Glasnost 21 adds support for vCards

By admin | Published: November 30, 2009

Starting today, Glasnost users can update all their colleagues to new additions or edits they make in the Contact Management module, by automatically sending multiple vCards by email.

To explain the benefits of this, here is the process one of our clients uses to manage their contacts amongst a dispersed team.

This Management Consultant has a team of people spread around the UK and Europe. Prior to using Glasnost they all shared one copy of Outlook to keep track of contacts. On moving to Glasnost they uploaded all their contacts using the bulk contact upload facility in System Admin. That gave everyone access to the latest information. So, when online, all the team had everything they needed.

The only issue then was how to make it easy for everyone to import new contacts into whatever mobile phone they used.

And that is where vCards come in.

Now when you view a contacts full details page you will see a link saying ‘Send vCard to..’ Click on this and you will get a pop up listing all your colleagues on Glasnost. Simply select who you want to email and click OK.

Every user you selected will then receive a branded email saying that they have been sent details of XYZ in vCard format. From there it’s easy to process this information into their mobile address book.

Simple, efficient and very useful.

Hope you like it

Antony

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Glasnost 21 introduces Twitter integration

By admin | Published: November 17, 2009

We are pleased to announce that Glasnost 21’s Contact Management module now integrates, in real time, with Twitter. This allows you to supplement your own data with up to the moment data pulled in from Twitter.

How does it work?

Twitter

When you add or edit a new Company in the Contact Management module you can update the ‘Corporate Twitter ID’ field in the form. Then, when you go to the details page of that Company, you will see, in the right hand ‘Feeds’ pane, the Twitter logo. Upon loading this will perform a live search of the Twitter database to see if that Company has published any Tweets. If it has there will be a ‘Tick’ icon next to the logo.

Click on the logo and Glasnost will now search for any Tweets from the Corporate ID AND also perform a ‘Like’ search using the name of the Company. The latest Company Tweet will be displayed at the top with an option to ‘View All’. Below will be the results of the ‘Like’ search. Click on any of these items and a pop up window will be launched providing all the relevant information plus a link through to the Tweet itself on twitter.com.

Glasnost also provides a search box that enables you to perform a live Twitter search for any term.

With Twitter use becoming so pervasive across the Internet, this functionality allows you to keep informed and up to date not only with messages being put out by the companies you deal with, but also with thoughts, comments and opinions that other people have about them. Potentially crucial information that can give you a real edge.

We hope you enjoy using our Twitter integration and please do contact us if you need any assistance or would like further information about Glasnost 21.

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Why does Glasnost do what it does?

By admin | Published: October 6, 2009

Glasnost started out as a way to help us run our own web software business. First as an HTML system but now as an Adobe Flex Rich Internet Application.

In our business we need:

Contact Management to:
1. Manage many companies details
2. Manage and interact with many contacts
3. Track all comments, assign tasks and store documents relating to the above
4. Create Task reports for sales meetings
5. Be able to create good looking email newsletters
6. Be able to send these newsletters to unlimited custom mailing lists
7. Link companies to relevant projects

Project Management to:
1. Create unlimited projects and link users to them
2. Track and share comments
3. Track and share tasks
4. Track and share documents
5. Have advanced search facilities across tasks and documents
6. Have good quality reporting on project activity
7. Keep everyone updated by email whenever any activity occurs
8. Have all the above outputted to bespoke RSS feeds
9. Link projects to companies and image galleries

Image Management to:
1. Store and share any number of image galleries for marketing, presentations, websites etc
2. Add comments to images
3. View metadata and licensing information of images
4. Batch upload and edit images
5. Create custom lightboxes
6. View as slideshows
7. Link galleries to projects and companies

Instant Messaging to:
Text chat and share documents in real time with a fellow user

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY:
1. Be able to view and keep track of all the above really easily
2. Do it all with a system which is attractive and a pleasure to use.
3. Be able to easily collaborate on all of this with our colleagues, clients and suppliers

So that’s why Glasnost does what it does!

We think lots of other business work in a similar way and so now Glasnost is available, fully custom branded to anyone.

Enjoy

Antony

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What is different about Glasnost ?

By admin | Published: October 6, 2009

The other day we were asked to say, in just a few hundred characters, what was different about Glasnost.

We decided, in essence, that Glasnost is different in four ways:

First, it is specifically designed for collaboration outside the firewall, with clients and suppliers as well as colleagues.

Secondly, as an Adobe Flex application it provides an exceptional user experience and makes information remarkably accessible.

Thirdly a dedicated Image Management module means vastly superior handling of digital assets.

And lastly, the Contact Management Module provides ‘lite’ but powerful CRM functionality as well as email campaign management.

