blog

The Perils of Dog Fooding

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:24:50 -0700

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.

AffinityLive - Sneak Peek at what's coming in May

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:16:25 -0700

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.

Introducing Alison Russell and Trevor Berman

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:44:23 -0700

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.

AffinityLive at Yammer on Tour SF

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:40:10 -0700

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.

TimeSheet and Productivity Reports!

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:00:00 -0700

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

More than an egg from a rabbit - Easter 2012

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:58:40 -0700

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 launches integration with Adobe's Business Catalyst

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 05:55:59 -0700

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.

Interview with Adam Broadway from Adobe

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 05:35:25 -0700

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/

Yammer Announces Integrations with AffinityLive

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 05:16:03 -0700

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:

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

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Improved Auto Email Capture

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 03:40:42 -0700

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.

AffinityLive 2.0 - FAQ

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:00:00 -0800

We've changed a lot in AffinityLive 2.0 - here's a list of the main things that have been updated. Of course, if you've got any questions, either "ask a question" in AffinityLive using the question mark icon in the top of each screen, or email support@affinitylive.com.

1. Some of the old navigation items are missing. Where'd they go?

One of the biggest complaints we had about the old navigation was that it was so cumbersome and intimidating. Of course, the flipside of this is that it had lots of stuff in it! We thought long and hard, and decided that speed and ease of use were more important than having the options that make a Swiss Army Knife so bulky, so here's a cheat sheet on where to do some the power-user things you used to do with the old navigation:

Contacts - you can still add a new one under the Companies menu, and to search for contacts, use the global search in the top right. Of course, if you use our new feature to change the name of "Companies" to something like "Clients", then it will be under the Clients menu!
Tasks - rather than have their own dedicated menu item, we've put your task list where you're most likely to be actually doing work - they're listed on the right hand side of the ToDo list, they're on the Work Screen, and of course you can find any task by searching for it in the global search box in the top right of every page. Remember, you can still filter tasks based on criteria like who the task is for or keyword and save that filter query for a later time, in which case you'll also find a link to your tasks under the Bookmarks tab.they're on your To-do list, Work screen AND Bookmarks if you've saved a Tasks search filter.
Diaries and Resources (aka Attachments) - both of these guys are still searchable from the global search box on the top right, however since you'll likely have a "lot" of diary entries and attachments, you'll probably find the new "Full Diary Search" button that appears on every activity list will be more helpful, since it already filters the search to include only the diary entries against whatever you're looking at.
Sub-categories and filter options, like manager, status and type - you can use the list screen to start your search, use the filters to customise it, then save it. Now refresh your screen and check the menu - your filter is easily accessible and only ever a click away!

2. Where's the Admin navigation?

We've moved a few links from the top right corner to be in the menu under your username, including a link to a new Admin page where admin functions are grouped in a more logical manner.

This new page lists all of the Administration and configuration options in AffinityLive, and also includes links to our help documentation and videos to answer your questions and get you up and running fast.

Also, you might notice that your own user picture is a grey blank picture - you'll be able to upload your own photo (or connect your account to Facebook or Linked) soon!

3. Where did the Dashboard, To Do, Schedule and Work buttons go?

We know how important easy access to your schedule, work (timesheet) and to do screens, so we put them together under the "Home" tab. If you have a favorite screen, you can update your personal "Settings" page and choose which one to load when you first log in - and if you click on the AffinityLive icon in the top right, you'll have a shortcut to that screen too!

4. What happened to those tabs at the bottom of screens where I could see a list of diaries, resources, etc?

We used to call these bad boys the "associated" tabs since they show just about everything associated to that record. Unfortunately, the old way of showing them meant using frames, which don't play well with modern browsers, tablet computers and more.

The other problem with these old tabs was they tended to squeeze some of the most important information into a tiny little space - things like diary entries, attachments and more. So, we completely redesigned our "view" screens to bring this information front and center.

Now, most of the content from those tabs has been moved up into the tabs in the middle of the page:

Activity tab - here you'll find an improved activity stream since it lists diary notes (internal things) by date as well, and the option to search for all diaries in a fullscreen view. This replaces the old diaries tab.
Attachments tab - this is simply the resources tab, upgraded!
Invoices - this is a simpler version of the old invoices associated tab.
Jobs, Prospects, Issues and Contracts tabs - The information for these are all still just 1 click away on the right-hand-side of the view screen when you're looking at a company.

