I have some exciting news to share: today, we are rolling out Fleep 2.0. This means a brand new look and feel to the messenger across all your devices – desktop, iOS and Android. We hope you’ll like it and that it makes your messaging experience even better :)

When we started with the redesign months ago, we estimated to be ready by September. Evidently it took us a bit longer, but it was definitely worth it.

Over the course of the last year we have added a lot of new functionality to Fleep: Labels, Tasks, Integrations etc. So, we realized it was time to align the Fleep experience across all devices.

With the goal of delivering a seamless experience across platforms, we focused on revamping three core parts of the UX:

• Easy prioritization. We made several improvements to give you a better overview of your unread conversations, to make it easier for you to decide which conversation needs your attention first.This includes an overhaul of the Sidebar in the desktop version and redesigned conversation lists in the mobile apps. Mobile apps now also support conversation Labels for an improved experience when you’re on the go. Additionally, we introduced conversation avatars across the platforms to give you better visual context in your conversation list.
• Easy participation. We spent a lot of time fine-tuning the message flow in conversations. Our goal was to ensure that it’s easy to read new messages and post your replies both on desktop and on mobile. In Fleep 2.0, the message text size has increased, and the messages have been moved into one clean column with as little visual noise as possible.
• Less formal, more friendly. Wth our new branding and design, Fleep 2.0 provides a friendly but smart environment for your everyday work conversations. We’d like you to feel at home in Fleep, not like you’re in a gray corporate office cubicle without much to enjoy :)

The practicalities: desktop apps will be automatically upgraded to the new design, but for the mobile Fleep 2.0 on Android and iOS, you need to update the apps on Google Play or in the App Store.

I am very grateful to our whole team for the effort over these past months. I am also very thankful for the great designs from Stefan Hiienurm – the man behind the redesign of Fleep.

Even though we are releasing Fleep 2.0 today, be assured that we’re not finished with the redesign project just yet. We will keep rolling out more improvements across all platforms over the coming weeks.

I hope you enjoy the new release and share the excitement with us - as always, we would be grateful to receive your feedback :)

Yours,

henn.
co-founder and CEO of Fleep

The post Welcome to Fleep 2.0! appeared first on Fleep Blog.

Hooray – the first half of 2015 is behind us and Summer is finally here! In the beginning of July, we made our plans for the third quarter and, as usual, I’d like to share them with you. But first, let’s review how we did last quarter, Q2 :)

Looking back to what we achieved in Q2, between April – June, I would call out:

• Unlimited conversation history – You spoke and we listened! In case you didn’t notice, we decided to change our strategy regarding conversation history, and from June 9 all Fleep users have unlimited access to all of their messages and files! Forever! Enjoy :)
• Tasks – We’ve been rolling out the Tasks feature slooowly over several quarters. I believe we made Tasks available in desktop clients at the end of 2014 already, without any big announcements. Now,we have built Tasks into our Android and iPhone apps as well, which completes the feature. Go ahead and give it a try! At Fleep, we use Tasks for all of our product development tasks and bugs and we love it :) It keeps us on track and holds people responsible! (P.S. We also have a “My Taskboard” feature in the backlog – this means that very soon, you’ll be able to see all tasks assigned to you, from across all conversations, in one place!)
• Pinboard sorting – Many of you have said you’d like to be able to reorder pinned messages – and now you can! As with Tasks, you can just grab the pinned messages and reorder them on the pinboard. Additionally, when you have many long messages on the pinboard, we autocollapse long ones – and you can expand them any time.
• HTML emails support – Now you see newsletters and other emails with rich formatting in Fleep as you would see them in your email client. As Fleep groups emails into a Fleep conversation by the sender address, then newsletters or notifications from the same sender are mapped nicely into one conversation, which you can rename or label as you like.
• New integration – This quarter, we released an integration with Sameroom. If you have some conversations in Skype or Slack for example, then Sameroom allows you to have these conversations without running these programs. Sameroom makes sure the messages in these external conversations run into Fleep and that your replies are posted back into Skype or Slack (or other messengers that Sameroom supports). It’s almost like you were in the same room!
• Conversation history export – This is a useful feature if you’d like to have a backup archive of your Fleep conversation history. We create conversation history files in two formats – HTML and JSON.

As our plans for Q2 were a little bit too ambitious, then making plans fro Q3 was quite easy :) In the third quarter of 2015, we will be focusing mainly on completing email integration and team management features. More specifically:

• Gmail integration – Soon, you’ll be able to fetch incoming emails from your Gmail account into Fleep, so you’ll get all of your existing conversations immediately into Fleep.
• Send emails with your existing email address – Many of you have said that while you like having a Fleep ID, sometimes it’s necessary to send outgoing emails with your current email identity, be it your gmail address or your own domain. Coming soon!
• Bulk actions for conversations – This was already in the plans for Q1 and in Q2 – being able to add / remove members, add / remove labels etc to multiple conversations in one go, instead of doing this one by one for each conversation.
• Team management – This is kind of big. The team management feature will enable you to create “teams”. Once you’ve created a team, you no longer need to add team members to any conversation one by one, but you’ll be able to add the whole team at once. If at some point you make changes in the team, membership in all of the related team conversations is adjusted automatically. So, adding a new team member into all relevant conversations or removing someone becomes a one-click action :)
• Dropbox & Google Drive integrations – These integrations will make it possible to post files into Fleep conversations directly from your Dropbox or Google Drive folders!

