmail only) 

One of the other our users have been asking for is the ability to import historical emails from their inbox whenever they add a new contact. Where this is useful is a situation where you've traded a bunch of emails with a contact before you added them to AffinityLive, and then really wish you had all of that email history.

Until now, you had no way of filling in this history (emails are either captured or ignored at the time they come in depending on whether the customer's address is in AffinityLive at the time), but we're working on an enhancement which will make this easy for users of Gmail/Google Apps.

Dashboards, Dashboards and more Dashboards 

When we released the redesign of AffinityLive, we were missing a few features, and perhaps the most missed was our dashboards. While we've since implemented a new User Dashboard, and we've released a new version of the Company Dashboard, there's still a few missing screens.

We're also working hard on introducing a number of new dashboards over the next few weeks - and we hope you'll find they've been worth the wait!

The dashboards we're working on include:

• Executive Dashboard
• Prospects & Sales Dashboard (pictured above)
• Jobs & Projects Dashboard
• Issues & Service Dashboard
• Contracts & Retainers Dashboard

For more information on these new features - and more than we're not quite ready to share with you just yet - keep an eye on this blog and we'll also send you an update email when they're ready to use.

We're excited to announce two new additions to the AffinityLive family in our San Francisco office - Alison Russell as our Business Development Manager, and Trevor Berman is our Digital Marketing Manager.

Alison Russell

Alison is managing the business development activities here at AffinityLive - odds are you'll receive an email or a phone call from her at some point in the future! Alison grew up in Manchester in the UK, and attended the University of West England where she studied Neuropsychology. So, yeah, she's a smart cookie who already knows how you think ;-)

Alison moved to the States in 2001, where she worked at the British Consulate while attending business school at San Francisco State University. After getting her MBA, Alison went into medical sales, worked in sales for medical devices, biotechnology companies and a cloud-based SaaS healthcare IT startup.

As we scale up AffinityLive following the successful launch of our new version, Alison is going to be working closely with our hundreds and hundreds of trial users to help them get familiar with AffinityLive and how it can help them run their business more successfully.

Likes: Cheese, her dog Ripley, dive bars, NASCAR, red wine, more cheese, the San Francisco Giants, Japanese beer, World War Two history, electronic music, white wine, collecting books.  These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, neither are they in any particular order.

Dislikes: Parking tickets, ants. Mostly ants.

Trevor Berman

Trevor is managing our digital marketing activities here at AffinityLive, and turning his extensive skills and experience in everything digital to ramp up our lead generation and online acquisition tempo. 

Trevor was born, and raised in, Los Angeles California. He moved to San Francisco 7+ years ago to attend San Francisco State University, and has loved it here ever since. While attending state college, Trevor earned his degree in Marketing, with a minor in Creative Writing. Applying his formal education and real life experience to his work, he was promoted to Director of Marketing for Platinum Ltd. Designs at the age of 21, while still finishing up school. Since then, he has worked in a similar role for other SaaS providers, and aside from excelling in a marketing role, he has a true passion for Sales, and customer experience, as well.

When not in the office, Trevor enjoys a variety of activities from snowboarding, to taking pictures of local musicians, and drawing and painting if time ever allows. He also loves to read and sites The Beat generation as among his favorite authors. Trevor is also very enthusiastic about music. So much so, that you will find tattoos hidden all over his body ranging from the Rolling Stones, to Velvet Underground, and more. Aside from going record hunting every week in San Francisco’s used vinyl stores, he attends many live shows, and loves all music ranging from acid jazz, to blues, to rock, to electronica, to folk, and much much more. He is also an avid fan of any strange facial hair, homeless rants about the government, and prefers whisky to beer.

Almost a month ago we announced the launch of our integration with Yammer. Yesterday, Yammer invited our CEO Geoff McQueen to present to a group of their users and developers at their Yammer on Tour Event in San Francisco. 

During the session Geoff presented some of the AffinityLive team's experiences with Yammer, how AffinityLive integrates and the benefits users have seen.

Also disclosed was that within the first month, 60% of AffinityLive client deployments had integrated with Yammer - an outstanding result, which showed just how powerful the combination of business software and social platforms can be for a business.

The following are some of the benefit highlights from the integration between AffinityLive and Yammer - to find out more, check out the AffinityLive and Yammer partner page.

Auto Email Capture Notification

Work Logs, Timesheets Notification

Object Creation and Update

Business Process Activity Notification

Yammer Application Directory

This week also marked the listing of AffinityLive on the Yammer's Application directory - you can see us and the other companies Yammer connects with at www.yammer.com/applications.

Since our redesign, we've been adding a bunch of new screens with one common focus - giving our users new screens to get a lot more valuable information about what's going on inside their AffinityLive account.