For example, instead of accessing the Prospects tab to view closed Prospects for a company, you would locate the Prospects section on the side of the page and click "Show all". This will load a list of all Prospects for that company/contact.

5. The Breadcrumbs are new - how do they work?

The breadcrumbs are on of the things we hope will make AffinityLive 2.0 much easier to use than the old version. Breadcrumbs point you back to the "top level" object - such as a company - so you can see at a glance which company or contact, and then which prospect, project or issue the work you're doing is against.

For example, if you did a search for prospects which brought you to the list screen, then you clicked "add diary" against one of the results, you will be on the Add Diary screen with breadcrumbs at the top of the page showing something like:

This is because the Prospect (sale) that you're entering your diary entry against is connected to a Contact (the person you're selling to) which is connected to a Company (because they work there).

6. What is the new search field on the Work screen for?

This has been one of our most requested features - a way to add new work entries on the fly without leaving the work screen! Ah it's a new feature which allows you to lookup a company so you can find other work in AffinityLive that you want to log your time against.

Start typing to match a company name, then click the company to see a list of Prospects, Jobs or Issues you could put your time against.

7. Can I really rename Prospects to "Sales" and Jobs to "Projects"?

Yes. If you have admin access, you can go into the new Administration screen and click the "General Configuration & Preferences" link.

From here you can update the names of several modules in AffinityLive. You might prefer to refer to the companies module as "Clients", and therefore make the following change:

Click "Save" from the bottom of the page when done, and then do a full re-fresh of AffinityLive. If you find a screen where the new module name hasn't taken effect, please use the "Ask a question" link on that page to let us know! (see FAQ 9 for more info).

8. Will AffinityLive work on my iPad/GalaxyTab/Playbook/other-tablet/smartphone now?

Yes, with the caveat that there are so many types of browsers and tablets out there, and new ones being released all the time.

But, what we can say is that we've made sure in this redesign to make sure we're tablet friendly. How?

AffinityLive 2.0 is built on HTML5, so any browser that implements the (still moving) standard should be able to use AffinityLive. Yep, that means mobile Safari on iPads and the default Android browser with Honeycomb (ie, Samsung Galaxy Tabs)!
We've removed (almost all) of the Flash elements from AffinityLive. The holdouts are the gantt chart tab and a couple of other small things. We're working hard to get rid of the last holdouts too.
AffinityLive has had its width set to be tablet friendly too.
We've also highly optimized the way pages in AffinityLive load, with more AJAX for faster load speeds.

9. How can I report a bug or something that doesn't look quite right?

We've unashamedly borrowed our engineering ethos from Facebook - most fast and (occassionally) break stuff. While we've gone to a lot of effort to make sure AffinityLive 2.0 is ready for prime time, we're also pretty sure that a few small things have slipped through the cracks.

If you find something that doesn't look quite right, we'd love you to tell us, and we've made it easy for you to do so.

Every single page in AffinityLive has an easy way to ask a question and get help. When you click on the blue questionmark icon, shown in the image on the right, you'll have a small black window open which shows you any relevant help articles on our help.affinitylive.com website, as well as giving you a form you can fill in to ask your question.

When you submit this form, an email request is sent through to our support team, and we'll get back to you as quickly as we can!

10. Where can I make a suggestion or request an improvement?

The image above illustrates the link to ask our support team a question, and the yellow light bulb icon next to it opens up our ideas forum.

Unlike asking a question, which is private, when you make a suggestion other AffinityLive users can see your suggestion and vote on it! You can comment on questions asked by other AffinityLive users, and of course we pay the most attention to suggestions that get the most votes, so suggest early and vote often!

Introducing AffinityLive 2.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:29:51 -0800

After 8 weeks of around the clock work, tomorrow we release the latest version of AffinityLive, version 2.0. This major upgrade has resulted in almost every screen in the system changing, and has been built on the feedback and suggestions we've gotten from our thousands of users since we launched three and a half months ago.

