5 Feature We Want to See in Podio

We like Podio so much, that we spend our spare time dreaming of additional features. When you spend all day in Podio like we do, it’s easy to think of a few extra features to make life easier. So here we have a list of the top five features we want to see in Podio.

5. Color Options for Apps and Workspaces

We often get complaints from clients who have a difficult time differentiating between the screens they’re on. What if apps (and workspaces!) had an app color option? Color options would give the option to change the color of the Podio toolbar to match the color specified in the app. 

4. Custom Security Levels                                                 

Podio has three user security levels: admin, regular, and light. What you can do with these levels is fairly restrictive – for instance, you cannot change what each user level has the ability to do. Many businesses we deal with have more than three levels of users that need to deal with the same data, which means we have to build a separate workspace for each user group.

If Podio had custom security levels, it would save small businesses and integrators from building separate workspaces for employees performing similar tasks with different read/write rights.  

3. Additional Information from Calculation Fields

The need for this features comes from a pet peeve more than anything. There is a lot of useful data that we’re unable to target via calculations fields. Podio could even go one step further by building a library of functions for calculation fields.

• Created By / Created Time (related items)

• Contact information (contact fields)

• Developer information (item IDs, field IDs, app/workspace IDs)

• Loading a full object of related items (with the fields as index)

Having this information would be useful to everyone. A basic Podio user would be able to parse out contact fields from a set of related items as in-item contact cards, along with a timestamp of when those items were created. If loading a full object of related items was possible, you could pull all of the relevant data from any related app into a single field.

2. Relationship Fields to App Views

As it stands, relationship fields relate to entire apps. But what if a user only needs to see items marked with a specific category field option?

A very simple use case for this would be an "Employee Database" app. As it stands, if a department head wanted to assign something to an employee, that department head would need to search for his employees and know who is or is not in his department beforehand.

Since this potential Employee Database app would contain all HR information related to the employee (including which department the employee works in), we could change the relationship field to only relate to people in that specific department.

This will drastically increase efficiency for people who don't need the entire data set.

1. Show / Hide Options for App Fields

Our number one feature request for Podio is to have the option to show / hide fields. One of the biggest problems we deal with is differentiating pertinent front-end user data with data that would normally exist in a back-end database within the same app.

You could even build upon the security level feature we discussed and use show / hide fields for members depending on their permission levels. This allows multiple employee types to seamlessly work within the same app.

As it stands, we often build apps in a limited access database workspace for the sole purpose of storing data that doesn’t need to be accessed by users in other workspaces. The show / hide field eliminates the need for such workspaces, and makes Podio’s API an extremely powerful data management tool.