The Capsule Blog

Capsule contextual gadget for Gmail

One of the projects we've been busy with recently is the development of a Gmail contextual gadget. A Gmail contextual gadget is a gadget that is triggered by clues in Gmail, such as the contents of Subject lines and email messages. For example, Gmail already provides a YouTube contextual gadget. If the body of an email contains a link to a YouTube video, a clickable thumbnail view of the video appears at the bottom of the email.

Rather than replicate the CRM functionality in a small window at the bottom of each email, we've designed the Capsule contextual gadget to improve the workflow around receiving an email and the actions that you need to take as a result.

Here's a summary of Capsule contextual gadget functionality:

• Add new contacts straight into Capsule
• See details you hold about the sender and click through to their page in Capsule
• Store messages in Capsule without using the dropbox
• Create an opportunity or case linked to the email
• File the email under an existing opportunity or case
• Create a follow-up task

If you are already using Capsule and want to take advantage of the gadget you'll need an administrator of your Google Apps domain to grant access to the gadget for the new information required to support the gadget. To do this visit your Google Apps dashboard by following Manage this domain from Gmail. Scroll down to the Service Settings section where you will find Capsule listed and follow the View and grant access link:

Then accept the new data access requirements by following the Grant data access link.

It can take up to 10 minutes for the gadget to propagate through Google's caches and appear in your account so hold tight if it doesn't appear straight away.

Here's just a sample of the positive feedback we've had from users of the gadget:

The gadget is phenomenal. If we had known about this beforehand, we would not have hesitated to use Capsule. It's a gamechanger for our business.

I think Capsule just gave me the excuse I needed to finally ditch Outlook!

This is great productivity tool. Really integrates your email with Capsule

It has by far pushed the use of Capsule here to a higher level due to the simplicity of connecting the emails to the contacts and opportunities.

We hope you find this addition useful. Thanks as always to our beta testers and customers on uservoice for their feedback and suggestions on this.

Zferral integrates with Capsule

The team at zferral have integrated their solution with Capsule.  Simply put, zferral lets you create and manage an affiliate program to promote your products or services through your existing customers or other networks. This can be a very effective sales tool, particularly if you’ve got customers who are fans and can introduce you to new customers.

For more information on how affiliate marketing could help your business, check out zferrals’s website which explains the service and their integration with Capsule in more detail.

One click export

Capsule runs on the battle-tested services from Amazon and we backup your data every hour and regularly test the restore process. So I've got every confidence in our restore capability should we ever need it. However there's nothing like having a copy of your data to hand for the ultimate peace of mind. We're also strongly of the view that customers own their data and should be free to export and move their data to another service. To make this easier, we've added a new one-click export function to Capsule.

The new export function generates a single ZIP file and emails it to you. The zipped file contains CSV files for your contacts, opportunities and cases, including a history of emails and notes. We've chosen to stick with CSV for the export since this is the most portable format for transferring data into another system.

By the way, if you're looking for a CSV file to support mail merging or analysis in spreadsheet I'd suggest using our lists feature. This excludes email and note history which makes the CSV file easier to work with.

We hope you find this feature useful, and many thanks for your votes and feedback on the uservoice suggestion.

More context in the history

The layout of the the contact history in Capsule was designed early on and it’s been long due for a tidy up.  The main problem with the old design is that the sender of an email wasn’t clearly identified. This made it difficult to know if the email was sent by you or by a contact.

The new design shows the sender and recipient(s) of the email so it’s clear whether the email was sent by you to the contact, or was received from a contact.  We’ve also included the contact’s picture alongside each entry in the organisation’s page.  The user and entry date are still displayed, but are given less prominence to make it easy to scan through the information in each entry.  Here’s a preview showing the new design:

New in Capsule: Pictures from Social Networks

With so many businesses now using social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn, we've been looking for ways to include the information from these social network profiles inside Capsule. With our latest update to Capsule, pictures from these profiles can be pulled into contacts in Capsule. When you add a social profile such as a twitter account, LinkedIn or Facebook profile to a contact, Capsule will check to see if the profile has a picture, and if so automatically display it when viewing the contact. Capsule also checks for a gravatar which is a picture associated with an email address, so in many cases Capsule can grab a picture for a contact using just the email address.

To see it in action, add a social network profile to one of your contacts. Here's an example for Phillip, my co-founder here at Zestia.

