Ofuz 0.5.8 has quite a few new features, and over 90 across the board improvements. In this blog post, I want to tell you about the new Auto Responder feature in Ofuz.

An Auto Responder is a mailing list feature that sends timed followup messages to your mailing list. You create a sequence of email templates and tell the Auto Responder how long to wait before sending each one. Then, when new people join your mailing list, the Auto Responder sends out your emails at your chosen intervals using the merge fields from your email templates to personalize each email.

Auto Responders can be a great way to convert contacts into customers. Remember the following important facts:

• On average, it takes 7 contacts within 18 months to make a sale. Reference
• 2% of sales are made on the first contact, 3% on the second, 5% on the third, 10% on the fourth, and 80% on the fifth to twelfth! Reference

Auto Responder sequences should provide interesting or valuable information to your contacts, and it should remind them about the benefits of becoming a customer.

Here’s how to set up an Auto Responder in Ofuz.

1. Sign in to your Ofuz account.
2. Set up any email templates that you plan to use for your Auto Responder.
3. In the top right of the Ofuz page, click Settings.
4. On the left navigation bar, click Auto Responder.
5. Click Create New.
6. In the Auto Responder Name field, type a name for your new Auto Responder.
7. In the Tag Name field, choose the tag that you want to associate with this Auto Responder. Contacts tagged with this tag will receive your new Auto Responder sequence.
8. Click Create.
9. The new Auto Responder appears in your list of Auto Responders. Click the new Auto Responder’s name.
10. Click here to the right of You do not have any auto responder Email Templates for Auto Responder1.
11. Either click Select Email Template and choose an existing email template to add to your Auto Responder, or create a new email template using the form that appears.
12. Fill in the Name field with a name for this template.
13. Fill in the Subject field with the subject you want this email to have.
14. In the Send it in field, type the number of days you want to wait before sending this message.
15. In the Message editor, create your message.
16. Click Create.
17. To create additional emails for this Auto Responder, click Add a new email, and then repeat steps 11 – 16.

That’s all there is to it! Ofuz contacts that are tagged with the tag assigned to your new Auto Responder will automatically receive personalized emails at the intervals you’ve chosen. You can really save yourself some time by combining the Ofuz Web Form feature with the Auto Responder feature.

Thanks for tuning in, and be sure to get a free Ofuz account to take advantage of over 90 enhancements, just released in Ofuz 0.5.8!

We’re excited to announce a new version of Ofuz that includes almost 100 changes, new features, improvements, and bug fixes.

We listen to our users, and your feedback really drives our development. In this release of Ofuz, about 90% of the changes are directly based on your feedback. Please keep the feedback coming!

Some of the new features include:

• Taxes on Invoices (global and per line)
• PDF invoices can be downloaded from Ofuz and sent by email
• Payments can be applied to multiple invoices
• Client view includes a list of all the invoices due
• Auto Responders allow you to create a series of email templates and attach to a tag
• View all your invoices for the year by default instead of Month by Month
• Update the invoices status, so you can manually set an invoice as Sent
• Cancel invoices and delete proposals
• Copy a note, file or document from a contact to a project
• Attached Tasks to Contact and Project
• Notes can now contain some HTML tags
• View Tasks grouped by projects

Private client link with invoice view and online payment

We are very exited about this new release as we have now reached feature parity most of our competitors in the Online Invoicing space. Remember that Ofuz does invoicing and has powerful contact management, group emailing, and task management features!

We are now getting closer to our next major release, Ofuz 0.6. That release will be available as a web-based application at Ofuz.com and as an Open Source download.

Stay tuned, and if you haven’t already, sign up for a free Ofuz account now.

Timesheets made their official appearance in Ofuz a few weeks back.

We’ve been playing around with the concept for some time. So today we decided to release the first draft of what will become a powerful time management application.

In this first version we’re covering:

• Tracking your time on a contact or client.
• Tracking time on tasks in a project.
• Viewing your and your co-workers’ daily work logs,  notes, and time recorded.
• Total time for all client & project tasks, weekly or monthly.

Online time tracking, time management, and timesheets are wide subjects so the goal of this initial version is to offer very simple, non-intrusive features to cover as much usage as possible. They are tons of good reasons to track your time and no reason for not doing it. Time is the most precious resource we have.

Homer Every Day from Noah K. on Vimeo.

Time tends to just pass, so tracking time is a good start. But being able to come back and review what was done during the recorded time is precious.

So we attached a time entry section to notes. You can add a note to a Contact or in a Project discussion, and using that note you can enter an amount of time, in hours, related to the time spent.

The idea is to not only track time but to be able to come back to it and see, “where did my time go?”

I often have that feeling that the day just flies by and at the end I get this frustration of not having done anything.

So I keep a record of all my activity throughout the day. For each client or task I work on, I enter a short description of what I did along with the number of hours I spent doing it.

