So, what are we going to implement from the features you’ve suggested?

Let’s start with the Projects section. The good news is that it will be essentially revised this month. We’ve followed your most popular requests and prepared a few important updates, including:

• subtasks;
• tasks priority;
• project statuses: active, paused, closed;
• new format for time tracking: hours/minutes;
• the ability to filter tasks by due date, person in charge, milestone, status and your personal tasks;
• extended description field in tasks;
• the ability to remove attached files in tasks.

The listed options will be firstly released in the beta-version in several weeks, and you’ll be able to switch between the old and new versions to understand which one is more convenient for you.

In the next summer releases we also plan to significantly enhance the tasks features: introduce recurring tasks, the ability to “accept” a task and task statuses. The report system will also be improved and integrated with the Documents module, the section about milestones will be added.

There’re also two suggestions for Projects – Gantt charts and tasks dependency – that keep to be in the top requests. Paying attention to this high demand, we’re already working on its implementation. This functionality is closely connected with all the components of the Projects, and our goal is to make the integration of these new functions efficient and smooth at the same time, keeping the whole system as simple as before. It requires considerable human and time resources, but we plan to add the mentioned features in less than half a year.

Documents is the second point in TeamLab grand releases schedule for the near future. This summer we will add a completely new fully-fledged Document Editor, built in HTML5. Unlike the current editor in TeamLab Docs and other popular editors like Google Docs, Zoho Writer, this fresh TeamLab Document Editor will provide a considerable number of benefits, such as:

• a richer toolset that includes advanced table processing, line spacing, multi-level numbering, text and heading styles;
• fast upload and processing of multi-page documentation;
• absolute identity of document displayed and printed or imported versions, regardless of browser or OS;
• a maximum number of fonts with hieroglyphs included.

Currently, you can try the beta version of TeamLab Document Editor at html5.teamlab.com We’ll be glad to receive your feedback!

That’s our roadmap for Projects and Documents. As you may see, we’ve taken into account most of your popular suggestions and hope, you’ll be satisfied with the results

P.S. Next time you’ll get to know our plans on CRM and Calendar. Stay tuned!

The topic of my today’s post is data transfer from Google Apps to your TeamLab portal. Let’s stipulate at the very beginning what exactly you can import:

• contacts from your Google account as TeamLab portal users,
  
  
• your documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and forms from Google Docs,
  
  
• your calendars from Google Calendar.
  

Importing Contacts as TeamLab Portal Users

Being a portal administrator and having the contacts you need for your business at your Google account, you can import them to your TeamLab portal as users. To do that, please proceed through the following steps:

1. Access your TeamLab portal using your login details.
2. Click the ‘Add Users’ link situated on the panel above.
Note: you can also find this link within the 'Community' and 'Projects' modules.
3. In the opened ‘Add users to the portal’ window, click the ‘Google’ icon.
4. Then you will need to log in into your Google account to allow TeamLab to access the data stored at Google by clicking the ‘Grant Access’ button.
5. Your contacts from the Google account will be shown within the ‘Add users to the portal’ window. All contacts are selected by default. Uncheck the boxes next to the contacts you don’t want to import. Click the ‘Add selected users’ button.
6. You will see a message letting you know that the import process is successfully completed.

To view the imported users on the portal, switch to the ‘Community’, ‘Projects’, or ‘CRM’ module and open the ‘Users’ tab. As simple as that!