The reason why we built it like this will be in the next post!

Antony

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Glasnost reporting options

By admin | Published: September 29, 2009

Glasnost provides various reporting options.

Contact Management
You can perform a contact or company search (simple keyword, by tag or using the advanced option) and then when the pop up results are shown you can click on ‘Export to Excel’.

You can create task reports. To do this click on search tasks in the left hand menu and then choose your search criteria. You can search by task added date, task end date, the company related to the task, who the task was assigned to, and the task status. Click on search and then when the results show look at the bottom of the results pane. Here you will be given the option to ‘Export to Excel’ or ‘Create Task Report from These Results’.

If you opted to create a task report you can then click on task reports in the left hand menu, and then edit the report, email a pdf of the results to another system user (or yourself of course).

You can also click on history to view a pdf of previously created reports. In this way you can create a task report once, and then re-run it as you wish. Handy for sales meetings where you may wish to distribute a task report prior to a meeting.

Project Management
You can perform task searches in the same way as in contact management. In this case tasks can be searched by task added date, task end date, free text across the title and description fields, by task ID, by selecting one or more projects to search, who the tasks are assigned to and the task status.

Again, you can export to excel the results or create a task report. And again by clicking on task reports you can edit. email or view a history of previously sent tasks.

RSS Feed
You can set up your own personal RSS feed of project data. If you do this (by clicking on the option in the left hand menu) your RSS feed will include all additions or updates, made by any project participant, across all the projects you are linked to.

Email
Not reports as such but if you are linked to a project every time anyone adds or edits anything to do with a project, Glasnost will email you the information.

We thought carefully about the reporting options in Glasnost and hope we have covered the ‘essentials’. If there are other options you would like to see please let us know. We will always endeavour to match your requirements.

Antony Slumbers

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Glasnost goes to the Antartic !

By admin | Published: September 24, 2009

The Kaspersky Commonwealth Antarctic Expedition will see 8 women from the Commonwealth countries of Cyprus, Ghana, India, Singapore, Brunei, New Zealand, Jamaica and the United Kingdom brave blizzards, crevasses and temperatures below -30C as they ski over 900 kilometres across Antarctica to the Geographic South Pole.

As well as building them a website – www.kasperskycommonwealthexpedition.com – the expedition team are using their own ‘Glasnost’ to manage the whole mammoth project. With team members from all around the world there are a myriad of people who need to contribute or download all manner of digital materials. Glasnost will enable everyone to collaborate and communicate effectively and efficiently wherever they are.

The expedition starts on the 12th November and the team expect to arrive at the South Pole around New Year’s Day 2010.

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Glasnost in action.

By admin | Published: August 19, 2009

As a software company we often work on projects with many different parties. Below is a real world example of a recent project which demonstrates how Glasnost can be used to bring everyone together and generate deep, productive collaboration.

A client was looking to do a major revamp of their corporate marketing site, involving a significant re-working of their brand, including a new strapline to use with their logo.

So the project team consisted of:

1. Us

2. The client

3. A design agency

4. A copywriter

5. A marketing consultant

Now various members of our team are based in Surrey, Sussex and London, the client is based in London (but in offices in both the West End and the City), the marketing consultant is based in Manchester, the design agency and copywriter in Oxford.

That’s 10 people in 7 locations. Without some software help all of us could have spent hours and hours flitting between all these locations, at considerable expense.

This is where Glasnost comes in:

1. All the project team were set up on Glasnost.

2. All the company and contact details were added in to the Contact Management Module.

3. A new project was set up and all the parties linked in.

4. A new image gallery was set up, and all parties given access.

5. The gallery was linked to the project and the project linked to all the relevant companies.

With this in place (which took just a few minutes) we were ready to go !

The brief was uploaded, consisting of a Word doc and various jpeg’s.

Thereafter further documents, tasks and comments were added to Glasnost and assigned to the relevant parties, so everyone always knew what they had to do. In addition by clicking on ‘All’ everyone could also see what everyone else had to do.

Every time a comment or task was added or edited all the appropriate people were alerted by email.

Altogether 16 documents were uploaded, four of them in multiple version, 28 tasks were added and completed, 52 images were added and commented on and 64 comments were exchanged.

Add a number of Skype sessions into the mix and that was pretty much all that was needed. We did meet up a couple of times in person, but largely for social reasons. It wasn’t necessary but was fun.

Open and transparent access to everything everyone needed to know made the whole process simple to manage and hugely productive.

Their new site is now live. Any updates will be handled through Glasnost as it contains a complete record of all the correspondence, documents and images that were used in the development process. Rather than 10 individuals in 5 companies each keeping a record of their part of the jigsaw, with no one having the whole thing, it’s now all in one place, with access for all.

