Greetings Julie,

Welcome to Solve360 (old)‘s alter ego and the Solve360 (new) community.  Thanks for your note and kind words (blush).

You should find Solve360 (new) will do everything that Solve360 (old) does now, but it uses a modern, simpler approach to organizing information.  For example, instead of storing items in different feature areas such as Files, Bookmarks, Calendar, etc it relates information and files directly to what you are working on; in most cases a contact or a project blog.  This creates a simple and effective context to organize information around - “everything needed on a single page”.

Solve360 has a calendar, but we refer to it as a “calendar view” and not a mash-up of a “set of personal calendars”.  Our approach is that there is only one calendar and events are filtered by who is attending.  This design allows us to create a simpler, more logical big picture of integrating events, tasks and milestones together.  For example, the next actions view (a best practice to organizing tasks) is the queue of ALL tasks, events and milestones (what do you need to do), the calendar then becomes the list of those items that have a date attached to them (where do you need to be).  You access the calendar view by opening the Activity window and select “Show calendar events for…” in the command bar.

Instead rehashing the traditional day/week/work week month views we introduced a new single month view that expands each week to reveal details.  This single view takes some getting use to but it’s actually easier to use / count on when trying to organize dates/times.  You can create personal events, shared events and events linked to a contact or a blog.  You can also publish a read-only view of the Solve360 calendar to external calendar systems such as Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar etc (click Data, Publish this list iCal).

Solve360 has an email dropbox feature which automatically links shared email messages to contacts/blogs/companies and works really well.  We are currently working on a full “Webmail” client.  Like the rest of the currently available features you will find it fast, useful and easy to use.  We also have an unannounced surprise related to email that will be very useful when managing communications to many prospects.  With all of this well underway your email needs should be met shortly.

Solve360 is ideally suited to track prospects through the lead qualification process through to the delivery of service and support phases.  A key feature to look at here is called “Tags” which allow you to categorize each contact into custom stages / lists.  We also automatically track when contacts are last viewed / updated, column sort etc to make managing your “queue” or “funnel” easy and flexible.  You probably already noticed that you can customize the contact fields so you can track information that is specific to your unique business and process as well.

PS: We develop and test on Macs and the latest version of Safari is an ideal browser to use.  We recommend Firefox on PCs.

Steve

Thanks for this really comprehensive response, Steve—and so quickly, too!

I’ll wait for that Webmail client with barely-concealed excitement! (By the way, I notice elsewhere that you were talking to Constant Contact… I’ve been using an email broadcast system called ‘My Emma’ and they are a fantastic company, so if the the CC conversations come to nought, Emma might prove interesting ... plus the guy who writes their copy has a great sense of humour).

I’ll read carefully through everything you’ve said here and see how it could work for me. I love the Solve360 interface and I’m not shy of trying new apps, I just need to be sure it will work for me, not only in terms of production (writing, editing, designing and publishing our books) which it looks particularly well suited for; but also our external business development people who need to access different price lists, product information, etc.

I really like the idea of ‘next actions’—they’ve always made perfect sense to me and I agree that it’s good to get into the habit of breaking tasks down in this way. I’m glad you’ve taken that route.

In all honesty, the webmail client might well clinch it for me. I have found you lot great to work with and I don’t really want to move away.

One more point. When I export Accounts and Contacts out of Solve360 (old), and then try to import into Solve360 (new), I receive an error message telling me ‘this is not a .csv file’, when it is (I even opened and resaved in Excel, just in case…)

Any thoughts?

Final point, do you have a User Guide so that I can refrain from posting these long messages??

Thanks for the tip about My Emma. I will definitely have a look.

The reason we are continuing to invest in webmail is not to become (another) email provider, but because it’s obviously an essential tool to manage communication with clients, which is the area we will focus on / innovate around.  When it’s available we won’t be bragging about it much (it’s not what we want to be known for) but I expect it will rank with the best in terms of usability and performance.  With Solve360 (old) we gained a lot of experience and capability in this area.

Please send your contact export file to our support team along with the email address of your Solve360 account and they’ll be happy to take a look. In some cases we’ve noticed extra “invisible” header information in the export file that creates some confusion when Solve360 tries to detect the file format.

We are continuing to extend and refine features which makes “documenting” the system a bit of a moving target at the moment.  As we identify specific areas users tend to need help with we go back and try and refine the feature or add hints in the application to make it more intuitive.  As time goes on we expect to have a better idea what should be documented and the best format to communicate the information.  Until then it’s a bit of an easter egg hunt :)

Hello Julie.  I just signed up for a demo account and am excited.  I also use gmail and my first inclination regarding linking emails to blogs is to set up filters in gmail so that emails get automatically forwarded to Solve360.  I currently use gmail filters to tag and organize about 80% of my email.  You can also create specific addresses so that you could send an email for an activity for instance and it would be automatically be forwarded to the appropriate place in Solve360.  I haven’t tried any of this yet, but just some ideas.  Joel

Thanks Joel… I’m going to try using the filters and tags as you suggest. Although it sounds as if it could take a bit of setting, it would be probably be worth to get the automated forwarding to Solve360 (although not quite as exciting as having the emails automatically attached to the contact within Solve360! *smile*)

I’m feeling a little nervous about leaving the safe confines of Solve360 for my email and moving over to Google mail, do you know if I can run both simultaneously for a while? (The digital equivalent of an email safety net, I guess!)

Julie

You sure can.  I actually have a few different old lingering mail accounts on totally different servers that Gmail pulls in and puts into my inbox.  I could choose to have these go to different folders as well (with filters).  In addition, I can send mail from other email addresses right from the Gmail interface. 

The filters are pretty easy to use in Gmail once you get the hang of them.  To link email to a contact in Solve360, here is what seems to work:  create a filter in Gmail so that incoming emails from certain people go to particular folders.  Then in Solve360 under each contact (add an activity) add a URL and enter the URL of the folder in Gmail that you want associated with that contact (since that is a unique URL within Gmail). Now you have a link under the contact’s activity list that links directly to a folder with all of their emails.

I just tried it and it works!  Joel