Highlights of AffinityLive 2.0

Highlights of the new version include:

Completely new navigation which is designed to be fast, uncluttered and easy to use.
Redeveloped completely in HTML, making AffinityLive tablet friendly, and removing all of the old cumbersome framsets.
Automatic lists of recently viewed items to make finding the clients, issues, jobs and sales you use the most easy to get to.
A new activity stream, which makes it a breeze to see the recent work done for a client, on an issue, in a sale or against a job, including all of the automatically captured emails.
The ability to customize the titles of the modules in AffinityLive. Don't like Prospects, but prefer Sales? Sure thing - this and more are easy to change.
A new, easier to use Administration panel showing on one seen all the things you can tweak, change and improve in AffinityLive.

Coming Soon

In many way, though, this is really just the beginning. With this new version, our team have completely changed the way they develop and roll out updates to AffinityLive. Additionally, getting out of those horrible frames and away from that horrible tree navigation opens up lots of additional possibilities, including more reports, more dashboards and better integration with services like SalesForce, Adobe and more.

Oh, and we're starting work on an iPhone and Android app for AffinityLive - also high on the feature request list.

Finding out more

In addition to running free guided tours where we show you through the highlights of the new AffinityLive, we've also recorded a short video, embedded below.

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AffinityLive 2.0 - Free Tour Webinars

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:08:12 -0800

Version 2.0 is our biggest upgrade yet to AffinityLive. Hardly a screen has remained the same, with the product being extensively overhauled to improve ease of use. Join us for one of a series of online guided tours to see the highlights of this upgrade and get familiar with AffinityLive 2.0.

The Americas

Our CEO, Geoff McQueen, will lead you in a guided tour of the new and exciting features on Friday the 24th and Tuesday the 28th of Feb. To reserve your space at the date that suits you best, visit the links below:

Friday 24th of Feb, 1pm New York time
Tuesday 28th of Feb, 1pm New York time

Europe

Friday the 24th of Feb, 3pm London time
Tuesday 28th of Feb, 3pm London time

Australia, NZ and Asia

Our client service manager, Hugh Cowling, will lead you in a guided tour of the new and exciting features on Friday the 24th and Tuesday the 28th of Feb. To reserve your space at the date that suits you best, visit the links below:

Friday, 24th of Feb, 2pm Sydney time
Tuesday 28th of Feb, 2pm Sydney time

Watch a Replay of a Guided Tour

Can't make it to one of our guided tour sessions? Don't worry - we made sure we recorded one for you; feel free to watch it below.

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You Asked, We Delivered - Better Timesheets!

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:06:33 -0800

One of our passions at AffinityLive is ensuring that time is recorded in a meaningful way - against a particular activity for a client. A key reason for this is when it comes time to bill your clients you can be confident in invoicing for the time that has gone against those issues, jobs or contracts. As our client base grows we've learnt a couple of lessons about the way people work:

Professionals work out of their email a lot.
Professionals look after their clients and work first, and timesheets second.

These factors have helped us re-design the Work screen - effectively the timesheet screen - so that you can go back in time and log work easily and see the email conversations you had that day, which will help you log that past time more accurately.

The new and improved Work screen can be accessed as before - by clicking the Work button from the top navigation menu.

Timesheet Graph

This is a new feature at the top of the screen which illustrates how many hours you have logged over the last 14 days - so you can quickly identify days where you missed some hours.

Click on a day to see the breakdown of items that you worked on - issues, jobs, prospects and more. Your diaries will be nested under items in the My Activity list.

See ALL your activity for a previous day

Besides seeing work that was logged using a diary note, you'll also see email conversations and meetings that occured on that day, nested under the record they relate to - such as a component for a job. This is super-handy for those who do a lot of work via their email. You can simply use this activity list like a timesheet to quickly add some billable hours for those conversations or create a follow-up diary!

Log past time for Tasks too!

Not only can you add/update past hours for your diaries and emails, you can also log past work against any of your overdue, scheduled or suggested tasks on the right-hand side of the screen.

And a bonus feature is the ability to mark a task as complete from this screen too!

New Forms API now live

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:32:16 -0800

One of the strengths of AffinityLive is the fact it is so tightly integrated - you bring a new, prospective client into the front end, and you're able to manage all of the sales, work, support and billing for that client in one, central place.

