Search in Messages and Documents has been redesigned. This is a first step to a series of new features that will be available in a near future. The “contains” criterion replaces the “all text fields” option. If you want to narrow your search, you can use other criteria such as document name or last modification date in Documents, or sender or subject in Messages. You can use the * character to search on words starting with the letters you entered. Example: “contactof” for “contactoffice”. You can’t use the * character in the first four positions because this would create too wide queries. Example: you can enter “conta” but not “co*”.

Overview of pending meeting invitations You receive meeting invitations from ContactOffice users and then accept or refuse them. As these invitations are sent by e-mail, you might forget to handle them. The list of pending meeting invitations is now displayed in your private calendar, in the “Invitations” section. Meetings occurring in the past are not displayed though.

Free, busy, tentative and of out of office Each event now has availability options:

Free: This means you are still available, despite the event. For instance, you have created an event to remind you that an item will be delivered between 2 and 4 but you are not actually busy waiting for it and unable to do something else. “Free” is the default status for “all day” events because you are at work although it is John’s birthday (or even yours). Busy: This is the default status for normal events, meaning that you are actually busy because of this event. Tentative: This status is for unconfirmed reservations in your calendar. Meetings invitations that you haven’t accepted (or refused) yet appear with a tentative status; when you accept them, they switch to the busy status. Use the Tentative status when you create an event which is not sure yet. Out of office: This status means you can’t accept events because you are not at the office, for professional or personal reasons. If you want a day off because it’s your birthday, create an all-day event and apply this status, instead of the default status (which is “Free”, as explained before).

You can change the availability status of any of your events by editing its properties. You can’t change the status for layered external calendars though. These options are standards. You will find them in third-party software, such as Microsoft Outlook. Note that Apple iCal only supports 2 of them: Free and Busy. In next releases, we will improve the display of events according to the availability status.

Quotas moved to the Account menu Quotas are now located in the Account menu, which now appears in every tool. You can view the Quotas for your private environment as well as for each group you belong to.

Here are the release notes for Advanced interface version 1.8.001, currently available on ContactOffice servers. “Quit” button now appears on the right The “Quit” button has not disappeared, you will find it on the right, in last position.

Use this button to leave your virtual office in a secure way: just closing the browser window does not end your session. Lighter menu bar Because some features are not used every day (such as Preferences and Filters for Messaging for instance), we grouped these in a new menu bar item called “More”. Just click on it to display its contents.

Messages: bye bye winmail.dat files Some Microsoft Exchange servers or Outlook clients send e-mails in a proprietary format. In this case, you get the message contents in a “winmail.dat” attachment that you can’t read. ContactOffice now converts such files and display their contents immediately. Other improvements:

Messages: Printing problems with Internet Explorer are solved. Messages and Documents: In search results, you can now move or drag an item to the Trash. Calendar: When you refuse a meeting, the event window will now close automatically.

The SynchroExpress software synchronizes ContactOffice with your computer. Your computer can then synchronize with mobile devices. This way, you can synchronize ContactOffice with mobile devices. The latest SynchroExpress version (3.0 - build 3052) has been released and allows synchronizing ContactOffice with:

Outlook (all versions, including 2007) Devices running on Microsoft Mobile (via Outlook) Synchronize your mobile device with Outlook. Then, synchronize Outlook with ContactOffice. Apple iPhone (via Outlook) Choose “iPhone” when setting up Synchro Express. Then, set-up Apple iTunes so that it synchronizes your iPhone with Outlook. Unfortunately, it is not possible to synchronize with iTunes directly. BlackBerry (without Outlook) If not installed yet, install BlackBerry Desktop Software. Choose “BlackBerry” when setting up SynchroExpress. You don’t need Outlook to synchronise ContactOffice with your BlackBerry. Palm (without Outlook) If not installed yet, install Palm Desktop Manager. Choose “Palm” when setting up SynchroExpress.

