iZepto Blog

After some feedback we have updated the Daily Reminder email functionality for Watches to not send emails if the total is zero.  There might be some who might quite like to get an email saying ‘nothing happened’ but it seems like the majority don’t.Of course, we could have added a preference to “don’t send on zero total” but as I may have expressed earlier I am not a huge fan of preference-mania.  A tool should make assumptions on the best case and make it easy for users.So, keep the feedback coming.  We are working on some exciting things that I am not ready to talk about, so you will need to wait a bit longer… 

Based on the feedback from last week, we have implemented the first phase of the sharing of information with people outside of iZepto.

When you set up a watch, you can now enter a list of email addresses to send the watch to. These can be external people outside of iZepto, such as your client. This way they can see the total of a watch (such as effort this week, month to date or for ever) in a handy daily email.

They are CC’d on the email sent to you, so you know exactly what they are seeing!

Try it out and let us know what you think!

Congratulations to Anibal for winning our weekly prize of an iPod Nano for best feedback. Anibal provided some great feedback about how it would be great if he could allow his clients to see time entries and report in a read-only way.  He believes this would help clients to manage their own budgets as they would be on top of how many hours are being logged when they are being billed by the hour.
So in response,  here is what we plan to do:
Short Term - this week
We think the existing Dashboard functionality of getting a Watch emailed to you is a good start.  If you have a watch for hours for a particular project, why not email this to your clients directly each day?  So, we will be providing the ability for you to enter in additional email addresses for a Watch. Nice and simple, and for most cases might be enough to keep your client in the loop.
Long Term - By the end of January 
In the longer term, we are going to build functionality such that you can add a new type of user to your company - external reporters.  These users would be added to your company with only privilege to report, and only for Projects that you specify.  They would be able to log in and see the Reporting and Dashboard pages.   They can run reports, save reports they like and add watches on their reports.  They can set up their own emails, etc.
We hope that this functionality will be helpful to many people.So congratulations again to Anibal, we will be contacting you soon to arrange delivery of your shiny new iPod Nano.
Keep the feedback coming, and you too could share in the prizes. 

We just added a feature to iZepto to allow you to see who is keeping their timesheet up to date. It is one of those features that seemed like a good idea, but until I saw it in action against our production data I didn’t realise how useful it would be.The system we used to use allowed to find this information out - it was just a bit hard. So we never really did it except when we had to. Usually at the start of a month doing the invoices. Then I found out people hadn’t been logging time correctly or at all. Sometimes this even caused some grief with clients as I had to go back and say “You know how I said we had only used 10 days budget… I meant to say 50 days”. Ouch. So rejoice all you iZepto users, you can now have your finger even tighter on the pulse of your business - with little effort. Oh, and don’t miss the ‘Send Reminder’ link. It sends an email straight to the user. Awesome!