After having the pleasure to work with so many neat companies over the past 2 years, I thought it would be fun to tell you about some of them. If you would like to hear about some of these unique and interesting organizations you can find them here each weekend. (And if you are a customer and would like us to write about you, drop me a note and we’ll interview you.)

I just finished speaking with André Cymbalista at CAN – Cyclist Advocacy Network. It is a New Zealand-based not-for-profit that works to influence local and national policy in support of cyclists. The end goal is to encourage health and happiness through cycling as well as help the planet with a few less cars on the street.

Long ago CAN took a look at countries like the Netherlands and Denmark, which benefit from large cyclist communities, and decided they would like to see the same in their own country. Over the last decade they have been very successful in establishing good relationships with local and national governments. Because of their direct efforts there has been a noticeable drop in cycling incidents and an increasing view of cycling as a means of transportation; not to mention all the great people who have been connected through their various groups within the network.

André, who is in charge of their digital communication initiative, explained their latest efforts involving the creation of an entirely new web platform where each of the user groups will receive a “fully customizable, ready to use, cycling user group website template, and training workshops to upskill group members in web publishing.” The idea is to continue to encourage more cycling by using these communication tools. What’s really great is that their government is completely on board as CAN was given an $80,000 grant to complete the project.

With 3 to 6 people (volunteer and paid) who try to answer all the incoming email from their website, CAN is using Mailroom centralize their email and standardize some of their responses. That way, their volunteers can log in at anytime from anywhere to help respond to the needs of their local user groups.

All of us here at Sproutit love to ride our bicycles around Silicon Valley both for pleasure and as an alternate means of transportation. We really appreciate things like marked bike lanes and courteous drivers. That’s why we jumped at the chance to work with CAN in their efforts to make a more cyclist-friendly world. Besides, you never know when you might want to visit the beautiful islands of New Zealand.

BONUS We haven’t officially announced it yet but if you work with other great not-for-profit organizations like CAN we would love to help. Send us an email in exchange for a free basic account.

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

I promised erwin a more in-depth look at what’s coming with MR2 within a week or two. That was a few days ago, so now here it is: The first public demonstration of Mailroom 2, coming in January from Sproutit:

It’s not very flashy. I did something quick so I could actually get it out to you and get back to the project. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it though (especially if you are excited about the updates. ;-)

Cheers!

Speed has always been one of the most important areas for Mailroom. Our goal is to help you get through your email as fast as possible so you can get onto other things. We’ve been making steady improvements in this area since our launch and this next release will be no exception.

This blog has been a ghost-town lately, and I apologize for that. The reason is that we have been pretty heads down for the last several months working on some major upgrades to Mailroom and (gasp) another app. We’re not alone actually. Some of our friends from Omnidrive and Riya took some time from their blogs this summer to get some work done.

But that is about to change. Over the next few weeks I’ll post a bit more about the features coming with our new release. Mailroom is getting a major overhaul, so big we’ve sometimes internally been calling this “Mailroom 2.0”.

More soon…

When we explain to people what we are building at Sproutit (especially when we talk about our next product), they often nod their heads and say “right, its like CRM”.

Sproutit is not CRM. CRM is about helping you keep all the information you have about prospects and customers organized. It’s about tracking sales pipelines, or verifying sales track records.

CRM is about management, Sproutit is about caring for your customers. It’s about helping you make sure that every experience your customers have with you is personal, timely, and helpful. Sproutit is about making you look good to your customer.

That’s the reason Mailroom is designed the way it is. For example, Mailroom does not issue “ticket numbers” or anything like that for emails your receive from customers. Instead, Mailroom tracks conversations just like tickets in other systems, but every email you send through Mailroom will appear personal and individual to your customers.

Ticket numbers are the waiting lines of the internet; they make the customer feel like you don’t care enough to give them individual attention. Mailroom emails, on the other hand, are like private consultations. They send the message to your customers that you really care about them.

The same thing goes for our More About feature. Sure, other systems make it possible for you to dig up all the emails you or anyone else have exchanged with a person, but only Mailroom puts a summary of that info right next to the email when you view it along with a picture of the person if we have it.

Context and personality means better service. It puts you in the right frame of mind to treat your customer like a person even if you never meet them face to face.

Sproutit is not CRM.

Well, its been a long time coming, but we finally rolled out attachments support for Mailroom last Friday! We’ve been testing it this weekend, and so far things seem to be working great. If you’ve been waiting on attachments to give Mailroom a try, now is a great time to give it another go.

In addition to attachments, we’ve also made some other major upgrades to Mailroom in the last few weeks. Our latest deployment adds forwarding to the Cc and Bcc support we added a month ago. We also moved Mailroom to new servers, sped up the UI, reduced the time it takes to receive new email to under a minute (for emails sent directly to Mailroom), and made some massive improvements to our spam filter.

We’re really glad to have these features finally out, and especially excited to get started on our next round of improvements. We have some new things planned with our UI, suggested replies, and assignment features that I think you are going to love.

Special thanks to Shanti, Peter, and Rob (at OCS Solutions) for all the hard work you put into making these changes the last few months. This has been a big project.

As always, thanks everyone for your tremendous support. We are anxious to hear your thoughts on our recent improvements. Please give it a try and drop us a line anytime.

What a crazy couple of days for Mailroom. After a few teething issues last week, we made the Big Move for Mailroom this last weekend from New Jersy to Michigan. I’m glad to say everything went very well. In fact, Mailroom seems very happy in its new home. Pages take about half the time they did before to render (which was pretty fast anyway).

One of the things I am most excited about though is the improvements we made to Mailroom’s receiver – the component that receives your incoming email. On our previous setup, Mailroom’s receiving system would need to be reset frequently. Although no email was lost, it meant email would sometimes takes a lot longer to get delivered than we would like.

