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Background
I'm a one man shop (a micro-ISV). A week after putting my product online I get a mail from one of my customers about a bug. It was an obvious fix and I fixed it in 5 minutes but I realize that the reason why the bug was reported so late is because the only contact I have with my users is through mail.
I feel I need something more but I have difficult time finding the right solution.
I was checking out some solutions, but I would like some feedback from the community
Question
What do you use for a micro-ISV (both online and built into software) when you want to give good quality service and support to your clients?
Have an issue-tracking system that your customers can use through a web page. (You do have a web page, right?) Alternately, if your software is interactive, have a menu entry "Submit Bug Report" which will email you what the user says, and perhaps other useful things (users very frequently omit things like software versions, OS versions, that sort of thing). Or both.
Also, your customers are likely to feel happier if they have a standard way to report problems.
If you want to go beyond the "email us" link, you might consider putting up a bulletin-board or even wiki-style forum on your site for your clients to use. Make your own list of Frequently Asked Questions the first post. I'd recommend using an off-the-shelf package, instead of rolling your own. A pre-existing solution should include the spam-filtering and moderation tools that you'll need.
Another idea would be to start a company blog, and invite users to leave feedback.
You fixed it in five minutes? Sounds like you're already giving good quality service / support. But if you really want a tool, I would check out if Unfuddle.com has a public bug report feature. I love that site.
This is a subject I've thought a lot about (since I'm contemplating doing just what you're doing), and there's considerable precedent for how you could proceed.
Set up a feedback page on your website
Set up a dedicated email account for your website
Set up automated opt-in bug reporting and crash reporting for your software
Set up a twitter account; and conduct twitter searches for your software name
Set up a Google Alert to track when a website or user references your product, and respond to them.
Set up a Uservoice account for your software/website (it's free for a 'small' company).
For a start, you can ensure your website is clear, and has useful sections like FAQs and How-Tos.
Make sure your customers can get in touch with you easily, and that you respond to them in a reasonable amount of time.
If you out and don't have a Blackberry enabled phone you could have your software send you an SMS of the fault.
A well designed website with a forum for news, updates, user discussions is probably a good start. It's worth paying someone to do this for you if you want to spend more time designing and coding good software. The more information you can put out there, the less time you'll spend dealing with customer issues.
In addition to giving your users more options on how to report a problem, your site should also be logging a fair amount of information. Such as, who, when, and what they did.
Further, ANY failure should be logged and automatically be reported back to you. Most clients simply won't say there is a problem and will just move on.
Just basic logging will also give you usability information. What pages do they use the most, which ones are used least, what is different about them. Are there features no one cares about?
Finally, engage your customers by asking them what they would like to see. Quite often their vision is different from yours.
I use ontime as a customer portal and help desk / bug tracking tool. It's free for a one person license. Which is great for me since I'm a one man shop as well. I'm the only full-time employee and have one to two part-time 1099 contractors here and there as work comes and goes.
There are also lots of open source out there. However, I've found the ontime to be dead simple, free for a 1 user license and cheap for 5 user license.
Split your time between development and customer support. If you focus too much on support, new functionality will suffer, and if you focus on development, customers will suffer.
So find a balance and plan portion of your time for development and another part to support.
Also keep in mind that solving the bug is just the first step.
You need to test (preferablyseveral configurations)
create a new installation
possible update manual and help files (and don't forget the translations if it's multi lingual).
Add a new version number (every deliverable must be identifyable).
Update website...
So it often takes several days to ship a single bugfix.
Besides, most customers are happy with a few updates per year. And ocasionally an urgent hotfix if the customer is in serious need of a bugfix.
I have a few systems. My main system is through a fogbugz account with buttons built in to my application that create emails for users so that they can then submit comments / bug reports etc. I also run a wiki as the documentation for my application, although I am the main contributor to the wiki and it does take a lot of effort to keep up to date. Again, there is a menu item in my application that takes users directly to the wiki. I have a built in crash reporter using an open source framework, which again submits emails to fogbugz. Finally I do online video and text based tutorials on my applications website, although I'd like to integrate them more into the application.
One (free) product that I know uses Yahoo Groups (and also a Google Group).
It acts as a mailing list: so if you report a bug, that's seen by other users as well as by the group's owner/moderator (i.e. you).