Importing Files from Google Docs

Every TeamLab user might have important documents needed to perform his duties and he might want to transfer documents from his Google account to TeamLab to facilitate and speed up his work, as he won’t any longer need to switch between Google and TeamLab and waste his valuable time. For this purpose, please follow these steps below:

1. Access your TeamLab portal using your login details.
2. Click the ‘Documents’ link on the start page or at the very top of any portal page.
3. Click the ‘Import from…’ link to open a dropdown menu and select the ‘Import from Google Docs’ option.
4. Then you will need to log in into your Google account to allow TeamLab access the data stored at Google by clicking the ‘Grant Access’ button.
5. All the documents from Google Docs (including author names and file creation dates) will be displayed in the ‘Import from Google Docs’ window. Select the files you want to import into your TeamLab portal checking the boxes next to them.
6. Have a look at the lower part of the window. You need to select a section where your files will be imported to. By default the section is selected that is currently opened. To change the section, click the icon and choose the necessary section and folder if needed.
Note: as a portal administrator, you can select between two sections – 'My Documents' and 'Common Documents', while being a portal user, you can import files into 'My Documents' section only.
7. Select an action that will be taken in case of a file conflict whether the documents with the same titles will be overwritten (the ‘Overwrite’ option) or the imported document will be ignored and the existing document will be preserved (the ‘Ignore’ option).
8. Click the ‘Import’ button. After that you will see the importing progress.

The section (or folder if you assigned it) where you saved your imported documents will open. There you will find the ‘Import from Google Docs’ folder containing your files.

Importing Events from Google Calendar

This operation can be performed by any portal user, if he wants to transfer events from a specific Google calendar into TeamLab Calendar. To do that, please follow the steps below:

1. Enter your Google Calendar.
2. Find the needed calendar in the ‘My Calendars’ section, open the drop-down list next to it and select the ‘Calendar Settings’ option.
3. In the ‘Private Address’ section, click the icon and follow the link displayed.
Note: if your calendar is publicly shared, you'll need to click the 'iCal' icon within the 'Calendar Address' section.
4. Save the exported file to the desired folder on your computer.
Note: to export content from all calendars in your 'My calendars' list:
1. Click the drop-down arrow next to 'My calendars' and choose 'Settings'.
2. On the 'Calendar Settings' page, click the 'Export calendars' link at the bottom of the 'My Calendars' section. Keep in mind that you won't be able to bulk export calendars in your 'Other Calendars' list (for example, public calendars you've added to your list, shared calendars with 'view' access only, etc.)
3. In the resulting compressed folder, you'll see an ICS file for each of the calendars you have permission to 'Make changes and manage sharing' for.
5. Access your TeamLab portal using your login details.
6. Click the ‘Calendar’ link at the very top of any portal page.
7. Open a dropdown menu clicking the ‘Add’ link and select the ‘New calendar’ option if you want to import events from the needed Google calendar into a new calendar on your TeamLab portal.
Note: to import events from your Google Calendar into an existing calendar at TeamLab, direct your mouse cursor to a calendar within the 'My Calendars' section. Directly after that the icon will appear. Click it to open the 'Edit Calendar' window.
8. In the opened ‘Add new calendar’ window, click the ‘Import events from Google Calendar’ link.
9. Select the exported file stored on your computer HDD and click ‘Open’.
10. Press the ‘Save’ button.

Now you can view the imported events within TeamLab Calendar, edit, or delete them.

You can also add the iCal feed link of your Google calendar to TeamLab Calendar. If you edit some events within your Google calendar, the changes will be automatically applied and can be viewed within TeamLab Calendar. To do that, open your Google Calendar, click the icon in the ‘Private Address’ section of calendar settings (if your calendar is publicly shared, you’ll need to click the same icon within the ‘Calendar Address’ section) and copy the link displayed. Then enter your TeamLab portal, open TeamLab Calendar, click the ‘Add’ link and select the ‘New iCal feed’ option. In the opened window, enter the iCal feed link into the appropriate field and click ‘Save’.
Note: please make sure you entered the feed link starting with http://.

That’s all for today. Please feel free to leave comments in case you have questions that are not covered in the post. If you need assistance, visit our Help Center or write to our Support Team. Your opinion on TeamLab as well as ideas for further development are welcome on our special feedback page.

From now on you can generate a recipient list and use any third-party emailing program or try out sending emails to your customers via TeamLab internal engine. To do that, please proceed through the following steps:

1. Enter your TeamLab portal using your personal login details.

2. Open the CRM module clicking the corresponding link in the middle of the start page or at the very top of any other page.

