This weekend we are releasing our March 2012 release. Here's a quick preview.

Heres a bit more information:

Ad-hoc Reporting: 

• includes project directory businesses and contacts. Ad-hoc reports may be filtered, grouped or sorted by business, discipline, contact and their job.
• includes the Location & Design Attributes custom field expansion.
• includes the Project Classification custom field expansion.
• apply sorting independent of grouping.

Location Master:

• location master: 200 custom fields including the addition of multi-select fields.
• project classification: 100 custom fields including the addition of multi-select fields.

Photo Library:

• upgrades user interface to eliminate pop-ups.
• upgrades user interface to increase usability on touch devices.
• upgrades user interface to integrate selection of thumbnails and view of detail photo onto single page.
• decreases page load times for photo library lists and photos.
• download all photos as single PDF document.
• upload photos to existing or new libraries via email.

Document Uploads Via Email:

• email single or multiple file attachments directly to project folders.
• upload of new versions of existing files with auto-matching

Photo Library Uploads Via Email

• email single or multiple photos directly to photo slideshows.
• create new photo slideshows via email photo attachments.
• support upload of embedded photos in email from iOS devices.

Email Archive and Discovery

• archive emails by project on any outgoing or incoming message.
• simply include one or more archive email address.
• capture the email thread as a single file with multiple versions.
• easily access all email threads within the document folder structure or fully-indexed search.
• protect email archives with flexible security.
• download entire email archive as a single ZIP file.

Various Updates

• IE9: photo library thumbnails now render
• Project Documents: user alerted when changing permissions and remove their own access
• Project Directory: v-card download now includes Country and Postal Code.

In this next video we show how easy it is to update an existing report to meet the needs of your team members. In less then three minutes we take an existing report, add a project count, add columns, rework the grouping by quarter, save as and export the results to excel.

Easily access and manage your real estate development program via the cloud. As my eight year old says. "Easy Peasy"

Visit our Youtube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/sitefolio

Tablets take off in real estate development: link >>

"When Paul Ozinga arrives on the jobsite, it doesn't take long for a small crowd of construction workers, superintendents and managers to gather around him. Their excitement isn't because he is bringing lunch or paychecks. It is for his iPad."

Back in 2009 site|folio released support for all major web browsers. This decision required a redesign of the user interface and 6 months to execute. We bet that mobile devices would standardize on a single web standard known as HTML5. We looked to provide a quick rendering, highly responsive HTML5 compliant experience for our users across our entire solution. By achieving these goals our solution provides an experience that is not only accessible in major web browsers but across an array of major mobile devices.

Every new feature and effort is designed with compatibility in mind. The industry expects a fully-functional experience across a myriad of devices.

We will meet that need.

How many emails do you send each day.  Dozens?  Hundreds?  You know they’re important, but there’s a good chance some of them get ignored in overstuffed Inboxes, especially the automated variety.  Our automated emails make notifying your team really easy - and sometimes even automated. We allow you to quickly select recipients, add to the body of the email, and include relevant links and attachments. 

In our most recent release we included an enhancement that is simple but powerful - custom subject lines.  Whether your using site|folio to send a folder update, a date change, or a request for information, the ability to also personalize the subject lines will ensure your automated emails get the attention they deserve.  This request comes straight from our clients - and we were happy to oblige.

In the past a notification subject line might have looked like this: ‘Notification: RFI 0005 Tenant Improvement Regency Mall’’ -- and it might have gotten lost in the shuffle.  Now, before sending, you can append a subject line.  Add ‘IMPORTANT!’ or ‘Please read tonight’ to make sure your email gets the attention it deserves.

Now our clients can have confidence their message gets through.

Our Location Master Edition is a big differentiator.  It is included in each Edition we offer and glues everything together for our clients. By tying your projects back to a location our clients easily reference any relevant location data.  This straightforward approach models your portfolio of locations, reduces duplication, and increases accuracy.

