Another two busy weeks have passed and here’s what we’ve done to further enhance our products.

Please note these changes will not take effect until Wednesday, August 24th, 2011, 8:30PM EST. 

As always, all listed updates have undergone a rigorous quality control process before we’ve sent them into production. In case you notice any disruptions, please let us know and we will take fast, appropriate action to ensure system stability.  Thank you!

API

• We added a new API to retrieve all Proposals.  It includes the fields: Name, Description, creation date, Creator, Status and Score

WEBSTORM

Facebook App

• We fixed a tiny issue to make sure the profile pictures for posted comments in the Facebook app are displayed correctly.

WEBSTORM ADMIN

Ideas Site Plugin

• If a user is not yet logged in to the Brightidea system when submitting an idea through the Ideas Site Plugin, any attachments to this idea will be saved on the user’s local computer, not on the Brightidea server. For security reasons, attachments will only be saved on the Brightidea server once the user is logged in.

SWITCHBOARD

We continue to enhance Switchboard, our proposal development and evaluation tool, increasing usability, effectiveness, and intuitiveness.

Proposals

• A great new enhancement in Switchboard now lets users cycle through the proposals of a round by simply clicking on the “up” or “down” arrow in the upper right corner of the screen.

• Introducing: the Proposal ID. Available by default, a unique proposal code (P___) will be assigned to all proposals for enhanced proposal management.
• We also added the ability to filter proposals by date.
• Proposal template improvement: If an idea submission form (in WebStorm) asks for additional information, these additional questions will now be captured in the proposal template. For a seamless transition between idea and proposal, the answers to the additional questions of each idea will be automatically displayed in the proposal view.
• The word “Proposal” was made a label everywhere to offer more flexibility. It can now be changed into “Concept” for example.
• Proposal Versioning has been enhanced to provide better clarity and documentation:

»         We enhanced the version numbering to be more detailed and exact. The proposal version numbers will always be exposed to the user when viewing proposals.

»         The date version now displays the time since the version was saved (e.g. 2 days ago, or 5 seconds ago).

»         We locked the proposal version to the related evaluation. Now, when an evaluator clicks on an action item, he/she will be taken to the version at the time the evaluation action item was created. The correct version will be displayed to the evaluator to avoid confusion.

Scorecards

• We added the ability to remove an assigned scorecard from a round or make changes to it.
• To clarify which proposal version is being evaluated, we added the version numbers to scorecard evaluations in Rounds and Collections (also see under “Proposals” in this release)
• For collections that have no proposals yet, the “Assign Round Scorecard” option was disabled.

PIPELINE

• Users can now filter projects in Pipeline by column (title, date, owner and more).

Hope you find the new enhancements useful. Contact us if you have any questions and stay tuned for more – our next release is scheduled for September 7^th.