Alvanda 1.6.21 – Prepare For Liftoff!

Dear Ambitious Professional,

We hope you’re ending this first half of 2024 on a high note.

On our side, these last 3 months since the completion of our very first Expansion, From Chaos To Order, have been non-stop action and progress. 

As a summary, we’ve completed well over 100 platform improvements! 

A few of those improvements we’ll discuss in today’s Alvanda Development Update: 1.6.21 – Prepare For Liftoff.

If you have any questions or ideas, please email them to support@alvanda.com. And our team will gladly help with any matter or consider any idea! 

Expansion Release Date: 6th of February, 2024

Today’s Update: 6th of May, 2024

For the recorded version watch the below video!

Ready For Launch!

Since the release of our first Expansion: From Chaos To Order, a significant part of the team was implementing all of the technical aspects of getting ready for our Launch! 

We guess most people don’t know. But the simpler something is for end users, the more complicated or difficult to implement it tends to be for developers. 

In this case, for professionals that have purchased Alvanda on our dedicated Launch Page (i.e. collection of funds was outside the app itself) we needed to then automatically create full access accounts (which otherwise couldn’t have been be purchased) in our backend. And make sure those companies have the right level of access and seats. And also ensure the entire transaction is smooth both ways. 

The team’s been amazing at BOTH implementing all integrations AND making steady progress on Feature Updates and Bug Fixes. We’ve very happy to see everyone on the team leaving their own contributions, week after week!

So, without further ado, let’s get into it! 

New Features

The main development focus during this period was to real-world test. And also make improvements to everything we released in the 1.0.0 Expansion. 

However, we did add a few very important features, as we’ll see below.

Added Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)

With more and more persons and companies getting hacked, we felt it’s important for us to take the time now to add 2FA into Alvanda.

And, we have. After extensive testing, we have already pushed the security update to live. And any Alvanda user is now able to go to their Settings and turn on 2FA!

Alvanda 2FA works well with Google Authenticator, which anyone can install on their smartphone.

Platform-Wide Speed Improvements

As we’re getting closer to passing 1,000 users on the platform, we noticed our initial Server Architecture and Database Queries were starting to lag. 

To make room for more and more users, we invested significant time into both upgrading our Server Infrastructure. And improving the majority of our database queries. 

Now, both current and future Alvanda users can enjoy millisecond-responses to the majority of their interactions with Alvanda! (Based of course also on their own internet speed and computer’s performance 🙂

Pathways

Our MOST requested feature is finally done! 

Completing one Procedure within Alvanda can now be set to AUTOMATICALLY start another Procedure! 

This feature will allow Directors and Managers to define their ENTIRE business operation. One Procedure after another. Never having to delegate repetitive tasks again. As Alvanda will automatically create tasks, assign the appropriate person, give them a due date. AND ping their manager if they haven’t done their task.

Detailed Documentation

As an ever-evolving platform in these past two years, we never created detailed documentation. Mainly because most features and even entire modules would constantly change. Based on how companies were using Alvanda in the real world. 

However, how that we’ve landed on a stable version, which we released a few weeks ago, we dedicated a significant amount of time to documenting every single module of Alvanda, so that anyone who wants to “read the User’s Manual” and make the best use of the platform, now can do that even without our involvement. 

You can find all Alvanda Documentation publicly available on our blog, under the Documentation category. 

Of course, if anyone needs help with anything in Alvanda, just email support@alvanda.com and the team will gladly assist you!

Improved Features

Task Details Layout Improvements

We’ve improved the Details Page of every individual Task to now differentiate between 

1. New Components – which have been created as a result of this task
2. Modified Components – which have already existed and were just modivided as a result of this task

This was an important distinction to make as users wanted to know if, for example, a Sales Call was with NEW Prospects, or existing ones that they have already talked to and were in their database.

Component Improvements 

We’ve brought various UI (User Interface) improvements to everywhere Components are used.

For example, in the Components Builder, before you were able to add the same option twice into a single choice dropdown.

We haven’t denied that because we said “who knows?”, right? 

However, we realized that it’s best if we give users an error message saying “You’ve already added that option.” This makes more sense as it now helps counteract any potential mistakes of adding the same option multiple times.

Second, we made a slight UX (User Experience) improvement by removing some extra text from the Components Library that wasn’t adding any value in that section. 

We’re big believers in REMOVING everything that is not necessary, so we as professionals can focus only on what matters. This is just one such instance of simplification.

Finally, we’ve made significant improvements to the Individual Component Details Page, both in terms of a very improved Historical Changes view, improved Comments functionalities, and improved error handling that now includes more niche cases and prompts with more context. 

Improved Video Tutorials

As part of the same initiative of giving all our dear users as much helpful guidance as we can, alongside writing detailed Documentation, we also added Tutorials to every module within Alvanda! 

Once you log into Alvanda, you’ll be able to see the Tutorial buttons in the top right corner of almost every page! 

Data Formatting Collection

Though this might not seem like much, multi-paragraph strings of text (such as for example an entire blog article) were previously being saved as concatenated strings of text. 

Though this wasn’t an issue previously as all text strings from companies in the Beta Phase were short, now that companies started using Alvanda to store ALL of their information, it quickly got messy.

