Amberlo changes - update (2020 March)

General improvements

• All entries in the Activity Feed separated by color

New features:

• Receive and Send Emails Directly from Amberlo
• Time Recording While Organizing Your Emails

GENERAL IMPROVEMENTS

1. All entries in the Activity Feed separated by color

The Activity Feed provides an easy way to see the latest information about all activities performed in Amberlo. It’s displayed on a tab within the Dashboard, Contact card, and Matter card. Within the recent Activity Feed, each entry displays appropriate activity (e.g., an envelope beside an entry for a received/sent email and etc.), has a special color separation and a timestamp.

• Yellow color - indicates Note;
• Blue color - indicates a received or sent Email;
• Grey Color - indicates all other activities performed in Amberlo (created a bill or matter, changed status and etc.)

Note: you have the ability to filter the entries in the recent Activity Feed to view activities of a certain type (e.g., events, emails, bills, matters, etc.).

New features

1. Receive and Send Emails Directly from Amberlo

We know that Email is central to most law firm communication, so from now on you can write, review and organize emails right within Amberlo. Email seamless integration with Amberlo results in an easy and automatic saving of emails to their correct place: Contact or Matter. When you have multiple people working on the same file, you can see each other’s emails relating to a specific Matter, eliminating the headache of forwarding, bcc’ing, or printing. Stay effortlessly in the loop on each Matter and easily address clients’ inquiries on an email even if you were not the original contact on the email thread. 

You can send emails from both the Contact and the Matter associated with it. All emails will be automatically linked with appropriate Contact and Matter.

Getting started

First, you have to check:

1. What kind of Amberlo subscription you have? Because Email Management is only available to our Premium and Elite subscribers.

NOTE: If you want to upgrade your subscription, you can easily do it in Amberlo Settings -> Subscription Settings.

and

2. Connect your Email account.

How to connect your Email with Amberlo?

It's easy to connect your Email, here are the steps:

1. Got to Amberlo Settings; 

2. In the left-hand Settings menu, click Email, choose Connection and enter your email address:

• If you use Gmail, you will not have to enter in your server settings - just click on the button Sign In with Google;

• If you use a different provider (ex: Outlook or other) that supports IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), just enter your email provider’s server credentials;

Below you'll find the additional parameters you need to enter for connecting your Email using IMAP or SMTP:

• Email address;

• Username (if your user name is the same as email address, just click on checkbox Username is the same as email address);

• Password;

• IMAP Server Address;

• IMAP Server Port;

• SMTP Server Address;

• SMTP Server Port;

• If you have additional SMTP credentials (username or password), just click on the checkbox Show additional SMTP settings and enter the required information.

Press the button Connect and Voila! You now have the Email in your Amberlo account.

Email settings and email signature

Once you connected your Email to Amberlo, your Email settings will display info as follows:

1. The Email address that is connected to Amberlo;

2. If Email connections were successful, you’ll see status Connected in green color;

3. If you want to change the Email password, click the button Update your password;

4. Here you can set up your Email signature. An email signature is a text, like your contact information or a favorite quote, that’s automatically added at the end of your emails as a footer.

5. If you want to disconnect an email from Amberlo, just press the red button Disconnect.

Note: Disconnecting your email from Amberlo, all emails will be deleted from the Amberlo system, but you can see it in your regular email account.

How to send Emails from Amberlo?

You can send emails from Contact or Matter. Just select the appropriate Contact that you would like to send an email to and open it. Find and click on Send An Email.

Once you clicked on Send And Email, the new email window will be opened:

1. Amberlo will automatically add the email address of the Contact you are writing from. To add other contacts to the email, click +  and enter the appropriate email addresses.

2. If you want to include additional recipients, who should receive the email as CC or BCC, then just click the appropriate buttons on the right side of the window.

3. Specify a subject for your email.

4. Write the email. And if you specified an email signature in Amberlo Settings then this signature will be automatically displayed at the end of the email.

5. You can use additional text style control buttons to format the text of the message content.

6. If you want to register the time spent on the letter writing, just tick the Log time checkbox.

7. You can turn on the Timer before writing an email. In this case, Amberlo will stop the Timer when you finish your email and press the button Send. The Log Time pop-up window will show and ask for a job description, all other information (Client, Matter) will be added automatically.

8. If you want to attach additional files, you can easily do so by clicking the Attach button and selecting the required files from your computer.

9. Click the Send button to send the message.

How to reply and forward an email?

When you receive an Email from a Contact, you can immediately reply to him using the buttons at the bottom of the received message:

To reply or forward an Email, select one of the following actions:

• Reply - you will reply only to the sender;

• Reply to all - you will reply to all participants in the letter;

• Forward - you will forward a received email to other recipients.

When you select one of the actions you want, Amberlo will prompt you to write a new message:

If you want to change the action from "Reply" to "Forward", you only need to click on the arrow (1) in the upper right corner of the message to select another action.

 

2. Time Recording While Organizing Your Emails

From now on you can log the time associated with Email communication: writing, reading, etc.

Time Recording for Outgoing Email

Before writing a new Email you can turn on the Timer (1), which will count down the time to the moment you send the Email or stop the Timer:

If you do not want to turn on the Timer, but want to log the time anyway, then simply tick the Log a time checkbox:

After the Log a time is checked, click the Send button and Amberlo will open the Log Time window, where you will need to specify the job description. After saving, the time entry will be associated with the Contact or Matter:

Time Recording For Other Emails

To log the time spent on previously received/sent emails, simply spread the Email and click the Log Time button:

 

That’s all for the new features! We hope this will help to start using it smoothly. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to contact us via support@amberlo.io. We are always happy to hear from you!