Friday evening saw the successful deployment of our Autumn 2011 release, which included some major new functionality, addressing a number of customer enhancement requests and making Workbooks even more flexible to use.

Some of the new areas of functionality include:

Custom Page Layouts

It is now possible to customise the appearance of Workbooks records and share the customised layouts with specific Users or User Groups. This is particularly useful if the same record is used by different Users for different purposes as you can specify which fields appear on a record and their position on the form, as well as specifying a default value. For forms with editable grids, such as transaction records, you can control which columns are shown, hidden or excluded. You can also specify which tabs are displayed. This functionality will help Users to focus on the parts of your business process that are most relevant to them.

Pinning

If you want a particular record, Landing Page or other form to be displayed on your desktop every time you open Workbooks you can ‘pin’ it so that it’s automatically displayed when you login. You can pin more than one window, giving you instant access to the areas of the system that are most useful to you.

Landing Page Views

We’ve added functionality to the Landing Page views including:

• Default Views - You can control which of the views in each Landing Page opens by default when opening that Landing Page, which gives you quicker access to the records that you use most frequently.
• Sharing Views - If you’ve created a view of records that you want other Users to see you can choose to share the view with them rather than them having to login and recreate your view.
• Managing Views - Individual Users can manage saved views more effectively and can now rename them, rearrange the order in which they’re displayed and ‘hide’ any that they don’t want to see, rather than deleting them.

Custom fields on Products can be added to Line Items

Now when you add a custom field to a Product you can add the same custom field to the Line Items within Opportunities and other transaction records and the values entered on the Product will be pulled through onto the transaction record. This will make displaying information such as a part number, nominal code and so on, much easier.

Re-ordering Line Items

Sometimes when you’re adding Line Items to a transaction record you need to see them displayed in a different order from the one in which they’ve been entered. The new release enables you to re-order Line Items easily by amending the number in the Display Order column.

Re-ordering Picklist values

Previously Picklist values have been displayed in alphabetical order so it’s been necessary to prefix the value with a number in order to control the order in which they are displayed. We’ve improved this functionality so you can now specify the order in which the values should appear, which is helpful if you want to force the most frequently used values to the top of the list.

Opportunity Stages

Depending on your sales process, you may want to prohibit users from being able to ‘downgrade’ an Opportunity (ie, move its Opportunity Stage backwards). We’ve added a capability which allows you to control which, if any, of your Users can downgrade an Opportunity in this way.

Security Changes

This release includes two enhancements to the security features of Workbooks:

• Exempt from Password Expiry - It’s now possible to exempt specific users from having to enter a new password after a specified time. This will be particularly useful for API client users to ensure that access to Workbooks doesn’t fail due to an expired password. Of course, we recommend that general Users are not exempted from password expiry.

• Lock down access for users to a set of IP addresses - Whilst one of the benefits of using a CRM system delivered via SaaS is that Users can login anywhere, some customers have requested that they can retain control over where their Users can access Workbooks so we’ve added the ability to restrict Users’ access based on the IP address they’re using. This restriction can be applied to just some or to all of your users (except System Administrators).

Assigned To Field in Campaign Membership

When managing Marketing Campaigns it can be useful to see who the Person / Sales Lead / Organisation is Assigned To so we’ve added this to the columns that can be displayed within the Campaign Membership tab. You can sort, filter and group the records based on assignment making it easy for the relevant person to follow-up the campaign members.

If you have any questions about this new release, please don't hesitate to get in touch and as ever, please continue to help drive our roadmap by contributing your suggestions to the ideas section of our community site.