Are these new contacts?  The next time you see this please press <f5> and let us know if the refresh corrects the label.

I had one “untitled”, but after refreshing, I now have have two of ‘em.

Each has a first and last name in the record.  I also tried re-entering the name.

Do you know that that F5 refresh, closes the program and relaunches?  Is that what you mean by refresh?

Will the Contacts fields be customizable?

For instance, we would like to enter the a contact’s given name and then their nickname, too.  So that the given name would be used for addressing, but the nickname when calling.

About those “untitled” contacts.  It has been several more hours and I just refreshed.  Still have two untitled contacts but one is now different from before.

a red error message popped up . . . something about unable to load . . . .

Just thought you might enjoy knowing this ;-)

I am now several messages ahead of you. 

In the Contacts SHOW drop down menu:  I can no longer scroll down thru my categories - but I seem to recall being able to do that earlier. 

Anyway to remove some of the items on that drop down that my group might never use?  Not a big deal, but just wondering.

BTW, we are having fun with this.

Love being able to copy/paste an address from a doc or email.  Almost all other databases have multiple fields for address so this is very different and VERY enjoyable.  Thanks.

Our next update changes some things that might be related to the untitled / load issue. 

I’ll need to look into the categories appearing in the dropdown, they should be listed there.

You can customize all of the contact fields - click Workspace, Customize Form fields.  Does this do the trick?

We thought a lot about changing address from multiple fields (like most systems including Solve360 old) to a single one and agree it makes the system much simpler and friendlier.  Most of the value provided by keeping them separate can be derived through some special effort in the programming area.

Thanks for reminding me about the custom form fields.

These are GREAT!  Very intuitive and flexible without being the least bit cumbersome.  We could not be happier with this feature.

Good job!

>>In the Contacts SHOW drop down menu:  I can no longer scroll down thru my categories - but I seem to recall being able to do that earlier.

I confirmed your categories are showing correctly.  Could it be that the list is larger than the window is showing?  Can you make the window larger to confirm this?  I think we’ll put categories in a submenu so the lists are shorter.

I can’t make the window larger and the list won’t scroll.

A category sub-menu would work.  You might also consider eliminating some of the fields that probably don’t get used much for searching, i.e., extension, job title, background, etc.

Regarding the vertical view of contacts - will we be able to control how many/which/order of the tabs/fields that show?

(btw - it is great to be able to switch these views)

Also, see response above to your earlier inquiry

We will be adding submenus to these dropdowns which should nip this issue.

Please clarify >>we be able to control how many/which/order of the tabs/fields that show?  The fields that are shown in the horizontal view are the ones selected in the form designer (and in the same order).  Workspace -> Customize Form Fields.  The vertical view only has the minimal name and date info.

Sub-menus should work well with the drop down field list

Regarding the listed tabs in Vertical view.  Let’s wait until I am able to customize the fields.  Was looking for a way to have certain fields show in that view so that I would not have to scroll to see info needed (for instance) for running a list of calls.

Something like First/Last/cell/phone/ . . .

Need to get my thoughts clearer on that and may be able to arrange the fields on the form to fit what I need to see on the Vert. View.

Having fun with the task list.  Thanks for this.  The functionality is a bit “clunky” but I suppose that will improve as we go along.  Regarding the e-mail notification - should that message be linked back to the task list? Or maybe that isn’t such a good idea because you don’t want non-subscribers to click in?

This gets complicated.  It’s a wonder you stay in such a good mood.

RE past issues: I stll have that problem with random contacts showing in the left pane as being named “untitled”

I could keep typing for another 5,000 characters but then you might want to kill me . . . .

>> listed tabs in Vertical view?  Do you mean you want to see more fields in the list on the left side of the window i.e. not the list on the top of the window?

>> The functionality is a bit “clunky”  We can’t let that go, specifically part of this area are you working with/ what are you trying to do?

You’ll need to hang on for the next update scheduled for next week before looking back at the untitled issue.

In contacts, the company name field has disappeared.  None of us can see it.  How do we restore it and all its data?

And what happened to it?

The companies “field” was expanded/replaced with the ability link to complete company records (under related to).  Having both would be redundant.  If you need any specific help with the field change please send our team a support request.

Hmmmm.  I think you may still want a company name field for those companies with one contact. Having two “records” to fill out, etc would be cumbersome otherwise.

