Roadmap: notifications

The next set of features to be developed into the agileBase platform are all to do with notifications. In some ways a disparate set of functions, they nevertheless all work towards the goal of making communications between different people in the business more effective.

Laid out separately, these are

• Comment links
  This feature has actually already been released today and you can use it now! Whenever a comment notification is sent by email, it will now include a link back to the record in agileBase. No more having to search for the comment when you log in.
• Operating system / browser integration
  Where the operating system or browser allows it (e.g. Mac OS X or Google Chrome), you will have the option of receiving alerts by in-built notifications, instead of (or as well as) by email. These have the advantage that they pop up when you log in but remain visible after you log out. Also it cuts down on email bombardments which is always good.
• Opt-in/out
  Users will be able to enable or disable emails and in-built notifications, per table. This will be controlled through tile options or through ‘remove’ links in notification emails.
• Recipient visibility
  When adding a comment, you’ll be able to see who will be notified. You’ll then be able to manually remove or add people to the recipient list. The initial list will be populated from those who have privileges on the data, or who are linked to the record and who haven’t opted out from that particular table. It’s not 100% defined yet, but there may even be the option to include external people in the recipient list
• Criteria based alerts
  You’ll be able to use views as alert generators. That means you can use complex criteria to generate alerts. For example, you may want to send an email to the owner of a sales opportunity if there’s been no update within the last month
• Colour coded rows
  We always like an opportunity to brighten up the interface – in this case we’ve been asked to provide criteria based colour coding of rows so, for example, a traffic light system can mark records as red, orange or green. All the colours from the agileBase palette can be used.

As these features are still in the planning phase they are subject to change in minor or major ways, especially from feedback from early testing! But you should start seeing the results being released in the near future.