The Nutshell Blog

It’s been 6 weeks since our exciting launch event in New York. Since then we’ve been talking with many of you, working with users trialling Nutshell, hiring more savvy people to answer our phones and most importantly: continuing to improve Nutshell with new features and a better user experience.

After a year of under-wraps development, it’s great to share new things as soon as we release them. We’ve been releasing updates to Nutshell on a weekly basis, and we’ll be sharing those highlights more often on this blog. Here’s what’s new.

Email BCC Integration

Nutshell has a hearty email storage and cross-referencing system at its core, but many of the email import features weren’t production-ready at launch time, so we tucked them away. Two weeks ago we released the first iteration for our own usage, and it’s currently being used by many of our early adopters.

As of today, any time you send an email to a contact or account, BCC it to bcc@nutshell.com and we’ll attach the message to the appropriate place. When you view a recipient in Nutshell, you’ll see all messages that have been sent to them.

We’ve got a lot of additional plans for this feature, including the ability to track internal emails you send regarding a lead, and to capture messages sent from a lead to you. Email is going to play a huge role in some of Nutshell’s upcoming features — watch this space!

HTTP POST API

We heard from many of our early adopters who were looking for a dead-simple way of adding leads to Nutshell without using our more powerful SOAP and JSON-RPC APIs. Many of these users were hosting forms on platforms where they were unable to run their own code, or were using third-party form managers like Wufoo.

We responded by building a POST API that allows you to create new leads, accounts and contacts with nothing more than a form post. After posting to our servers, we can redirect your leads to another page that you specify. Several of our early adopters are already using this API for simple web-to-lead forms on their own sites.

API Documentation

We’ve been hard at work building easy-to-use documentation on our APIs, including the brand new POST API. As of today, you can browse our full API documentation suite. We’ll be building upon this documentation, and providing actual code samples. Our open API is one of the most important parts of Nutshell, so please let us know how we can improve its documentation.

Other Improvements

Since our launch, we’ve made hundreds of tweaks, fixes and performance improvements to our web and iPhone apps. Some of these include:

• Improved email and iPhone push notifications
• A brand new time interface for scheduling activities
• New interfaces for managing large product catalogs, and products with long names
• An indicator of a contact or account’s timezone and local time (based on their address)
• Easier integration with Google Calendar
• Better sorting and pull-to-refresh on the iPhone leads list

Our network team continues to improve our cloud architecture with additional servers to support our fully replicated and secured databases.

Roadmap

We’ve got huge plans for Nutshell, and some of these are just a few weeks from being released. We’re also hiring more developers to make sure we continue to accelerate our pace. Shortly we’ll be upgrading the lead timeline view, so you can view all relevant notes, emails and activities in one place. We’re making reports faster and more insightful, and adding better custom field support.

Our mobile team is working on some really exciting features that we can’t announce just yet, but they’ll connect activity editing with some of the iPhone’s unique multimedia features…

Thanks for taking an interest in Nutshell. 2011 is going to be huge — we can’t wait to show off more of what we’ve got planned! Happy new year.

Andy Fowler

Andy is the lead developer at Nutshell and has been working with the web since the 28k modem. He’s a master at turning designers’ sketches into pixel-perfect interfaces. Look for his bike in front of our Ann Arbor offices, and find him on Twitter.