Introducing Groove 2.0 — up to 8× faster, rock-solid stability, better collaboration, powerful new reporting, and a whole new look.
For the last 18 months, our product and engineering teams have had a single focus: rebuild Groove from the ground up.
We’ve had the honor of more than 8,000 businesses trusting us to host their customer support inboxes with us over these past five years. Most software companies don’t get to stick around that long, and we’re excited to have beaten — and to continue to beat — the odds.
But that longevity has created some technical challenges.
Five years is a lot in software time.
And we knew that in order to continue to make our customers’ lives easier for another five, ten, twenty years and beyond, we’d need to make some updates.
Today, I’m excited to share the very first sneak peak of this across-the-board overhaul.
The new Groove — we’re calling it Groove 2.0 — runs on an entirely new codebase. It’s incredibly fast (8× faster, in fact) and will redefine, we think, how teams collaborate across email.
It also comes with a new design that’s laser-focused on making you more productive.
Rebuilding the product wasn’t an easy decision to make.
It’s a huge project, and we didn’t want to do it just for the sake of building something “shiny and new.”
We had very specific goals we wanted to achieve that would leave us and our customers with the best software possible for the long-term.
And after a lengthy exploration of our options, we decided that rather than patching up a five-year old code base that was created by an outside agency in Groove’s early days, we would start from scratch with a clean, modern framework that would allow us to build a rock-solid foundation.
With that solid foundation now in place, the sky is the limit.
You’ll see much more rapid development on useful features that will make collaborating with your team easier and more enjoyable.
Here’s what to expect in the new Groove:
- A modern look and feel: Redesigned from top to bottom, the new experience gives users a fresh yet familiar interface to collaborate on customer emails. If you’ve used any popular email clients like Airmail, Apple Mail, or Outlook, you should feel right at home in the new Groove.
- A brand new framework that’s stronger and more reliable: More than just a new UI, 2.0 has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. The Groove codebase has been updated to React, after years of working on a homebrewed JavaScript setup built on top of a system that was made 5 years ago.
- Up to 8× faster: Helping people get support done faster has always been our goal, and 2.0 is a huge leap forward, starting with our new search-based backend that can fetch and count conversations up to 8× faster. But the real gains come from shortcuts in the UI like only needing one click to close a conversation. For those of you who prefer to navigate with your keyboard, now you can ditch your mouse as the entire app can be controlled using shortcuts.
- Brand new API: To make the new Groove easier for developers to work with, we decided to build out public portions of the API for literally everything you can do in Groove. If it’s something you can do in the app, you will be able to do it with the new API, making it much easier for anyone to customize Groove or build valuable integrations.
- New real-time infrastructure: With our new realtime infrastructure, those pesky server restarts, both scheduled and non-scheduled, will be going away. This also means faster delivery of messages, and your coworkers being able to see updates to conversations in realtime as you make them.
- New search: At its core, 2.0 is powered by search. With an array of new search modifiers, we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for you to find exactly what you need. These new modifiers also make it possible to find things that you couldn’t before, like your satisfaction ratings, mentions, deleted conversations, and drafts.
- Introducing workspace customization: Not all agents work the same way. So we’ve introduced a way to pin any search (or folder) to the top of your window. The three panes are also resizable so you can make Groove look just the way you want it. You can even collapse the left or right side if you want more focus.
- Simpler custom profiles: It’s easier than ever to bring your own data into Groove. If you can host a webpage, you can customize Groove for your company. And those with more Javascript chops will have the full power of React 16 at their disposal. We’re excited to see what you build!
- Brand new Knowledge Base: In addition to a new Team Inbox, we’ve been hard at work building a brand new Knowledge Base at the same time. We’re talking a beautiful new frontend for your customers and a modern, user-friendly CMS that makes it super easy to add great looking content to your Knowledge Base.
- Powerful new reporting: Whether you’re a founder looking to get a handle on customer sentiment or a manager reviewing the performance of 20 support agents, Reporting 2.0 has you covered. Slice and dice your numbers however you want (including by business hours), and dig into the stats that matter for your business. And look to automated insights for quick wins across your support channels.
- New parsing engine and better HTML rendering: We’ve also rebuilt our HTML parsing engine from the ground up to render messages as you’d expect them to look every time. The days of endless scrolling are over 🙌
- Built for what’s next: 2.0 lays a rock-solid foundation for our platform and will boost our development velocity in 2018, which will include a brand new Knowledge Base, a dozen new deep integrations (Github, Shopify, Trello, Salesforce and others), native iOS & Android apps, more CRM features, Live Chat and a sprinkle of artificial intelligence across it all.
The new Groove is coming in the Summer of 2018, and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on it.
If you don’t want to wait, we’d love to have you in our closed beta program. Please sign up below for early access!
Here’s what some early adopters are saying:
This software feels like it was built for me personally.
Wow, love it guys! Total game changer.
This is amazing. I love it.