However, some of our clients have been asking to make it even easier to get clients into that front end.

Wouldn't it be nice to have an enquiry form on your website create a new company/contact in AffinityLive, saving you and your team time in entering data?
Wouldn't it be nice if someone can fill in an online enquiry form and have a new prospect/opportunity created in AffinityLive?
Wouldn't it be great if you could have the same flexibility and customization that AffinityLive gives you - with custom fields, notifications and file uploads - in these online forms?

The new AffinityLive Forms API gives you all of this and much more. With the AffinityLive forms API, you can construct forms on your own website or websites, and when users fill in the form details they can be pushed across into AffinityLive, instantly. You can configure notifications - so that your staff get an email letting them know about the new submissions - and submissions can handle all of the custom segmentation and profile fields, as well as file attachments, and all you need is a little help from your web developer or CMS to create a simple web-form - and AffinityLive will do the rest.

For an example of a great web form in action, check out AffinityLive client the Angel Group. This innovative recruiting practice uses the AffinityLive Forms API to capture lots of key information about jobseekers and prospective clients; to get a sense of the power and flexibility of the Forms API in action, check out their Applicant Registration Form.

For more information on how to use the new Forms API, check out our extensive documentation at http://help.affinitylive.com/setup/api-and-forms/forms/

QuickBooks Desktop now syncs with AffinityLive

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:39:46 -0800

Quickbooks, from Intuit, is a very popular accounting system - especially in the US where it has around 85% market share. As many of our clients began asking for integration, late last year we released an update which allowed AffinityLive to connect to QuickBooks Online via Intuit Anywhere online services.

This update was great for those who had moved to the QuickBooks Online system, but at the time users of the desktop/installed versions weren't included.

After a few weeks of hard work, we've just released the ability to integrate AffinityLive with Quickbooks Desktop Edition (Windows Only). This means now you can create invoices in AffinityLive, and see them synchronized with QuickBooks Windows in both the Pro and Premier versions!

If you're interested in making the connection, you firstly need to have an Intuit online account. In order to create an account that can access your data, launch the Intuit Sync Manager within QuickBooks and follow the instructions.

More instructions are on our help website

Here's a summary of what you can with AffinityLive and QuickBooks:

Import clients/contacts, invoices and payments from QuickBooks to AffinityLive.
Import account/ledger codes from QuickBooks to AffinityLive for more accurate invoicing.
Create invoices in AffinityLive that push to QuickBooks. New client/contacts will also be pushed.
Receive payments in QuickBooks that will synchronize back to AffinityLive
Optionally have invoices created directly in QuickBooks sync up to the company record in AffinityLive.

Notification Preferences, Exchange Integration Updates and More!

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:00:00 -0800

It's been a busy couple of weeks for the AffinityLive team as we work out all the movings parts needed to bring our beta customers on as monthly or annual subscribers to AffinityLive!

Fortunately we've also found time to prepare a few features that have been sorely missing :-)

Email Notification Preferences

This feature resolves the frustration of receiving too many email notifications from AffinityLive - especially when you set yourself as a manager of another user but don't want all their diaries sent to your inbox!

As we started planning this feature we quickly knew it was going to be very tricky to build an intuitive interface to configure the plethora of notifications built in to AffinityLive. So we came up with a plan to allow a user to configure their email notification preferences for all diaries that are created via the "Add Diary" screen. In the future we aim to expand the notification preferences to control a range of other automatic email notifications which are generated from other actions in AffinityLive.

To view the notification settings, click your username from the top right, then click "Settings".

On the screen that appears, you'll notice we have added a new section called "Notification Settings" which provides a matrix of options. By default all these options will be enabled - as per the current behaviour of AffinityLive, but using the On/Off buttons you can update your preferences and then click "Save" from the bottom to confirm.

In the image above, I have setup my preferences to be notified about diaries added by other staff when I am the manager of the object (Job, Issue.. but not companies or contacts).

I also care about diaries that are created against Issues, so even if I am the company manager for an issue, I wish to be notified (as per the single ON setting in the 3rd row).

Finally, if any staff I manage add diaries, I only want to be notified if those diaries are against Issues.

Exchange Integration now supports Exchange Web Services and Office365

Once we had access to an Office365 developer system we found we had to re-write a lot of code to get the calendar, contact and task integration with AffinityLive working smoothly.

