Category: Product News

As projects progress and work adjustments are made, it’s common for the due dates on deliverables and assignments to change. If you’re using Insightly’s activity sets or entering tasks on a regular basis, you have probably encountered a time when you had to open a group of Insightly tasks one by one to change their due dates. With the new bulk editing option for tasks, you can now adjust task due dates directly from your Tasks tab.

As on other Insightly tabs, the task bulk editing options will appear when you tick the boxes to the left of tasks on your list. The Change Due Date button displays a calendar icon and appears between the Complete and Delete buttons.

To change the due date for the selected items, pick a new due date from the list of options or choose a date of your own, then click the Change Due Dates button to save the changes.

All selected tasks will appear with their new due dates on the refreshed Tasks tab. With fewer clicks, you can resume your work with everything properly prioritized.

With Insightly’s linking feature, you can create relationships between different items to visualize and navigate important connections, from the organizations involved with a project, to the contacts connected to an organization. Since organizations tend to be the hub of these relationships, it makes sense that many Insightly customers have asked for a history of related items within each organization record. We’re happy to bring that to you in our latest update.

You can now view a complete history of the activities for an organization and its related contacts, projects, and opportunities. Previously, if you wanted to see this information, you would have to click through to each contact, opportunity, and project and view the history for each separately. Now, you can select the Show filter from an organization’s History subtab to select an inclusive history of activities from related records.

By default Insightly will show you the history for just the organization. The other options for the drop down are to show the history for the organization and all linked items, all linked contacts, all linked projects, and all linked opportunities.

This allows you to see everything that has happened around an organization in one view. You can quickly scan the history list and catch up on progress if you’ve been away from the office or if you’re about to make a phone call to a client. If you need more detail on a specific item, you can click through and drill into the details. (Tip: Hold down the CTRL key when you click a history item to open up that item in a separate tab.)

When you change the history drop down to show the history for the organization and linked items, Insightly displays the names of the linked items below the activity title. You can even hover your cursor over the name of a related record to view the details without clicking to open another page.

With one dropdown list, our product design team has added a simple feature that will save you a lot of clicks.

Insightly’s many bulk editing options help you get your work done faster by allowing you to update many records in fewer steps—much quicker than editing them one by one! We’ve added a new bulk edit option for contacts and organizations to make adding a single note to multiple records even easier.

To display the bulk editing buttons above your list of organizations or contacts, tick the boxes to the left of each item you would like to add the note to. Click the Add Note button to link the same note to all selected records.

A familiar dialogue will open allowing you to enter your note’s details, add file attachments, date the note, and adjust viewing permissions. After typing your information, just click the blue Add Note button to save the note and link it to the selected records.

The note will be linked to each item in the Links section of the note and of each record.

While the bulk edit options allow for mass maintenance of records, keep in mind that you can select single records, too. This can be very useful if you’d like to tag, link, or add notes to records directly from the list without opening the record and navigating from one page to another. With flexible options like these, your productivity will just keep improving!

If you’ve ever copied-and-pasted without lifting your hands from the keyboard, you have used a keyboard shortcut. Shortcuts help you do things faster without reaching for your mouse, and Insightly is happy to include them as a quick way to navigate and create records. We’ve even placed the list of shortcuts right in Insightly for easy access.

To see the list, click your profile icon and select Keyboard Shortcuts.

To use an Insightly keyboard shortcut, click outside of an entry field and type a sequence of letters from the list. For example, “G” is to “go to” a tab, so typing g then c will open the Contacts page. Explore more of the following shortcuts and give your Insightly productivity a boost!

Product update (12 Dec 2014): We’ve added a switch to customize your use of keyboard shortcuts. You can enable or disable this feature right from the shortcuts menu.

With Insightly’s newest integration, you can easily link Microsoft OneDrive files to your Insightly records. This file management option can help you keep track of files related to your customers in Insightly, whether you use Microsoft Office Online or upload and sync your files directly to OneDrive. Select the Files subtab under contacts, organizations, opportunities, or projects and click the OneDrive cloud icon to get started.

From the OneDrive window, select files or folders by clicking the checkbox in the upper right, then click the Open button to link the item to your Insightly record. You can also click folder tiles to access their contents.

The links to OneDrive files will appear in the Files subtab of the current record as well as on the activity history listed on the Home tab. Clicking the link will open the item in OneDrive, so the permissions for who can see linked files will be determined by the settings in your OneDrive account.

For more details on Insightly’s OneDrive integration, see our help article: Can I link to my files in Microsoft OneDrive?

