It’s 120 degrees or so in Phoenix these days (or so I’m told), and everyone knows that when you can’t go outside you might as well work on the Infusionsoft July Update, right?

Well, regardless of the reason, the product team is pushing out another valuable release, and I figured I’d take a moment to share the highlights:

Feature #1: Sharable Dashboard Custom Statistic Widgets

What it does: This allows you to configure a dashboard widget for one user, and then share it to other dashboards for your other users.

Why it matters: This is really valuable for accounts who have a lot of users, or for people who have a lot of Infusionsoft accounts (ICPs, VAs, Partners, etc).

Here’s the deal – you’ve always been able to create saved searches and give other people access to those searches.

But in the past, they had to know where the search was in order to go access it. And if they wanted to add it to their dashboard, they had to know how to add a widget, and then how to configure that widget to give them the information that they wanted.

Not anymore.

With this update you can configure a custom statistics widget (RIP Lil Box O’ Stats) and then once you’ve got it just so, you can push that widget (stats and all) through to the dashboards of other users. Giving them all of the reporting insight, and none of the effort of configuring it.

Feature #2: Create Dashboard Widgets to report on Campaigns

What it does: This allows you to quickly and easily create a widget on your dashboard to give you a handful of statistics from your campaign.

Why it matters: This information has always been available to us, but in order to access it you had to use the performance tab in your published campaign, or you had to create the report from scratch under the Marketing>Reports section.

Not anymore.

With this new release Infusionsoft will automatically choose 5 goals (goals only), and will a widget to your dashboard telling you exactly how many people have achieved this goal in the last 30 days.

Caveat: Yes, I’m a huge Infusionsoft fan; but I also have really high expectations for them, and this particular feature is….a good idea. It is. I think this is a step in the right direction, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet. The good news is, if their recent track record of improving is any indicator, I think Infusionsoft will get there over the next few releases. In order for this widget to really be usable, we need a few things to be added:

1. I need to be able to choose the goals that I want to track. Most of my campaigns have more than 5 goals, and having the system determine 5 random goals isn’t going to give me the insight I need.
2. We need to be able to adjust the date range. Right now it defaults to show you those 5 goals and their activity over the last 30 days. I’d like to be able to switch that to 24 hours, MTD, YTD, last 7 days, etc.
3. We need to be able to apply additional filters to this report. Show me how these goals are performing for those who don’t have the “customer” tag. Or who are assigned to Greg and not Craig.
4. Right now it only draws goals that are exit points, or entry points. I’ll definitely want to be able to measure important milestone goals along the way.
5. Finally, why isn’t this widget sharable? I mean, forgive me, I’m not a developer – but if you’re busy coding up a new widget. And you’re also busing coding up the ability to share widgets. It seems like maybe we’d be able to share the new widget. Please?

Like I said, good step in the right direction. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

The other big features that they’re releasing with this update have to do with the beta email builder.

1. They’re allowing you to select legacy templates now when you want build an email, and as you bring that template into the email builder it will automatically convert the legacy elements to the new mobile responsive equivalents. It won’t be an exact translation, because not everything from legacy has a 1:1 counterpart in the new builder, but it should be pretty close.

2. In that same vein, you’re now also able to convert existing emails over to the mobile responsive beta builder. Yup, that means if you have hundreds of emails you’ve built and have been using, and you’d like to convert those over to mobile responsive emails, you don’t need to rebuild everything. You can  use the converter tool to migrate the old content into its fancy new home.