3. The ‘Contacts’ tab will open letting you select recipients of your future email checking the boxes next to them. You can also use filters to facilitate the search for the needed clients and a box at the very top to mark all the contacts displayed in the list.

4. Click the ‘Send Email’ button over the contact list.

5. Select the ‘Internal SMTP’ option.

Note: bear in mind that you can send an email to maximum 1,000 recipients at once.

6. If the SMTP server is not configured for your portal yet, you will see the ‘Configure the SMTP’ window where you will need to set the server parameters:

• Host – specify the domain name you use.
• Port – specify the email port. The standard SMTP port is 25.
• Authentication – check the box to ensure that only the authorized users can use the server.
• Host Login and Host Password – specify your login and password in order to access the SMTP server, if needed.
• Sender Display Name – specify the name of the sender which will be displayed in the ‘From’ field.
• Sender Email Address – specify the email address of the sender.
• Enable SSL – check the box to enable encryption in client-server communications.

After you finished, click the ‘Save’ button.

Note: if you need to make some changes to some SMTP settings you can do that on the 'General Settings' page of the CRM module.

7. The ‘Compose Mail’ page will open. In the ‘From’ field you will see the sender name and email address indicated while configuring the SMTP server. The ‘To’ field shows the number of the selected contacts. All you need to do is enter the ‘Subject’ for your letter and type in your message. The ‘Formatting Toolbar’ helps you format your text changing font style, font color, alignment, size etc. You can find more precise information on how to use these tools in our Help Center.

If you need to add some variables to your message make use of personal tags.

For example, if you wish to add the recipient name to the salutation, just place the mouse cursor at the point where you want the variable to be added, then select an appropriate tag from the drop-down list and click the ‘Add to Letter Body’. In our case it will be: ‘FirstName’ and ‘LastName’ as we send our letter to ‘Persons’. As a result, you will see the following line: Dear $(Person.First Name) $(Person.Last Name).

The necessary data will be automatically taken from your TeamLab CRM customer database.

You can also attach a certain file to your message. Click the ‘Show file attachment panel’ link below the ‘Letter Body’ field and using the ‘Attach File’ button browse your hard disk drive for the necessary file.

You can also store this letter in history checking the corresponding box. If you do so, this email will be added to the ‘History’ tab displayed on each customers’ page.

8. Click the ‘Next (to preview)’ button to preview your email.

Note: the following text watermark will be included into your letter: "Powered by TeamLab.com".

9. Click the ‘Send’ button to proceed or the ‘Back’ button if you need to edit the letter.

10. After you pressed ‘Send’, the ‘Sending Mail’ page will open to let you follow the sending process. Clicking the ‘Abort blanket mailing’ button, you can cancel the process. On this page, you will see the progress in percent as well as total emails, how many of them have been already sent, estimated end time, and errors if any occurred.

That’s all! Now you can start trying out this new feature helping TeamLab CRM become a full-featured integrated tool for creating, maintaining, and enriching the customer data base of a company. Thank you in advance! If you face some errors or bugs, please do not hesitate to write to us at support@teamlab.com.

Today I’ll tell you about an effective way of getting new leads with practically no effort introducing you a new feature of the CRM module – website contact form. It lets you generate the source code of a contact form with custom number of fields which you can embed into your website. Filling in the form in the Internet, your prospective customers will provide you with their contact details that will be automatically added into the contact list of your CRM system on the TeamLab portal constantly enriching your client database.

There’s no secret that the goal of each business is to get profit, in fact the more the better. No matter what area your enterprise specializes in, it needs new customers to grow and bring income. That’s why the website contact form generated on your TeamLab portal and embedded into your site might appear so useful to you.

How to generate a website contact form?

To create a website contact form, please follow the easy steps below:
1. Enter your TeamLab portal using your login details.