Sometimes the simplest things are the most powerful:

One client was ecstatic: the days of digging through the file cabinets for random requests were over!  Everyone in the company instantly accesses accurate square footages by simply searching for that store location or running any number of user-created reports, leaving this group to focus on the more critical aspects of their job descriptions.

Another client couldn’t believe the amount stress caused by different departmental reports having different names for the different locations and projects.  The amount of time it took to simply coordinate location and project names was depressing.  And tedious.  Until they used site|folio, which allowed project name changes to immediately be reflected in reporting across all departments.  No more confusion.

These are just a few examples of how organizing your real estate processes around a portfolio of locations could help you take advantage of the simpler and powerful things site|folio has to offer. In the future we’ll outline Location Master a bit more, see how it can be adapted to your needs and how powerful it is paired up with Document Collaboration, Master Scheduling, Project Administration, Capital Budgeting, and Leasing.

In the meantime, let's keep making things simpler.

We recently heard from customers who wanted a personalized list of action items and milestones to complete sitefolio’s dashboard.  Great idea!  We ran with it and came up with ‘My Actions’, which will be live next Friday.

With ‘My Actions’ customers will be able to view items, filter them by alert type, and adjust their durations (completed, overdue, coming up, in progress).  Need to see what slipped?  Need to see what’s coming up in the next 10 days?  Need to see what was completed in the last five days?  No problem with ‘My Actions’.  Being able to quickly navigate through what just got done, what needs your immediate attention, and what’s on the radar will make our customers’ lives easier. 

Customers also wanted the ability to view different sets of projects when searching action items.  ‘My Actions’ will have this covered as well by allowing users to change the set of projects you are referencing.  Working in a collaborative environment means focusing on yourself and everyone else on your team.  Knowing if a task has been completed by a peer, direct report, or consultant allows you to plan and adjust accordingly.

We hope ‘My Action’ adds a few extra minutes to your day.  Let us know.

Clients tell us that sitefolio’s scheduling feature has revolutionized the way they work by centralizing milestones, tasks, and dates in a single online source.

Now we’re taking scheduling a step further with the launch of expanded, multi-format real-time Portoflio Gantt charts, or specialized bar charts that illustrate the critical dates of various elements of projects – like a store remodel – and highlight progress made toward its completion.  Single projects or a full portfolio of projects can now be instantly translated into tailored Gantt views for distribution, either to executives, department heads, or project managers.

Our clients asked us to help them instantly produce multiple uniquely formatted Gantt charts leveraging the underling centralized scheduling data in site|folio. The first was an Executive Portfolio Gantt consisting of 6 critical milestones – displaying the baseline, project and actual dates across all project types. The second format was an Executive Project Gantt which drills into schedules at an even more detailed level displaying the main 5 phases of the project against the baseline. The third is an all-out, no-holds barred Project Level Gantt displaying all milestones. Three critical formats produced instantly with the flexibility to add any new Gantt formats as needed. 

They are thrilled from the gained efficiency and standardization – not to mention exporting any of this to MS Project in a single click.

If you are still using MS Project or Excel Workbooks for scheduling - I suggest you take a look at how site|folio can save you countless hours. We would love to help!

This image shows an example of an Executive Portfolio Gantt focused format integrated into our real-time reporting engine.

A site|folio client’s accounting department needed to produce a report comparing stores on a square footage basis - "NOW!".  Not a problem with site|folio’s attribute tracking capability, which easily centralizes detailed information on individual stores, and our easy to use ad-hoc report writer.   The real estate team was able to produce, in a couple of minutes, a portfolio view of all square footage, grouped by size, across their stores.  Nice!

How do I know this?  Because the client called to tell me.  A simple task that used to take hours now took minutes. This is the very best part of my job, listening to the success stories of the people we work with, learning about how site|folio turns potentially bad situations good. It makes me proud of our product and what we’re trying to accomplish.