The post Fleep Quarterly: Review of Q2 and plans for Q3 (2015) appeared first on Fleep Blog.

Why we are doing this?

After the launch of Fleep usernames, we got lots of feedback that limited access to chat history was a barrier to people making the change and fully embracing #LifeAfterEmail. You asked for certainty that all your messages and files will always be available in Fleep. You told us that otherwise it can only be used for short-term conversations, which decreases our value to you. We heard you and decided to make the change. In addition to that we’re also increasing everybody’s free storage limit to 5GB!

What about paid subscriptions?

When we developed our Free and Premium subscriptions we optimized Premium for business users who use Fleep with their teams every day, not only within their team but also when working across organizational borders with customers and partners.

As well as the upcoming Team Management feature there are other exciting features for business use that we will be ready to launch later this summer. We will add these features into the paid-for service soon. To be fair to current Premium users we have decided to decrease Premium subscription pricing to 1 EUR per month until we launch the additional business features. Premium users will still be able to take advantage of premium support and will now benefit from an increased storage capacity of 50GB!

We have put a lot of thought into this change and we truly think this is a right and fair step towards replacing your email conversations, I hope you like it, keep using Fleep and keep spreading the word about it :)

Yours,

henn.
Co-Founder & CEO of Fleep

The post Fleep conversation history is now free, forever! appeared first on Fleep Blog.

• Fleep ID – in the middle of April we launched Fleep ID – an email compatible ID for all Fleep users which others can use to reach out to them in Fleep or from email. I got my Fleep ID in February and forwarded all my emails to it, this has saved me a lot of time and focus as Fleep is grouping emails by participants not by subject. I still use Outlook for Calendar but other then that it’s all Fleep nowadays! If you haven’t claimed yours yet, I’d suggest to hurry up :)

• @mentions – Yep, finally :) Just type @ and a popup with members (that have Fleep ID) appears to select who you want to mention, he will get extra notification and this makes him easier to look into these conversations first where he knows his attention is needed. We’ve been using it ourselves and we like it, but we still want to tune its behavior together with Muted conversations in the upcoming weeks.

• Conversation labels – long waited feature for those who have a lot of conversations on different projects in Fleep. It also turns out to be a crucial necessity when you forward all your email traffic to your Fleep ID. I haven’t used labels too much yet, but I have few labels. I still mostly read conversations from Recents, also I’m planning to start Mute’ing low prio email threads more aggressively and read them every once in a while under Muted label.

• New integrations – In January Helmo joined our team and since then we’ve been busy adding new integrations to Fleep. Overall 6 new integrations have been released by now – Pivotal Tracker, New Relic, Bitbucket, Zapier, GitLab, Confluence – Let me know if you’re still missing your favorite :)

• Inline link previews – Oh boy, if I would have known how different expectations people have on this. It sounds like a simple feature – you post any link / URL into a Fleep conversation and we generate a short link preview for others to show what’s behind the link. Eventually we had to add three different ways to control link previews: 1) You can remove specific preview from the message in the conversation 2) You can disable link previews from all conversations across Fleep for yourself 3) You can disable link previews in a particular conversation for all members. Once all three were done it seemed that everyone was happy again :)

• Conversation link sharing – Again, a long waited feature by those who want to create a conversation and leave the door open for joiners. It works very simply – enable conversation sharing in settings and share the conversation link anywhere you like – everyone with the link will be added to the conversation automatically. Haven’t used it myself too much, but this should be useful whenever you need easy onboarding for your team, group of friends or classmates.

These were the most important improvements to Fleep from January to date, I think we had a pretty good quarter in product development and I hope you still like the direction we’ve taken.

Now, on to our plans for Q2

Our main focus will continue to be improving Fleep experience to become a true replacement for email conversations, for that we want to build the following features:

• Gmail integration – Ability to fetch incoming emails from your Gmail account into Fleep, so you get all your existing conversations immediately into Fleep.

• Send outgoing emails with your existing email address – many of you have said that they like Fleep ID but for outgoing emails they would like to keep their current email identity. This will be exactly about that.

•  Show HTML messages in Fleep – Currently we turn them into plain text messages and preserve links, but we would like to preserve more of the messages’ original look and feel.

• Password protected messages – Ability to encrypt your messages with password to gain additional security when posting highly sensitive information.

• Conversations bulk actions – this was already in Q1 plan – add / remove members, add / remove labels etc actions to all selected conversations in a one go instead of doing this one by one to each conversation.

• Team management – Enables you to create „teams“, once created then instead of adding team members one by one to specific conversations you can add the whole team at once. Later when you change the team, membership in all these conversations is adjusted automatically. So adding new team member into all the relevant chats or removing someone becomes one click action :)

• Export your Fleep conversations history – useful for those who want to keep their conversations archive outside of Fleep.

