Over many years, extensive searching for a software programme that allowed us to be customer centric whilst giving us easy time management proved to be fruitless. We wanted an application that allowed us to ‘get on with business’ without the need to monitor different applications for projects, calendars, email, phone calls and tasks menus and track time, it needed to be all there at your fingertips. In 2011 we decided that these basic needs simply did not exist in one package. This prompted us to develop our own software and in 2011 design and development of theMesh began. One of the other major functions of theMesh is that it becomes your link between all of your disparate applications and data allowing you to utilise and report the data from these disparate systems.
We chose Python/Django/html5 and bootstrap as the development platform as Python is light, secure and open whilst remaining very stable. This allows us to spend our time enhancing theMesh with new features and functionality rather than spending our time continually upgrading the software simply to meet other Vendor’s changes (marketing and sales cycle). It is a modern language that works on all of today’s devices (PC, MAC, mobile phones and tablets) with no need to install clients onto those devices, it simply works from your web browser.
Where theMesh lives is completely your choice. It can be onsite in your office, in our data centres, in Google’s cloud, in Microsoft’s cloud and many others. It is completely impartial to its environment.
The concept of actions and time
theMesh doesn’t discriminate between the type of time you’re spending. Unlike Outlook and other applications where you need to visit multiple areas – calendars for appointments, tasks for tasks and the email area for emails and no ability to track time on all of these. We believe time is time in business, regardless of what it is you spend time doing so we have called all items actions which are then categorised by type – email, appointment, quote, order, task, phone call. These are fully customisable giving you the ability to add any type of action needed in your business and can be set as a once only action, or recurring.
Every action has the ability to record time. Many systems allow you to put time against a meeting but not email. All time recorded is produced on a report which can be exported to your accounting package for billing. Once billed, time is shown as invoiced so you have no risk of double billing your customers.
Actions can be shared, assigned to others and also marked as private. A private action is only viewable by the user its assigned to.
They can be related to one another for example you can schedule a follow up email and relate this to an appointment action. Opening either action will show all other actions related to it.
Note: Actions in turn can be related to projects.
Accounts and contacts
There are two contact types in theMesh. Accounts, which are legal entities and contacts which are private individuals. These can be related to each other and have the ability to have a many to many relationship. For example, you may have a contact who works for two of your customers. In traditional systems you can only have the contact once, related to one entity. In theMesh this Account/contact can have multiple relationships so that their record can be entered once and related to many. (unlike traditional systems where the same John Smith has to be John Smith the customer, John C Smith the supplier and JC Smith the contractor and then when you’re trialling to call from your mobile phone contacts you’re wondering ‘which one is it’) Opening their contact window will show all relationships and actions for this Account/Contact without you having to interrogate different areas of the system.
Accounts/contacts can have multiple addresses, multiple phone numbers, multiple email addresses. The ability to add this information is limitless in theMesh.
Accounts/contacts will synchronise to your mobile devices and other email clients for example Outlook, Google Apps and Thunderbird
Tabs and Views
You can create your own views which allows you to see any type of action of your choosing, assigned to you, assigned to other staff, unscheduled and so on. You can show all of these on your home page or create a tab for each different view. Its totally customisable per user, by the user, to how you choose to work.
Usability
theMesh has a simple but brandable interface, that not only gives you better responsiveness, but allows theMesh to understand what device you’re connecting from so whether its a PC, MAC, tablet, mobile phone, your screen, tabs and views will automatically resize to suit that device.
All scheduled actions record on the built in calendar which will send reminders to your devices.
You can perform full context index searches (like a google search) as well as advanced searches where you can filter certain types of data.
A basic project system is also built it.
Email is built into theMesh. You don’t need to use it, you can simply use your preferred email client and use theMesh for email archiving only. It does allow you though to access your email and all other actions from the one web page.if you do choose to use the built in email client.
Client Portal
You can give your customers access to theMesh allowing them to see the status of their project/actions. Its fully brandable so they see your brand when they log in. They can add notes and update items. This means less phone calls and emails as your customer no longer needs to ask, its all there for them to see. You control what they are able to view. There are notes areas that you can enter information into and you can choose if these remain private to you or your organisation or choose to allow your customers to see them.