Now that we’ve bid adieu to 2021, we wanted to look back and take a moment to thank our Citrix Podio customers. Your trust helps us enable remote work and help your organizations collaborate and be productive.

The last two years have been about more than just challenges. They have also been about opportunities, change, adaptability, and solutions to new problems. The pandemic has shifted work models around the world and helped businesses recognize areas of untapped value.

We’ve always seen Podio as a work collaboration software, but it does much more. Combined with other Citrix products — Citrix Workspace, Citrix ShareFile, Citrix RightSignature, — it is positioned to help revolutionize the future of work and help your organization thrive in the new era of employee productivity.

Let’s look at some of the milestones we achieved with Citrix Podio in 2021.

Celebrating 10 Years of Podio

Last year was an important milestone for Podio, which launched on March 23, 2011. We have grown consistently over the last 10 years and created enormous value for our user community as shown below through data items, structured apps, automated workflows, and many more. To all our users and partners — thank you for being part of our journey. We wouldn’t be here without you. You make us who we are and continue to inspire us to do better than yesterday, every single day!

Empowering Users and Admins with Their Desired Level of Security

We closed 2020 by adding a layer of user-level security via two-step verification. In 2021, we continued to focus on enhancing user security and added an organization-level single sign-on (SSO) configuration, taking user security to an entirely new level. Organization admins are empowered to simplify and secure their employee experience with SSO enforcement and have the level of security and the uniformity they need across the organization. As part of this enhancement, we also mitigated web/mobile parity and introduced Microsoft SSO login on mobile apps.

Doubling Down on System Reliability and Performance

Calculations has always been one of the most powerful features of Podio. But the scale of growth in user data and usage patterns presented challenges around reliability and speed. Focusing on calculation reliability, we improved our architecture and reduced calculation error rates by 90 percent. We also addressed calculation delays by separating standard and bulk calculations, improving calculation speed by 92 percent for standard calculations.

We also modernized the view pane experience in Apps. Views provide a great way of avoiding repetitive actions by creating a set of filter rules and saving it for later reference either for team or personal use. Loading the views was a heavy operation because it involved calculations at multiple levels and could affect loading of the app data. We improved the UX for this view pane and optimized the load time of the views and stopped the unnecessary auto-creation of views for every category field. That, in turn, contributed to a reduction in the overall page load time. App view panes have been loading 77 percent faster than before on average (and as high as 89 percent faster), during the preview release. We’re proud that this modernized view pane marked our first public release of 2022.

A Fresh, Modern, Bright Feast for the Eyes

Last year we also made enhancements to the user interface that makes the theme more modern and aligned with industry best practices and also aligns Podio with Citrix’s new brand. This new look for Podio was released after extensive design and customer research. It delivers a fresh new theme on both the web and mobile apps, modern retina-ready icons, a new color palette with more category colors, modernized components, and much more.

Constantly Improving Workflow Automation

The number of workflow automation actions triggered on Podio has grown exponentially over the years. Starting from 0 in 2015, we reached 700 million actions per year by 2018. Now in 2021, we have tripled that to 2 billion action triggers per year. Over the years, this growth has demanded continuous effort to keep our infrastructure updated to support the scale and security needs, and 2021 was no different. In addition to that, we have also added some of the most requested feature enhancements to our workflow automation last year.

More App Packs and Extensions to Enhance Your Power

The app packs listed on Podio App Market are an excellent starting point for setting up your business processes on Podio. Extensions built by Podio partners and third-party developers can complement your business requirements and provide you with capabilities not included in the out-of-the-box Podio feature set. In 2021, we focused on growing this app and extension toolbox. We built four app packs, powered with workflow automation and integrated with other tools like Citrix RightSignature, CallRail, and smrtPhone to streamline various business processes. You can find more details about these app packs in the product news section. And, thanks to our active developer community, we also introduced six new extensions last year.

Citrix Podio is Making a Difference

We can, of course, keep talking about how awesome our product is. But what makes it more interesting is to hear about how passionate our customers and partners are about Podio. We shared interesting stories in guest blog posts. Check out how Podio helps our customer Integrity work smarter, and how our partners Kandio and Plecto have built a contributor universe and a data-driven culture through Podio. It is great to see how YTranslations progressed from being a customer, then a power user, and now a Podio partner. Also, check out how our partners are creating a difference and empowering users with more value through their extensions like QuivvyTools, smrtPhone, and CallHippo.

With an all-round focus on security, performance, reliability, the user interface, and new features, 2021 proved to an eventful year and has us looking ahead with great excitement.

A Look Ahead

We welcome 2022 with the enhanced performance and interface of Citrix Podio, and we look forward to reaching the 2 billion items mark soon. You can stay up to date on major Podio developments by subscribing to our Product News section and stay connected with our vision and strategy on the Citrix blog. In the meantime, we will continue to:

  • Focus our commitment and efforts around reliability, security, and compliance.
  • Modernize our workflow automation capabilities and make them a more integral part of Podio infrastructure.
  • Invest in user experience improvements and achieve more web-mobile parity as requested by our user community.
  • Redefine the future of work by building closer integrations with ShareFile, RightSignature and Citrix Workspace.

We look forward to another exciting year of work, productivity, collaboration, automation and helping your organization embrace the hybrid work confidently, without compromising your priorities or business processes. Cheers to an amazing 2021 and an even better 2022 with Podio!


Disclaimer: The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion and are subject to change without notice or consultation. The information provided is for informational purposes only and is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions or incorporated into any contract.