It also acts as a weblog/archive: so users can search it for known issues/answers before they submit a new message.
Have you tried Casengo? Its a free solution (for 1st agent) for handling email, chat and social media . It might be of interest to you. url: http://www.casengo.com
I am using Casengo for several weeks and is very easy to use.
Jeremy
Related
Easily seen in the JSON result from this:
https://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=https://www.linkedin.com
Which currently returns:
IN.Tags.Share.handleCount(
{
"count":0,
"fCnt":"0",
"fCntPlusOne":"1",
"url":"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com"
});
Apparently it affects most of the LinkedIn Share buttons/counters out there on the web, including WordPress and other blogs. This has been "broken" since late last week (13 Jan 2018).
I opened a ticket with LinkedIn support. Response was to post here, as this is where the LinkedIn Developers support resides. Hoping for a response that says "Oops, we'll fix this." Or, if deliberately crippled, an announcement that says so. (Twitter made a similar move a few years ago. It was unpopular among developers, but we've moved on.)
Further to Chris Hemedingers response, this feature has now been entirely deprecated
Deprecating the inShare Counter
As you can see they have deprecated this saying:
The share count on its own doesn’t fully reflect the impact that a piece of content delivers, and we encourage publishers and other content creators to leverage the inShare plugin as a way to drive conversation and engage with members on LinkedIn.
They then link to the Documentation saying:
Share on LinkedIn plugin will no longer return share count.
This is massively inconvenient for my company as we have just finished construction of a suite of tools powered by this.
The share count service is back in operation, working as it was before. The outage was deliberate (apparently) but temporary.
As far as I know this is an undocumented API, but it's integral to the "LinkedIn Share" buttons that are used in countless websites/blogs around the world. As such, LinkedIn has no contract/obligation to keep that service running...so consumers of the service in non-LinkedIn components should beware.
Thank you for the update! That was quite frustrating to track this down. I had to research the code, request from the API itself with multiple URLs, submitted a ticket to LinkedIn... and ultimately found myself here and read this. Just a recommendation, I think it would be better to return some kind of error code than a 0. Many people actually display the count on their sites.
I started using Hukkster.com a few days ago. It is really fast and accurate.
The bookmarklet of hukkster always fetches correct price from the product page.
This happens for all the featured merchants it supports.
I was really curious to know what technology stack they might me using for such a fast and accurate response ?
I have tried to search everything I could on google. I found nothing other than Hukkster success story, Hukkster in NEWS etc.
There was nothing related to technology stuff used by Hukkster.
It is Mozenda .
Found it. Here it is:
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2012/08/29/the-founders-creators-of-new-shopping-app-hukkster-definitely-not-brogrammers/
The co-founders believed in their idea. There was just one problem–neither one knew how to code. They didn’t let that stop them. They developed a “paper prototype” that they could run without coding. They built a crawler using a data extraction service called Mozenda, and did the rest of Hukkster’s legwork with spreadsheets, emails and phones.
http://www.mozenda.com/
I hope I'm not using stackoverflow.com in the wrong way: asking this question!
Recently I ventured in to starting my own business to Sell software without realising the terrible implications that come with ecommerce - the only way to buy my software I offer. This would be fine if I was just selling the file downloads and/or shipping...But I'm not! I the hope that it would be easier (and alot cheaper) I am only offering digital downloads!
All this is fine, and I only have one hurdle to overcome - a big hurdle that is.. automating serial key disturbution!
By the way - the reason I'm using Drupal and Ubercart is, I wanted to make my business website look as professional as possible and I saw a CMS as the way to go. I picked drupal because its open source (free), flexible, very search engine freindly and I knew that lots of other sites with the same idea as me used it, among other reasons! AND I picked Ubercart because it seemed like there was more support for it and it seemed more up to date, etc. But I suppose I can turn to drupal ecommerce module if needs be.
Anyway. All I want is to be able to generate a serial key, add it to a MySQL database and sent it to the user via email as soon as I know that the payments gone through sucessfully - how ever they payed!
I've got the script for that!
I just don't know how to use it! How do execute it, when I some how know when the payments gone through? And How do I know the paying customers details like email, name and amount paid, etc...
Any advice or help appriciated...
Thanks in advance
This is can be done with no problems, i want to tell you that Ubercart as a choice is very good , and more organized than ecommerce, just wanted to tell you that so you know you are on a good track.