Please note SynchroExpress is available for Windows only. The installer is Windows 7 compliant. To get this new version, log in your account and go to the Synchro page. Before installing it, read the documentation and limitations in the online help. In a few months, we will offer alternatives such as SyncML to synchronize :

with other platforms (Mac, Linux) “over-the-air” (ie. without connecting the mobile device to a computer, the device will be connecting directly to ContactOffice through the Internet).

Here are the release notes for Advanced interface versions 1.7.003 and 1.7.004, currently available on ContactOffice servers. Display most hours of the day in the Calendar We received feedback about the Advanced interface calendar displaying “less content” than its Classic interface counterpart: some events are not displayed in the visible part of the Calendar. Of course, you can display them by scrolling up and down. In other words, events taking place in the first or last hours of the day are not displayed immediately. This is because of the calendar grid resolution. The “60 minutes” option was lacking in the Advanced interface Calendar preferences and is now available. Using this setting, each calendar cell will cover an entire hour, whereas the default setting is 30 minutes. Take a look at the screenshots below. They belong to the same ContactOffice account. Calendar with 30 minutes grid resolution (default setting):

Calendar with 60 minutes grid resolution:

Improvements to the “Infos” tab “Infos” is a special tab that you can see just after logging in. It appears only if you belong to at least one group. Its purpose is to allow group administrators and co-administrators to display a message to group members. We’ve fixed a bug preventing the Infos content to appear when the account was member of a large number of groups. Besides, if a group has no Infos available, it is now completely hidden in the Infos tab in order to gain space.

More languages for Contacts The Advanced interface is available in English, French, Dutch and Portuguese. You can now select not yet translated languages (Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Finnish) when you create or edit Contacts. As system-generated e-mails (meetings and meeting polls invitations, reminders, etc.) are already translated, these contacts will get the e-mails in their own language.

CUME (Club des Utilisateurs de Micro-ordinateurs dans l’Education), founded in Rennes (FR) in 1984 is a computer users association which aims to gather people working in IT departments in schools and universities. The activities of CUME are oriented towards three main themes:

New hardware and software platforms (Windows, Unix, Linux) Educational use of networks, Internet, … Educational use of information technology and communication (multi-media, self-training, distance training, …)

On 19 and 20 january 2010 CUME organized a national day with the subject: “Outsourced Services” and invited big market players such as ContactOffice in order to present its Virtual Office solution to an interested public. The programme of the days can be found here. If you missed our presentation or if you simply want to see it again or save it, please visit slideshare: ContactOffice Presentation “journée CUME Externalisation de services” January 2010

View more presentations from pdeschutter.

Here are the release notes for Advanced interface versions 1.7.001 and 1.7.002, currently available on ContactOffice servers. Calendar: “Working week” view We added the Working week view, so that you can focus on week days (Monday to Friday). This view is also useful on smaller screens. Click on the new tab to activate this view. If you would like your Calendar to open automatically in Working week view, go to the Calendar Preferences and change the “Start page” preference to “Working week”. Moving a large number of items Drag and drop is fun but sometimes you need to move dozens, hundreds or even thousands of items. This version introduces a “Move” feature in Messages, Documents, Bookmarks and Notes. In Messages, you can easily clean up your Inbox by moving messages received before some date to an archive folder. You can also move selected items or all items from one folder to another. Maybe it’s a good idea to clean up your inbox (or sent items folder) a bit at the beginning of the year. Other improvements:

Meeting polls: as first improvement to our latest tool designed to easily find a date and time convenient for a series of participants, we added to possibility to send the invitation mail again, in case some participants would forget to answer your meeting poll. Messages: you could already choose the default font. You can now choose the default font size altogether. These two options make sense only for HTML messages. Calendar: optional confirmation for drag and drop. Activate this option in the Calendar Preferences if you would like to get a confirmation message each time you move an event with drag and drop. Groups: the members list now displays who is a group co-administrator. A group co-administrator helps the group administrator in the group rights management. For more details, see online help. The Fax and Synchro help pages were missing in the Advanced interface set of tools, although these features were still available.