• Dropbox & Google Drive integration – ability to set up integration with Dropbox or Google Drive in a way that all files posted to a Fleep conversation will be copied to a specified folder in Dropbox or Google Drive

• My tasklist – As a next step in our Tasks feature we will be adding combined view to all tasks assigned to you across all your conversations.

• Zen mode – Many of you have asked for a separate, bigger view to a message that you are composing, zen mode will be a solution to this, open in a full screen and lets you focus on writing your message in piece

Hopefully these are in alignment with your expectations. We haven’t yet decided which of them will be part of our Premium subscription, this is something we still need to figure out, but we are happy to hear your thoughts and feedback on it (as always :) )

henn.

The post Fleep Quarterly: Review of Q1 and plans for Q2 (2015) appeared first on Fleep Blog.

First, let’s have a look at what we did in Q4:

Manage files & messages as one entity – now I can pin, edit and delete messages and files as one entity. I like the ability to pin messages with files, previously I had to somehow refer in pinned message to a related file, usually by copy pasting file name into pinned message, which wasn’t cute. Sometimes I also use message edit to add additional files (screenshots or logs) into previously posted message. Just for the background – technically this was quite an effort for us, not only because we needed to rebuild the logic in backend and in apps, but also because we needed to figure out a way how to maintain backwards compatibility for users still using the old apps.

Copy messages between conversations – In the past my main problem was how to forward files from one conversation to another one. Now I just copy original message in one conversation and paste it into another one without the need to download files in between onto my computer. There’s still some confusion on how Fleep internal copy & paste works with clipboard copy & paste, but we will continue improving there.

Video calling & screen sharing – By now we have migrated all our internal meetings from Skype. I like the ease of joining a video call from Fleep conversations and the screen sharing works quite well too. For short term we don’t have any further plans with video calls, we have ideas and thoughts on how we could build an even better experience on our own, but this has to wait a little longer as we are currently focused on text based communications.

Premium conversations – after the initial launch of Fleep Premium subscriptions we quickly understood that we need a solution for conversations where the Premium user is working with Free users. For example a freelance designer (Premium user) working with a client (Free user). Premium Conversation is a solution for this – if there is at least one Premium user in the conversation then the whole conversation history is accessible to all members, including the Free users. It works like a charm and has helped me to stay Free so far :)

Disclose message history – we now have two ways how one can disclose message history and I use them both. When someone joins the team, I add him into a team chat and disclose him the whole conversation history. And sometimes I also include someone into ongoing conversations and then just disclose the last few messages as an intro to why I added him.

Picture previewer – previously it was a pain to download pictures to view them which isn’t an issue any more. Also scrolling between pictures in a conversation is useful, I use it in our design chats quite often.

Tasks – as planned we built them but for internal use only. Our current plan is to use tasks internally for our task management and release this feature into public use once we are happy with them :)

Browser notifications – in addition to Mac and Windows apps we now (finally) also have an option for those who don’t want to install an app but would like to get desktop notifications whenever new messages are posted.

Moving on to Q1 plans

If you compare the list of features I already described to the initial Q4 plan then you’ll notice that not everything was delivered, some items are already in development just haven’t been released yet and some didn’t even get started on… which is fine from my perspective as long as things that are up in the backlog were delivered and those in the end didn’t make it.

This leads us to the 2015 Q1 plans – as usual, our first candidates that were added into the list were items from the Q4 which were not delivered and in addition to them we added some more and came to the following:

• Integrations – we will continue adding integrations based on our users’ requests. Currently, these are the ones in the pipeline: Trello, Pivotal Tracker, New Relic, Bitbucket, Confluence, IFTTT, Zapier, Twitter and Asana. (If you’re favorite missing from the list then please let me know :) )
• URL inline preview – this feature is already rolling into live as I’m writing this post, but essentially this will be a preview of imagery and metadata from posted links.
• Shared conversations – when enabled, anyone with the link can join a Fleep conversation (regardless if they are a Fleep user or not). One scenario where I can see this becoming useful are the countless teacher – student conversations or any other user case where the creator of the conversation doesn’t know who wants to join. By default, conversations will stay private as they are today, but this will definitely make it easier to create and maintain bigger group conversations.
• @mentions – well… this is kind of embarrassing that we still don’t have it, isn’t it?
• Fleep address – yep, we are introducing Fleep’s own identity, which is username@fleep.io. It will be email compatible, so anyone from email world or from Fleep world can reach out to you using it. It will be huge, believe me :)
• Email integration improvements – we’ve got a handful of things that we’ll improve there, from the logic how we group Fleep messages to outgoing emails to how we map incoming emails to conversations. It works well already but we’re aiming to make it great.
• Conversation labels – those who have more conversations will be happy to hear that we will soon roll out labels. You’ll be able to search by them, group on the left pane, create them yourself etc.
• Conversation’s bulk actions – add / remove members, add / remove labels etc actions to all selected conversations in one go instead of doing this one by one to each conversation. Wouldn’t it be nice?

Hopefully we can deliver most of it by the end of March, we’ll see, as usual I’m optimistic  :)
henn.

The post Fleep Quarterly: Review of Q4 and plans for Q1 (2015) appeared first on Fleep Blog.