This week, in addition to a bunch of small bug fixes, we've shipped two new screens this week we think you'll really enjoy.

User Dashboard

What have you been working on? How have you been going logging your time, working on things for clients? The answer comes in our newest addition to the Dashboards menu, this is the place to get a snapshot of your performance over the last week.

• Keep an eye on hours logged, and how much has been billable

• See how consistently you have been logging time over the last 3 months, and how that time has been classified.

• Take note of you overdue tasks, active tasks and diaries to be actioned.

• Click through to view your Time Sheet Report (introduced below).

There's also a handy checklist on the right-hand side to ensure you've setup your profile, and a checklist for admin users too! And for those with a competitive streak, you can compare your hours logged with your colleagues under the Leaderboard section.

TimeSheet Reports

You've been diligently recording all your time using the handy Work screen, but actually seeing an overview of worked logged this week or last week has until now been a bit tricky since the screen is more optimized for inputting time, not viewing the workd done.

Introducing the Timesheet Reports!

The default view will give you the last 7 days of activities logged for your user account, and if you like, you can change the time period to look at a shorter or longer window of activity.

You can view the report for other users you manage by selecting a name other than your own in the top left select field.

• Time is grouped by company/client, ordered by the most hours. On expand you can see the time that user has logged for each project, issue and sale (where applicable) within each company.

• # Activities are the diary notes, emails, meetings and calls. A future update will allow you to expand the project and see each diary entry!

• The "Amount" column provides an indication of the billable value of the work - based on the rates used for those activities.

• Toggle the date range using the selector in the top right corner.

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback. You can either email support@affinitylive.com OR if you want to submit a feature request, visit our suggestions forum

Turns out Easter brings more than chocolate eggs laid by a rabbit. Today we've released a bunch of new features and bug fixes for AffinityLive - we really hope you find them useful!

Work Screen Improvements 

The work screen is one of the more important parts of AffinityLive. Since releasing it in its first version a couple of months ago, we've gotten some great feedback (particularly from our clients at Cardinal Path and Calligo). Here's a run-down of our improvements and bug fixes.

• Recording a start and end time for a work log
  Now, instead of just saying you worked 2 hours on a day, you can say when you did it! Perfect for cases where clients want more details of the work you and your team do, this feature has the benefit that it retrospectively puts the entry into your calendar so your history is up to date everywhere you care about it.
• Seeing meetings that you're an attendee at, but were created by someone else
  This one was a bug, and a pretty embarassing one. If someone else created a meeting in AffinityLive and included you as an attendee, you couldn't see it on your work list, which made it very difficult for the work screen to give you an accurate report of the time you worked on a date. We've now fixed this, so any meetings that you are included in that are created by others are captured, automatically.
• Bringing back timers!
  Wow, when we released the new work screen, we didn't think you'd miss the timer functionality. Turns out we were wrong! The timers have now been reinstated, and they're smarter than ever (which itself is a function of how much more this screen is doing). We'd love to hear what yoiu think.
• Logging work against components and component tasks
  This one was another shortcoming with what we released initially, and also pretty embarassing. Our users released - and appreciated - how they could find almost anything in AffinityLive - a client, a job, an issue, a task - and log work against it. Unfortunately, you couldn't log work against a component of a project/job - the place where a lot of you do most of your billable work! We've now remedied this - you can now search by company name and find the components - and their sub-tasks - straight from the work screen.
• Relocating diaries and conversations to other places (especially billable ones)
  Some of our clients have discovered that you can't log billable time against companies or prospects. This is deliberate, since you can only invoice for time against jobs, components and issues. Unfortunately, with the email capture putting diary entries against a company if the email isn't a reply to something already in AffinityLive, it is common to find a bunch of your time entries against non-billable company records. We've now made it really easy to relocate a diary entry from one place to another, so if you move a diary from the company to a component, for example, you'll then be able to log billable time - oh, and invoice for it later!
• Little improvements
  We've also made a bunch of little improvements, including the ability to add a diary entry from your task list on the right hand side (important if you want to do more than just log time, such as scheduling a meeting or logging a phone call), not removing the tasks when you log time against them (in case you do work on the same thing a few times a day) and making sure after saving the changes in hours the screen reloads to where you were with the diary entries expanded out. Oh, and finally, we've now made it easier to log billable and non-billable time in the same place for things that are billable - very handy.

Of course, we're not done here. In the future, we'll be making it possible for users to take things they create outside AffinityLive - such as recurring and internal tasks in their calendars - and make it easy for them to convert these appointments across to become time entries against client projects, issues and more in AffinityLive.

If you'd like to share your feedback and suggestions, we'd love to hear them - either use the Make a Suggestion feature in AffinityLive directly, or email support@affinitylive.com.

