PSA vendor Tigerpaw announced major upgrades to their software at their annual user event in Omaha.

OMAHA — PSA [professional services automation] vendor Tigerpaw Software, has announced the release of the 16.1 version of their software. There are several upgrades of significance. Project management capabilities have been enhanced significantly. The number of API integrations is being massively expanded to open up the software. Multiple meter capability has been added as well.

The biggest single enhancement impacts the software’s project management capabilities.

“Many of you told us that they would use project management in Tigerpaw if it did more,” said James Foxall, Tigerpaw’s CEO, to the Tigerpaw users at the company’s partner event. “At the same time, you wanted it to be as simple as Microsoft project. It’s a behemoth under the hood, so making it simple was a challenge.”

One of these changes is the additional of the ability to attach multiple accounts to a single project.

“All your purchase orders are linked, so they are treated separately, but under a master umbrella,” Foxall said

“We have also added the ability to define sub-phases on a project,” he added. “This is a big deal. We are keeping a lot more information on phases than we ever did in the past. This information used to be stored at the master project level, so it could be hard to tell where you were falling behind.”

The software now allows users to set pre-defined workflow events for project phases, checklists and tasks. Cheers from the audience greeted Foxall’s announcement that they had added a due date and checklists on tasks.

“Due dates are a very small thing but it’s really cool,” he said. “If you don’t complete a task by the time its due, you will get a notification for that.”

“I know not everybody in the room does projects, but projects do touch everybody in the room,” Foxall told the partners. Other project-focused improvements include the ability to create a quote or add an existing quote or service order quote to a project, and to generate more sales and cost information detail on a project.

“Some of these new project management features will be of more benefit to large clients who manage projects,” said Rudy Jivaraj, Tigerpaw’s director of software development. “Multiple accounts are typical of a larger client, but SMB-focused users would use other things here, in particular the new sub-phases capabilities.”

Foxall also indicated that Tigerpaw has been pursuing a major expansion of opened API relationships with other vendors.

“We want to get everything in the product,” Foxall said. “Our new REST-based API will really open up the integration landscape.”

“Historically, integration at Tigerpaw didn’t get the attention it did,” Jivaraj said. “When I came on board three years ago, I said we needed to catch up and leapfrog the competition in that area. You can expect to see all the different parts of Tigerpaw available through APIs so integrations with other vendors can go deeper. Most of the sales side is available today. The focus now is on service orders, and expanding that to purchase orders and time logs. After that comes invoicing, followed by inventory management.”

An API integration is currently underway with cloud backup vendor Datto, the premier sponsor at the event. Other integrations in progress are with another backup vendor, StorageCraft, documentation platform provider IT Glue document integration in progress, managed print tool maker Print Audit, and RMM software maker Naverisk.

“A lot of time has been spent updating the APIs to make it easier to integrate with us,” Jivaraj said.

“We are also adding SYNNEX and Scansource as real-time price lookup vendors in 16.1,” Foxall said. Plans are afoot to add many more.

Several mobile enhancements were announced, including a new password keeper feature.

“It lets you access passwords in a secure way, and also logs every time someone changes the password or even views it,” Foxall said. “It’s a nice usability thing – not a huge feature. We are making this kind of quiet improvement to the core product, as well as fixing bugs quietly.” He also noted that all documents available in an account are now available in mobile as well, even though they are not cached there.

“Our next step will be to let you attach any documents on your phone to the account,” Foxall said.

A new multi-metered contract has been added, which allows the user to define multiple meters on a contract, and multiple meter groups for billing items on a contract. Multiple devices can also be added to items covered on a contract

“Multiple meters are an important part of managed print services, and the lack of this is one of the things which has kept you from being efficient in this [managed print] space,” Foxall told the partners.

Tigerpaw also announced new features for merging quotes, including merging multiple quotes for an account into a matrix and creating a single, unified quote.

Tigerpaw 16.1 is being rolled out in two stages. Most of the changes will be available by mid-November. A few, including changes to the mobile app, will be available in December.