Better, Faster, Stronger Podio
Today we are releasing two significant updates to the calendar behaviour in Podio. They will for most people seem small in the appearance but the backend architecture work to make this possible has been huge. I am personally really proud of our team for making this update possible.
The overall goal of the changes is to improve the architecture of the calendar events, which has been the fastest growing area of Podio until now.
From making these updates, we will be able to ensure a more reliable and scalable platform in the future - and give a better experience for our customers using Podio every single day to manage their work.
What is different?
1. Updated calendar layout: From today, the calendar will give you a 6 months view of past events. Your data will continue to be available in your apps and from using search, however we are limiting the calendar view to only allow for scrolling 6 months in the past. All future events will continue to be available in the calendar.
2. Updated date field behaviour: Date fields in Podio automatically show dates in the calendar for event apps. We are changing the behaviour for standard and contacts apps - the dates will only show in calendar if you manually enable the setting "show in calendar" from the field in the app template.
Next to improving performance and reliability, we also believe these updates will help decrease clutter in your calendar - so the most important meetings, deadlines and projects will be able to stand out more. As an extra tip, we recommend you to check out the calendar colouring feature, to help you customize the colour appearance of your meetings, deliverables and events for better visibility and overview.
Please also note - we are reviewing the updated architecture in production over the next few weeks and will need to make additional updates in the backend before you will experience the full effect of the expected improved performance.
// Sara,
Product Manager
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Hi Sara,
We aren't too happy with this update as we refer to the calendar for past events.
We often need to review events 1 year ago or more.
Now that we have to use the search view it is cumbersome and takes longer. Also we can't see the day, it's only the date. See attached. So if I need to see what events we had on Saturdays last December I now cannot. I have to manually look at a calendar, note down the dates and search them.
A step backward for Podio's user interface.
Hopefully Podio can revert back to seeing all past dates in the calendar.
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Hi Sara,
I appreciate your team. Podio's a great product. And I'm sympathetic that something like a design view should cause such load on your platform.
However — Podio is billed as a service that let's us look at "your data, your way." This solution strikes me as a compromise of your software. It's a non-intuitive limitation on a view of data. Now I can't look at my data my way—when I could before. Suddenly I'm forced to look at it *your way.*
I'm sympathetic to the problem, appreciative of your team. But this isn't a great fix.
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NOOOO. Sorry but No. This actually not great at all. We run an event production office. We FREQUENTLY scroll back to find events we produced for clients and colleagues in the past. Especially for events one year ago.It's the most intuitive interface for scrolling back.
Additionally, we run events for which we maintain production calendars that have horizons as long as a year. Again, the calendar interface is one of the strongest and most intuitive for scrolling back over our planning.Sorry, but please change this back. Six months is so arbitrary. Or make it 1 year. Or something. But please... this is a completely off putting change.
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So the notice in podio says "two new updates today with the goal to make the platform more reliable for you in the future", which one would think might be alluding to stopping the various slowness and outage in the past months.
But actually what you are doing is improving the calendar and date fields.
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I also feel reducing the past calendar view to six months is limiting, and a major step-back in terms of front-end user experience. And asking us to export to Google Cal as a workaround seems counter-intuitive. Don't you want us to be able to use Podio for all our work needs? The more you send us out, the less likely we are to come back in.
As an organizational and event consultant I love being able to scroll back through a year, sometimes two, for calendar details. People think in different ways. I am highly visual, so a quick scroll through 12, 18 or 24 months to see what I did last year is often my planning MO. I also make use of color coding to help demarcate items as being Open or Closed events, campaigns and tasks. Now, when doing a yearly review I cannot see what may have been missed in the earlier months of the year.
I completely understand the backend reasons for doing this: it sounds like otherwise there is simply too much data to load and it slows things down for all users. How about a default setting for 6 months that folks can manually uptick to 12 or 24 months, as needed. You allow us to manually create the calendar views we wish (Show settings: 'everything date related..., I'm following etc.). Why not create a check box for extended viewing options?