This creates a kind of work log that’s very useful. If I go in my Dashboard and click “Notes & Discussion” I can view all the daily activity like a chronological journal of the day’s events.

If I share project or contacts with my coworkers, I can also see their activity on those contact and projects.

Daily work log of project discussions and contact notes

To get a total of all the time spent by contact, I click on the Timesheet tab where I can filter by Month or Week.

It will display all the time I’ve recorded and all the time recorded by my co-workers on the projects and contacts we share.

Monthly Timesheet

Timesheets are used to record time you spend on a contact or on tasks in a project.

To record some time you spent on a contact or  in a project task discussion, start by adding a note and click on the ” More Options” link.

Expend the Notes options

It will pop up a long list of options associated with your note including the Hours Worked.

Record time in the Hours Worked field

Type the hours with a short summary or note related to those hours entered as a reference.

It works the same way on project discussion notes. For each note you can add time and adjust that time when you edit the discussion.

With the hundreds of beta users and thousands of contacts added during beta1, things were getting slow when managing contacts.

The search and tag selection were especially below the acceptable threshold.

So first we built a full Javascript user interface using Google Gears that’s as fast as a desktop application. It also allows you to view your contacts when offline; this will be the base for the future Ofuz Desktop.

To enable Google Gears to manage your Ofuz contacts, go into Settings, choose the Google Gears tab, and then turn it on.

But Gears is not yet available for everyone — like on my Linux 64b desktop.

Then, last week we rewrote the standard web-based version of the contact management section. This added infinite scrolling, so it’s a great performance feature. It initially loads just the first 50 contacts and as you scroll down it loads more contacts until it reaches the end.

Lastly, we moved Ofuz to new hardware servers in a new cloud environment based on Open Source technologies. The result is a 10x performance improvement in Ofuz contact management. Now, even with thousands of contacts the user interface is extremely responsive.

Give us your feedback and let us know how fast it runs for you.

We are on the final sprint for Ofuz 0.4

The 0.4 tasks are now frozen, and all new requests and minor bug fixes will go into Ofuz 0.5

Even if we still have about 40 tasks & bugs to implement, there is a good chance that Ofuz 0.4 will be released this month.

Even if we have been adding tons of small improvements and features for the past 3 months, we have 3 major features that will go live this month:

Google Gears support

It’s a free and open source add-on created and donated by Google that you install in your web browser, like the flash plug-in.

Once installed, the application can then be used off-line.

The contact search using Google Gears is super super fast, with 2,000 contacts in an instant. For 0.4 we have implemented it as a proof of concept in the Contact management section. It’s totally usable, so if you guys like it we will extend it to additional parts of Ofuz.

Google contact Sync

This means importing and exporting your contacts from Gmail to Ofuz and Ofuz to Gmail.

For now the sync is not automated; you have to go in settings->sync and click Google to import and export contacts to Google.

We did this because some may not want all of their Ofuz contacts in gmail or do not want all of their gmail contacts in Ofuz.

So you still have a choice. Based on your feedback we will adjust this.

Invoicing

This is the last piece. Ofuz was initially designed to cover all the business customer relations needs from start to finish.

- Find customers by organizing your address book and working your network
- Get things done in collaboration with project management.
- Get paid

Now the “get paid” part will be in Ofuz 0.4. It was originally planned to be in Ofuz 0.5, but due to popular demand we created a initial basic version for Ofuz 0.4

In this initial version of the Invoicing we have implemented the following features:

- Create invoices
- Internationalization (currency, number formating)
- Manage payments
- Customers can view invoices online
- Online payment with Paypal or Authorize net

In 0.5 we will add:

- Recurring invoices
- Invoices attached in PDF
- Taxes
- Auto Alert on past due invoices.

I’ll give you more details on the other 40 tasks later this month…

Thanks to all the beta users for their feedback during Ofuz 0.3

This is the new feature of the day. We just added a new drop box for projects.

Now each project is associated with an email address; if you send a message to that email address it will automatically create a new task in that Project.

The project drop box email address is on the bottom left of the Project page. See the screen shot.

If you’ve never used a drop box, you may wonder what those weird email addresses are everywhere.

They are email addresses to send content to Ofuz — can be a note on a contact, task, project task or task discussion.

If you have an open project you are actively working on and want to stay on top of it, even if you are not in front of a computer, then the drop box becomes handy. To begin, just add the project drop box to your address book. For example, create newtask-17@ofuz.net with a name like Project x51.  Then, any time you think of a task for that project, just send an email to that address. It can be from your smart phone, public web mail or your email client; perhaps because you don’t want to open Ofuz.net just for adding one task.

If you have not used drop-boxes yet, try it. In your settings page you will find one area to add new tasks and one to add a note to a contacts.

Regarding the one to add notes — if you add it to your auto Bcc it will put a copy of all the emails you send attached to the appropriate contact.

Have fun, let us know what you think.