Pending Contacts

If you look in your My Contacts list you will see a new category in there called, Pending.Pending contacts are folks you have invited who have not yet installed Spheres. From this list you can resend invites or send your pending contacts an email to remind them that you’d like to collaborate with them in Spheres. You can also remove people from your pending contacts if you no longer want to see them in your list.

Live Search & Invite Queuing

In addition to the pending contacts list, we have added a few things to the invite process from within a sphere to help grease the wheels of collaboration. We added a live search of your contacts’ email addresses so as you start typing the email of an individual you would like to invite, Spheres will recommend people who match your typing.

We also added the queuing of invitations to a sphere for people who are not Spheres users. So if you try to invite someone to your Sphere, but they need to sign up for a Spheres account first, they will now be automatically added to your Sphere as soon they sign up for an account.

There have been several other behind-the-scenes improvements that we hope will make Spheres perform better and become more easy for you to share as you set up your workspaces.

New File Menu & Navigation

When you update to version 0.9.18.0, you’ll see that Spheres has a new header, which includes a colorful new icon (more on that later), a completely redesigned file menu, and some changes to how things are organized up top.

From the new File Menu, you have quick access to all of the core features Spheres offers, from wherever you are in the application. We’ve also added a new list of links for your convenience where you can go to manage your Intuit account,  edit your Profile and Preferences, visit our new Help Desk to browse our FAQs and user forums, submit new feature requests, and contact us directly for support.

Invite Contacts via Gmail

We want to make adding contacts as easy as possible, so you can quickly get Spheres set up and running with the people you work with. Not only have we made improvements to how you add contacts throughout the application, if you’re a Gmail user, you can simply login to Gmail from within Spheres, browse through your Google contacts, and select the people you’d like to collaborate with.

Not to mention this new feature allows you to more easily take advantage of our referral rewards program and scoop up those Amazon Gift Cards we’re giving away. But, if you don’t happen to be a heavy Gmail user, that’s okay. You can still enter e-mail addresses manually, and we’ve even made some improvements there as well.  However, we are planning to link with more email services in future releases, so why don’t you let us know which of them you’d appreciate most. As always, we’re listening.

What We Already Had, Only Better.

In addition to the new features we make available with every release, we’re continually looking for ways we can improve upon the features we already have. One improvement included in this release are new “new” buttons, thoughtfully placed around the application, that let you create new spheres and add new contacts when and where it makes sense to do so, without having to hunt for those features in the file menu. (We admit, they were a bit hidden before). There’s also a  few other small enhancements that we’ve made but why don’t you grab the latest update (if you haven’t already) and see for yourself.

How it works:
Like everything we do, it’s simple. All you need to do is use the sharing functionality in Spheres to send an invite to someone you know. If they download the product and sign up for an account, you get credit. Once ten of your invitees sign up, we will send you an Amazon gift card via email. It’s easy money.

What’s the catch?
We are only going to give out 100 gift cards, so act fast and you can be one of the lucky ones. We are only giving out one per person though, so if you share Spheres with more than 10 people, you’ll have our sincerest gratitude but not another gift card unfortunately. Remember, luck favors the bold, so don’t be shy!

With push data, we just made communications a whole lot faster for you inside of Spheres. So instead of waiting around for your spheres to sync and retrieve data, you and your contacts are going to see the messages and files you post almost instantly, as data is now “pushed“ to recipients as soon as it’s posted. In most cases, we’re even faster than e-mail! Go ahead and race them if you like. We did – and 2 out of 3 times – Spheres won, every time.

Along with push, Spheres now has presence, perhaps more commonly recognized as “online/offline status”. While you may already be familiar with the addition of presence from our previous release: (v0.9.13.1), we are mentioning it here again to share that we’ve completed all the behind the scenes engineering needed to ensure that it will function properly as more and more people continue to join the Spheres network. We hope you enjoy the benefits of presence as you communicate with your colleagues and co-workers using Intuit Spheres.

The last thing we’d like to share with you today is our redesign of the 1-on-1 sphere experience, which, as I mentioned earlier, we are no longer referring to as “1-on-1 spheres”. From here forward, if you want to have a private conversation with one of your contacts, you can simply click his or her name and you’ll be taken directly to your contact’s profile. In this view, you can carry on conversations, and share files and links, all of which will only be visible to you and that individual contact.

Clicking on a contact's name in Spheres will launch his or her profile.

In addition to the new profile view, we have also added a convenient options menu that contains a few shortcuts for getting around within a contact’s profile, as well as the ability to quickly add a contact to an existing sphere.

And that concludes our notes from today’s beta release. Please feel free to share your feedback in the comments below or by getting our attention on Twitter by mentioning @intuitspheres in your tweet. Have a great weekend and we’ll talk to you again soon.

- The Spheres Team

(In case you were wondering, this has been Mike Matthews, currently lead designer for Intuit Spheres, filling in for your usual Spheres host, Michael Colombo, while he travels to Austin, TX for SXSW through March16th ).

Another big release for Spheres today. We are excited to be announcing the beginning of real time collaboration technologies into Spheres. We began by implementing presence in Spheres so now you will know when folks you are collaborating with are online. However you will also have the ability to set your online status in order to control what others may see.

You can see the online/offline status of your contacts via an icon next to their name:

Icon next to your name indicates current status.

You can also set what status you want others to see using the small menu in the bottom left corner of the Spheres UI. We have moved the “sign-out” function to this menu as well:

This menu allows you to change your status settings and sign out.

For the more technical folks, we have implemented Openfire, an open source XMPP server, for managing presence and push within the Spheres client. We are very excited about the potential this presents for Spheres as we add more real-time collaboration features to the application.

Look for some more updates on this and other fronts in the near future!

Thanks for the feedback folks and we’ll be in touch!

New navigation item for sending someone an invite to Spheres.

Following directly from this feature was a request to be notified when someone you invite to Spheres gets into the product. This too has been added into this release in the way of a new notification system. We hope this notification system will grow with the product as a means of keeping you up to date on key items related to your spheres. You can find the notifications by locating the bullhorn icon in the main Spheres navigation.

New notification system in Spheres

This has been a big final release to cap off an exciting 2009! We’ll look forward to your continued feedback into next year. Our UserVoice site is a great place to share and comment on exciting ways to enhance Spheres for your needs…we hope you’ll join us there!

Thanks for the feedback on this issue and helping us improve the signup and setup process for all Spheres users!

Over time we will continue to focus on the sign up and onboarding processes to ensure folks can begin receiving value from Spheres immediately.

Stay tuned for some other big Spheres news in the next couple weeks. Things are moving quickly!

In addition to a streamlined sign up and invite workflow, and some cool learning assets, we have added some handy features related to file sharing. You can now drag and drop files into Spheres, and you can also see the upload or download progress of files you are interacting with in Spheres.

In the expanded view of Spheres you have a new media player for previewing audio and video files right inside the application which is super handy if you are sharing lots of media with folks. Of course, you can also still preview images inside of Spheres through the expanded view as well. (click the little up arrow in the top right corner of Spheres to see it expand).

We look forward to your feedback on this release of Spheres as we think it is a really important one in terms of helping you easily share Spheres with those you need to, and then help them get in and up to speed quickly.

Let us know what you think!