Seems to me most people would not bother to check that box (or bury it as an optional setting even deeper within Podio so we really have to work to find it). You'd still dramatically reduce the amount of users slowing the system down with extended views, but give those of us who NEED it the option we require.
I have to agree with others who commented here, six months seems arbitrary. And no one should be asked to view only six months of a year's worth of data. Most people in business plan at least 1 year at a time. If you are going to limit, please at LEAST increase it to 12 months. Doing so will likely appease many of us who are not happy about this, and hopefully not affect the backend speed too much.
Please consider. Thank you for your time.
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what is the benefit of showing only 6 month of past??? We have yearly events where calendar view is a great tool to see all timings, bookings, deliveries, etc. Please try to fix problems and give us back to chance to see all our entrees. Its just a view- i hope this will come back!
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Ouch, this change hurts us too :(
Nothing beats the power of Calendar view for certain tasks - it's what brought us to Podio in the first place! I'd also feel more comfortable with 12 months.
@Sara - I've tried your suggested workaround but the Calendar Export only pushes 1 month of historical events. I've used both iCal and Office365 service. How do I get all the historical events in?
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Hi Sarah,
Thx for your answer. I see the point of amount of data. But in times like this that cant be the solution. Please find a way to handle it. BTW iCal Export isnt any solution. I only can see the last 2 month there. I reported it in the past but no solution has been presented yet. Sorry to say it again but the new calendar restriction is a Step backward from my point of view.
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Sara, thank you for your comments. In business, I would think anyone working with an event, marketing or even budgeting calendar would need at least a year's worth of data for analysis and comparison purposes. Any way I slice this, 6 months makes no sense. So yes, please strongly consider moving the calendar view feature back to 12 months (or providing a manual view feature as I previously suggested).
I understand it is not easy to get a comprehensive cross-section of users when conducting a survey. But I please ask the Podio team to consider that not everyone using this platform is a millennial, or young professional more used to the "now" way of doing things And, when you do research on systemic changes to please be mindful that you have an accurate cross-section of users for analysis. I have expressed concerned to the Podio team in the past for changes that appear to be focused more on the needs of younger users (such as when you reduced your emoticons to tiny circles so small I could barely see them). I was told that Podio aims to keep up with trends. Which I completely understand. But please do not throw your more seasoned users out with the bathwater when making these shifts. I honestly have no idea how someone would calendar only in the "now", as everything I've ever learned in business over the past 22 years includes a comprehensive analysis of data from at least one year out.
I have been a Podio over five years, using the platform for both business and personal use. I am more than happy to be included in any test group that is reviewing potential feature adjustments. I have not been shy in the past about writing to you guys for help when needed. And have occasionally dropped a note here. But I have never been asked to participate in a user research survey. By trade, I am an organizational expert and systems consultant. Use me!
Thank you, Maeve
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I will just chime in here as an avid Podio user.
I greatly appreciate all the work Podio has done and the product you've created to this point.
But I would agree as well - in marketing, we look back a year in order to look forward a year.
I definitely get the issue of data slowing everything down and causing crashes, but not having the option for at least a 1-year view is very limiting for us.
We're coming up on our Annual Campaign...this is a great example of a time we'd say, "Ok - what did we do last year for the staff campaign? What events did we have for the community campaign? when did we start the board campaign?" - and now that will all be reduced to trying to search those things individually.
I was hopeful when I saw calendar updates that it might be updates like...
- Being able to filter what views export to your external calendar (our marketing team puts all calendars on 1 app so we can see what the other is doing...but I don't want EVERYBODY's meeting synced and giving me reminders on my external)
- Colors being able to be exported (it's nice to have in Podio but then when looking at my external calendar, 8 colors are reduced to all the same color)
- Being able to see someone else's entire calendar (I have calendar items pulling from multiple workspaces that my team can't necessarily see. If they're trying to schedule a meeting in what looks like free time, it's actually not because it's reserved for a meeting in a different app)
- Being able to get calendar view in the phone app like you are on the computer (not just your personal calendar in calendar view)
There were many things I hoped for in calendar updates, but I must say - limiting our view to just 6 months in the past was not one of them.
