Blog time! It’s been a really hectic week and I’ve had more work to do than usual. That being said, I’m taking a break to write about another important part of our company, and that is our customer portal. The really exciting part is we’ve made some internal adjustments with scheduling / staffing which has enabled us to bring on a full time developer for portal! We previously had a team of individuals who would work on it throughout the week, but nobody was a dedicated full time dev. As of a few weeks ago that changed, and man have there been some improvements already. The combination of a full time dev + contributions from the other folks has really shown a major change in the development life cycle.
Looking back over my emails, I see at least 5 instances of new features in the past few weeks. There have also been a massive amount of changes and improvements to existing features on the admin side of things. As far as customer facing changes go, the major one we implemented was PTR control. As a client you can now modify your IPs PTR records without having to contact us before changing them. This is the first of many changes we expect to roll out of the next 3-6 months to make your life easier. A few other things we have on the roadmap:
1) OS reloads – We are researching and working on implementing a system which will allow automated OS reloads directly through your client panel.
2) IP provisioning – This would allow you to request, pay for and have allocated an IP range automatically through our backend
3) Customer support – While a major undertaking, we have the framework in place for an integrated customer support system. This would replace our existing support channel.
4) Uptime monitoring – A feature that will check that your device(s) are online, and send a notification (email and/or SMS) if the device is seen as down.
5) A new look – We’re in talks with some graphic designers and artsy types (of which we’re certainly not) to get a nice skin put on portal. It should look as beautiful it feels, ya know?
As far as the admin side changes go they’ve been some serious productivity enhancers. We’ve optimized the way tasks and jobs are assigned to employees and tracked, implemented a brand new system for internal collaboration and issue tracking, and have also added some fancy features which improve the overall navigation and ease of use on the backend.
Short post this time around, just a once over on the latest happenings over here. If you guys have any features you want to see added or any feedback about the existing system, we’d absolutely love to hear it. A lot of the features we’ve added and improved have been a direct result of user feedback so we really enjoy communicating on this. Just email feedback@ourdomain.com (replace ourdomain.com with the website you’re on) and we’ll get right back to you.
-Brian
