iDashboard Real Estate Software – May’s release is here and it is a big one!

This month we focused on developing new components for iDashboard based on our agent and user feedback. Included in this months release are some big new core components along with multiple minor changes to help with your everyday work flow.

In addition to the below changes we will be rolling out a few more posts later in the week that focus and elaborate more on the larger components of this release.

What’s New?

• Mini Group Email Alerts
• Image captions
• Property feed to Allhomes.com.au is now available
• Splash Display Property Feed
• Action Plans for Rentals & different Sale Types

More things that help you!

New merge fields – We have two new fields on contacts in iDashboard, Letter Greeting and Envelope Greeting, which are also available for use in the document library as merge fields. These fields are great to personalise letters and envelopes further with items such as ‘Dear Jane and Joe,’ for the letter greeting and ‘Mr & Mrs J Doe’ as an envelope greeting.

General compositions – A note is now lodged against your contact’s activity tab when they are included as a recipient on a general composition. This will help you gain a better understanding of what is being sent to your contacts, all in one place on the activity tab.

Permission to publish – A new permission is now available on Roles that allows you to stop users from modifying the publishing settings of a property. This is great for offices that want to allow a user or agent to fully populate the listing, however then have a quality review step in place prior to the property being published to the internet by a user with appropriate permissions.

Administrators group lockdown – Accidents will happen, and in the past we have found a couple of users have accidentally removed their Administrators group or removed super access from the group, preventing them from changing key settings in their accounts. For this reason the Administrators group is now permanently set, so you will not be able to accidentally lock yourself out of modifying your account settings.

Permission to reorder – Only Administrators (and super users) may now reorder the employees list and tick/untick the ‘On Website?’ check box.

Fully furnished – We now send out the Fully Furnished tag to the third party portals that support it.

Further Improvements

Faster facebook and twitter – We introduced a Facebook Like and Twitter Tweet button in our last release, however the nature of the components from Twitter and Facebook meant that it was slow to load – too slow for our liking. So we have implemented new Facebook and Twitter icons that appear almost instantly when you load the Real Estate tab in iDashboard.

Fewer merge errors – RTF documents are really simple, however when you create your rft documents for our merge feature they can sometimes develope oddities that don’t work with most merge systems, including iDashboard. Now that our document library has been operating for over 4 months we have been able to review the most common errors and allow for them, meaning fewer errors and more merges first time.

Market watch searching – When searching through the market watch, and you opt to sort by Street Name the properties now sort by Unit/Street number too.

Commissions error – After copying some properties, a warning message would appear saying the commissions are invalid. The error message itself was invalid and was appearing when there really wasn’t an error at all.

Improved upload delay times – iDashboard uploads property updates instantly to most major portals, with the exception of HomeHound which is overnight. The delay time on each property is the time it takes for the portal, such as Realestate or Domain, to process the update and respond back saying it was successful. Improvements to our algorithm to calculate this time means that the time is now more accurate.

Faster outgoing feeds screen – For the tech savvy the Outgoing feeds screen in the Admin tab provides you with insight to exactly what property updates and what data is being sent to your own website and the major portals, along with any errors that may have occured. Since launching the new xml feeds system in April 2010 we have processed over 30 million property updates to agencies website and the portals. This is a LOT of data and was slowing the screen down a little bit, so these speed improvements will help us provide the data you need and want faster.

Stay tuned for more…

That’s it for this release – we hope you enjoy it! If you are not currently using iDashboard but are impressed with the ongoing updates and features we add – be sure to read more about our real estate software or give us a call on 03 9328 5455.