Viewing Diaries in Threaded View 

The redesigned AffinityLive brought a lot of pluses, but one negative we heard was the loss of full diary threads. So we've brought them back in a new way. Now when you view a diary, at the bottom of the screen we'll list the other diaries and the number of diaries in the conversation. Sweet!

Confidentiality 

While the auto email capture stuff is great 99% of the time, if you've got relationships with clients that you need to keep a little closer to your chest, we've got the answer for you.

We've recently refreshed our Confidentiality feature. Here's the short version of how it works:

• If you have a contact or company that you need to have a more private relationship with, you can set your status as manager to be "confidential" through the "relationships" screen. [more at help.affinitylive.com]
• If you select "Confidential", every email you send or receive from a contact against that company will be set to be "confidential". When you see them, they'll look normal. Other AffinityLive users will just see CONFIDENTIAL as the subject, and not be able to see the body. This way, if they can ask you for more info if they have a legitimate relationship with the company, but other than showing an email was captured, it is all completely obscured.
• For more info about privacy, visibility and access controls, check out our help website.

Companies Dashboard 

In the same vein as the Manager dashboard, you can now view all companies with the most email/phone activity and all companies where staff have been logging the most time + revenue.

You can also track the users managing the most companies, as well as see an overview of companies by status and other segmentations.

To access it, simply click on "Dashboard" from the "Company" navigation in the top left of AffinityLive.

Improved Job Export 

We've made a bunch of improvements to our job export to include more real-time information about budgets, billable time and performance. 

To see it in action, simply do an export from any job list and see our new handiwork.

Around the Corner... 

Of course, we're not done yet! Here's a few things we're releasing in the next few weeks.

• Timesheet report
  Want to see what you and your team have been working on? Think it is kinda crazy we don't already have a dedicated interface for this key info? Yeah, so do we. We've got an awesome new report coming to you this month - stay tuned for more.
• User Dashboard
  Who's working the hardest? What is going on with your work? We're about to release a new dashboard which tells you all this and more. 
• Contracts Module Upgrade
  Do you do ongoing, retainer based work? Want to have cool tricky stuff like defined charge out rates, links to projects and issues, and one click renewals and invoicing? You're in luck - we're currenrly working on a major upgrade to our Contracts Module.
• More in-line help
  We've also heard that some of the screens and fields in AffinityLive can be a bit tricky. We've heard you - coming soon are going to be a lot more help cues, in line and easy.

AffinityLive is a powerful platform to manage a service business, and with its ability to manage all of the work you do for clients from prospect right through to payment, it has applications across all sorts of industries.

While we boast clients across a whole range of industries - including consultants, lawyers, accountants, architects, engineers, designers, IT services and more - the history of AffinityLive as a platform to manage a web development firm means we've got a lot of clients in that sector too.

One of the most well regarded and popular web development platforms is the Business Catalyst platform, part of the Adobe family. Business Catalyst makes it easy for web developers and designers to quickly and easily create websites for their clients which are both easy to use and tightly integrated. The Business Catalyst - or BC for short - platform allows companies to have a functioning e-commerce website with features like customer databases, inventory, checkout, e-marketing and more, all in one place.

While the BC platform's integration for clients is impressive, the Partners who sell, implement and support BC websites are often left flat-footed. The need of a web firm to manage clients, sales, projects, support, retainers and invoicing is real, but they're often left relying on spreadsheets and other manual tools to keep their business running.

This is where AffinityLive comes in.

With the new Adobe Business Catalyst integration, BC Partners can now connect their BC partner portal with AffinityLive. With this integration, BC Partners can use BC to create and coordinate BC websites, and know that AffinityLive has all of their key client and site information synchronized automatically. 

There are many benefits available to BC partners from this integration. Now, whenever a client sends through a support request or issue, you can link it back to their BC website and see which clients are costing you the most support time - and how much. If you've been doing support for free because it is too hard to track, AffinityLive makes it easy with its automatic email capture - now, whenever your client asks for help, or your staff are answering questions, the work is automatically captured, making it easy for timesheets to be updated and invoices to be billed.

Finally, the BC and AffinityLive integration makes it easy for you to upsell ongoing service agreements or retainers for your clients, once again, all tied to their BC website.

For more information, check out the Adobe Business Catalyst partner page on our website, and if you're a BC partner, sign up for a trial of AffinityLive today.

Earlier this month our CEO, Geoff McQueen, sat down with Adam Broadway of Adobe and Evangelist for their Business Catalyst product and recorded an interview.

The interview has now been posted online, and will be featured as part of Adobe's monthly update to more than 50,000 creative professionals around the world. To see it before it hits the inboxes of everyone else, check out Adam's BC Evangelist blog. 