Here are the release notes for Advanced interface version 1.6.008, currently available on ContactOffice servers. Automatic signature In the Messaging Preferences, you could already set a signature for each of your sender addresses. From now on, you can also activate an automatic signature. The appropriate signature will be automatically inserted at the bottom of all new e-mails, including replies and forwards. In case you select another sender address in the pull-down menu, the signature is automatically changed. If you would like to send a particular e-mail without your signature, select “Disable” from the “Signature menu”. If you have not activated the automatic signature, you can insert it anytime at the bottom of the message or at the cursor position. The latter possibility seems to be a ContactOffice exclusive. Other improvements:

Messaging: Hyperlinks in HTML messages are opened in a new window. Messaging: The e-mail window is now bigger. Messaging: When you answer an HTML e-mail, you can now enter your own content in the midst of the original text. Messaging: Filters using a size condition are now correctly saved. Note: the unit is the KB. So, if you want to create a filter for 5 MB or more messages, you have to enter the following value: 5120 (as 5 * 1024 = 5120). Calendar: many descriptions improvements: the full description is displayed in the event preview, the description is also displayed in day view and the long descriptions can be read by participants using Internet Explorer. Calendar: the layers are now ordered by name. Wiki: A Wiki page being a Document, you had to manage the Access rights from the Documents tool. Now, just select “Properties” from the “Edit” menu in the Wiki to display the Access rights immediately. Contacts: the autosuggest feature now takes a contact rename operation into account.

You can invite group members or external contacts (from your private addressbook or a group addressbook) to an existing event by selecting the “Participants” tab. This is the best method to collect RSVP’s (ie I will attend or not from participants). The meeting will automatically be displayed in the group members calendars. External contacts will get an e-mail with instructions and the event attached (.ics file). If you don’t need to manage RSVP’s, you can now select “Send by mail” in the event contextual menu and it will be sent as an iCalendar attachment (.ics file). The recipient will be able to import it into his favourite calendar software, which is probably ContactOffice! This new feature is available in the Advanced interface only.

Because a file is quite large or because some servers limit the size of incoming e-mails to a very low value, sometimes you just can’t e-mail a file to someone. In other cases, the recipient’s mailbox is almost full and won’t accept a large file… Instead of sending the Document in the e-mail itself, you can send it as an hyperlink by selecting “Document as hyperlink” from the “Attach” menu when you compose an e-mail. The recipient will have a few days to download it by clicking on the hyperlink and you will be notified when he does.

Alternatively, you can start in the Documents tool and select “Send as hyperlink” from a Document contexual menu (right click). This new feature is handy for large documents but you can use it with small ones as well. It is available for paying subscriptions in the Advanced interface.

Not easy to find a date when more than two people are involved! The meeting poll feature (aka “meeting maker”) allows you to gather participants votes on a selection of dates and times. It is much easier to find a schedule that is convenient for all or most participants.

Participants don’t have to own a virtual office account. However, they must be in a private or group addressbook because you will select them from there. Once the final date has been chosen, the meeting will appear in the virtual office calendar. This feature is automatically available for all subscriptions in the Advanced interface. However, the number of simultaneous polls, participants and dates depend on your subscription. To create a new meeting poll, select “Meeting poll” from the “New” menu.

ContactOffice is now a CalDAV server: you can read and write events from CalDAV software such as Mozilla Sunbird, Mozilla Lightning (a plug-in for Thunderbird), Apple iCal and also iCal on iPhone (version 3.0 is needed). Note: Microsoft Outlook 2007 has no CalDAV features. For other software, see http://caldav.calconnect.org/implementations/clients.html The settings depend on the software. Please log in your ContactOffice account and read online help for limitations and software settings. This new feature is automatically available for all ContactOffice accounts.