And here's the resulting mugshot in Capsule:

We've also taken the opportunity to revamp the contact panel a little which you can see in the screenshot above. Rather than displaying the URL for a social network profile we show an icon which you can hover over to see the URL/account or click through to see the full profile.

Finally, we noticed a lot of users weren't aware that Capsule integrated with Twitter to show recent tweets (and now profile pictures) right inside a contact's page in Capsule. To make this more intuitive we updated the add new contact page to default the twitter input field. You can leave it blank or change it to another network, but hopefully this makes it clearer that you can add a twitter profile amongst other social network profiles to your Capsule contacts.

System Status page for Capsule

We had a couple of periods earlier in the week where the service was slow for some users. Sorry to those affected.  We are resolving this by adding server capacity, some of which has been put in place and we’ve got more coming.

A number of you asked whether there is system status page for Capsule. We haven’t had one, but as of today we’ve published a System Status page to keep users informed when the service is down or problematic. We’ll post whenever there is an issue or we schedule downtime. We’ve also also published our Pingdom Uptime Report which provides both current status and history of the system availability.

Hope you find this useful, and more importantly, I hope we don’t have to update it too often!

A PHP Wrapper for the Capsule API

At Capsule we love APIs; they allow Capsule to be connected with other popular web applications like Google Apps which we integrated with recently. It's also great to see developers using the Capsule API in creative ways such as Alive Docs' recent integration with Capsule, FreshBooks, Gmail and Xero.

David at echolibre has created a PHP wrapper for the Capsule API and has kindly made it available on github. PHP is a popular framework for creating web applications so our thanks go to him and his team for making it easier to integrate PHP applications with Capsule. Examples and further details are available on the echolibre blog.

Capsule integrates with Google Apps

We’re excited to announce our long requested integration with Google Apps.  Google approached us late last year to ask us to participate as a launch company in their new Google Apps marketplace.  As announced by Google earlier today, the Google Apps marketplace provides a range of cloud apps that integrate with Google.  Capsule is one of the first 50 apps to be offered in the marketplace.  It can be installed using the “Add it now” button inside the Capsule marketplace listing.

Here’s how the integration works…

After installing Capsule into your Google Apps domain, users access Capsule straight from Google’s universal navigation in the same way as they would access other Google Apps such as Google Mail or Calendar.  Here’s an example of what that looks like for a user:

Pretty neat huh! Also, since the user’s Google Apps credentials are used to log them into Capsule, there’s no extra user name or password for the user to remember.

Google does email and collaboration well and it has a basic personal contact manager.  However it doesn’t provide a good solution for sharing your company contacts with multiple users.  Capsule provides a solution to this since a CRM is the natural place for your company contacts to be stored and shared with other users.  In this model Capsule is the master repository for all company contacts, and users can choose to have their Google Contacts inside Google Apps kept up-to-date by Capsule.  This is a user choice, and is easily enabled from the user’s setting page in Capsule:

Once enabled, Capsule will push a full set of contacts from Capsule into the user’s Google account.  Any time a new contact is added, or a contact is updated in Capsule those details will automatically get pushed to the user’s Google account.

Another enhancement we’ve made for Google Apps users is to have Google Mail pop-up when a user clicks on a contact’s email address inside Capsule.  This is a user choice, and is easily enabled from the user’s setting page in Capsule:

Finally, users can also see their Capsule tasks inside Google Calendar (we actually released this feature last month).  Follow the “Subscribe to iCalendar Feed” link from the Capsule calendar page to enable this.

Many thanks to the users that beta tested and provided feedback on the Google Apps integration. If you are an existing Capsule user and would like to integrate, please get in touch with us so that we can provide instructions for connecting with your existing Capsule account (rather than creating a new account as per the default process). Hope you all find the new functionality useful and we look forward to refining and extending it further based on your feedback.

Quick contact preview

We’ve had lots of feedback from our users asking for a quick way to view email addresses and phone numbers of contacts on the case and opportunity screens. Until now to view the contact details required clicking through to the contacts page.  So now we have added a contact preview. To view the preview hover your mouse over the contact card next to the name of the contact to see phone numbers, emails and addresses.

New in Capsule: calendar view and task categories

We greatly value suggestions from our users in making Capsule the best CRM around for small businesses.  Some of the more popular suggestions on our uservoice forum have been to add a calendar view of your tasks in Capsule.  A related suggestion has been to show your Capsule tasks in your favourite calendaring apps such as iCal on the Mac, Outlook Calendar and Google Calendar.