It’s on Glasnost…

Antony

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IE6 – Not an issue here !

By admin | Published: August 15, 2009

As many people know the dreaded browser Internet Explorer 6 is still used by 20% or so of Internet users. Admittedly this is more in a corporate environment than amongst home users, but nevertheless it is, to the developer community, an astonishing figure.

Eight years old it is has not only been superceded by IE7 but more recently by IE8. It only ever was an OK browser and it’s replacements are dramatically better. IE6 is full of security holes, does not have tabbed windows (how do you live without that) and is very slow. Both the latter IE’s are better, as is Safari and, our choice, Firefox.

Why isn’t it dead ? The answer involves apathy, ignorance and inertia – not to mention the arrogance of the large corporation. However, at Glasnost we decided before we started development that, much as we may be baffled by how anyone could believe sticking with IE was a good idea, we knew many would, and many of those would be in a position to force many, many other users to follow suit (spot the large IT department). So we built Glasnost using Adobe’s RIA software, Flex. This is, in essence, dynamically controlled, database driven Flash. And because of that, so long as you have Flash Version 9 or later (and almost everyone does), it does not matter which browser you use. You will still be able to enjoy all the latest bells and whistles that we’ve built into Glasnost to make the user experience as rich as possible.

So, if you are using IE6 and are allowed to update it, we think it would be to your own advantage, but if not:

WELCOME IE6 USERS – YOU ARE WELCOME !!

Antony

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Where did Glasnost come from ?

By admin | Published: August 10, 2009

Glasnost was initially developed for our own use. As a company that did not exist before the Internet we have always operated pretty much virtually. We have always needed our tasks, comments and documents to be instantly available to team members via the Internet.  Coding takes place via a VPN (Virtual Private Network) but all interactions between the team are over the public Internet.

We needed a secure flexible intuitive but powerful set of tools to make this work so, over a period of years, we developed the first – HTML based – version of Glasnost. This included Contact, Project and Image Management. Some two years ago, as online tools became more and more powerful and the age of RIA’s (Rich internet Applications) started to emerge, largely in the form of Adobe’s Flash/Flex platform we looked to see how we could build a ‘Next Gen’ version of Glasnost that we could start to use directly with clients but also with a view to making it available to third parties. And that is what we’ve done.

Starting in early 2007 we had, by January 2008, a product ready for use. Since then we have been refining and redefining the functionality as we garnered feedback from clients and came to understand ourselves how a service like Glasnost really can improve the way we run our business. On top of the core Contact, Project and Image Management we added:

1. A Notepad’  feature, which is unique to each user, to mimic the scribbling of notes and aide-memoires one normally uses paper for.

2. A simple to use but powerful Newsletter module which allows for the easy creation and sending of smart, functional email newsletters (that are ‘likely’ to get through corporate firewall’s).

3. An Instant Messenger like module (Online Now we call it) that allows you to ‘chat’ with other Glasnost users in real time, as well as send attachments.

Nowadays Glasnost is at the heart of how we operate, both as a company, and with our clients and suppliers.  For us, being able to handle all our Contacts Projects and Images in one place, knowing that – if it matters – ‘it’s on Glasnost’  is a godsend.

Antony

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Some New Features

By admin | Published: July 24, 2009

We’ve been working away on some new features following requests from users.

In Contact Management there is now a ‘Bulk Import Contact’ feature which speeds up the process of adding multiple new entries into Glasnost. We provide a sample csv file which shows you the ‘best’ format to use during the import process, though you can also map your fields to the ones in Glasnost.

Further improvements to Contact Management include:

a) The facility to download to spreadsheet Company and Contacts details should you wish.

b) The facility to search for Contacts across multiple offices of the same Company.  So for instance if you wish to find all your contacts at ABC Ltd, whether they are in the London, Frankfurt or Madrid office you can now do so. And of course then download the results to spreadsheet.

c) In Project Management you can now download to spreadsheet the results of a Task Search. This is handy for such things as toting up the time spent on Tasks, or grouping Tasks by type.

d) We’ve added ‘Reset’ buttons to all Glasnost searches to make it easier to redefine search criteria.

PLUS we’ve now incorporated our new HELP system, which you will find in the top navigation bar of Glasnost to the right of Contact Us. This covers a multitude of FAQ’s and provides extensive ‘How do I’ advice. We make big use of videos so please do consult this area for clear guidance on making the most of Glasnost. If you would like us to provide additional video guides please let us know.

We hope you find these new features helpful.

Antony

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Glasnost is a Flex-based Online Project, Contact and Image Management tool. This is the developer blog with Glasnost news & views.

For more general information, please see the main Glasnost website