Here's a sneak preview of the new project management tool. 



As you can see from this screeny, we've taken on board a lot of feedback. 

You can now colour code projects and milestones, the milestone editor itself is infinitely more intuitive than Veetro 1.0's "Phases" table. Also there are no AJAX related performance issues/freezing.

Adding a new milestone is as easy as click & drag to highlight your project region, punch in a name and you're done. If you need to resize a milestone, you can simply grab it's ends to adjust, or you can shift the entire thing anywhere along the gaant chart. Easy as pie.

This whole new approach to project management makes setting up and modify a project insanely flexible. Sign up to be the first to try it out.

With Veetro 2 comes a greatly enhanced Address Book and Contacts navigator.  The big change here is the ability to tag a company, a person or an employee.

For example, your business might have 10 suppliers for office stationary.  Some suppliers may deliver overnight, others may be a discount supplier or may only have a limited product range.  When an employee new to your business comes to place a stationary order, the tags immediately help them identify who to order with.

Another scenario may be sales prospects for your business.  By tagging leads with the name of your employee who is the contact for that opportunity, other employees know who to go to before making an approach.

Tags can then be used to compile email marketing lists, direct mail pieces and to report on.

From the sneak preview below, you can also see how much cleaner and intuitive the new interface is.

There <!-- ckey="1AD8E03D" --> is nothing worse than getting half way through a task and realizing you don't know what to do next.  So much of the web 2.0 software I've played around with doesn't provide adequate documentation. 

For example, you might be halfway through creating an entry in a blog and realize you don't know how to embed a Youtube video into your post.  You're then forced to leave what you were doing and search around for the answer.

We've addresses this common complaint in Veetro 2 by embedding support directly into the Veetro 2 interface.  On every screen, support for that tool can be accessed on the right side panel.

Take a look here:

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One of the big stumbling blocks with Veetro 1.0 we discovered was the steep learning curve, which was largely a function of complex user interface.

Even though all the tools were categorised and neatly grouped by related functionality, people found it difficult to remember were tools were located.  Also - there was no quick and easy way to skim through the menu items to find a tool quickly.

We've gone right back to the drawing board with version 2.0.  Completely redesigned the user interface and menu system.  Over the coming weeks, we'll reveal through this blog how the newly designed tools are shaping up, but for now, here are some samples of the new menu system.

Welcome to the first public announcement for Veetro 2.0.

Whilst this is the first public announcement, we've been working in the background almost since the release of version 1, 18 months ago.

We've taken 18 months of feedback, 18 months of customer suggestions and 18 months of learning as we go and brought it all together in version 2.0.

Two of the major changes include:

• A vastly improved user interface.  One of the common suggestions from version 1.0 was that the menu system was not intuitive.  It took a while to learn and could be confusing.  With the range of tools we bring together as Veetro's Small Business software solution, it was always going to be challenging to get it right.  We've overhauled the design, refreshed the code and have come up with a simple, but extremely functional system.
• Better Integration.  Better Classification.  No business is the same.  Businesses have their own unique vernacular, their own processes and personalities.  Version 2.0 introduces the concept of "tagging" and language.  By tagging an object such as a contact, you can provide more descriptive depth which in turn allows better searches, better profiling and more detailed profiling.  Changes to the Veetro language library also means you can adapt the Veetro tool language to suite your organisation.  Customers can be called clients, partners can be changed to affiliates, resellers, licensees etc.

As we continue to develop version 2.0, we will release more information and invite feedback.  Stay a part of Veetro 2.0 by subscribing to this feed and pre-registering for the Veetro 2.0 launch.