As such, now you can confidently write entire blog articles, whitepapers, or anything else you wish in Alvanda, and trust that it’s going to be correctly formatted, everywhere across the interface where it’s displayed. 

Website Improvements 

After having over 100 calls with professionals from all over the world, that were seriously considering Alvanda or that already started enjoying its benefits, we noticed a lot of patterns in how they would describe their day-to-day issues, and what solutions they were looking for.

As such, we’ve made significant updates to our website, to reflect the insights we’ve gathered from our community of fellow professionals. 

More so, based on VERY popular demand, we’re now inviting people to have a 100% free demo call with one of our experienced Business Process Optimization Specialists, who’ve already generated over $500Million for our clients. 

The Demo Call is worth well over $500, and now any new company which desires to implement Alvanda to create more consistency within their operations gets the additional benefit of asking our specialists any questions they might have!

Permissions Improvements

As part of our commitment to simplify every ambitious professional’s life, during this time, we’ve also brought various permission improvements that automatically trigger (i.e. without Managers or Staff having to do anything)

For example, within the Organizational Chart from now onwards, only user with permissions to edit/create Position Descriptions will see editable input boxes.

Everyone else will:

1. Not see empty input boxes, at all
2. Not see any edit options on those pages

A second example is that now, a Staff Member or Consultant will not be able to see any Administrative pages, even if they were given the direct link to those pages!

They couldn’t make changes before either, however now they won’t be able to see the pages at all, without being granted Administrator privileges first.

And as a final example, by default, Task Assignees will now NOT be able to change the Due Date and Time section of a task that has been assigned to them.

Instead, the person assigning tasks now has a checkbox that says:

[ ] Allow colleague to change Due Date and Time

And ONLY if that box is checked will the Assignee have the options to edit those settings.

Creating And Following Procedures

Finally, we’ve made a lot of UX improvements everywhere users interact with Procedures.

For example, we’ve now increased the standard with of Steps within the Procedure Builder as we noticed most Step Names our users add tend to be longer than we envisioned and weren’t able to see enough of the Step Name before. Now they will.

Or, as another example, we’ve implemented email validation (for fields that Managers set as email capture fields) BOTH when users are trying to complete a Task AND when users try to edit those same fields later, in the Component History section.

Bug Fixes

1. Resolved a niche case where you sometimes couldn’t see the Components generated from completed Tasks.
2. Fixed an issue where the Date field would also show time as 00.00 (Midnight). Now Date fields will only show dates, and Date & Time fields will show both. 
3. Adjusted various instances where certain graphical elements or fields would have incorrect sizes based on different screen resolutions.
4. A problem where time tracking wouldn’t automatically start on Tasks that were created in Strategic Roadmaps was solved. 
5. Corrected a case where Steps within Procedures would not link appropriately to one another, based on niche case settings. 
6. Realized our new video tutorials were by default displaying at low resolution. So we changed settings to help them be presented at higher quality. 
7. Fixed an issue where the information from Component fields which were filled in one Step of a Procedure, would not propagate to the following Step.
8. Solved an issue when new Alvanda accounts were on trial. They sometimes would not see certain screens, even though all Alvanda Trials are full-featured. 
9. Corrected a minor UI glitch where the Options icon (3 vertical dots) of the Statuses within Components grew in size after rearranging the Statuses.
10. Realized some of the search results from the Alvanda Universal Search feature were displaying HTML tags, such as the paragraph <p>, so we made sure those won’t show anymore.

Development Roadmap

As we’ve been focused on implementing all integrations for our Launch efforts, alongside making the dozens of quality of life improvements and fixes you can read about above, our internal Development Roadmap has remained similar to the one we set at our Expansion Release. 

As you’ve read above, we’ve already released Pathways, which was the most important post-release Milestone we had! 

Moving forward, we’ll continue our journey with implementing more cool features. Such as Processes and Multi-Company Support, which you can read about in our Expansion Release Update. 

Outside of that, many of the hundreds of new users who signed up to Alvanda these first few weeks have already started sending us a ton of feature ideas. So we are intentionally not adding anything new to our Roadmap for now,. In order for us to be able to build what our community most needs!

As soon as we consolidate everyone’s points of feedback and prioritize it based on the number of “votes” we got and will continue to get from our users, we’ll share our updated Roadmap with everyone!

Opportunity To Join

Looking at what we’ve recently achieved, and what we plan on building moving forward, we’d like to ask: 

Do you know anyone who can help us build or promote Alvanda? 

If you do, please send the link to this article their way. So they get a sense of what we do, and if they enjoy what they see, they can email our team at: support@alvanda.com

Thank you.

Final Thoughts

Our Official Launch Date was March 18th. Less than 2 months ago. 

In these first few weeks, well over 100 companies purchased and started using Alvanda! 

More so, we got over a dozen great testimonials from tens of managers at all levels. All of whom were happy something like Alvanda was finally built! 

Our average review score across 4 different directories is now 4.7/5, which means a lot to everyone on our team! 

Thank you so much to everyone who’s been with us on our journey thus far! And here’s to more amazing victories, together!