Adding a link to selected items in a list

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

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

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

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 !

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:

• Contact importer
• Filters for list views
• Create tasks from emails
• Multi-language support
• Tagging enhancements
• Search within lists
• Exporting tagged items
• Themes
• Enhanced task system
• Google Calendar integration
• Export Contacts to Google
• Contacts list name ordering options
• Multi-link notes
• Pipelines and Activity Sets
• Gmail gadget
• Google Docs integration
• Better Organization history display

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

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.