2. Click the ‘CRM’ link in the middle of the page or at the very top.

3. Switch to the ‘Settings’ tab and click the ‘Website Contact Form’ link on the ‘Navigation’ panel.

4. In the ‘Form Properties’ section, enter a ‘Redirection URL’ address that will lead to a page on your website after your prospective customer filled in the form.

Note: please make sure you entered your URL address starting with http://

If you are creating a form for the first time, you’ll see zeros under the ‘Web Form Key’ caption. Click the icon to generate a real key that will be used to authenticate the form and prevent spam, fraud, and unauthorized use.

Note: you can generate only one active form with a web form key. If you change the key in the CRM settings, the form generated with the previous key will stop working.

5. In the ‘Field Selection’ section, choose between the ‘Company’ and ‘Person’ option depending on your prospective customers’ status. Then check the fields you want to be included into the contact form.

6. In the ‘Access Rights & Tags’ section, you can restrict access to the contacts added using this form checking the ‘Restrict Access’ box and selecting users you want to grant access to. If you don’t do that, all portal users will be able to view contact details of the leads added.

You can also enter your own tags that will be added to the contacts in the list clicking the ‘Add Tag’ link.

7. Click the ‘Generate Form’ button.

After that the ‘Form Source Code’ area will appear displaying the source code of the created website contact form. Then preview the form, and if you are satisfied with the result, you can proceed to the embedding process.

How to embed the form into your website?

As soon as the source code of your website contact form is created, you need to embed it into your site. Open the page or control where you want to place the form in an HTML editor, copy the source code from the ‘Form Source Code’ area at your portal and paste it at the needed place.

How does the form work?

A potential customer sees a contact form at your website and decides to fill it in. After clicking the ‘Send Data’ button he will be redirected to the page on your site that is specified in the ‘Redirection URL’ field, while the data itself will be added to your contact list. The portal administrators and users who were granted access rights will be informed about new leads added using this form by email or TeamLab Talk depending on the notification type selected on their ‘Subscriptions’ page.

That’s all for today. Please feel free to leave comments in case you have questions that are not covered in the post. If you need assistance, visit our Help Center or write to our Support Team. Your opinion on TeamLab as well as ideas for its further development are welcome on our special feedback page.

We are glad to inform you that TeamLab launches the application programming interface (API).

From now on you will be able to:

• import and export necessary data,
• build applications on top of TeamLab
• integrate TeamLab tools into existing programs and services
• create javascript widgets.

Implemented as the representational state transfer (REST) architecture over the HTTP protocol, TeamLab API processes the standard requests with the GET/POST/PUT/DELETE commands and supports JSON/XML data formats. All the module elements, like posts or comments, have their own URLs and can be requested separately allowing users a flexible choice of features for integration depending on their needs.

Along with that the quick access to larger amounts of data is also possible. If an application needs the ability to retrieve data and make changes to several objects at once, TeamLab API provides a batching option to submit instructions for several operations in a single HTTP request.

To get use of TeamLab API, please go to http://api.teamlab.com

Our community of contributors has always been a great help in spreading TeamLab all over the world. Due to their hard work, now TeamLab speaks 15 languages:

• English
• German
• French
• Spanish
• Russian
• Latvian
• Italian
• Chinese Simplified
• Ukrainian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazilian)
• Greek
• Turkish
• Czech
• Vietnamese

One of the recent updates is the release of the Ukrainian and Vietnamese versions of TeamLab.

We want to thank the team of Dmytro Levytskyy, Maxim Tkach, Mike Romaniv, Vladimir Kharlashkin, Vladislav Naprikovskiy who conributed to translation to Ukranian and Võ Thái Lâm with Nguyen Tran for translation to Vietnamese.

In the near future we’re going to add the Finnish language. Meanwhile, TeamLab is also being translated to Hebrew, Georgian, Azerbaijani, Slovak, Farsi, Dutch, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Korean, Hungarian, Chinese(TR), Swedish and Arabic. If you speak the languages mentioned above and ready to share your knowledge to make TeamLab available for your colleagues, write to documentation@teamlab.com. You will be given access to our TeamLab Online Translation System that enables you to translate the portal interface in a simple and convenient way.

