Just wanted to list out some of the new things that just got deployed.

First, vCard exporting has been given a significant upgrade. They'll now include a photo if available, URL links, relationships, and their groups and tags listed in the notes section. To see the feature request this came as a result of, check it out here - http://support.stafftool.com/forums/3023/entrie...

Messages - you can now reply to messages very easily. Simply open up a message to read it and click the new reply button or hit the R key on your keyboard, and a message form will come up with the previous subject as the Re: subject and the message quoted in the body. Just write your response like you would any other reply and send it off!

The tag fields for building up smart groups now has the same tag autocompletion that the people and events forms have to make entering and keeping your tags consistent.

All this and some some smaller bug fixes and tweaks are all waiting for you the next time you log in. Enjoy!

I just pushed out a new version last night with some enhancements that have been asked about for a while now. First off, you can now subscribe to your personal calendar in any app that supports the authenticated iCalendar standard, such as Apple iCal, Outlook 2007, or Mozilla Sunbird. If you have one of these apps, you're good to go. Simply click on the new "Subscribe to this calendar" button on the events page:

This will open up the program on your computer that is set to handle webcal subscriptions:

Then, you'll have to authenticate...use your Stafftool login and password to continue:

From there you can set up some details for the subscription:

Another thing to keep in mind - this will also work with filtered calendars. Do do so, just filter your calendar by groups or tags, and when you're viewing that filtered calendar click the subscribe button and you will subscribe to just those events. Makes it much easier to create very specific calendars if you to do something like only tracking upcoming private staff events in your iCal and nothing else.

That's all there is to it! You'll now be able to view all your upcoming private Stafftool events on your desktop alongside all the other events you manage in your app. The second new feature is an improvement to tagging that will hopefully help keep your tagging efforts more consistent and easy. Now, whenever you are adding or editing a person or event, the tags field will now display a listing of all your current tags that you can click on to add them to the current record.

This list will only show up when you click inside the tags field, and you can just click the tags to toggle them within the field, comma separated and all.

Here's a little video clip so you can see it in action.

This is a first pass, so there are still some improvements that I'd like to make, such as automatically highlighting the tags in the list if you choose to type them in rather than click, and I'm sure some things might not work exactly right...but let me know what you think! Hopefully it will make it much easier to have a consistent set of tags applied to your records.

Just a small addition, but one that I hope you find useful. Basically, there are three new smart group rules available to help you organize people even more:

1. Member of - this lets you create smart groups that take into account people's memberships. Yes, you can already filter by groups, but this enables you to create a smart group, for instance, of everyone who is a member of the men's group who is over 30.
   
2. Created within - this lets you add a rule which looks for people who have been created within the last X days
   
3. Updated within - this lets you add a rule which looks for people who have been updated within the last X days

And remember, these can be combined with other rules as well, so you can get very fine grained. Another example would be a smart group of people tagged with "visitor", not tagged with "followed up" and who have been added within the last 2 weeks, which will make it even easier to keep track of recent visitors who have not been followed up with yet. The possibilities are endless!

I just pushed out a new version with a few slight updates and/or changes.

First off, I finished up some of the logic for group leaders. Now, group leaders:

• can add people and events
  
• can associate those events with only the groups they lead
  
• can edit people they lead
  
• can edit events of groups they lead

This enables you to assign a non-admin user as a leader of a group (or groups) and they'll be able to add people and events to them, as well as edit people within them. That way, if they lead a small group and they get a new visitor, they can add them to the database and associate them with their group. Or, they can add a special event that they have planned without having to go through the staff. There are slight concerns with events since they'll be able to add public events that can show up on the public calendar, however, they need this capability to have their own events be public. However, the assumption is that you will only be making responsible people you trust group leaders and that this shouldn't be a problem. One possible issue - should a group leader be able to edit a higher ranking staff member who happens to be in the group they lead? If you see any holes in this set up that need to be patched, let me know.

Another usability feature that was added is more explicit duplication of people records. There is a new icon for people that is a little person with a plus sign. Click on this and the person will be opened up in a new form with all the relevant info filled out, but the first name will be "Copy of First Name" and a few things won't be carried over, like birthday, login account, relationships... So now instead of opening up a person you want to make a copy of and clicking the "save as new record" just click the duplicate button and make the changes and save, which will create a new record. Since the duplication is more explicit and doesn't carry over things that shouldn't be duplicated, it's more straight forward to quickly create new records using someone else as a template.

Finally, church addresses now always have a custom text field rather than the normal drop down with Home, Work, Other, etc. This is due to the many unique situations that churches will have for their addresses, such as "Youth Building," "Office," "Sanctuary" etc, whereas people normally require the standard work and home address labels, which make things like importing and exporting more standard. As always, your feedback is appreciated!