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This seems like a downgrade. This is not a “Better” update at all.We love Podio as we rely on the Calendar for past events to compare previous data, a year ago or more. This is important to our workflow and a reason why we love Podio so much.Now with the limitation of only seeing 6 months we don’t have a visual aid to guide us. It’s like Podio took a step backward in the user experience. It just doesn’t make sense.Podio was working fine and we experienced no performance issues. Maybe we might have waited for the page to load for a few more seconds but that is not a big deal. Certainly not worth changing a very important feature.We really hope Podio can revert back to seeing all past calendar entries. This is just an expected feature of any CRM and what any other CRM out there provides. Podio is the best but with this limitation…. well it isn’t. -
For those looking to sync their Podio to calendar to an external service, such as Google calendar, you should be aware that Podio has a limitation on the export. If you have a lot of items in the calendar in the past, they just don't sync. This is only useful if you already had calendar sync set-up prior to this change.
I use Podio for managing events, and would like to be able to look back more than six months in the calendar view. I was also pretty annoyed about this, and it's is certainly started some conversations about what else is out there to replace Podio in our office. I've been a user since 2011, so we have a lot invested in Podio - so any potential change is not a decision we will take lightly. Part of the discussion is about what next - what changes might Podio make next that could adversely affect our operations. It's now viewed as an operational risk, and risks need to be managed / mitigated. I work for a government agency, this kind of thing is taken quite seriously.
Our calendar export only sync 1000 events initially and will then automatically add new events going forward as they are created. This is a limitation due the external API's we use to sync the data.
(learn more here about general limitations, including calendar export: https://help.podio.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000424752-Known-limitations-in-Podio)
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Hi Sarah, Thx again for your feedback. I am really happy to see how many users agree with my point of view.
And I need to agree with some here that limitations in calendars is a reason to quit the platform in the long run.
Don't get me wrong but it looks like the Apple philosophy to me: Sell a limitation/ restriction as a great feature/update.
A bunch of other platforms offer unlimited calendars. So technically speaking: there must be a way to fix your performance issues in another way. And as I wrote before: Podio calendars disappear on Mac OS platform after 2 month. So this is no solution anyway.
I started using Podio late 2012 if I remember correctly. When you released the calendar view I got my company on Podio as well. I brought you a bunch of paying clients from the event scene. All of these use the calendar view regularly and not only 12 month back- sometimes you need to go 2-3 years back.
To be honest we pay a monthly fee because of the the possibility to get our calendars managed by your platform. Now Podio comes back to us and announce to lose it. Sorry to say it again: I'm not very impressed by that.
Your platform is great! Your team did great things in the past! So please Sara - go back to your programmers and try to find a solution! And that can't be any restriction in calendars! Thx for understanding and best regards
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Hi Sara and all other great people here. I was shocked that my calendar is broken and my first thought was like - its just a new limitation that can be changed somewhere in the settings of the app, dont panic, just find the right settings to get things back how it was before. But the reality is written down in this feed.
We are event rental company mainly working just in the calendar view and going to future and past is just a natural way how we use a calendar at our work. We need to plan, we are doing the same kind of events every year and we need to plan from the past events. This is how calendar works anywhere else in every software I used for about 20 years. I am not happy with this question but I need to ask - what will you downgrade next time? It will be nice to announce this strategy of downgrading the features because we can lose something important for our everyday work. I am really not happy with only 6 months, we need to look more in the past events and check sometimes 2-3 years back in time.
Is there any roadmap of features you want to add in the calendar please?
Anyway, thank you for a great work you did with Podio, we love the system and I appreciate your answers here. We just hope to see new features more than downgrades.
// David - founder of Smybox.com and Printka.com
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Sorry, it's me again ;)
We now have a big trouble already because we can't use calendar work of an event we did last year. It makes so much work so check all single staff bookings in the initial app! It's a pain, really. And will start from now on each month!!!!
