During the course of 2019 we released a whole bunch of new features, improvements, tweaks and bug fixes to the AnyHow platform.
They've been rolled out over the year but with the end of the year approaching, we decided to group them together into a big release. Version 1.3 is what it's being labeled.
Here are some of the things that were released since our last announcement.
Major
These are some of the bigger features or changes we've rolled out.
Files
You may have noticed the File Storage area already as it was rolled out in waves during the last 6 months. It's basically a centralized file storage area for all organization employees. It also removes the need for everyone to store a ton of files on their own workstations when they really only need a much smaller subset. This is our favorite new feature.
Files can be uploaded, organized, tagged, made private, and made available to client/guest accounts. If you need to share a file with someone outside of the organization, you can also share a file (or group of files) with a public share URL.
We think companies will really like this feature because of it's centralized nature, ease of use, strong filtering/permissions, and it's included in your AnyHow account. In a lot of cases, it can be a complete replacement for company wide services like Dropbox.
Discussions (and Wiki)
We've made a few updates to discussions. Here are some of the broad strokes.
- Speed - Huge speed improvements! Previously, the discussion listing and filtering pages were very slow. We felt it too. It was a pretty bad experience. Well, we heard you and rewrote the entire logic for discussions. The result? A nearly 500% increase in performance (no joke!) Enjoy!
- Reactions - You can add reactions to comments now. By default there are just two reactions enabled (thumbs up and thumbs down) but the organization admins can enable a whole slew of others, should they choose to.
- Categories - Discussion posts can now be categorized for easier filtering and reading. Again, categories are completely controlled by the org admins and you can create as many categories as you'd like.
- WYSIWYG - We updated the WYSIWYG editor (huh?). It's a lot faster, has better preview support, and looks nicer. This was also applied to the Wiki editor.
- Embed - You can now easily embed from popular social and sharing websites by simply pasting in the URL to the content you want to share. Currently supported are YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Vimeo.
Invoice Reminder Emails
This has been requested multiple times. We added invoice reminder email support. This is a feature that can be enabled/disabled in the organization settings area. Now, clients will get an invoice reminder email a week before it's due, the day it's due, and a week past due. Of course, you have to enable this feature if you want it. It's disabled by default.
Turbolinks
To quote from the application's github repo:
Turbolinks makes navigating your web application faster. Get the performance benefits of a single-page application without the added complexity of a client-side JavaScript framework.
Essentially this nifty little open source helper makes browsing websites that have it integrated much faster. It should help speed up your browsing of the AnyHow application.
Welcome Email
A few users have mentioned that they'd like to automatically send a welcome email to new employees. Something they can edit, update, etc. so that a new employee can be sent to the right starting points. A good example is a new user check list or how to file your HR paperwork, etc.
Well, you got it. Just head to the organization settings area, click the "Welcome Email" tab, write your email, enable the feature, and you're all set.
Minor
Here is a quick run down of some of the minor changes we've made that you may notice.
- Improved wiki styling.
- Improved discussions styling.
- General design improvements.
- Improved invoice editing options.
- Added new timesheet approval listing page instead of using the left menu. That list can get fairly large for companies with a lot of staff.
- Settings notifications improvements to avoid losing changes.
- Improvements to client/guest account access and permissions.
- Added tours to major feature pages.
- Discussions post, or reply, permalink shortcut (with automatic clipboard copy.)
- Added organization wide project listing and status page for quick views. Has filtering support as well.
- Better highlighting when "@mentioning" another staff member in discussions. Highlighting is now in different colors for other users, current user, and non-existent org user.
- When "@mentioning" another user, the highlighted result will now be clickable to display an employee "quick view" summary.
- Made employee detail screen a lot more friendly with more details, active projects, previous week history, etc.
- Updated ordering of tag/filter items (ie, Project, Client, Employee, Team) to order by active first, and display inactive items in the select options.
Bugs
Here is a list of the bugs we've fixed. We didn't list all of them because most you wouldn't have noticed or they may be very technical and explaining them here wouldn't make a lot of sense.
- Verify hours bug (inaccurately including unapproved hours.)
- Fixed broken tag selection when editing a discussion reply.
- Fixed quick invoice automatic ID ordering upon creation.
- Attachments not shown when editing a discussion post.
- Fixed bug where inviting an employee who already has an account would lose their project status.
- Fixed display bug when editing the parent comment and marking the comment private (or disabling private mode.)
- Fixed a few annoying UX items when using the timer.
- Fixed invoice listing display issue when a manual invoice is created but has no items assigned to it.
Wrapping Up
A lot of work went into AnyHow this year and we look forward to continuing that in 2020.
As always if you have any issues please head to the support page and let us know. We're here to help.