Keystroke is pleased to announce that we've just added several key new features to the Knowtifier that are now available free of charge to subscribers through the Act4work updater.
These new features include the following:
- Activity Knowtifications: This new feature allows you to configure the Knowtifier to send email alerts to people you have scheduled activities with in Act!. Act alarms may alert users, but contacts can now be alerted by emails of upcoming activities. Admins can configure which activities types to include, which users, and how much lead time.
- Enhanced Integration with Reporting4Act!: Now the Knowtifier can be configured to reliably automate report delivery to members of your team through the most power reporting tool on the market, namely Reporting4Act!. Excellent for teams where non-Act users, contacts, or vendors need reports on a regular basis, and you want to set-it-and-forget-it!
With this new enhanced level of integration, Keystroke is now offering a $100 discount on Knowtifier subscriptions when bundled with Reporting4Act! purchases. - Enhanced Management settings: We've added a number of user requested enhancements to provide easier management and configuration of new and existing Knowtifications
- Remote Database Sync Notice: The Knowtifier can now send Admins or Managers alerts when remote database users fail to sync for a set period of time. This is critical in work environments where lots of database updates make regular syncing required.
- Enhanced filtering: Our new filtering options allow the use of And/OR, brackets. The Knowtifier now also allows use of both Contact and Custom Table fields in the filter
- Field Change Triggers: see below
Field Change Triggers
The last feature, namely field change triggers, has been requested by customers and Act Consultants worldwide, and represents a significant expansion of the Knowtifier's workflow capabilities.
What does this mean to you?
Previously the Knowtifier would allow you have workflow trigger off most date fields in your database, including Contact, Opportunity, or custom tables. Now any type of field change can be used, so that a simple change of a field, character or otherwise, can trigger workflow events. For example, imagine if you want to send a welcome email to all contacts whose ID/Status changed to "Customer", the Knowtifier can now do precisely that.
Here's a breakdown of the new feature:
- Knowtifier can now trigger emails based on field changes.
- Fields can be any Contact, Opportunity, or Custom Table fields.
- Knowtifier will check for field changes once every 15 minutes
The last point is worth expanding on. The Knowtifier creates a separate database of field values that it monitors every 15-minutes for changes, and if it recognizes changes that match a "Knowtification", a workflow sequence is triggered in Act!. That workflow could involve emails being sent, activities being scheduled, or even changes made to other fields, that could in turn trigger additional workflow.
System overhead
When developing this new feature our biggest concern was overhead. How much system resources would this workflow consume while it monitored these field changes every 15-minutes. We're pleased to report that when tested on our production database of 200K contacts and 10 separate custom tables with nearly 100K custom entities, the memory utilization on the server next exceed 90MB's. To put that in perspective, that is barely half of one percent of a server fitted with 16GB 's of RAM. In other words, "negligible" from a system overhead perspective, and that was on a database that is probably 20-50x the size of the average Act! database.
The Knowtifer has earned a reputation for it's ease of use and rock solid reliability, and it's the technology that Keystroke relies upon for the maintenance of the subscription renewals for all our products & services. We're delighted to deliver this latest feature to help businesses get more out of the Act!.
Existnig Knowtifier subscribers can get these exciting updates by using our popular Act4work product updater. We expect this new build to be available on the Updater by the end of this week.
More changes are being developed to improve the capability of the Knowtifier so it is an indispensable part of all Act! teams workflow management.
Stay tuned!