Welcome to the second Support Bulletin! We haven't rested on our laurels since we introduced the Control Panel in early April; here's the latest batch of improvements.
IASP 5.0 Update Process
Our engine goes through several stages of testing before we deploy it system-wide. We first test it within our office, then 'in the wild' using testing sites. Combined with our advanced fault notification system and 24 hour monitoring, this means that by the time a version of the engine goes 'live' to all our clients we can be pretty confident that it's robust and reliable.
Recent incremental improvements
- Site Meta Title - we've noticed a lot of our clients use the 'Site Name' to boost their search engine rankings by including keywords in it. This works, but as the Site Name is also used in Email subject lines, it can result in some cumbersome behaviour. We've introduced a separate 'Site Meta Title' field that is used only for the title in browsers, and your meta data. The Site Name field is now length-limited, and will still appear in all other cases (email subject lines, within automated response content, etc).
- Content filtering is now more capable of cleaning up certain kinds of mangled HTML and XML, and provides you with more helpful feedback when something goes awry.
- We've been continually refining the wording of the 'green panic bar' text to clarify the meaning of certain aspects (particularly the 'raise a support ticket' checkbox)
- All IASP 5.0 sites now have the enhanced 'Menus and Sections' area, which provides an easy to follow, tree style view of all Menus and the top-level Sections they contain in a single page.
Web Statistics
All IASP 5.0 websites have been collecting in-depth usage data since the end of October 2006, and from today that data is available to you.
You'll find it under 'Usage Statistics' in your Control Panel. Please note that some elements of the analysis may take a while to load the first time around.
You'll find there's in particular a wealth of information on search engine referrals and keywords, for those of you looking to enhance your rankings, or keep track of which keywords are working best for you.
Email administration
As a first step towards our Business Grade Email system, administrators of IASP 5.0 sites can now handle some aspects of management of their own email accounts directly from their Control Panel.
Your Control Panel's Email Administration module, launched today, allows site administrators to look up mailbox information, and directly control email redirection. In the near future you'll be able to instantly order new accounts, or upgrade existing email accounts to the enhanced services explained elsewhere in this update.
These enhanced services, however, require completion of the final stage of a gradual email system upgrade we began in July last year.
NETWORK MAINTENANCE NOTIFICATION
The final stages of our email system upgrade require relocation of hardware between two of our datacentres. This upgrade will take place on the evening of Friday the 8th of June, starting at 6pm.
While this relocation takes place, POP3 and IMAP access to email hosted on our network (i.e. 'receive' access from programs such as Outlook, or access to webmail) will be unavailable. Mail will continue to be received via our secondary servers during this period; no inbound email will be lost, and users will not lose the ability to send email. We anticipate that normal services will be restored by approximately 9pm.
We recommend that any email programs set to automatically download email from email accounts hosted with IASP are closed during this period to avoid error messages.
Further reminders of this maintenance will be provided closer to the date.
Near-future improvements
We've got a host of new features coming over the next few months, and we'd love to hear your thoughts about any features you'd like to see included. Here's a few that haven't already been covered in the Client Update or this article:
- Online Survey System - The online survey system, allowing administrators to build and run their own online surveys, is in its final stages of development; we expect to have it ready to be deployed to clients very soon. We already have a list of interested clients for this feature, and if you'd like to be notified as soon as it's ready to roll, please let us know via a Support Ticket or a comment on this page.
- Advanced Reporting - The reporting system allows you to generate reports on any number of customisable metrics; sales, usage, survey results, enquiry information, user data, customisable external data sources, and more! If you'd like to be notified as soon as this feature is ready, please let us know.
We'll be setting up an online wishlist function here in the next couple of weeks to get soundings and thoughts on any future improvements to the system.
For more important information, please see the May-June Client Update on the IASP Corporate Website.
Kieran Morrissey
Chief Technical Officer
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