I am proud to announce that Bizroof is now available in Chinese! As I said 3 months ago, native language support is one of our primary goal for this year, and we would be more than happy to extend Bizroof into as many languages as possible.

Bizroof Internationalized Checklist:

1. Date Format DONE!  (Options: 20/08/2008, 08/20/2008, August 20 2008, August 20th 2008, 2008-08-20)
2. Time format DONE! (Options: 19:30, 7:30pm)
3. Time zone DONE!
4. Currency DONE!
5. Week start on DONE! (Options: Sunday, Monday, Saturday)
6. Full name format DONE! (Options: Jason Smith, Smith Jason)
7. Multi-lingual Done the Chinese language package!

Screenshot 1: The sales site

Screenshot 2: The Application

We recently received an email from Yahoo explaining the importance to update OAuth to 1.0a for their Fire Eagle location sharing platform, and we can now confirm Bizroof now supports OAuth 1.0a protocol to fix the identified security thread. Here is the email from Yahoo Fire Eagle Team:

This important service announcement is being sent out to all
developers who have Fire Eagle application keys.

Due to a potential security vulnerability, revisions have been
made to the OAuth protocol. This is the protocol that allows
different services to connect to one another without sharing
passwords -- and is a core part of Fire Eagle.

To address these concerns, we've implemented support for
OAuth 1.0a and will be phasing out support for OAuth 1.0 over
the next couple of months.

** If your application does not yet support OAuth 1.0a, you will
need to update it over the next few weeks. Otherwise users will
be unable to authorize your application. **

Existing authorizations (i.e. you already have access tokens)
will continue to work.

In the meantime, any users attempting to authorize applications
that don't yet support 1.0a will be presented with a screen that
warns them about the OAuth vulnerability and discourages them
from continuing.

Developers are already at work rewriting aspects of the OAuth and
Fire Eagle libraries. You can find out more about this and the
changes to OAuth below:

* http://oauth.net/advisories/2009-1
* http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/developer/documentation/using_oauth
* http://mojodna.net/2009/05/20/an-idiots-guide-to-oauth-10a.html

If you have any questions or need help, please don't hesitate to
ask via the Fire Eagle Mailing List. You can also keep up to date
with the latest Fire Eagle happenings on our Twitter feed:

* MAILING LIST: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/fireeagle/
* TWITTER FEED: http://twitter.com/fireeagle/

Yours,

The Fire Eagle team

You can safely connect your Bizroof account with Yahoo’s fire ealge without sharing passwords. To do that, you need to login Bizroof, click your name on the top right cornor on your dashboard, and then click the Upload Location link on the following page, and… you will see the following page to confirm the connection -

Bizroof tries to develop an easy-to-use CRM application with cutting-edge technologies and solid software architecture, and our approach is deadly simple: We try the best to be at the forefront of new and exciting technologies whilst letting our customers decide what we should build.

Last week, we’ve received great feedback from Sam Guzman (operations manager at BrightBox Creative studios ). He suggested that there should be a way to set up default privacy level on Bizroof so that all the new things being created will inherit it. We totally agree and we believe it will bring benefits to other users who share stuff within groups. So, we’ve just implemented the new feature 2 days ago.

You might already have noticed that the default privacy setting is available on your profile page, and you can choose among public (anyone in your company can see it), group (only the users in the chosen group can see it) and private (only you can see it), and then the setting will be applied to the things you create in the future, including contacts, documents, cash flow items, and events.

Send us your feedback or talk to us on Twitter

We are exited to annouce that you can now import multiple contacts into Bizroof CRM, and the data sources we currently support are Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Gmail, Microsoft Live Hotmail and Sage ACT!.

To import multiple people into Bizroof, you’ll need to export them from your original data source as a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file, and then upload the CSV file into Bizroof.

At the same time, you can specify the privacy settings for the whole batch. You can make all these contacts available to everyone; make them visible only to a group of users; or make them visible only to yourself. Also, you can add tags to the whole batch to make them easier to find later.

Another cool thing we want to mention is that we support data in multiple languages, and we’ve tested it in French, German, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese so far.

Why do we develop this feature?

It is simple – Customers like yourself told us to!

We only develop features being asked by our customers, and we make sure the new features are easy-to-use and add value to you.

What’s next?

You know what I am going to say, don’t you? —– Please Let us know what do you need from Bizroof CRM and we will build it for you.

Last month, our development team worked on the permission engine and user groups setting, which had been rolled out last week. Now, we are focusing on importing contacts in the CSV file format (Comma Separated Values), so that you can import all your contacts with just a few clicks.

CSV file format is being used by many popular software, such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, Salesforce,  and ACT!. I bet you use some of them on a daily basis and stored a lot of contacts there. It doesn’t make sense that if you have to manually type in all those data into Bizroof again.

As we said before, Bizroof CRM is designed and developed in such a way to help you, and we believe that if we help you, you will help Bizroof to grow. So, let us hear your voice!

We’ve been working on our new permission engine for the last five weeks, and today I’m very proud to roll it out! The new system allows you to create groups for users, so that you can have an option to share things only with the people you choose. It also enables that people only see the information they need to see.

You can easily create and manage groups. Here is how:

1. Click the Groups on the right cornor of the page.

2.You will see all the groups you’ve created. To create a new one, you can simply click Add a group, and type the name of your new group, and then select users to be added to the group.

To change the group name and members, you can click Edit next to the group you want to edit, and type in the new name or choose users from the dropdown list.

Ok, you have learnt absolutely everything about setting up and managing groups, secriously.

3. Now, if you creat a new person, an event, a cash flow record and a document, you will have a Select a Group option in the privacy settings section.

Click Select a Group, and it will fade out, and then the list of groups you’ve created will appear.

Guess what? You now have a real understanding of how to create and use group settings. Easy-to-learn, isn’t it?

We have been very busy at Bizroof for the last couple of weeks, and our primary focus is the new permission system, which will allow you to group users based on their common interests and share information within each group.

Every piece of data has its own privacy settings, including 3 options:

• Public – Anyone in your company can see it.
• Group – Only the users in the chosen group can see it
• Private – Only the creator can see it

Bear in mind that if a user can see something, it also means he can edit and delete it.

Twitter.com went down again at 11:22 am CET today.

There is no doubt that twitter is useful in terms of synchronizing information, but it has to be technically strong, rather than wrong (screen shot), to make people confident to use it. We wouldn’t complain too much since twitter is completely free at the moment. However, I don’t think twitter could run itself without a business model forever.

Today, we have removed the beta label of the iCalendar Feed feature as it met our goals for ease-of-use and overall performance.

If you want to subscribe to your bizroof events on other Calendar (e.g. Google Calendar, Outlook, etc), please sign in your bizroof account, and go to the Events page, and then click iCalendar Feed for events on the left hand side of the page.

Bizroof is a better web based CRM thanks to the many users who sent their feedback, helping us rapidly fix issues and improve the product.

You can now subscribe to your events feed so that other calendars which supports the iCalendar format can stay up-to-date with Bizroof.

The following is a list of applications which support iCalendar: Apple iCal, Mozilla Calendar, Google Calendar, Microsoft Office Outlook, Windows Live Calendar etc.