Bitrix24 boosts its social intranet for SMBs

Bitrix24, an enterprise social network specifically designed for small to midsize businesses (SMBs), has released a new version of its cloud offering. The company reports the updated customer relationship management system now includes its own activity streams and new reporting tools for leads, managers and invoices. Additionally, through integration with Zingaya’s VoxImplant, Web phone calls can now be made and recorded directly from the Bitrix24 account without any IP-telephony equipment, server or complicated setup.

Improvements have also been made in Bitrix24’s productivity and collaboration tools. Bitrix24.Drive, which functions as a free Dropbox alternative for companies that want to have full control over their data, now supports company and group files in addition to personal files. Further, data storage for companies that use the Professional plan has been increased tenfold from 100 GB to 1 TB without any change in pricing in order to accommodate increasing reliance of businesses and organizations on Bitrix24 as their primary file server and online document management system.

The Project Management module has been more tightly integrated with Time Management and now allows easy tracking of time spent by each employee on any particular task, making employee workload planning an easy and transparent process. And, the new Task counter has been introduced to alert managers about tasks and projects that are in danger of not being completed on time.

The new Bitrix24 mobile app comes with an iOS7 friendly design, data caching and an offline mode that lets users access and work on their company intranet and CRM even when no reliable intranet connection is available. Other improvements include Company Pulse engagement suggestions and integration with MailChimp available via the Bitrix24 marketplace. For the on-premise version of Bitrix24, there is now a new virtual environment that is said to deploy more easily than ever.