*You can set the language in the Language and Time Zone settings of the portal.

Being pretty active online, this year TeamLab team has decided it’s time we went offline to meet our users, thank our contributors face-to-face and, finally, define TeamLab as a serious promising project, equal to the highest global software market standards.

As you already know, this week TeamLab is participating in CeBIT, a great international IT event held in

Hannover. We’ve decided that it’s a great opportunity not only to meet our users face to face, but also to reveal details on our coming enhancement – HTML-5 based TeamLab Document Editor.

For those, who couldn’t participate in the exhibition, we’ll sum up the main points announced at our press-conference yesterday.

The cutting edge technology, that drives TeamLab Document Editor, differs from all the other existing counterparts, getting use of all the HTML5 features and making it a proper alternative to desktop word processors in the following aspects:

- the input that is always identical to the output: a processed file keeps the same style, paragraphs, symbol and line spacing etc. while displaying in any browser on any OS as well as while importing or printing;

- a proper choice of options for table processing, line spacing, multi-level numbering, text and heading styles;

- possibilities for hassle-free processing of multi-page reports, business or financial documentation precisely complying with all the corresponding standards;

- no language barriers as the number of fonts is maximum with hieroglyphs included.

In other words the goal of TeamLab Document Editor is to combine the convenience and mobility of web applications with the multifunctionality of conventional package doc processors like Microsoft Office Word or OpenOffice Writer.

You can try the beta version of the new editor right now – visit TeamLab Demo Portal at

http://html5.teamlab.com and give us your feedback.

Thanks to the synchronization feature you can:

• export your TeamLab calendar into some other calendar you use,
• import some other calendar into TeamLab Calendar,
• add the iCal feed link of a third-party calendar to TeamLab Calendar (i.e. view a read-only version of a third-party calendar within TeamLab Calendar).

Exporting TeamLab Calendar

You can export all events from a calendar created in TeamLab Calendar proceeding through these simple steps:

1. Direct your mouse cursor to the calendar you want to export. Directly after that the icon will appear. Click it to open the ‘Edit Calendar’ window.
2. In the ‘Import/Export’ section, click the ‘Export events from TeamLab Calendar’ link.
3. In the next pop-up window, you will see the link leading to a .ics file that contains all data about the events from your calendar. After clicking it, you can save this file onto the hard disk drive of your computer.
Note: you can integrate TeamLab Calendar into any other calendar that supports the iCal format. iCal represents a common file format which allows Internet users to share meeting requests and tasks (stored in files with the .ics extension) with other users.
4. Export the file created in the previous step into the calendar you need.

After you proceeded through steps 1-4 listed above, follow the next ones:

For Google Calendar
5. Enter your Google Calendar.
6. Open the drop-down list next to the ‘Other Calendars’ section.
7. Select the ‘Import Calendar’ option.
8. Click the ‘Choose File’ button and find the file that contains your events, then click the ‘Open’ button.
9. Select one of the calendars within Google Calendar where you’d like to import events, then click the ‘Import’ button.

For Apple iCal Calendar
5. In Apple iCal, choose ‘File’ > ‘Import’.
6. Locate the calendar (.ics file) you want to import.
7. Select the calendar you want to add the events to.
You can also drag a .ics file from your desktop to Apple iCal.

For Yahoo! Calendar
5. Enter your Yahoo! Calendar.
6. Open the drop-down list next to the needed calendar and select the ‘Import’ option.
7. In the appeared window, select the necessary ICS file from your computer and the calendar you want to import events to.
8. Click ‘Save’.

The events from the selected TeamLab calendar will be migrated into Google, Apple iCal, or Yahoo! Calendar.

