A hundred or so lazy tweaks….

A friend in the mining industry once told me he was about to “drop a lazy million dollars on a property”.  

I remember being put-off by his choice of words, thinking what right did that million dollars have to be lazy?  Give me a million dollars and I’m sure as hell going to see that it is put to work.

Even a single dollar should never be lazy as eventually the small things will always add up to something big.

And so it is with our hundred or so productivity tweaks that are soon to be released.

These are were all tiny, user interface annoyances.  Each issue is insignificant in its own right, but multiplied across all the hours in the day and the tens of thousands WORK[etc] users, total time saved is going to work out in the millions of dollars in extra productivity (and there’s nothing lazy about that).

Here are some of the major tweaks and as always, most of these originated as ideas in our “Suggest a Feature” forum.

Stalk Me Menu

We know an improvement is killer when you quickly take it for granted but as soon as it is gone you miss it like an old friend.

You Auto-Complete-Me

WORK[etc] now attempts to auto-complete the name and email address when composing an email in any of the “new message” screens.

Auto-icons for the Shy

If your co-workers are too shy (or too lazy) to upload a picture of themselves, we now automatically give them a colored square engraved with their initials.  Associating a picture or icon with a person makes identifying their contributions in WORK[etc] that much faster.

Search & Insert

The new Rich Text Editor (the box you type into) now lets you search and insert directly from the menu.  Previously you had to open up your WORK[etc] account in another window, find the object you were looking for and then copy and past across.

Discuss This!

OK, so this is actually a major feature release but I wanted to give a sneak preview now.  A hybrid Instant Messaging and Forum tool, Discussions allow you to discuss any WORK[etc] object.

But taking Discussions one step further, we included the ability to “call out” and request an answer from a particular co-worker.  For example, lets say your sales team is in an active discussion around how to close a big new contract and they need their CEO to approve pricing.  With the “Request a Response” they can quickly alert the CEO into the discussion and get the answer they need.

I’ve been using Discussions these last few weeks and am fully addicted – the boost to productivity has just been profound:

• When someone needs an answer on something, Discussions tells me exactly so.  I’m not left searching through emails wondering what needs a reply, what doesn’t and what I can safely ignore
• When I need to get an answer from someone, I now feel confident that they are going to see my request; rather than that request getting lost in someone’s overflowing inbox.
• Because it takes place inside of WORK[etc], the Discussion is safely captured alongside that project, or support case, or sales lead for others to read up on later.  And this also means no daily torrent of email coming my way.

Beta Invites and Coming Soon…

Follow us on Twitter or Linkedin in to be the first to find out when registrations will open for the beta release.  And in the meantime, stay tuned for some big announcements on:

• New Reporting tool (with upgrade option to Build Your Own)
• Discussions & Requests
• New Customer Portal (for your customers)
• iPhone and Android version 3.0 apps

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