Work better together: create, collaborate, control & approve briefs & ideas with your team & your clients.

Improvements

At ideapi, we are constantly trying to improve both functionality and usability and have just released an update with a number of fixes and improvements.

As ever, thank you to all our clients who have submitted feature requests, suggestions and general feedback - you are really helping us to make ideapi better.

Feature your business

Calling all ideapi-ers! How do you use ideapi? Please send us your experiences and we will feature you and your business on our website.

Have a great weekend!

ideapi..

We hope that you had a great 2010 and now fully in the swing of making 2011 even better. At ideapi, we have been busy. Feedback about the software has been really positive, some of which we have taken on board for this release (2.3).

Briefs are now Documents

The term ‘brief’ limits the type of document that people might create with ideapi - that from some of the feedback that we have received. So, we have renamed ‘briefs’ to ‘documents’. ideapi enables document collaboration and associated creativity through ideas.

Inline Editing

The long awaited ‘inline editing’ is now live and ready to roll. In a nutshell, inline editing allows you to edit each section of your document on the fly, rather than having to change screens and edit the whole document. It also allows you to create documents from scratch, without the need to use templates. We hope that you like this feature - we think it’s great!

App Look & Feel

As we have been doing updates, we have made some across the board changes to buttons and layouts to make ideapi more consistent. Again, we hope you like it.

Homepage Design

Our homepage has also had a bit of a facelift - the main motivation behind this was to make finding out about ideapi and how ideapi works more accessible. If anything is unclear, we would love to hear from you.

Feedback & GetSatisfaction

As always, thank you to everyone who has sent us their feedback - it has been invaluable. We have now set up a GetSatisfaction community to manage feature requests and questions of any kind. Have a look at http://getsatisfaction.com/ideapi.

We look forward to continued collaborative awesomeness for 2011 and beyond…

ideapi Team.

Often with document creation, especially briefs of any kind, there is a need to specify a structure that you and your co-collaborators can stick to. I know that since we have been using ideapi in our day-to-day lives, creating proposals for client web projects has become significantly easier as we can define the sections that we need to fill in. Couple that with the ability to discuss the various sections with others in the office, often remotely, and we are happy.

So what is ideapi?

ideapi is a document collaboration tool that allows you to define templates for your documents/briefs/proposals and subsequently collaborate on those documents.

There is a second stage to ideapi also, which is ideas - those collaborating on a document can submit ideas in response to that document. For example, ideas in response to a client brief.

How do I set up a brief template?

When you first log into ideapi, you are presented with the Dashboard. The Dashboard shows you all of the documents that you are collaborating on. From the tabs, select Templates and then ‘create a template’. From there you can define your section titles.

How do I create a brief document from my template?

Now that you have your template, you go back to the Dashboard and click ‘create brief’. There you give your brief a title and select a brief template for your document. Now, fill in your brief document and publish (or save as draft if necessary).

How do I get others to collaborate on my brief document?

Once you have published your brief, invite others to collaborate from the Collaborators widget on the right of the brief. Giving Author privileges allows them to update the text, see ideas and invite other collaborators. Giving Approver privileges allows them to approve ideas that are submitted in response to the document/brief.

Some features coming down the line soon

We are committed to keep making ideapi better - here are some useful features coming down the line that will make your document collaboration even easier!

• In-line editing - allowing you to create a document from scratch without the need for a template. You will also be able to reorder your brief sections from the brief view page. We are very excited by this one!

• Email control - allowing you full control of what emails ideapi sends to you and your users.

• Dashboard changes - which will make the dashboard more helpful in terms of helping you and your users navigate in the most efficient way.

Get in touch

If there is anything that you are not sure about, or any questions that you want to ask, please visit our new Get Satisfaction community. You could also check out our FAQs.

We look forward to helping you with your document collaboration.

We have started our own community on Get Satisfaction, so if you have any comments, good or bad, then please leave them at getsatisfaction.com/ideapi.

We have also written up a number of FAQs to help answer some more frequent questions. If you have any questions about ideapi, please check them out at http://ideapi.com/faq/. They include:

• What can Collaborators, Authors and Approvers do?
• Who can create briefs?
• Is my information secure on ideapi?
• How do I invite others to collaborate?
• How do I add users to a brief?
• How many collaborators can I have on one brief?
• How many briefs can I have on ideapi?
• How long will my briefs stay up on ideapi?
• Can I create my own brief templates?
• How do I create my own brief templates?
• I’ve changed my template, why haven’t my briefs changed?
• How do I submit an idea on a brief?
• Who can see the ideas that I submit?
• What emails are sent by ideapi?
• Can I turn off email notifications?
• What size files can be uploaded to ideapi, for briefs and ideas?
• What is ideapi’s privacy policy?

Suggestions always welcome.

We have some juicy features coming up which we are currently testing, but we are keen to get some proper user feedback, both for these new changes and for ideapi as a whole.

As Mac users ourselves, we have been using a great product called Silverback. Silverback actually records you and your screen as you go through the app. This allows us to see what things are confusing and whether users are navigating through ideapi as we intended.

