Exciting developments at Moobiz

Posted by Wes Hooper on 10th February 2011 in Features

We’ve just updated Moobiz, to reflect a big change in our business focus. Read on to see why we’re doing this, and exactly what’s involved ...

Moobiz comes first

Moobiz grew out of a web design agency. As Moobiz evolved, it didn't really fit any more and was starting to get held back. That's fixed. Moobiz Ltd is now an independent company with the focus, freedom and resources to make Moobiz great.

Focused on Business Management

We want to build the best business management app. Not your website. Therefore, the website management features have gone. Very few of you used these and we've helped move customers that did. Instead, you can pull product data out of Moobiz, create invoices and collect payment notifications, but leave all the design, SEO, content management and other website tasks to your web designer.

API? We can do that.

If you've never heard of an API, please skip this bit! Probably one of our most requested features and something we've had bits and pieces of for a while. We've now started to make an official API available for testing, and as you'd imagine, it's dead simple.

For example, if you're viewing a Person in Moobiz, type .vcf in the address bar after the number and you'll get a VCard. Or type .jpg for their photo and so on. Want to create a Contact in your Moobiz from your website or use PayPal to notify Moobiz when an invoice has been paid? No problem. Full details coming soon.

Analytics

We've long had a great way to show information about your website visitors through Moobiz. It's handy to see it all in the one place and so, of course, we're keeping this feature. What's changing is we'll probably switch over to using Google Analytics data instead of gathering it ourselves. We built our visitor tracking when we were part of a web design agency and before Google Analytics became what is now generally considered to be the industry standard.

To be honest, Google can do a better job of analysing all that information. What we can do though, is display it to you in a simpler way, alongside the rest of your business information.

Right now, you can add your Google Analytics account into Moobiz. We'll keep our own system in place for the time being until we've got the Google one doing everything we want and everyone has migrated, but our current plan is to no longer develop our own system.

Intranet news

Using Moobiz as an intranet makes sense, but one thing missing was the ability to share news within your business. You can now add simple stories and they'll show up on your dashboard for everyone to see. If you previously had a Moobiz website, we've copied any news articles here.

The knowledge

FAQ's, employee manuals, documentation, wikis, knowledge bases … Whatever you call them, most businesses have information they need to keep somewhere and share with employees, or perhaps even customers.

Moobiz now has a place to store these. You can link them to Projects, simply tag them, or even grab a feed and pull them in as FAQs to your website if you're feeling clever! If you previously had a Moobiz website, we've copied your FAQs here, and beta testers who'd been playing with Wiki Pages will find these migrated here too.

Email campaigns

Emailing a tagged group of Contacts has always been easy when you needed to send a quick message. If you wanted to use a more powerful marketing campaign with delivery reports, automated subscription management and so on, this was also available, but with an extra per-campaign cost.

You found that confusing and it wasn't much fun for our billing system either! We've simplified this so it fits with the rest of our subscription levels.

As of today, you can send campaigns to 500 addresses per month, included in your Moobiz subscription. If you need more one month, you'll automatically be billed for the appropriate subscription level.

In both cases, we always let you know if that'll happen. And the experience of creating and sending a campaign has been improved too.

Invoice payments

Moobiz can invoice your customers directly, but so far there's not been a way for them to pay you online and have that invoice status updated automatically. We've built this functionality now, and are using it ourselves with PayPoint, and testing it with PayPal.

We hope to add other Payment Service Providers in the future - let us know which one you'd like next!

Sharing your email

And finally, coming very soon is the ability to pull in your email (IMAP or Gmail) with automatic linking to your Contacts, tagging to Projects and sharing with others in your business.

Communication is key to any great business, so storing emails about a project in just your inbox simply doesn't make sense if you're working in a team.

So we've come up with something a bit different and built a tool that works with email, so that you can work more effectively with it rather than having to work around it! We already use this ourselves every day and it is close to becoming our most used Moobiz feature. If you're interested in helping with our final testing and in trying it out, get in touch!

Time for your feedback

So, this is where we're going. Lots still to do, but Moobiz is now less about trying to do everything and more about being your central business hub, where everything you need seamlessly comes together. If you have any thoughts or suggestions on our new direction, why not contact us.