Technology Updates

For many using CiviCRM, CiviMail is the least attractive feature. Though very powerful and reliable and fully integrated, it is not as user friendly as MailChimp or Constant Contact can be. The main thing that CiviMail has going for it, however, is that CiviMail is part of CiviCRM which means that you do not have to deal with synchronization challenges with an external application. In addition, all your readers activities such as opened mail, clickthrough, forward email, and unsubscribe are stored in CiviCRM rather than in a separate database giving you concrete data to tie together with the rest of the information in your CRM.

In a recent blog post, Google announced that it will soon, in the Chrome browser, mark as insecure websites that are using unencrypted communications (ie. http:// instead of https://). We can't wait for this to happen!

CiviCRM has announced a new monthly release schedule. This release schedule means that Cividesk will be able to provide bug fixes and feature updates on a monthly basis!

When a new release is made by the CiviCRM project, we test it and then include that new release into our Software as a Service offering so you can benefit of it immediatly.

New releases are exciting because they mean that regular and timely improvements are made to the platform instead of long wait times for updates. We keep your system current and up to date with the latest and greatest from CiviCRM! 

The Cividesk development team is working hard to deliver even more tools from our Desk. Recently, we have made it so customers who are not using our CiviCRM Standalone can access the Desk and its resources. If you have questions about accessing the Desk contact Steve Kessler. 

There are two competing interests when it comes to email. We all want our email to be delivered and yet we do not want to get spam.  80% of email traffic on the Internet is spam.  To combat this Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are trying to verify (authenticate) that senders of email are who they say they are. 

The two main ways that this is done today is by using SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). 

For all our customers, being able to send emails from the CRM, and that these emails get reliably delivered to their recipients inboxes, is a critical function. As ISPs, email services and other IT and service providers are fighting the constant influx of spam that clutters our inboxes, it has become very hard to send email while avoiding being caught in anti-spam filters and/or being blacklisted.

We all have this pile of business cards on our desks and thought ... wish I could enter all of these in my favorite CRM ...

Well ... wait no more. Cividesk has developped an interface with an iPhone application that allows you to take a picture of your business cards, have these transcribed and then automatically uploaded as new contacts into CiviCRM.This of course works whether you are sitting at your desk, attending a meeting, or staffing a trade show.

In a previous post we announced the upcoming upgrade to CiviCRM 4.6 for all our customers. This upgrade brings plenty of exciting features, and you will find in our newsletter a complete schedule of webinars to walk you through these.

New year, new release of CiviCRM .. CiviCRM 4.6 will become LTS at the end of January 2016! With this much anticipated announcement, it is now time to migrate all our customers to this release.

We have been testing CiviCRM 4.6 for more than a couple months now on our own website as well as a few of our customer's, and have been impressed with all the new features, improvements as well as its stability.