Over the weekend we rolled out the new calendar view and the iCal feed.  You can see how the screen looks below.  We also introduced task categories so that when you add a task to Capsule you can give it additional context such as it’s a Meeting or a Milestone or you need to Follow-up.  We think this is a useful productivity improvement to the tasks functionality in Capsule.

We’ve added a default set of categories to all Capsule accounts which you’re welcome to edit and extend.

Javelin is now Capsule

As per our previous blog post and email notification to users, Javelin is renaming to Capsule. The switch over of the branding and the change of the domain name from javelincrm.com to capsulecrm.com has been completed today. We've sent an email to users with instructions for accessing accounts and support. If you have any trouble, let us know on .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

And now for a bit of nostalgia here is the old logo alongside the new:

Javelin is being renamed to Capsule

This weekend Javelin is being renamed to Capsule. Accounts on the system will continue as before with the same data, username and password.  However the URL that you use to access the CRM system will change and we’ll notify users of the new URL once the change over has completed. Integration with 3rd party applications will not be affected as we’ll continue to make the API available on the existing URL.

The reason for the name change is that we have been contacted by a company who has a trademark on the name Javelin.  While we don’t agree there is an infringement of their trademark we figure our time and resources are better spent building a great CRM rather than fighting court battles. We’ll share further details on this once the change over is complete.

To complete the changeover, Javelin will be unavailable this Sunday from 12:00 to 16:00 GMT.

Javelin saving the UK millions during big snow

Here in the UK we’ve had the worst snow in decades according to the minute by minute news reports.  Apparently the place has been bought to a standstill. According to the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), lost employee productivity could cost the UK £600m per day.

The bad news for our Javelin users is there is no excuses for an extended holiday since Javelin can be accessed from anywhere you have an internet connection. As tweeted by one of our users, “Hmmmm, I think I’ll work from home today using #googleapps, Javelin CRM & Xero”.

So while it might be a stretch to say Javelin is making the whole of the UK more productive!, businesses using cloud applications like Javelin, Google Apps and Xero have a much better chance of remaining productive if staff can continue to access the systems they rely on. If you are considering home working for your staff, SaaSage who offer services for Javelin and other cloud apps have put together a list of considerations for home working

For any businesses out there still using traditional software instead of cloud applications, here’s an incentive for you to convert to Javelin.  This week only get 25% off your first 3 months by signing up with discount code BIGSNOW

Opportunities & Cases now with more flexibility

Custom fields and Data Tags have been a very popular feature for contacts in Javelin with good reason.  By adding your own custom fields you can adapt Javelin to better suit your business. Now the same feature is available to Opportunities and Cases.

As a simple example to demonstrate the power of this feature, let’s say I’d like to use Javelin to keep track of my client projects.  First I configure a new Data Tag called Web Project and add fields for start date, planned end date and planned budget.

Now when I apply the Web Project tag to a case, Javelin prompts me to enter the new information and when I’m looking at the case in Javelin I can see the Web Project information I’ve entered alongside other case information.

Finally, it’s easy to use the new fields to add conditions to lists that are created in Javelin.  For example, I can create a lists of projects due in due by February adding the following condition:

Hopefully this demonstrates the power of the custom fields and Data Tag functionality and has given you some ideas for your own.  If you’ve got an interesting use of this functionality that you’d like to share with the Javelin community then we’d love to hear about it.

Internet Explorer is officially square

We’ve been introducing rounded corners into the Javelin user interface recently.  Rounded corners and curves are nice and they provide us with a simple way to keep Javelin looking fresh, or at least it should have been simple.  As any web designer will tell you in words I can’t print here, Internet Explorer is a party pooper.

We’ve looked into using the many hacks for round corners in Internet Explorer and we tried a couple but they all have their issues which leads us to this position:

So instead of spending our days making Internet Explorer fit a round hole we’ve left it square.  In Firefox, Safari and Chrome you’ll get some rounded corner love:

And in Internet Explorer you’ll see square:

And another example:

I’m not on a crusade to change your web browser.  The beauty of web applications is you get to choose your operating system and browser, but if you are using Internet Explorer and want to consider an alternative then Mashable did a browser round up recently.