Sorry, but we don’t “get” the idea of how the companies are supposed to work.

For instance, we have a contact at XYZ company (entered the old fashioned way using company name).  Now if we want to add another contact at that company, how do we do so?  It seems that your old 360 way of duping the contact record was (dare I say?) better (or more logical?).

Is this another one of those “wait and see” situations?

I could just add another field named “company” - guess that might work for now.  Please advise.

In the meantime the names to about 90 or companies has disappeared with the field.  Any chance of retrieving that or do we just have to re-enter the data?

The design is:

1) Click Add a Company, add the common info
2) Click Add a Contact, add the basic info, in the related to field start by typing the company name (autocomplete), bam! select the company.

The benefits of this approach are that it’s quite fast, it supports a lot of companies/contacts, a contact can be linked to multiple companies, no data is duplicated (easy to make changes) and if you follow this as a single approach you won’t need to circle back to clean-up data later when looking to create reports / mailers etc.

You will start to see these “related-to” links become more apparent in different places as the interface is refined.

You can add as many additional fields as you need, including one called Company….the power of customization.  But we’re not adding one by default (for the reasons above).  We could probably put the same field back in your configuration (no data has changed).  If it’s important, we’ll try and accomodate, just open a ticket.

In the Beta phase we are not managing changes with the same consideration or diligence that we would normally do.  The current goal is to get the service feature-complete and stable as soon as possible.

Hope this helps!

I understand 1 and 2 above, but if it is possibe, please make the Companies searchable with the ALL fields invoked.

Finding a contact is not nearly as much fun when we have to switch back and forth between ALL and Company for searching. 

Also, your graphics are great but we have a hard time seeing the shading between the contacts/projects/etc tabs.  Any chance of getting a bit more contrast?

It will be fun to see what we can do with all the “linkage”.  Thanks.

Good suggestion.  I think we can do something there e.g. considering a “Related-to-Company” value as a standard contact field when searching, or something along those lines.  Let me touch base with Eugen (the expert in this area).

Kathleen Howard - Jul 22, 2008 02:00pm

Sub-menus should work well with the drop down field list

How are they working out for you now?

Love the sub-menus.  They are such a help.  Thanks.

Some of us are “losing” entered info, i.e. a note that has been entered a couple of times just disappears on one of our contacts.  We have tried this a couple of ways and by different users with the same result.

Re: Companies.  We are adding a custom field for Company Name because we like to see it on the record.  That means that we will also be re-entering company names for ALL contacts, since that info went the way of the field when you added the Companies feature (related to contacts).  If there is a better way for us to do this, please advise.

The calendar is fun.  Still a bit clunky, but fun.

Looking forward to finding more Easter eggs.

I noticed from our logs that your account was “flagged” for triggering an error here.  It looked like someone there (innocently enough) copied and pasted content from one note to another (which actually copied part of the application too! - you’re really working with a web page and the note editor allows you to work with HTML).  This caused things to get a little messed up display-wise e.g. the note that “disappeared” was actually being shown on a different contact (the one it was originally copied from).  We’ve put in a filter to try and prevent this from happening.  Existing notes may still have some of this residual code in them (if you copied then pasted HTML into them).  Edit the note, copy the text, delete the note, and paste the text into a new note.  If that’s not the case we’d of course be quite interested in how you reproduce this.  Although there could be a quirk with rendering we’ve never had an issue with data.

Regarding companies you could do it “your way” or you could just link them the way we suggested and hang on for the company name to appear on the filter, contact records, export, etc later.  It’s up to you.  I doubt it was your intent but your point is perceived as being a bit snarky.  That’s not very nice because as we specifically offered to help you with this yesterday.

Sigh, clunky eh, you’re slowing killing me with that one.  I guess it’s relative.  Web apps are quite different.  Anyone else who has used web-app calendars before care to weigh in on this comment?

‘scuse me? Snarky? Never!  Just wanted to be sure that we don’t do something that is counter productive to your intent.

Solve360 is a beta, we don’t mind re-entering info but don’t want to go through that routine if you are heading in a direction that would either make that unnecessary, redundant, etc. That is why we declared our intention and asked the question.

Perhaps you’re just hungry ?

As for adding a custom field back to the Contact view, I think we have a better solution (and this may be what you have been trying to tell us).

