Today, we're excited to announce the Beta release of enhanced Activities and emails. This complements our popular Rich-Text upgrade that went live earlier this year, to further improve the process of creating emails, notes, meetings, and calls in Accelo.
With so much hype around rich-text editing & formatting, we wanted to give you more highly-requested upgrades to play around with. The team here have been pushing hard to ensure this Beta release exceeds all expectation, so we've got 5 features to share with you, including:
Yep, we've really bitten the bullet here to accommodate more of your everyday email-client features. This change adds a simple new option for forwarding any email, note, call or meeting that's visible in Accelo. No matter whether the email was captured or created in Accelo, you can forward it to your team or clients either way. Just look for the little forward arrow to try it out:
There are a few key reasons why users need this feature:
Note: While we allow any type of Activity to be forwarded, forwarding a meeting just means you're sending someone a copy of the meeting email in terms of the subject and body/description of the meeting - not actually inviting them.
When you're composing an email to Client A, by default Accelo would only return contacts from Client A as possible recipients. Of course, the Contributors feature allowed contacts from other companies to be included, but this side-step for making contributors disrupted the Create Activity flow. We've overhauled the recipient's search process so that you can now easily include any contacts from across our Accelo client database as recipients.
This change means you'll see three distinct result areas when typing in the recipient fields:
As you can imagine, the results area for Other Contacts could be very long, so to make the process of finding Other Contacts easier, the search will support firstname, lastname, email or company name - and you can mix & match your search terms, and even include partial matches
Because Accelo has a CRM at its core, sending an email to an address without a client or contact behind that email address was never possible. This might have been good in the sense that it forced some users to do the right thing and set-up company and contact records in the system, but for many, this was too restrictive and downright tedious. We admit it.
Fortunately, we've overcome it by introducing a nifty little "Add Contact" prompt so you can create that missing contact in-line as you're composing an email/activity.
As you can see, it is super light-weight - just the bare minimum to save the contact and get you back to the Create Activity window with the new contact inserted as a recipient. If you happen to remove them, don't stress, they've automatically been saved to be searched as normal!
If you happen to search by name (rather than email) you will still see the option and we'll speed things up for you by intelligently moving the text into the firstname and lastname fields.
We'll also use the email domain to suggest existing clients which this new contact might belong to - or even fill in the Company field for you if we find only one company with contacts that have the same email domain.
Being able to BCC staff and contacts when composing an email or note in Accelo is also now possible as part of this beta release. Simply toggle to show the Cc line and the Bcc line will also appear for you.
As you'd expect, any other users viewing the details of an activity in Accelo won't know who was Bcc'd, but we do store this detail and display it only to the sender.
Lastly - and we couldn't help ourselves here - this cheeky little option allows you to quickly emulate a Reply-All but without any client contacts, hence you're doing a reply to just the staff (internal team) who were included on the activity/email. Since we're not sure if this will be used as heavily as the new Forward button, we've opted to keep this guy in the 3-dot menu available on the right:
Just shoot an email to [email protected] - be sure to include your Accelo account - letting us know you want to be a part of the Activities Beta and we'll come back to you with details for getting access. We should point out these features will be available in your production account so you're battle-testing while working with your real colleagues and clients in Accelo.
