We’re in process of making a new beta release of OpenPsa 2. While there are new major features like sales project management and phone interview support, I wanted to also mention some of the small things that are happening.

Skype integration. If your contacts are using the Skype VoIP service their presence is automatically displayed in contact listings. You can start a call by clicking the Skype name.

We will later roll the Skype integration into Projects and Calendar to enable easy conference calling with the participants.

Task status history. Ever wondered when a project was started, or when a client approved it? Now Projects displays the full status history including task acceptance by resources in easy format:

If resources are remote DBE users they will be identified by a separate icon in the status history lists.

Automatic relations. If you archive email messages or other documents into OpenPsa’s Wiki notes manager, they will automatically be connected to the potentially related projects, tasks and sales projects. You can confirm or remove the relation with a single click:

The idea is to make the maintenance of a comprehensive CRM record in the system easy, but still not clutter the projects and tasks with unconnected information.

Buddy list integration. Since OpenPsa2 supports synchronizing events and contacts to mobile devices through the Funambol system we needed some way to limit which contacts to synchronize. There can be thousands of contact records in a company’s CRM database and synchronizing all of those would completely overwhelm a mobile phone.

So we instead synchronize only those contacts that are in user’s buddy list. The buddies can be added or removed manually, and the system also automatically adds new project participants and sales contacts to the list.