Charts in Forecasts application

You know the adage "A picture is worth a thousand words".

So we've added some charts in the Forecasts applications. They are dynamics and will react to the filter set in the search form.

The first chart displays the Sales people performance according the following parameters:

• Sales quota
• Expected amount
• Forecasted amount
• Won amount

Expected amount is the amount as set in an opportunity. Forecasted amount is the same amount but pondered by the probability to win the deal. It is a more realistic (lower) amount. Won amount is related to the opportunities won, invoiced, paid.

The second set of chart displays the opportunities according 3 variables:

• Their respective weight in amount in the pipeline
• Their stage
• The Sales people

Here yet we distinguish between Expected and Forecasted amounts.

Professional vs Premium

AppShore offering is available in two editions, AppShore Professional and AppShore Premium. A customer can from his private AppShore space decides to upgrade or downgrade from one edition to another one. What will change is the monthly price paid by user. $14 per user per month for Professional, $24 per user per month for Premium.

These two offerings are using strictly the same technical framework to ease the development and the maintenance of the applications. To justify the higher price, still very reasonable compare to most of our competitors, Premium edition boosts many extra features. Here a quick list of these goodies:

• Shared calendars which are the graphical representation of the activities by day, week or month.
  
• Saved search filters. Premium users can name, store then reload personalized search filters. Lot of time saved on repeating tasks.
  
• Custom forms and fields. A must have when you need to personalize your data model and the associated screen forms to reflect the specificity of your business.
• Your company is international and you need appropriate translation for your custom fields and forms, Premium gives you the opportunity to do so.
  
• A bigger disk space available to store documents, images and email attachments, 1024MB per user against 512MB.
• More data records per user, 20000 against 10000.
• More daily email slots, 2000 emails per user per day (that's gigantic!) against 500 (already a huge number).
• One to one online training session to ease the kick off of your AppShore space.
  
• Phone based support for those who want more than email and web based support.

New features will continue to be delivered to both of these editions in the coming months. We do not intend to give up one or the other because they respond to different business requirements.

Also we like to read from our customers about what we should add in our offering. So go to your AppShore space, hit the support icon and let us know all about your expectations!

Few "things" you should expect from AppShore for 2010

Beside our revamped web site, here a list of few features we are working on this new year:

• A new release poetically called v2.2 is available for all new created accounts since January 1st. Being new, we consider it subject to few improvements in the comings weeks. Then we'll work on a migration procedure to make it available to all existing customers. We'll come back later on the new features available on this v2.2 release.
• An extended API (Application Programmatic Interface) to allow more interaction and data exchange between your AppShore account and external applications.
• Along with the API, we will extend import/export feature for contacts information (and other type of records when relevant) with the leading web based email/contacts systems. Google Contacts, Yahoo Contacts and Microsoft Live Contacts are amongst the targets. Other more business oriented services are also in the wish list. All depends of the availability of an open API on the distant side.
• Today we lack some serious feature when it is about inbound emails in the Webmail and Campaigns applications. This is a fairly complex subject that we expect to see handled in the coming months.
• To allow better time management of the email Campaigns, we will add a scheduling mechanism. Later this should lead to a complete customizable email/form notification system widespread across all applications.
• Emails sent through Campaigns application will also include the option for recipients to opt out from campaign lists. Likewise, we will add an opt in web form similar in its usage to the leads web capture form.
• The search filter form allow to build some fairly elaborate search requests. It is sometime a pain to have to rebuild the same filter over and over. So most of search filter forms will have the option to be saved and shared amongst users.
• In forms, a new field type to store images, graphics will be added. It will be available as a new standard field in Contacts, Leads and Accounts as well as a custom field in all applications.
• Another custom field type requested is Computed field. It should come along some interface improvements of the custom fields and forms designer.

In term of new applications, Projects management, Products management and Workflow system are on the wish list but we wait for more feedback to decide how and where to go ahead.

This is an open list so do not hesitate to contact us to express your needs, expectations and also frustrations. Customer's opinions have great impact on the planning and release date.

Happy New Year 2010!