I hope you are familiar with hooks, and if not , you can understand them easily in no time, in Ubercart there is a hook_order which gives you the ability to add a functionality when the order is being newly added , saved, updated , or any other state , check this link :
http://www.ubercart.org/docs/api/hook_order
I hope that was helpful enough.
At the company I work for, we have an intranet that provides employees with access to a wide variety of documents. These documents fall into several categories and subcategories, and each of these categories have their own web page. Below is one such page (each of the links shown will link to a similar view for that category):
http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/9800/dmss.jpg
We currently store each document as a file on the web server and hand-code links to these documents whenever we need to add a new document. This is tedious and error-prone, and it also means we lack any sort of security for accessing these documents. I began looking into document management systems (like KnowledgeTree and OpenKM), however, none of these systems seem to provide a categorized view like in the preview above.
My question is ... does anyone know of any Document Management System that allow for the type of flexibility we currently have with hand-coding links to our documents into various webpages (major and minor , while also providing security, ease of use, and (less important) version control? Or do you think I'd be better off developing such a system from scratch?
If you are trying to categorize the files or folders in the document management system, That's not a difficult task. You only need to access to admin panel to maintain the folders or categorize the folders
In Laserfiche, You can easily categorize your folders regarding the departments and can also be subcategorized them
You should look into Alfresco. It's extremely extensible and provides a lot of ways of accessing the repository.
Note: click the "Developers" tab for the community edition.
My question is ... does anyone know of
any Document Management System that
allow for the type of flexibility we
currently have with hand-coding links
to our documents into various webpages
(major and minor , while also
providing security, ease of use, and
(less important) version control?
Or do you think I'd be better off developing such a system from scratch?
Well there are companies that make a living selling doc management software. Anything you can get off the shelf is going to be a huge time saver, and its going to be better than anything you could reasonably develop by hand.
I've used a few systems:
Sharepoint: although I hear some people don't like it, I didn't either ;)
HyperOffice worked really well for my company of around 150 employees and has all the features you describe.
Current company uses Confluence, I like it :) But its probably one of those tools whose pricetag isn't worth it, especially if you're only using a subset of its features like doc management.
I haven't used it, but one guy I know raves about Alfresco, a free and open source doc management system. I looked at its website, seems simple enough to use.
We also faced a similar problem. However version control was more on our priority and we did look into many solutions in and around. We found Globodox extremely easy to install and use and more important the support team was absolutely fantastic
Try Mayan EDMS, it's Django based, and open source, used it as a base and build the custom features you wish on top of it.
Code location: https://gitlab.com/mayan-edms/mayan-edms
Homepage at: http://www.mayan-edms.com
The project is also available via PyPI at: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mayan-edms/
Often when I post a comment or answer on a site I like to keep an eye out for additional responses from other people, possibly replying again if appropriate. Sometimes I'll bookmark a page for a while, other times I'll end up re-googling keywords to locate the post again. I've always thought there should be something better than my memory for keeping track of pages I care about for a few days to a week.
Does anyone any clever ideas for this type of thing? Is there a micro-delicious type of online app with a bookmarklet for very short term followup?
Update I think I should clarify. I wasn't asking about Stack Overflow specifically - on the "read/write web" in general I add comments to blog posts, respond to google group threads, etc. It's that sort of mish-mash of individual pages on random sites that I would care to keep track of for seven-to-ten days.
For stackoverflow, I put together a little bookmarklet thing at http://stackoverflow.hewgill.com. I use it to keep track of posts that I might want to come back to later, for reference or to answer if nobody else did, or whatever. The backend automatically retrieves updates from the SO server and updates your list of bookmarklets.
In my head mostly. I occasionally forget things, but it works well enough.
That's a very interesting question you asked here.
I do th efollowing:
temp bookmarks in browser
just a tab in Firefox left opened for weeks :)
subscription to email\rss when possible. When email notification comes I often put it into special folder in my email tree.
Different logins, notification types etc are complicating following info in the web :(
Other interesting questions:
how to organize information storage (notes, saved web pages, forum threads etc) for current usage and as a read-only library, sync it between different PCs and USB disks, how to label (tag) it and search it
how to store old mails, conversations, chats,..?
store digital photos for future: make hard-copy printouts or just regulary rewrite it from CD to a new one
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