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.

Ofuz is Software as a Service that covers the full business cycle, from getting customers up to getting paid, all in a very easy to use and clean user interface.

Ofuz is composed of 4 main applications: Contact management, Task and todo manager, Project management, and Invoicing, with must-have features for all small businesses such as email marketing, file & document exchange, drop box emails, web forms, contact synchronization, time-sheets, off-line support and social network integration.

Ofuz is focused on customer relations and communication with a minimalist user interface so every feature can be understood instantly.

“Over the past 10 years we’ve collected all the needs from our small business customers, who were frustrated by not finding an Open Source package that answers those needs in a single package. We decided to build it. Today we have a fully working base that works great for us and our 200+ beta testers” says Philippe Lewicki, CEO.

“This release is the first step towards our open source strategy. The current version of Ofuz will be the base for a much larger Open Source project. With a standardized User Interface and a simple Plug-In API, developers will be able to expand Ofuz and customize Ofuz to adapt it to all types of small businesses. Our goal is to do for the business application what Drupal & WordPress did to the CMS and blogging world” continues Lewicki.

Ofuz is a fully usable application open to all small business looking to get control of their leads, todos, documents, and payments.

About Ofuz
Ofuz ( http://www.ofuz.com ) is a startup based in Los Angeles, CA.
It is funded ($250,000) and created by SQLFusion ( http://www.sqlfusion.com/ ) an Open Source support, software development and incubator company based in Southern California. Created in 2003, SQLFusion also developed MailFusion, FormFusion, Open Source Fusion, Drag Drop Sitecreator, Radria, Mashtweet and YogaGlo.

Once set up, when working on a lead, prospect or even a client, you will have all your associated notes and emails in one central  location.

Previously, to add a note in Ofuz you needed to type it in or copy and paste text. To make this simpler for email messages that you send and want to keep in Ofuz, we’ve implemented a drop box.

A drop box is a special email address that’s generated only for you. You can then use that email address in all of your email messages as a CC or BCC to keep a copy of your emails in Ofuz.

Ofuz will automatically detect to whom you are sending the message and then attach your email to that contact.

If that contact doesn’t exist it will be created and the email message attached to it.

This makes life much simpler – as we are working a lot with emails, it’s convenient to be able to create new contacts or organize your email messages without having to open another application.

You can find the Add Note drop box in Settings → add note drop box.

http://www.ofuz.net/drop_box_note.php

Email address to add notes in offuz

Ofuz drop boxes are like normal email addresses.

In the example below, I use my drop box to add a message I sent to Abhik via Ofuz.

As seen above, I’ve added the add note drop box as a BCC. Doing so will add a copy of the email as a Note on Abhik’s contact page in Ofuz.

Add the BCC to new emails and the emails you reply to, and you will be able to keep a pretty accurate copy of your conversations.

If the contact doesn’t exist in Ofuz, it will be created and then your email will also be added as a Note.

This is a feature that I use a lot because it enables me to find past conversations and information in a Contact-centric manner.

I didn’t want to have to add a drop box for each email I wrote, so I used a feature of my email software that will automatically add the add-note drop box email address as a BCC to all the emails I send.

To enable this in Mozilla Thunderbird, go in Edit -> Accounts -> Copies & Folders  then check the box “Bcc these email addresses” and enter your add note drop box.

This setting  will add a copy of all the messages sent and attached it to the  contacts in Ofuz.

Some email software like Gmail will also allow you to add a copy of all the email you receive.

In Gmail, go to Settings -> Forwarding / POP3/IMAP, and then in “Forward a copy of incoming email to”, enter your add note drop box.

You can also adjust this with filters and only add specific email messages to Ofuz.

That’s all on this feature.

To summarize, the add-note drop box can be found in your Ofuz settings in the Note Drop box tab.

It can then be used when you send emails to keep a copy of that email in Ofuz.

You see, Ofuz has an approach to project management that’s very much oriented around discussions.

For us, managing a project is primarily about communication and secondly about metrics. Most of the project management software I’ve personally used in the past were mainly metrics oriented: hour per hour estimates, hourly rates, time line Gantt charts… Those are very cool features but most of the time they get in the way of doing the real work, which is communication.