We customized the form fields for Contacts:  Renamed Related to Company and then rearranged the field placement so that it makes more sense to us.  This works great for us.  The only glitch so far is that once we enter a company name in the field and then “hide form”, it moves back to bottom of the right hand column.

Regardless, these are the easiest and most flexible form fields ever and now we have something that works (for us) on the company side.

Finally, thanks for the research on the notes goof.  I did not realize that they were being copied and pasted and will forward your suggestion to the rest of the team.

You found a good in-term solution by renaming the related-to field.  This is where we are heading; using the related-to records and presenting them with more context.

I think we nailed the notes issue, but just in case, I’ll also offer that we are aware of a situation where the “browser state” times out after an extended period of inactivity e.g. if you leave the app open over night.  If this happens the filter won’t act on your instruction, records won’t save etc….so if you tried to enter a note while in this state a red error message would appear in the bottom of the window saying the note could not be saved (and perhaps this message was missed).  Anyway, we will be providing a solution to this soon but in the meantime, if you encounter this condition just pressing <F5> or relogging in gets the “state” back in shape again.

We do appreciate digging into situations like what happened to the notes.  This is real-world stuff that in the heat of battling with code one wouldn’t think of trying and that’s why beta testing is an important step in hardening the system.  One more off the list.

Can we sort all contacts by “last update”?  It seems to sort whatever page you are on (only).

It’s a verified bug, the fix is scheduled for Friday’s update.

BTW, last update means last time anything on the contact was updated (not just the field data).

Kathleen Howard - Aug 06, 2008 05:46pm

Can we sort all contacts by “last update”?  It seems to sort whatever page you are on (only).

It’s FRIDAY!  If you re-login this should be working for you now.

Fridays are such fun.

The sort works well.  Thanks.

Love the batch processing capabilities of adding/removng categories.  It is a great time saver.

But I now have many contacts for which I need to enter a company name.  Most of these are affiliated with large companies that I can filter by their domain names. 

Is there anyway to affiliate the entire batch with a company.  For some companies there are more than 50 contacts.  That’s a lot of clicking and typing.

Please let me know if this capability is coming down the pike. If so, I would prefer waiting for it.

Thanks.

It’s not something that we plan to do currently.  Did the contact-company relationships came in okay when you imported from Goldmine?

Regarding those contacts - the first batch was . . . . hmmmm . . . . what’s the word I’m searching for here? . . . . screwed up.

But it something that I can work around on subsequent batches.  GM exports one company name regardless of how many contacts there are for that company.  I can copy the company name into the CSV prior to importing.

Therefore, I have a big bunch of contacts with no company affiliation, so I will need to add that to each record. 

I cannot find a fast way - tried copy/paste company name and that was really interesting because it created multiple companies, each with one contact.

If you have any other suggestions, please let me know.

Aside from importing snafus, the batch processing would work well for company name changes, etc. but we can get by without it.

Just a thought.

Thanks.

Here’s a crazy thought… You could create your own “export” file that exactly follows the Goldmine format.  The only data records to enter would be contact record with the first name, last name, company field.  When you import this file into Solve360 it should “update” the existing contact with the link to the company.  Never tried it myself, but that’s the way it works.  You could try one to test.  The benefit here it is easy to copy/paste in Excel.

Thanks for the idea.  One way or another, we will get our data over to Solve360.

In the big picture, getting the data transferred is insignificant to what we will gain by using Solve360.  It is that good.

I am affilating contacts with companies and have created a company ING Clarion.

This name, however, will not appear as a choice unless I type Clarion into the Company field.  ING<space>C . . .  will not show up as a possibility.

I have tried deleting and recreating the name.  Is this possibly a glitch?

My guess to what is happing is that “ing” is a common character sequence within your company names, the autocomplete list only shows the first 10 records, so the answer you’re looking for is “out of reach”.  I’ll have an Engineer take a look later this week.  Perhaps they can use the space character as part of the string to help narrow the result list.

I thought the same thing, but even if I type the entire name, it still does not show as an option.

While we are talking and since I updated many records last night. There are times when the “show form” will not work.  I tried opening a different record, etc. but anything short of re-launch won’t work.  Since these are imported records, I wonder if it might be something in the import itself.

It would be helpful (if possible) to have the show/hide form default to the last request.  When going thru records it would save some clicking so that one does not have to re-open each record in order to update.