Last week we released an updated version (3.1.23) of our Android application.  With the new version, users can:

• Search, Edit and Add New – Tasks, Contacts, Organizations, Opportunities, Projects
• Search Emails
• Filter Tasks as Open, Completed or Delegated
• View Updated Detailed Views
• View File Attachments
• Filter Projects and Opportunities as Open or Closed.
• Filter Emails as Personal or Shared.
• Send Feedback to us From any Screen with the Device Screenshot

On a separate, but related note, Software Advice (a website that offers advice to online CRM buyers) recently surveyed almost 2000 mobile CRM users and found that users are looking for mobile CRM systems with reliable syncing and a variety of app features.    A couple key stats are:

What happens when the #1 online CRM for small business integrates with the #1 online accounting application? A measurable increase in convenience, efficiency and productivity! With our QuickBooks Online integration, users can view any customer payment status and history within Insightly via the QuickBooks Online tab. Now, you can eliminate dual data entry, and you have a single view operational and financial view of your customers and their account status, invoices and payments.  Our QuickBooks Online integration is available on our premium plan.    Click here to learn more.  Sign up for a 14 Day Trial of our premium plan!

Since adopting Insightly, our average time to complete a project has decreased by 28 percent, which we attribute to the Quickbooks Online integration. Before, we could not move through the process pipeline without an initial deposit or final payment from a client.  Now, we immediately have complete visibility into the status of a project from an operational and financial perspective.

– James Pennock, accounts manager and business strategist, Create180 Design

Insightly users on paid plans have the ability to sync their Insightly contacts with their Google Contacts if they have a Google account, and we heard from customers that the sync system was too complex and sometimes unreliable. We listened, and today we’re shipping a new contact sync system with some great improvements in speed, scalability, simplicity, and safety for your contact information and we wanted to let you know about these enhancements. One of the biggest improvements is you no longer have to select individual contacts to sync, and you no longer need to choose which type of sync – the Insightly contact list you have available to you is now copied into your Google contacts and kept up to date with changes automatically and in real time.

Simplicity and Control

Sync is now much easier to configure. Administrators have the ability to turn on or off contact sync for all their users under the system settings, and each user also has the ability to enable the contact sync feature if their administrator has it turned on for all users.

Real-Time Contact Sync from Insightly to Google Contacts

When you turn on contact sync, all the contacts you have access to see and change in Insightly will be automatically copied to your Google Contacts list, and tagged with the label of “Insightly-Contacts” so you can distinguish them from all the other contacts in your Google Contacts list. Any time someone updates contact information or adds a new contact to Insightly, that data will be copied over into the Google contact list in real time, and when someone deletes a contact from Insightly, that contact will also be removed from your Google contact list.

Mobile Sync Connectivity

For those users that add or update contacts on the go, Insightly has great native mobile apps available for free for both Google Android and Apple iOS phones and tablets. When you update or add a contact on your phone using either of the apps, those contacts will also be updated in your Google contact list too if you have this new Google sync turned on.

Reliable and Scalable

Lastly we have re-engineered the sync system to be more reliable and scalable. We went to great lengths to make sure that the system works and contact information gets copied over in a timely manner no matter how many contacts you manage in Insightly. We update the user interface in real time so you know how many contacts the system has left to sync up and what the current count is. We also added a re-sync button so you can choose to have Insightly resync all contacts for you immediately in the event you inadvertently remove or change the Insightly contacts in your Google contact list.

If you want to try out the new and improved contact sync feature yourself, you can turn it on under User Settings > Google Sync.

Building custom apps and integrations with Insightly is now easier than ever thanks to our Python client library. This library makes building apps around our web API super easy, as easy as:

from insightly import Insightly

i = Insightly(apikey=’your api key’)

contacts = i.getContacts(orderby=’DATE_UPDATED_UTC desc’)

for c in contacts:

 doSomethingWith(c)

The library handles all of the low level details of communicating with our API, so you can focus on your custom app or integration. You can find the Python library at github.com/insightly/python

We’ve also built a sample app based on the Python library that runs as-is on Google App Engine. The sample app demonstrates how to capture information from web forms, to convert requests for more information into Insightly Contacts and Insightly Tasks. App Engine is a easy to use yet highly scalable PaaS (platform as a service) environment. It scales automatically to handle user demand, and virtually eliminates system administration overhead. You can find the source code and docs at github.com/insightly/appenginedemo

Want to make some extra money? We’re looking to hire developers to build client libraries for other major development environments, including Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby and others. If you’re experienced in a popular development environment and already have experience working with our REST API, drop a line to brian@insight.ly to learn more.