So in Ofuz, projects are firstly a discussion with everybody involved in the project and secondly about metrics (yes, we have them, but it will be the topic of a future blog post)

In Ofuz, the project tasks have a flow of discussion; to make sure we do not miss anything it’s integrated with emails. So each new comment in a Tasks discussion sends an email to all of the project’s participants. The discussion can then continue with emails – if one of the participant does a Reply All, that email response will also be added to the Tasks discussion.

The result are very well documented tasks, with all the details, progress, and changes that are happening. Yet, it can also be overwhelming.

If you want to get the attention of a particular participant, you can address the discussion note to him.

Thus, we created a special notation. For twitter users it will look familiar: it’s @firstname or @lastname.

If you nudge a participant, s/he will receive a special email alert that is different than the regular tasks discussion alert.

It starts with: {Ofuz:Nudge}

The participant will receive it even if they have the email alert discussion turned off.

Inspired by the twitter notation, we felt that the “nudge” enables quick internal dialogue within a project discussion, limiting the message overload.

That’s all for today…

Let us know what you think.  Are you using the feature the same way we do ?

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.

For your email marketing strategy to be efficient, it’s important to send the right message to the right person. The best way to do this is to organize your contacts by category, and then send personalized emails to each of those categories.

In Ofuz we call these categories Tags. They can be used as a category or list and are very flexible, and you can apply as many tags as you want with a contact.

Click on a contact’s name (below, see an example of a contact with Tags):

Now click on the Edit tags or Add tags link, and it will change to:

Here you can remove tags or add new ones. For example, I am adding the tag “new product info” to this contact to send him information and news about our products.

Once you have attached different tags to your contacts you can send a personalized email message to all of the contacts with a specific tag.

Ofuz email sending capabilities are simple but quite powerful. You can send personalized messages by first name and last name to as many contacts as you want, and create and reuse email templates in HTML with rich text formating. A cool feature unique to Ofuz is that you can send Facebook notifications for Facebook friends without email addresses.

To send a message to multiple contacts, go in the Contacts tab and click on a tag that contains the contact you want to send a message to.

Then click in the white part of a contact line. See the screen shot:

Select a contact

It will highlight the contact line in yellow and open a menu of options. Click the same way on all the contacts you want to send the message to.

If you want to select all of your contacts, click on the select all link.

Then click on the send message button and it will open the message composer.

Create an email message or customize an email template

You can see in this example the [firstname] placeholder that will be merged with each contact’s first name.

On the top right you have a drop down that may be empty at first; it’s all the messages you have saved as templates.

You can manage your email templates in Account Settings → Email Templates.

Just below the template list you have another drop down with a list of “fields”. Select one of them and it will add a special code in your email message that will be replaced by the contact equivalent.

For example, add first name and it will add this weird [firstname] code. Place it anywhere you want, and when you send your message it will replace that code with your contact’s First Name.

If you are not ready to send the message yet you can save it as a draft and come back later to finish it.

If it’s an important message that you plan to send to a lot of users, it’s better to first test it. To do that, save the message as draft, go into Contacts and select yourself, and then send the message to your self.

Once you are satisfied with the result, send the message to your appropriate list.

After implementing a few hundred changes and features, and fixing tons of bugs, we now have a great version of Ofuz, fully working, and closer everyday to being fully stable.

If you want an invite to test Ofuz, fill in the form below:

The major new features are Invoicing, Google gear integration for performance and an off-line address book, and Google contact sync to synchronize your gmail contacts and Android phone contacts with Ofuz.

For more details on the new features, read the next post below

We have some new servers being configured for next week so we can accept a few thousand additional beta testers.

Thanks to everybody on this great new release.

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

It was a 5 minutes presentation so I concentrated on the main features.
Here are the slides:

We have keyboard short cuts to get to some parts of ofuz faster.

At any time you can type:

CTRL+ALT+ N = Add a new contact

CTRL+ALT+ C = List all the contacts

CTRL+ALT+ P = List the projects

CTRL+ALT+ T = List the Tasks