January 2007 Archives

Well, ready or not, here it comes. Introducing Mailroom 2.0, the fastest, easiest way to handle your sales and support email. Mailroom 2.0 is an all new application in many ways. We rewrote our entire interface as an advanced JavaScript application, which means it feels almost like you have a desktop application running in your web browser.

We’ve also made an incredible number of other number improvements. I’m going to post more about this later today, but for now I just want to say that this is the best version of Mailroom we’ve ever produced and I’m incredibly excited to finally get to share it with you. I think you are really going to love the changes we’ve made to this product.

Now, this new version of Mailroom has required some massive changes to the database that holds your email. We want to ensure the safety of your data, so we are bringing things back online in stages. Because of that, there are a couple of things I want you to know about the next few days:

First, we are bringing accounts back online one at a time as we get each of them upgraded. We are bringing paid accounts back online first and free accounts thereafter based on when you last logged in (so if you haven’t used your account in a while, it might be the afternoon before you have access again.) If you go to your account and it says you are still being upgraded, come back again in a few hours and try again. It will probably be available. We are doing this as fast as we can, I promise. We have over a million messages to go through through. It’s a big job.

Also, when you do get access to your account, we are upgrading some stats used for More About and the People page separately. So the conversation counts on these pages might be wrong for part of today. They should be back to normal by the end of the day, however. We could have waited until this was ready to activate your account, but we thought you would prefer to have your email.

Finally, we are expecting to receive a higher than normal level of traffic over the next few days. While we are going to do our best to keep your service as fast as possible, we really appreciate your patience as you have to share your server with some extra visitors. We will be adding resources and making improvements actively over the next few days to keep up with the demand as it hits us.

Mailroom 2.0 has been a long time in the making. In many ways, it is really the first realization of the vision we had for a polished, well designed business tool for small businesses when we started Sproutit two years ago. We think you’re going to love it and we would love to hear from you when you try it. Send us your raves and feedback at contact@sproutit.com and we’ll get right back to you. (Using Mailroom of course.)

Cheers, -Charles

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I just wanted to take a moment to thank on of our vendors, Unfuddle. Unfuddle provides a hosted bug tracking service. They even host your source code if you want them to.

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Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs gave keynotes this week. By now you’ve probably heard of the iPhone, Apple’s latest gadget. I bet it’d be a challenge for most of you to name even one thing Bill talked about though. How does Steve do it?

One insightful person mentioned to me recently that Bill’s keynote are always about the future, Steve Jobs keynotes are always about today. Bill gets up and talks about products (Vista, cough) that might come out in 2-3 years. Steve talks about products that are often available in 2-3 weeks. (The iPhone is an exception, it will take 6 months to arrive due to FCC regulation.)

Now is powerful. When we were at DEMO, I think we launched Mailroom with the overall wrong message. We’ve refined that part a bunch since we launched. Yet we still won the DEMOgod award. Why?

I think a big part of it is that we actually launched at DEMO. Most companies didn’t. After a day of presentations from people who were “going into beta in six months” or “launching in Q3 of this year”, you could tell from the audience reaction that it was refreshing to see a company demo their product publicly for the first time and then say “it’s available NOW!”

We’ve been chatting lately about whether or not we should something with the beta tag or not. Using the beta tag is nice because it gives you the freedom to field test your software without risking your reputation. It’s tempting to launch and tell people it will be really read sometime later.

But there sure is a lot of power in NOW.

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I said in the video preview that Mailroom 2 is a JavaScript application (or a “JSApp” as I sometimes call it.) When I said that, some of you probably thought what I meant was this thing called “Ajax”, but I didn’t. JSApps are far more revolutionary that Ajax. In fact, I think they are going to be a major factor in the adoption of web apps in the future.

Let me explain why.

While Ajax’d apps can make sites a lot easier to work with, JavaScript applications go beyond mere web page and turn the web browser into a full-fledged client. JSApps can be faster, more dynamic, more powerful, and vastly easier to use.

Let’s take one of the best designed Ajax web apps on the web as an example. Basecamp is a great web app for managing projects. You can write messages, add todos, milestone and more. Even though Basecamp uses some Ajax to add some neat effects to their pages (especially when working on Todos), you still will spend a lot of time waiting for pages to load when you use this application.

Each click…to visit…a message…or a task…requires…waiting…for a page…to load.

Even with a fast server, the simple fact is that waiting for pages to load creates dead cycles. It interrupts your flow of thought, taking you out of control and putting you at the mercy of your wifi connection, big telcos, our servers, and other customers to decide how fast you get to work.

Up until now, this has been a simple fact of the web. If you want something more rich, you would often resort to technologies like Flash that are not as native and require plugins. Thankfully, modern browsers running modern JavaScript engines have become so commonplace that its finally OK to make JavaScript a part of your product requirements and that is making a new type of product possible: the JavaScript Application.

A JavaScript application like Mailroom does away with the whole page loading concept altogether. Instead, you load your page just once when you first visit Mailroom. After that, everything is done right there in your browser.

Unlike an Ajaxed app where JavaScript is used to enhance a page-based experience, the JavaScript application is driven almost entirely by the JS on a single page. It is leaps and bounds faster and richer to boot.

Thanks to caching and other behind-the-scenes work, in fact, it is possible to almost entirely decouple your client experience from our server. That means that as you use Mailroom, you won’t spend much time waiting on data to go over to the internet. We do that all in the background so you can keep working.

Mailroom is certainly not the only JavaScript Application out there. Zimbra have been doing this for years longer than we have. But we do hope that Mailroom will be a shining example of what JSApps are capable of, and why we think they are the future of web apps for business in general.

Mailroom 2 is almost ready. I can’t wait. Really. It’s like being in the 9th month of a pregnancy without the pain and bloating.

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