Product Roadmap

Our Approach

At Workbooks, we like to be as open as we can with our customers. We think that our existing customers should have the opportunity to influence our product development priorities. And we recognise that potential customers can make more informed decisions if they have clarity on what new functionality is coming to Workbooks CRM and when.

As such we publish our short term roadmap and we’re happy to hear feedback or field questions on it.

So you are clear on how we handle our roadmap: we have items that are within engineering and are scheduled to be released, these are known as committed. We have others which are ideas that we are currently working on the scoping of and these are called candidates.

Committed Service Improvements Q2 2010

• Data Import Improvements.
  
• Improvements to the Workbooks One Platform.
  
• Message of the Day and Bulletins.
  
• Email Integration - Drop Box.
  

Committed Service Improvements Q3 2010

• Outlook Plugin.
  
• Contract Management. (Phase 1)
  

At Workbooks, we like to be as open as we can with our customers. We think that our existing customers should have the opportunity to influence our product development priorities. And we recognise that potential customers can make more informed decisions if they have clarity on what new functionality is coming to Workbooks CRM and when.
As such we publish our short term roadmap and we’re happy to hear feedback or field questions on it.
So you are clear on how we handle our roadmap: we have items that are within engineering and are scheduled to be released, these are known as committed. We have others which are ideas that we are currently working on the scoping of and these are called candidates.

• Email Marketing.
  
• Custom Page Layouts.
  
• Order Fulfillment.
  
• Record State and Status Changes and Approvals.
  
• Sage 50 Account Integration.
  

Data Import Improvements

By the end of the second quarter the data import mechanism will be improved. The enhancements will bring better performance and usability with additional levels of configuration..

Improvements to the Workbooks One Platform.

There will be an upgrade of the Workbooks underlying technology. This will improve some rendering problems when accessing the service using Chrome, Safari and IE8.

Message of the Day and Bulletins.

We will be adding a new feature to allow you to create and manage messages to Workbooks users and user groups. These messages or bulletins are over and above emails and notifications which are already widely used by our customers. Messages will have their own landing page and configuration setup. You might like to use this feature to send a message to the sales team notifying them of a product promotion or letting people know an important customer is in your offices.

Email Integration - Drop Box.

By the 2nd quarter of this year, it will be possible to synchronise emails sent or forwarded from any email client with matching contacts held within your Workbooks CRM. Each Workbooks user will have an 'email drop-box' inside Workbooks which will work a bit like an email in-box, however Workbooks will attempt to match and relate the emails to people, organisations, cases, opportunities etc where the relevant data is available. This functionality will be introduced ahead of the Outlook Plugin and work with any email client, e.g. web mail.

Outlook Plugin.

This new feature will allow users of Workbooks application suite to integrate contacts, appointments and emails with Microsoft Outlook increasing usability and productivity even when they are offline. Additional enhancements will more fully integrate Workbooks CRM and Outlook, allowing Workbooks users to manage their core CRM data from within the Outlook client.

Email Marketing.

The existing email marketing tool is to be extended so that emails sent out in bulk can contain personalised data originating from the Workbooks person or lead records. This is currently possible when sending emails on a ‘one at a time’ basis. This functionality will for example, enable you to display people names or values stored in a custom field in each Email when sending out in bulk.

In addition to this, to monitor the performance of an email campaign, analysis of the responses will be captured and be made available for reporting. It will then be possible to track how many members of a campaign have opened the email and clicked on any links.

Custom Page Layouts.

The way your application looks and feels is very important to us at Workbooks. We wish to improve your experience and adoption of the service and help you gain the best value from its rich functionality. We will be enhancing the service to allow more control over the layout of the screens, including the ability to rename/remove standard non-mandated fields, form tabs and add your own tool tips.

Contract Management.

For many of our customers, managing term contracts such as maintenance agreements and support contracts can be extremely complex and time consuming. During this year we will be discussing these issues with some of our existing customers to hone our functionality and design for this proposed new module. The areas which have been already identified include:

• Ability to register and view customer contract commitments with details of ‘term’ as well as ‘one-off’ products covered under contract.
• Ability to maintain contracts from customer orders with multiple start and termination dates, by product.
• Automation of the contract renewals process.
• Integration of customer contracts with customer cases.
• Comprehensive contract profitability reporting.
• Ability to create and view contract billing schedules. (Phase 2)
• Automation of contract billing. (Phase 2)

Order Fulfillment

In addition to managing your term contract fulfilment and billing commitments, managing your day to day orders and tracking the status of deliveries of each of the order components can prove to be very onerous. We are therefore proposing to add order fulfilment functionality to provide:

• Order and order line status tracking Order line quantity tracking - in terms of delivery and invoicing
• Order line invoice tracking – order lines may appear in multiple invoices

Record State and Status Changes and Approvals.

Within Workbooks, records are set with a status and or state depending where the record is in relation to your internal processes. Currently changing these atributes can be done outside of any pre-configured framework. For those customers who will find it useful, it will be possible to control how these different elements can be managed.

Sage 50 Account Integration.
 
A number of our Workbooks Business customers also use Sage 50 Accounts to manage their accounting processes. We recognise therefore that providing a level of integration with Sage will provide efficiency benefits. This integration will allow invoice and credit note transactions to be passed to Sage automatically as well as the creation of new customer Sales Ledger Accounts. In addition, customer invoice balances could be automatically maintained in Workbooks via an import from Sage, enabling credit management processes to be pushed back into the customer ordering process.