As announced in september, more languages are in the Pipeline. We are happy to announce that after French, English, Dutch, Spanish and Italian, ContactOffice now also is available in German. The entire application and commercial website has been translated and made avaible in the language of Goethe and Schiller. The http://www.contactoffice.de url has also been opened. This new language version has been released in order to answer to the increasing demand for our application in Germany and the german-speaking world. Willkommen ;-)

ContactOffice vision is to offer one central online storage place for all your personal data such as calendar, documents, contacts,… In line with cloud computing, we believe that there is an ever-increasing need to be able access one’s data from any computer or terminal (smartphone, PDA,…). People are on the move and have their data on different devices. That’s is why we have developped import and export modules for all our tools. We want our users to be able to as easily import their data from any tool as export them.
Our calendar for example can be accessed through different browsers, synchronised with outlook or PDA’s and smartphones. You can get notifications through SMS or RSS, you can access it via a calendar client in ICal on a personal URL, you can layer it with external calendars published in ICal and finally you can import or export it in iCal, vCal or a printable PDF file. Our contacts can be accessed through different browsers, synchronised with outlook or PDA’s and smartphones, imported from Outlook Express, Outlook 2000, Outlook 98, Outlook 97, vCard, LDIF (compatible with Netscape, Mozilla and Thunderbird), CSV. Finally you can export it to vCard for Outlook (Hey, they have their own vCard standard??? ;-) ), vCard (standard) and CSV (comma seperated value). Our documents tools is even more amazing. Not only can you access all the documents in ContactOffice from your browser. You can also be notified through mail or RSS. In addition our document server is also a WebDAV server, which means you can access the documents through your file manager as if they were documents stored on a local file server. You can then just drag and drop them from your hard disk to the ContactOffice server via your local filemanager. Our documents are now also an FTP server allowing you to access them through an FTP client. Finally we developped both a webdav and just released a CIFS / SMB client. Users can now access locally stored documents (on a local file server) through the browser interface of ContactOffice when they are on the move. For more in depth information on the Webdav or the CIFS / SMB protocol follow the links to wikipedia.
More about our attachment to standards and access modes in a following post.

We are happy to announce that after French, English, Dutch and Spanish, ContactOffice now also is available in Italian. The entire application and commercial website has been translated and made avaible in the language of Dante.
The http://www.contactoffice.it url has also been opened. This new language version has been released in order to answer to increasing demand for our application in Italy and has been developed in collaboration with a first private lable customer and reseller based in Rome. More languages are in the pipeline ;-)

Our new beta interface based on Ajax technology keeps on improving and is looking oh so slick. One of the recent novelties is the possibility to create multiple signatures for your email. This allows you to have a signature for each emailaddress that you use.
In addition you can now use a rich text editor in order to give a layout to your signatures. Check it out.

ContactOffice has just released in beta an integration of the Zoho tools including Writer, Sheet and Show. They are Web-based tools and allow you to create, edit, and access your spreadsheets, docs and presentations files from anywhere without the need of having these applications installed on your pc. All documents edited by these tools remain stored in your environement. For traditional interface users, just click on ‘Actions’ near a document and then ‘Edit’. For the advanced interface users (aka beta interface), right click on a .doc, .xls or .ppt document and select ‘Edit with Zoho’. Note : this feature is only offered to paying subscribers. Enjoy.

Having problems with a shared document that is in a format that you cannot open. Or… are you on a machine that does not have the right software to open a specific document of yours? Well as from now you can use our .PDF converter in the documents tool. You just need to ‘click right’ on a document that you would like to open and choose the function ‘View as PDF’. Your document will be converted to an Acrobat (.pdf) file. The following formats are being supported: “doc”, “txt”, “rtf”, “ppt”, “xls”, “odt”, “sxw”, “ods”, “sxc”, “csv”, “odp”, “sxi” Attention: This function is available for paying subscriptions only and must be accessed through the new Ajax interface. Enjoy ;-)