Please let us know if you are keen to do some user testing for us - should not take more than 15 minutes… rewards available!

ideapi was initially purposed for the advertising and communications industry, which has a strong need to collaborate better on creative briefs and ideas. We’ve been thrilled to hear that ideapi has since been adopted by other industries with similar collaboration needs.

This post will give a quick overview of how ideapi could be used for anyone that needs to collaborate on documents and discuss ideas.

So, who is ideapi for?

• Marketing & advertising

  Create the template you need. Creatives, planners, account handlers, partner agencies and clients can create, collaborate and approve briefs and ideas. Store all your briefs and brief templates in one place.

• Teachers & students

  Set assignments (by creating templates), allow students to respond by creating a brief based on the template. Collaborate with students on submitted assignments, discussing each answer in place. Use ideas to add external documents to the assignment

• Contract lawyers

  Create structured templates for your legal documents. Collaborate easily on the detail with clients and colleagues; anywhere and anytime, secure, access.

• Copywriters

  Receive your brief and create your copy. Keep all your work in one place. Collaborate with others, ask the client questions, keeping all your communication in one place.

• Graphic designers

  Communicate more easily with clients to ensure clearer briefs. Keep all your briefs and ideas in one place. Inform the customer when work is ready for review, manage the process of selecting design candidates.

• Estate agents

  Allow clients to fill out their own property brief online, refine their responses using the in document collaboration. Submit possible properties matching their criteria as ideas for the client to accept or reject.

• Recruitment consultants & headhunters

  Manage all client briefs and submit your candidate CVs for review - all in one system.

• Wedding/Event planners

  Discuss and plan each stage of your clients’ weddings and submit suggestions for different aspects of the event.

• How are you using ideapi?

  We are sure that many other companies and individuals will love using ideapi to make document creation and collaboration easier. We can’t wait to hear how you are using ideapi, and what suggestions you have for making it better - we want to hear it! Let us know at feedback@ideapi.com.

Upcoming Features

Just to get you excited, we have a couple of imminent features that we are very excited about:

• Even easier document creation with inline editing: Currently, briefs are created from templates, of which you can have as many as you like. Inline editing will not only allow you to edit individual sections of your document, but will allow you to build a document from scratch. More information will be published once the feature goes live.

• Take control of your email notifications: At present, each update to a brief section or idea results in a email notification to everyone collaborating on that brief or idea. Email Notification Control will allow users to decide whether or not to send notifications at the point of updating - we understand that not everyone likes receiving emails about small updates - this change will put the power in your hands.

More news soon.

We have just released some more changes to ideapi.com - a couple of small features and some fixes.

Features

• ideapi did have a limit of 10 users for the free beta account - this restriction has been lifted - please add as many collaborators as you like!
• Draft flag on the Dashboard, so that you can easily see which of your briefs have not yet been published.

Bugs

• Ability to remove all authors from a brief (fixed).
• User with multiple accounts sent to wrong path when resetting password (fixed).
• Error caused when brief submit button clicked multiple times (fixed).
• More IE7 improvements (fixed)

Feedback is, as always, more than welcome - thank you to all those that have already been in touch with requests, suggestions and questions. We look forward to bringing you new features soon - there are lots on the list!

Happy creating!

Take control of your briefs, collaborate better, prevent duplication and supercharge your ideas process.

• Manage your briefs and ideas in one place, online.
• Stop losing information in hundreds of emails.
• Progress your briefs and ideas while maintaining a view of originals.
• Manage multiple stakeholders and control who sees what
• Keep everyone up to speed on projects in real time.

ideapi is currently free and we promise to give plenty of notice if this changes.

We would like to thank all of our early-adopting beta users for all the feedback over the last few months - you have really helped make ideapi what it is today.

Release 2.0 - latest functionality

Our functionality to do list is still as long as a very tall person’s arm, but we have been working tirelessly over the last few months to make the system stable, browser compatible and fast!

This latest release, which represents ideapi’s coming out of beta, has the following additions:

• A very proud update to ideapi.com
• FAQs and help section
• Updated ideas section
• Many performance enhancements
• Better formatting for Internet Explorer 7 (Grr.)

As always, any suggestions or queries, please send them over to feedback@ideapi.com - we will of course get back to you as soon as we can.

Supercharge your ideas process, with ideapi…

We have just released ideapi beta 1.6. This ideapi has lots of exciting new features and bug fixes.

• Adding users to your account - when adding new users to your account, you can now specify permissions at that point, saving you the hassle of going into each brief to assign the relevant permissions.
• Dashboard notifications - this feature is half there… now ideapi puts notifications on the dashboard for questions asked/answered. Next step is idea notifications.
• Help text - ideapi now has much more useful help text on each page. This text can also be hidden once you know it - hopefully, this text will help walk users through the system.
• Header look & feel - ideapi has simplified the tabs and put some of the less used functions less prominently at the top right of the screen.

Further to these headlines there has been more work done on the email notifications, permissions, performance and other little bug fixes.

As always, feedback is more than welcome on any aspect ideapi.com.

More to come over the next few weeks…