Finally, if you're a Business Catalyst user, you'll be interested to know that we've just launched an integration between AffinityLive and Business Catalyst. For more information, check out http://help.affinitylive.com/setup/integrations/adobe-business-catalyst/

Today, AffinityLive and Yammer announced a new partnership based on an integration between our leading platforms.

Yammer's Announcement 

Yammer, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise social networks, today announced integration with AffinityLive, a leading CRM and project management cloud platform at Yammer on Tour in Sydney. The integration allow activity stories from AffinityLive to appear in Yammer's Ticker, a scrolling side module that streams actions taken within Yammer and third-party business applications in real-time.

Professional services organizations use AffinityLive to track key business processes in a single simple, automated solution. Activity stories from AffinityLive published in the Ticker enable critical issues -- such as a closed deal or an escalated support ticket -- to be surfaced faster and allow teams to work more collaboratively across departments. The integration also works with AffinityLive's automatic email capture, so that teams are alerted when important client emails are sent, improving client service and response time.

What it means

Yammer - which could be considered Facebook for the Enterprise - provides a social layer that connects staff members in a business to improve collaboration and productivity.

With this connection, all of the key client work that goes on in a business, such as updating client accounts, sending emails or scheduling appointments with clients is posted in real time to the Yammer activity stream.

For more information:

1. Check out our Yammer integration page to see some more details on how it works and benefits.
2. View the instructions on how to connect your AffinityLive account to Yammer on our help site.
3. Watch a video which demonstrates the integration, embedded below or on YouTube.

AffinityLive's automatic ability to capture emails between your staff and your clients is one of its most popular features. We've been getting a bunch of feedback from users on how we can make this awesome feature even better, so we've made a few improvements today we'd love to let you know about.

Automatically Add New Contacts

While AffinityLive automatically captures emails from known contacts, it ignored emails if the email address of the sender or recipient isn't in the client database.

This works great, but when you start working with a client/company/account, you're likely to start meeting and corresponding with new contacts at the same company. Until now emails with these new contacts wouldn't be captured until you'd taken the time to add the new contacts to AffinityLive - and in the process, you might miss some really important email correspondence.

That's why we've added a new feature to AffinityLive - now, when you get an email from a new contact who's domain matches an existing contact, they'll automatically be added to AffinityLive. 

This feature is currently in beta - if you would like this feature enabled for your account, please contact support@affinitylive.com and we'll turn it on for your account.

How it works:

• When an email is captured which is from an unknown email address, AffinityLive will then try and match the domain name of the sender to existing client contacts
• If there is only one company in AffinityLive with contacts with the same domain, then a new contact and email address will be added automatically.
• Once the email address has been added, the email will be captured from then onwards, on both sending and receiving.
• If a search for the email address matches more than one company, then the email will be silently ignored. This is to ensure that emails from domains like @gmail.com and addresses like @aol.com.
• If you would prefer the emails between yourself and your contacts remain private, you're able to set your own privacy settings - more information at http://help.affinitylive.com/modules/diaries-notes-and-emails/privacy/

Capture Full Forwarded Emails

Another thing our users have been asking for is the ability to automatically capture forwarded emails. To make sure AffinityLive is optimized for individual messages and screens load quickly, the often extensive previous messages in any email are automatically excluded.

There are occassions, however, where you really want to capture all of the email history. Often this is when someone is forwarding an email to someone else and you want AffinityLive to capture previous emails.

From now on, whenever an email is captured by AffinityLive and the subject starts with "fw" or "fwd", the full text of the email will be captured in the diary entry.

Save the Content of Emails Forwarded to add@yourdomain.affinitylive.com

One of the features of AffinityLive is the ability to quickly and easily add a new contact to AffinityLive by forwarding an email to a special address, add@yourdomain.affinitylive.com. In the past, the email you forwarded as a user was actually ignored other than searching for email addresses for to add.

Now, whenever you forward an email to the special Add address, not only will the contact be added, but the content of the original email will also be captured and saved as a diary entry, making it easier to capture the initial conversations.

Further Safeguards

AffinityLive's email capture functionality makes sure that emails between staff members - internal emails - are ignored unless they are in reply or relation to an email that was already in contained in AffinityLive (either because it was entered by a staff member into AffinityLive, or because it was part of a conversation captured from or to a client).

Where this model has a potential weakness is that anyone who can add a contact can add the email address of a colleague or manager as a client contact, and have potentially sensitive internal emails captured in Affinitylive.

One of the other aspects that has come up lately is some concerns that a rogue staff member might add the staff member of a colleague - to ensure this can't happen, whenever a new email address is added, a check is made to make sure the email address doesn't match the domain name of any active staff member. If a new contact email address matches the same domain as a staff member, all of the "admin" accounts within AffinityLive will be notified via email.