We already decided to stop the annual plan. We switched back to free version and need to look for any other platform. It's really sad. We supported Podio since the first day I heart of it.
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I actually use the calendar to scroll back to last summer to see how many events we had and to compare to this years events. I also sometimes scroll back to find a past event to see what we did (not to repeat anything) and calendar is the easiest way to do this. So if it is not a very big operation I would prefer if it was possible to scroll back more than 6 months.
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This removes one if not the most used function for our company, we are a wedding studio and we use the past years calendar to deliver albums, online galleries. videos etc... we need to look for past events everyday in order to get clients info. we only use the current calendar to book new events. In the search field we only get the names of our clients, for example: Diana and Pedro, if we have three couples with the same name we have to open each one in order to find the right one, its a waste of time and very confusing.
This is a huge downgrade for us.
if you could customize the search field in order to always show multiple fields like name and date it would be at least a way of find past year clients (active clients).
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I agree with all the users below. We should be able to view and use our data for more than 6 months. We often look back to track deliverables for particular projects. the user Maeve Richmond had a great suggestion to have an option for users who need to look back further.
There must be a way to streamline the flow of data and make it work, because this is not a good fix. You guys are can do it!!
Please make this an option!!! Thank you
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Hi @sara. Comments like, "I understand this is painful, however we strongly believe this change was required in order to secure a more reliable and better scalable Podio (from a performance stand-point) in the future." are dismissive. If the company strongly believes this was necessary than explain in this forum what the quantitative differences between 6 months calendar data and 12 months calendar data would be. Give us a case study or example, something to sink our teeth into. Something that illustrates what the improved performance is. So we can say, 'Oh thank you Podio for making things better,' rather than, 'What's the deal Podio, we've relied on you for years and you are making things worse.' You are asking us to believe in good faith that calendar access reduction is good thing. But so far we can only see pain points. So help us to see the good, not just by repeatedly saying it, but by giving us a concrete example or some data that helps us to understand what your engineering team clearly has figured out.
Personally, I never experience any performance related issues regarding the calendar (or how fast or slow it populates data). So I continue to think this change is arbitrary. I know you all believe it is necessary. So, can you break down for us what the difference between a 6 month calendar and a 12 month calendar would do to performance? Do we get 60% improvement rather than 80%? Is there a tipping point where 6 months is perfect, but even 7 months breaks the bank?
We are a bunch of business professional using a software that runs our businesses. Please treat us with professional courtesy and be transparent about the data behind this 6-month calendar decision. Please compare it out to a 12 month view, which so many of us are clearly stating we need, bare minimum. Thank you.
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Well, it looks like the app view is also limited to the last 6 months. That is pretty disappointing.
I've thrown together a very bare bones project as a rough proof of concept, but all it does at this point is make a list of events and when they happen and put them in a format that Tableau can accept easily.
I've also published a GitHub Repository if anyone wants to see the code at work behind this (again, very bare bones).
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I'm officially giving up on Podio. I'll probably continue with my current apps, but in the future I'll move my apps and development to another platform.
The "we did announce the upcoming change in the maintenance post in public 7 days prior to release" statement is scary.
Some of us are actually using Podio in the real world!
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Hi Podio Team, this sounds great! Thanks for always looking to improve everything for us all!
I was wondering if there is an option to remove viewing tasks inside the workspace calendar so we just see the items that we have chosen to show in the calendar, rather than having to sift through all the tasks due as well?Thank you
Hayley
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What i mean is that the ENTIRE Calendar is bugged 1 week behind. I'm forced to switch to UK language, as that calendar actually follows the Earths time. Look into the link below for further explanation.
See: https://help.podio.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360019740151-Calendar-reports-show-WRONG-Week-Dates-
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if Podio will not add unlimited calendar view for past/ present/ future we have to leave the platform as well. Thats really sad!
We already cancelled the payment contract. Hopefully a lot of clients will do same that Podio developers start working on this fixture!
Again: we DONT want to leave but its becoming a pain for our business.
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