All in all, though, I am having fun and appreciate the app.

Thanks.

>> It would be helpful (if possible) to have the show/hide form default to the last request.

Good suggestion.

>> There are times when the “show form” will not work

Are you using the refresh link around the time this happens?  When it stops, is it one contact, or for all contacts?

The F5 almost always works, just takes a minute or so.

On a slightly different note, I am still struggling with the concept of contacts and companies and I may have lost track of some of our earlier communication.

At one point I had suggested there being the capability to see (in list form) all the contacts within a company.

As it is, I can’t tell who (for example) handles acquisitions for a certain region - so I end up “stabbing” at related names within a company so that I can see the job title or other context that will let me choose the appropriate contact.

If we could see the results of our “related to” and “company” system fields in list form, this would no longer be an issue.

Or is there another way around this?  What do you think?

Thanks.

Just wondering . . .

Any plans to allow updating more than 1 page of 50 contacts at at time?

If so, I might wait for that change. I am changing permissions and categories on many contacts and it would be a lot easier if I could do more than one page.

Hate to sound like I am complaining, because I really do like Solve360.

Thanks.

This sounds (even to me) like such a dumb questions, but . . .

Didn’t we use to have a delete button on each contact record?

How do we delete an individual record?

Have you tried the new filter option “and search for (standard fields) Company starts with…“

A couple of changes we thinking of:

- to the list on the left, contact records will show the company name and title (if available) underneath the contact name
- in the company related-to display add “Job title” beside the contact name (if available)

With these changes in place do you think this puts it closer to where you’d like to see it?

Kathleen Howard - Aug 18, 2008 05:24pm

Just wondering . . .

Any plans to allow updating more than 1 page of 50 contacts at at time?

If so, I might wait for that change. I am changing permissions and categories on many contacts and it would be a lot easier if I could do more than one page.

Hate to sound like I am complaining, because I really do like Solve360.

Thanks.

No plans currently.

Kathleen Howard - Aug 18, 2008 05:38pm

This sounds (even to me) like such a dumb questions, but . . .

Didn’t we use to have a delete button on each contact record?

How do we delete an individual record?

You delete a contact/blog by selecting the checkbox in the list on left, then choosing delete.  We recently removed the Delete button from the contact and blog forms.  We felt it is not used frequently enough to justify to having it there too… As odd as that might appear it’s true.  Striving for simple always wins here.

So good to know that the question wasn’t quite as dumb as I feared.

I do agree with your defaulting to simple, but . . .

For some reason I am constantly on some record that is not showing in the left navigation pane.  Sometimes, this happens when I click thru several related/company connections.

Once there, how do I get this one-off record to appear to the left so that I can delete it?

Good point “you can’t get there from here”.  Currently you would need to search for it in the filter.

Solve360 Engineering - Aug 18, 2008 05:52pm

Have you tried the new filter option “and search for (standard fields) Company starts with…“

A couple of changes we thinking of:

- to the list on the left, contact records will show the company name and title (if available) underneath the contact name
- in the company related-to display add “Job title” beside the contact name (if available)

With these changes in place do you think this puts it closer to where you’d like to see it?

Part of the issue is that we do much of our “stuff” by company and then choose the appropriate person listed there. 

What you suggest may be a workaround, but I would like to think more on that.

I might just need some more thinking “outside the box” lessons, but the cloud of names under companies/blogs/projects, etc. just don’t compute for me.  Again, if I could see those in a list with the main name to the left - that would help.

What about the other users?  Am I the only one struggling with this?

Again, I may just need to re-work MY thinking.  Thanks for your help.

Again, if I could see those in a list with the main name to the left - that would help.

If you search by the company name field you can get most of the way there now (list contacts for a specific company in the list).  And with “Job title” added to the list, picking from the contacts at a company should be close to what you’re looking for.  ?

You might be tiring of me, but at least you know that I am putting Solve360 to some pretty tough testing as I have entered, categorized, permitted, etc about 5,000 contacts.

Can you include categories as a search option for companies?

We deal with different types of companies but the money is in finding and working with those that are real estate principals.  Would like to search by category so that we can list those companies and their employees.

Thanks.

Wow, that’s great!  We do plan to add additional filters for Companies.  We just need a bit of time to spread programming love to other feature areas before the launch.