We recently completed a team retreat, in which we discussed our strategic vision for the future of our Frontline products. You'll see a number of major improvements coming throughout 2014 to our products. We've even created a web page so you can keep track of them over time: New Features and Updates in FrontlineCloud. Back in the office, we did a short, 1-week improvement sprint and challenged our developer team to make as many useful improvements as they could in that time. We're impressed with their output, and we think you'll find the below improvements will make the application even easier for you to use.
Managing Your Connections
- The status tab has been re-named to "Connections" and now, not only can you monitor the status, you can also manage your phone numbers directly within the tab. We felt users needed fewer steps to add, edit, or troubleshoot their numbers.
- Routing preferences now save automatically -- no more worrying about forgetting to hit that 'save' button!
Inbox
- A while back we improved our tool for selecting people from your contacts list. That means now we can make sending a message all one, clean process rather than a 3-step wizard.
- "Quick message" now says "send message," because all of our messages should be quick if we're making a useful application for you.
Contact Management
- We previously made some major improvements to the contact page, and now we're refining our work. If you need to update your contact's information, you can now tell the app has saved that information automatically. We also added an "import" button to the Contacts page so you can quickly add more contacts using .csv or a vCard.
- "E-mail Address" in the contact field is now simply "Email," which should reduce errors on import.
General Improvements
- When selecting a group to receive a message, you'll see at a glance how many contacts are in that group, so you'll know how many messages will be queued.
- When sending a message, we hide empty groups so you don't accidentally try to send a message to nobody.
- If you select multiple contacts or messages, our buttons now read "delete selected" rather than the rather scary-sounding "delete all."
- Some basic copy improvements and bug fixes.
And stay tuned ...
We have a new FrontlineSMS desktop release on the way, with some fantastic new features, updates and bug fixes. We're very excited to share the details, which will be posted to our blog and on the FrontlineSMS page.
And as we hinted before, during our retreat we finalized our product roadmap for the next few months. We have some really exciting features -- and a few big surprises -- coming your way shortly! Watch this space!