When we moved to the new servers, we took the time to install some new software components to fix the problems we had with our receiver. I’m happy to say that since we deployed on Sunday, our receiver has worked flawlessly. In fact, most email is being delivered faster now, often in under a minute.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us as we’ve worked to install these major upgrades to Mailroom. We’ve been working on this for almost two months now; it’s very exciting to see it finally work out.

We’re not done though. We have a number of long-requested features ready that will come online in the next few days, so stay tuned!

Indigo Moon Systems mentions us along with some other easy business tools. I like his description of Sproutit Mailroom:

I just came across this one-it’s not free, but it’s interesting and I have at least one current client I’m going to recommend it to. It’s an online automated e-mail management system, using basic artificial intelligence to receive and sort mail coming in to common addresses (like “sales” or “support”) and automatically produce recommended replies, reducing the time to manage each individual piece of mail. This has long been a function available in helpdesk software, but that’s either very expensive or very complicated to implement-this is entirely web-based, easy to get started with, easy to quit if it doesn’t work well.

A few weeks ago we experienced what would turn out to be the first in a series of scaling issues with Mailroom when our search engine crashed. Since we launched Mailroom a few months ago, we have handled just shy of 250,000 emails for customers. This number grows at a rate of several thousand per day.

It turns out there are not very many search engines that can handle even this kind of growth, let alone when we get to the million of email mark we expect to reach in the next few months. We had to do something.

After several weeks of testing, we’ve rolled out our new search engine. This engine is faster and better able to scale with Mailroom as we grow. Many thanks for Shanti for his hard work in putting together this new engine.

Read the full details here. If you don’t have a Mailroom account yet, you can create a free account.

This new search engine is the first in a series of performance enhancements we are working on right now. We’ll be announcing our other improvements soon, so stay tuned.

alarm:clock euro just posted a nice piece on Sproutit and Mailroom. This interview was very different from most others I’ve done because the Valerie, the author, was really digging more into the business side of Sproutit. Read everything she wrote, but here is what I found more interest:

Here’s one of the cool things I love about Management by Feeds. I have a folder in NetNewsWire called “Sprout Companies”. This contains the blogs of all of our clients (that I know about). If there is a big event happening in the life on one of our clients, I know about it. Even if I don’t write to them, it makes me feel good to know that.

(For example, Omnidrive has had tremendous response to their new web-based storage solution. They are growing really fast. If you need to share files across the internet, you definitely need to give them a look.)

One thing we’ve learned since starting Sproutit is that personal touch one of the most precious commodities in the online. It seems like many people who start Web 2.0 companies are fascinated with the seemingly low costs of running a business. They can build a product for $10K, spend nothing on marketing, do support by email.

All of that is true and important, but you can’t use your website to hide from your customers. It may sound simple, but there is no better way to build a growing group of loyal customers than to simply become friends with them.

We have been hard at work optimizing Mailroom these last few days.

This morning (6AM EST) we just deployed some performance optimizations that should help a bit.

Rest assured though, we’ll always be working to make the service faster.

Due to this deployment, it’s possible that if you were logged into Mailroom this morning, your session was expired after the upgrade and you’ll have to re-lgoin.

Sorry for any inconvience, but we hope it’s worth it!

In addition to allegedly leading marketing efforts here at Sproutit, I also co-direct a nonprofit venture called Blogswana. Blogswana is an attempt to use social software tools to increase AIDS awareness in the African country of Botswana. One of the problems we had was email.

A typical lumbering, old-style kill-crush-destroy NGO (non-governmental organization) has a huge overhead: Tons of Western-salaried employees, insurance, office space, sub-contractors and, of course, expensive suites of software, including email management. Naturally, the overhead a company like this needs is gigantic.

One of the criticisms of the old-style NGO is that, at best, only pennies on the dollar get to the people who need it. The other complaint is that the money that does get into the target country winds up more often gilding toilets in presidential palaces than providing for the hungry or sick. But lately, there have been the first stirrings of a movement I (unapologetically) call, NGO 2.0.

Like for-profit companies of the 2.0-ish persuation, NGOs of our ilk are adaptible, agile, entrepreneurial, direct-to-user outfits that utilize “customer” content creation. We use as many web applications as we can; in fact, that’s all we use. But here’s the problem: email.

Unfortunately, the top three providers of free, web-based email services are also egregious flaunters of ethical business standards. They assist tyranical governments in censoring their citizens and even help them to convict them of trumped up crimes. All for the sake of theoretical, future increases in market share. It’s hard to be a do-gooder with an email that twirls its moustache like a silent movie villain.

Alternatives, such as Hushmail, though well-built and ethically smirch-free, are difficult for the average person to use.

So, to make a short story long, I decided to put my mail where my money was and employ Sproutit’s Mailroom, not just as an email management system but as our primary email service.

In addition to sending and receiving email for free and from anywhere, Mailroom also gives us the ability to answer and manage the email as a team, which is integral to our efficiency and was a monstrous pain before. It also, equipt as it is with a quick-learning artificial intelligence, automatically forwards mail to the proper recipient, while allowing acess to anyone in the company. It also suggests proper responses to day-to-day inquiries.

I’m really pleased with this solution and I would encourage all the rest of you out there who are involved with non-profits to consider Mailroom, like us, both as an email management system that is particularly well suited to the collaborative, NGO 2.0 way of doing business and as your primary email service.

The long-awaited second installment of the Sproutit newsletter, The Illustrated Sprout, is now available for your delectation.

If you missed the first issue, stop beating yourself up. The debut of The Illustrated Sprout is also available online.

Read it, learn it, love it.