Importing a Calendar into TeamLab Calendar

If you want to transfer events from a specific calendar into TeamLab Calendar, follow the instructions below:

For Google Calendar
1. Enter your Google Calendar.
2. Find the needed calendar in the ‘My Calendars’ section, open the drop-down list next to it and select the ‘Calendar Settings’ option.
3. In the ‘Private Address’ section, click the icon and follow the link displayed.
Note: if your calendar is publicly shared, you'll need to click the 'iCal' icon within the 'Calendar Address' section.
4. Save the exported file to the desired folder on your computer.
Note: to export content from all calendars in your 'My calendars' list, click here.

For Apple iCal Calendar
1. In Apple iCal, select the calendar from the list of calendars in the iCal window.
2. Select ‘File’ > ‘Export’.
3. Name the calendar, then save it.

For Yahoo! Calendar
1. Enter your Yahoo! Calendar.
2. Open the drop-down list next to the needed calendar and select the ‘Export’ option.
3. Click the ‘Save’ button in the appeared window and save the .ics file onto your computer HDD.

After you proceeded through the steps listed above for one of the calendars, follow the next ones:

1. Direct your mouse cursor to a calendar within the ‘My Calendars’ section. Directly after that the icon will appear. Click it to open the ‘Edit Calendar’ window.
Note: you can import events from third-party calendars into calendars from the 'My Calendars' section only.
2. In the ‘Import/Export’ section, click the ‘Import events from Google calendar’ link.
3. Select the exported file stored on your computer HDD and click ‘Open’.
4. Press the ‘Save’ button.

The events from the necessary calendar will be imported into TeamLab Calendar.

Adding an iCal Feed Link to TeamLab Calendar

As you surely know, there is a difference between the import/export option and adding iCal feed link. After exporting or importing events from calendars, you can edit them as you need and the changes will be applied to the exported/imported events only (not to the original events), while after adding a feed link into a calendar, you will be able to view the events only – to edit an event, you will need to make changes in the original calendar, and they will become visible in TeamLab Calendar.

To add a third-party calendar feed link to TeamLab Calendar, enter it on your portal, click the ‘Add’ link and select the ‘New iCal feed’ option. In the opened window, enter the iCal feed link into the appropriate field and click ‘Save’.

You can get the iCal feed link of the needed calendar in the following way:

• Google Calendar – click the icon in the ‘Private Address’ section of calendar settings (if your calendar is publicly shared, you’ll need to click the same icon within the ‘Calendar Address’ section) and copy the link displayed.
• Yahoo! Calendar – open the drop-down list next to the needed calendar, select ‘Edit Calendar’, switch to the ‘iCalendar and Web Address’ tab and copy the link displayed.
• Apple iCal Calendar – choose ‘Publish’ from the ‘Calendar’ menu. In the resulting dialog, type a name for your calendar in the top field, choose to publish it on your own server from the “Publish on” pop-up menu, select any of the other options you want, and then click ‘Publish’. When iCal finishes publishing, a dialog opens and displays the URL for your calendar.

That’s all for this topic. Now you know how to import/export events from third-party calendars and add their read-only versions into TeamLab Calendar.

If you still have questions and need assistance, please visit our Help Center or write a message to our Support Team. In case you have a great idea concerning TeamLab improvement or just want to express your opinion, you can leave your feedback that will surely be checked out and taken into consideration.

Dear users, we have recently introduced important and highly demanded changes in CRM and Calendar.

Here is a short list of them:

CRM:
1. Website contact form. Use it to build a form, that you can publish on your site for capturing new contacts automatically.

2. Enhanced filtration. The enhanced filter facilitates the contact search.

3. Calendar integration. CRM is now integrated with the calendar allowing you to see all the CRM tasks in the Calendar.

Calendar:
1. iCal compatibility. Now you may download the calendar file with the event in the iCal format and even import the ical file when creating and editing TeamLab calendar. You may also add the ical stream for monitoring other sources.

2. Export link. Now you may get the calender link for calendar export.

3. Repeated events. The possibility to create more complicated repeated events.

Speaking about general improvements now you may:
1.Send an invitation link for participation in your portal.

2. Delete your profile without administrator interaction.

Waiting for your feedback!