After a week of testing we're happy to release this for all to try - remember though, this is our first field test, so it is only for the brave!

To connect your AffinityLive account to Exchange (2007 SP1 or later) / Office365, simply navigate to the Integrations screen in AffinityLive and start the connection.

For more instructions, please see this page on our help website.

Invite External Guests to Meetings (schedule diary)

As more users have taken advantage of the calendar integration (Microsoft Exchange and Google Apps) we've heard that not being able to send a meeting invite to the client when creating a meeting diary was quite tedious.

We've now introduced a "Send Invites" tickbox to the schedule area on the Add Diary screen so that if you are scheduling a diary and attentioning a contact, you have the option to send the meeting invitation to them.

If you do, ensure that the diary subject and body have something meaningful to the client contact!

Note that the meeting description will not include the contact details and links back to AffinityLive (as previously included) - as this could confuse the client!

Sign Up for AffinityLive today!

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 10:17:54 -0800

Today is a very big day here at AffinityLive. It is the culmination of all the work our team has been putting into over the last couple of years. After months of development, then alpha testing and beta testing, today we're allowing our users to sign up for a subscription and go from being a beta tester or trial user to become a full AffinityLive client!

From today, we're making it easy to see where you are up to in your trial. If you're an administrator, when you next log in you'll see a bar across the top of AffinityLive which shows how much time you have remaining. This bar also has a handy link that allows you to sign up for a subscription whenever you're ready.

Sign up by Nov 20 & get a free t-shirt!

You can now sign up for a subscription to AffinityLive quickly and easily.

From the yellow bar, click on the green "Choose a plan" link.

Firstly, you'll be able to choose how many Professional (paid) users your company needs. We'll guess based on your current Professional users (which includes Administrators), but you can select to purchase more (or less if you plan on changing some accounts to be Collaborators or remove users).

We'll automatically suggest the best plan for you - Boutique, Team or Company - and you'll be able to choose whether you want Monthly or Annual billing. Annual billing has some big price advantages - see below for more info.

From there, just enter your credit card details - we accept Visa, Mastercard and American Express - and you'll be activated instantly. We'll also send you an invoice for your records. If you select the Annual billing plan, you can elect to pay on an invoice instead.

As a special bonus for our early users, if you sign up by November 20th, we'll send you one of our awesome and stylish AffinityLive t-shirts!

Month-to-month vs Annual Plans - what's the difference?

When you sign up for AffinityLive, you're able to select between month-to-month or an annual plan. To reward our users who commit to AffinityLive, we've structured our annual plans to provide a discount of up to 25% compared to our month-to-month plans.

The month to month plan gives you maximum flexibility - you can cancel at any time, and we just won't invoice you the next month. The annual plan means making an annual commitment, but if you change your mind in the first 30 days you're still able to get a refund thanks to our money back guarantee.

Since annual plan purchases are naturally larger transactions, we also offer our annual plan purchasers the option to pay on an invoice rather than via a credit card. Payments for these annual plan invoices can be made using checks or wire/bank transfers.

Training, Support and Feedback

As we've been talking to more of our users during this transition, we've heard from a few folks that they want to get some refresher training and help to become more familiar with AffinityLive.

To help out, we're running a series of special training sessions through our demo webinars. Sign up for free today for one of our regular sessions in your timezone.

AffinityLive launches (no more beta!)

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:01:04 -0700

We're excited to announce that we've reached a special milestone today - AffinityLive is leaving beta!

When we launched AffinityLive into beta in late February, we didn't know what would happen. Would people like our product? Would people even sign up for it and give it a try?

The answer came within a couple of hours of us flicking the switch and setting the site live. In the last 8 months, we've had companies from 86 countries sign up to use AffinityLive, including more than half a dozen hardy souls from Egypt who signed up during the middle of the "Arab spring"!

During the beta period, we've had a lot of feedback from users which has made a massive difference to the quality of AffinityLive. And throughout the period the rate of feedback and engagement has accelerated - aside from emailing us, users can also submit their own ideas and vote for other people's suggestions.

So, what does the transition from beta mean for you and your users?

