The Zignet office will be closed over the Easter break from April 2, returning on April 6. Of course, Blaq will still be available over the Easter weekend and we'll be continually monitoring the service as always.
Zignet hope all our clients have a safe and enjoyable Easter break!
We're adding a poll to our blog to get some user feedback about what you would like to see added next to Blaq.
We're currently looking at:
A mobile version - this would be a more basic edition of Blaq for use on mobile phones. We'd be focusing on speed and ease of use, so it would be more limited than the standard web version but great for use with mobile phones.
A login for your customers - we're looking at allowing you to give your customers the ability to login to a Blaq site where they can check on their jobs and invoices with you, and create their own quotes. You would be able to limit which customers had this access and the features they could access.
A payroll module - we added a few payroll details to the employees section a while back, but we're looking at creating a full payroll module.
Integration with Google Apps - Google Apps is becoming more and more popular, so we're looking at making Blaq able to connect with your Google Apps so you could synchronise contacts and calendars and send emails from your own email account.
Sync - instead or as well as above, we're looking at third party services for syncing your contacts and calendar events with Outlook, Gmail, mobile phones, etc. If you've got something you'd like to sync with, please let us know.
Mail merge - a mail merge function would allow you to send email newsletters, notices, etc. to your contact list from within Blaq.
Attaching files to emails - currently, you can email quotes, invoices, etc. generated from within Blaq directly to your clients, but you can't attach other files to the same email. This would allow you to attach other files from your PC or possibly from a file storage service such as Box.net.
If there's a feature you'd really like added but we haven't covered, please let us know also.
Tonight we performed a minor update of Blaq with the following new features and improvements:
The "Recent Activity" widget has been improved further. As well as writing about what you're working on, you can now add comments to what other users are working on. This is still visible to everyone using this widget, we plan to add filters for this in the near future.
Dashboard columns can now be given different sizes. The Widgets tab of the Preferences section now allows more choices in the way columns are configured for each user.
Charts have been given a minor refresh. Some of the tables displayed with the charts have been reorganised and are now considerably easier to read.
More widgets have been added including 'Purchase Orders in Progress' and 'Opportunities in Progress'.
Addresses have been changed in all sections. In order to allow for international addresses (addresses outside Australia) the Post Code is no longer a required field and the State / Region / Province field has been extended to allow for more characters. The Country field has been changed to a drop down field with countries listed. The country you're based in will always be used as the default country.
Currencies can now be used within Blaq. Each customer can have a default currency, and each transaction can be set to a particular currency. Currently, currencies are only being used for recording a transaction's currency, but in the future we plan to look at incorporating exchange rates to convert between a local and foreign currencies.
Further to changes from earlier in the month, another minor update overnight has seen improvements to form layouts and a few other interface changes.�
Also, the "Recent Activity" widget has seen an update. We've added a "What are you working on now?" status update, so you can let others in your organisation know what you're up to. Currently, these status updates will be visible to all other users using this widget, but we'll soon be adding ways to filter these so you only see the updates from users you choose.