July 2007 Archives

Mailroom has always had a rough time with HTML email. Although we tried to filter HTML content, it never quite looked right. Well, now you don’t have to wade through HTML tags to read your customer’s email anymore because we now display HTML email!

This upgrade applies only to new email you receive after today. Old email will still display as it always has.

Displaying HTML email in web-based application like Mailroom is tricky, believe it or not. Although we’ve done testing, there are probably some emails some of you recieve that will give Mailroom some trouble. If you experience any issues viewing HTML email, please drop us a line at support@sproutit.com and we’ll look into it.

Enjoy the HTML…

One of the more challenging parts of building web-based software is figuring out how to show it off. There is nothing physical for someone to hold in their hand, yet you still want to give people that close-up, kick-the-tires feeling without forcing them to go for a full test drive first.

Apple recently did a bang up job of this with their iPhone site. For six months people could only touch and feel their phone through the website. Thanks to a combination of amazingly large, close up still shots and videos, many people walked into the Apple Store on the day it launched and bought the phone sight unseen because they felt they had already seen it online.

Today we officially opened the doors on our new site with a pretty new front page. We’re taking our own shot at giving people a close-up with Mailroom.

The solution we’ve come up with involves two parts. The first you can see now on our new pages: large, intense screenshots of our softare highlight the beautiful Mailroom interface:

These closeups hanging slightly outside their bounding box give you a sense of seeing the product up close that I really like. Of course, we have more planned but you’ll have to wait until we have it ready to show you…stay tuned…

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With the launch of our new forum, we are going to start posting system status (such as hardware outages, etc.) in our announcements forum. Please click over to:

http://forum.sproutit.com/forums/5

And subscribe to the RSS feed there to get those notices. For a few more weeks, I’ll post system status here and there while everyone transitions, but soon we will post there only.

Here is the most recent post from the forum:

Some of you may be experiencing occassional internal server errors today. Here is what’s going on:

Over the last few weeks we’ve experienced occasional freezes on our main web server. The freezes have become more frequent in the last few days. To try to solve this problem we have been replacing hardware on our server among other things based on what appeared to be causing the problem. Each time we have made a change however, the source of the freezes has moved somewhere else.

Last night we tried replacing some additional parts but as you can tell the issue has not been resolved. Today we will probably take Mailroom down again for a few minutes to replace the entire server. Hopefully this will take care of the issue for good.

We know that maby of you spend eight hours a day in Mailroom so reiability is important to you. This is our only priority until the problems are resolved so please know we are working hard to get things back to normal as soon as possible.

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We launched the Sproutit Forums last year to provide Mailroom customers a way to easily communicate with both Sproutit and other Mailroom users. We’ve been using it for the last year, but we felt that some missing features in the software we were using (such as broken RSS feeds) were really holding us back from making the forums all they can be.

A few weeks ago, we made the decision to drop our existing forum software and move to something new called Beast. Today we are rolling out that change.

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Our friends at Plasq have created an amazing new product called Skitch. Skitch lets you take a screenshot or drop a photo into a work area and then mark it up. Like this:

If you do tech support and you ever need to send screenshots with instructions to your customers, this is by far the best app I’ve ever seen to help you do it. It’s in semi-private beta right now, but Plasq has given us 35 invites to try the beta just for Mailroom customers.

If you do support and you’d like to try this new app for free, just send me an email at charles at sproutit.com and I’ll get you an invite.

A hard drive on our primary web server went bad tonight causing problems. We are currently installing a new drive and Mailroom will be back to normal. It should be available again in about 15-20 minutes. Sorry about the inconvenience.

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