In short, nothing changes. Your deployment address, your data and your user experience remain the same. However, the one thing that is changing is that during the month of November you're going to need to sign up for a plan to continue using AffinityLive.

New Pricing Plans

We also took the opportunity during the beta period to look at our pricing and plans. Initially, we thought that our users would value having a choice between the different modules in AffinityLive. We went into beta with four offerings: CRM for client data and sales only, a Work version with clients, projects and invoicing, and a Service version, with clients, support, retainers and invoicing. We also offered a combined "everything" version we called the Suite version.

As it turned out, most of you clients wanted our Suite version. In fact, well over 80% of all active users on AffinityLive are on the Suite version, making it by far the most dominant. We also received feedback that more than 90% of our users liked the concept of "free" and "paid" users depending on their role, but having multiple versions and multiple user levels was confusing.

So, we reviewed our pricing model to make it simpler and fairer. Now there is only one version of AffinityLive, which includes everything, and we've lowered the price of the paid Professional user tier from $38/month to prices starting at $29/month. We've also introduced some handy bundles which provide even better prices for Professional users, which we hope will make it even easier for companies to get started and bring all their key staff into AffinityLive.

In the next couple of weeks, we'll be sending out emails and using visual cues in AffinityLive to let you know how to select one of our new pricing plans. You'll be able to pay via Mastercard, Visa and American Express, and if you make an annual commitment you'll be able to pay on an invoice (handy if you need to get things approved by finance first). If you've got any questions in the mean time, please don't hesitate to contact us.

One more thing...

This week we're excited to announce another highly requested and pretty awesome feature - Quickbooks integration!

Now you can integrate AffinityLive with Intuit's new Quickbooks Online and Intuit Anywhere product. For more information and instructions, check our our help page and get started with Quickbooks integration today.

Goodbye Old Dashboard - Hello New Ones!

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:30:00 -0700

The big news this week is the release of a new dashboard screen, and to make life easier, the ability to choose your home screen! Skip to the bottom if you want to review other minor updates.

New Dashboards - Manager Dashboard

If you are a client, project, sales or staff manager then this could be your new favourite screen :) See below for an outline of the panels included in this new dashboard...Contract managers - please bear with us as we're making some changes to the contracts module in the next 4 weeks!

To access the new manager dashboard (and the admin dashboard), click the "Dashboard" button from the top left of AffinityLive.

My Companies - There's 2 panels here. On the left you can review the companies that your staff interact with the most. The pie chart on the right is great for then comparing those high-touch clients with the ones your team have actually been working on, and how much revenue they're generating.

My Prospects - clearly for the sales staff, this panel provides lots of handy filters to review your prospects by due date, created date, rating, value and activity (# of emails, calls, etc.)
My Jobs - with a focus on budget tracking, this panel will help project managers see which jobs are running over budget, over time, or have a lot of hours remaining.

Staff I manage - easily see how much time your staff have logged this week (or last week) and what percentage of that time was billable!

Home Screen Preferences? Yes Please!

Not a big fan of the To-Do List? Prefer to have Bookmarks as your home screen?

Click your username in the top right corner and select "Settings".
Use the "Default Home Screen" picklist to choose between To-do, Bookmarks, Schedule, Work and now Dashboard.
If you choose Dashboard then you should also select the default dashboard screen - either Admin or Manager, with an Individual one coming soon.

Note - We've actually pulled out the old manually configured dashboard in favour of a new set of role-based dashboards. If you are really missing something from the old dashboard, email us so we can help.

Minor Changes and Updates

Adding Non-Google Apps users. Until this point, if your AffinityLive system was connected to Google Apps, you could not create a new user inside AffinityLive. Due to popular demand we have made it possible to create a normal AffinityLive user from the Users & Groups menu. This user will have no connection to your Google Apps domain.
Defaulting billable diaries. As we are updating reporting interfaces it became evident that allowing users to create "billable" diaries against records which you cannot approve for billing could cause reporting inaccuracies. Therefore, billable time can only be recorded against Jobs, Components and Issues as of this update.
Emails replies to Invoices. Some of our users noted that if a client replies to an invoice from AffinityLive, the reply isn't captured. We have changed the architecture so that the reply will be processed and directed to the email address that is configured under Admin > Accounts > Configuration