As the most popular email platform, Gmail continues to improve with each passing year. The free tool has everything you need to power both your personal and professional lives, putting your messages, contacts, and calendar all in one place. As useful as Gmail can be in keeping you productive, though, there are ways to push your team collaboration within Gmail to the next level.

Recognizing this demand, innovators have created Gmelius, a tool that adds advanced collaboration and automation features to Gmail and boosts your team’s efficiency. You’ll see big improvements within the software you already use as your go-to email platform. Before you jump in with both feet, though, here are some of Gmelius’ best features to help you get the most out of the software.

Run Gmelius and Shift Together

As a new year begins, you’re likely looking at ways you can boost yours and your team’s productivity. Gmelius will not only expand the capabilities of your Gmail account, but you can also access it in Shift. Kick off the new year by adding Gmelius directly within your Shift account. Running Gmelius and Shift together is the perfect combination. You can access multiple Gmail and Outlook accounts, apps and extensions with the boost of all the Gmelius features listed below in one beautiful desktop app.

Shared Inboxes and Labels

Imagine you have a customer service team trying to manage incoming emails regarding orders. You want to provide fast, friendly customer service, but if multiple people access the same email account, wires can easily get crossed. You could have the emails come into different customer service reps, but unless others are copied on the email, if one person is out of the office, messages can easily fall through the cracks.

Gmelius resolves that issue by offering shared inboxes and shareable Gmail labels that can be accessed by multiple team members and managed from their respective inboxes. Every employee with access can see all the emails that have come into that inbox, complete with a record of all interactions connected to that email. Anyone with access can read and reply to all messages in that folder, making it easier for your teams to truly work together.

With Gmelius you don’t need to worry about unanswered emails or double replies. Teammates will see each other’s avatars once they are viewing an email, and the red ellipsis will pulse in real-time if they are replying.

Internal Email Notes

Sometimes it isn’t enough to view previous interactions on an email. You want to be able to ask your fellow team members questions. At one time, it was just a matter of summoning your coworker through a cubicle wall or walking to the other side of the building. But today’s teams don’t always work in the same building. In some cases, they aren’t even in the same country.

Gmelius has you covered there, as well. With internal email notes, your team can chat about an email in that shared inbox before responding. You don’t have to move to a completely different chat tool and wait for your coworker to look up the email you’re referencing. Best of all, customers never see these chats, giving your team the freedom to discuss issues before you interact with external parties.

Project Management

In order to add an item to your project board, you need to first have one. Without a tool like Gmelius, you have to manually add to-do items to an external project management platform like Trello. This means copying and pasting, clicking back and forth to check to make sure you didn’t miss anything. It also means exiting your Gmail account and going to Trello if you want to check on the status of a project to respond to an email about it.

Gmelius integrates project boards into your Gmail inbox, similar to what you see in Trello. Not only can you easily transfer tasks to the board, but you can click on the board you need from the left-hand Gmail menu. You can also easily share the new boards you create inside Gmelius with team members who need to collaborate on them.

Create Tasks from Emails

Some of your emails later need to be turned into projects. Others are part of projects already in progress. But adding tasks to your project management software can be time-consuming, zapping your productivity and, again, increasing the risk you’ll forget something. If a client checks in with a new task that needs to be completed before the next milestone, you may even need to fire off an email to make sure someone on your team takes care of it.

With Gmelius, you can turn emails into task cards and add them to your project board without leaving your inbox. . When a message comes in related to one of your projects, you can add it to the appropriate board with one click. Just choose a board and set a deadline and the email will become a task.

Slack Integration

If you’re like many professionals, you use a combination of messaging and chat tools to accomplish your daily goals. Like Gmail, Slack has become a go-to tool for teams that need to communicate throughout the day. But Slack is best for real-time, quick communication, while you probably need email to communicate broader messages that need more explanation. If you have a lengthy email from a customer that you need to discuss with the team, you have to either direct everyone there or copy sections of the message over manually.

Gmelius gives you the best of both worlds, syncing your shared inboxes and labels with your Slack channels to automatically share emails in a Slack-friendly format. With Gmelius you can reply to emails and leave email notes to your teammates directly from a Slack channel. It will only copy messages within the shared inbox or that have a shared label, and you’re in control of which messages go where. But the tool can be essential in helping eliminate duplicate work.

Automate your Gmail Using Scripts

Gmail is a great tool, but its features are limited. If you want to track where prospects are in the sales cycle, for instance, you’ve traditionally needed a CRM like Salesforce. If you regularly assign tasks to team members so that they can take action, you probably use a project management tool or a ticketing system. This means paying a monthly fee for each piece of software, along with the maintenance and training required.

Once you have Gmelius in place, you can ditch those other platforms, doing almost everything you need directly in your Gmail inbox. It transforms each Gmail account into a dashboard that makes it easy to track prospects and assign items to team members. You can also easily access email templates and create automated email sequences without using a costly mailing list solution. The tool will not only boost your team’s productivity but save you money in the long run.