On the eve of the release of three major new features of Link2forms, we thought we'd share what we have planned for the Linktivity product suite in general this coming month. 

French Translation
For Linktivity in general, we plan to implement a complete French translation of all the products in this online suite by the end of the year. Currently, only Link2calendar is available in English and French, but we'll be updating the rest of the products in the coming weeks. As the Act! Master VAR for Canada, we take our responsibility to the French market seriously, and we hope they will soon enjoy the many lead generation, capture, and conversion tools in Linktivity.

OAuth mail settings upgrade
We also plan to implement OAuth 2.0 with your Exchange and Gmail account setups within the Linktivity mail settings. OAuth 2.0, which stands for “Open Authorization”, is a standard designed to allow a website or application to access resources hosted by other web apps on behalf of a user. It replaced OAuth 1.0 in 2012 and is now the de facto industry standard for online authorization. OAuth 2.0 provides consented access and restricts actions of what the client app can perform on resources on behalf of the user, without ever sharing the user's credentials.

We've recently witnessed a slow deprecation of Office365 and Gmail services, so we're accelerating this upgrade.

Link2quotes Team Upgrades
For Link2quotes Team in particular, we have many changes planned in the coming weeks, but let's begin by announcing the ones we've introduced in recent days:

• Merge Fields:  per customer request, we've added two new merge fields to the quote email templates called "Subtotal:Raw" and "Total:Raw", which allow users to transfer those fields to their online payment system without including currency symbols or another formatting that may break the hyperlinks.
• Product Searches:  In honor of Black Friday, we introduced a feature that allows users to search all quotes that include a certain product, which they may wish to send again to their prospects with current promotional pricing. Simply go to the Product section in Teams, search for a product, and then click the ellipsis beside the product name to search for quotes by name or quote number. 

OK, now let's review the features we intend to implement by mid-December:

• Major overhaul of the product database, which includes the following:
  • Adding a product category field to help you better organize and segment your products
  • Adding product type field - namely Product, Service, or Other
  • Introduce multi-language support for product descriptions so sales teams like the one at Keystroke don't need separate English and French products for each SKU
  • Enhanced filtering for product searches similar to what's available in the quote list section, so you can find quotes by name, value, category, type, you name it
  • Deduping of products in the product database. When you can support the easy importation of products into Link2quotes, duplicates are inevitable. Make the merging of them a snap.
• Security enhancements for quotes:
  • Implement the ability for a user to hide all quotes from non-Admin members of the team
  • Implement the ability for a user to share their quotes, but hide select quotes from non-admins

Link2events:
Changes to this service are mostly "under the hood" as we upgrade the schema to be in line with the other products. However one major feature request is being added to this product, and that's the ability to create drip campaigns leading up to an event and after it. Currently, Link2events only supports one reminder before and after, so this will significantly increase the program's capability.

We've often said the synergy between the different products is one of the Linktivity advantages, and this is certainly true in this instance as we're implementing similar drip technology to Link2events that we recently deployed with Link2forms.

Link2calendar:
We aim to add a feature that displays all booked appointments under one tab, allowing a user to quickly review the number of appointments generated by Link2calendar. With these appointments recorded on the server side, we're able to implement meeting reminders as an additional feature.

We think these are important changes to Linktivity in general, as well as some products specifically, an we'll continue to enhance these online products' appeal going into next year, making Act! the smart choice for CRM users looking to grow their business.