The Mambo foundation is a volunteer, non-profit organization charged with the governance of the Mambo open source content management system.  Mambo is free software released under the GNU/General Public license and like all such projects, dealing with emails and organizational issues takes valuable time away from software development.   They use SupportTrio to manage both time and resources more effectively.

Mambo developers must work in collaboration from many different locations which makes email key to their communication.   “Email is the key communication tool. The Mambo development team and the members of the Board of the Mambo Foundation are geographically distributed and work in a virtual, online environment.  All email that is not addressed to individuals is managed through the help desk.”  Directing email traffic through a central ticketing system allows multiple members to work together on the same issue if it is not specifically addressed to a particular individual.

Mambo foundation uses the knowledgebase in SupportTrio  to provide a central location for corporate documents that require routine turn over.  “For the management of Board affairs SupportTrio has proven to be an ideal solution.  Previously, corporate documents were kept by officers of the Foundation and handed over to new officers following our annual elections of the Board. This meant that record keeping relied on the diligence of the individuals who handled those documents. SupportTrio is used as a central repository and archive. By keeping all documents in the knowledgebase and keeping emails we now have accurate corporate records that are available to future Board members. This gives us confidence that we can not only meet our statutory obligations but also that institutional knowledge is retained for the future - two things that are extremely important and sometimes difficult to achieve in a volunteer environment.”     This improves efficiency and allows accountability that would otherwise be difficult to maintain.

“Volunteer, free software projects tend to have a reasonably high turnover in personnel. People work when they can, in their spare time, and often find it hard to commit their time in advance. By having a central document repository and by handling all email through the ticketing system it does not matter who is around and when. People can come into new roles and read what has happened previously and people can take leave for a few months while knowing that others can step in and take over handling of the enquiries.

“In the past, individuals took responsibility for one or more email accounts. There was no way the rest of the team could be certain that emails were being responded to in a timely manner and no way the team or Board could be certain it was receiving all information. By collecting all emails within the help desk the groups collectively have access to each email and the responses. This has made us more accountable and has improved our responsiveness to enquiries.

“Prior to installing SupportTrio we also had issues due to the distributed, virtual team environment we work in. Team and Board members are located all over the world and not everyone has reliable internet connections. Some countries have high fees for bandwidth. This resulted in some Board members being reluctant to take on responsibility for handling email enquiries due to costs - especially as a lot of the email is spam. By using the helpdesk nobody needs to worry about the costs because email goes into the ticket system and is not downloaded to individual’s computers. If someone’s internet connection is down for awhile this is not a problem - responding is a collective responsibility and no longer a burden put on individuals.

“The Mambo Foundation has used SupportTrio for nine months now. The improvements in our responsiveness and productivity have been significant. Best of all, we now have more time to devote to developing the software.”

SupportTrio provides a central framework to allow Mambo Foundation address the challenge of working in an environment that requires the collaboration of volunteers working in different locations.  It also provides a means for maintaining efficiency and accountability in an environment that necessitates a high turnover rate.

Click here for more information about SupportTrio

It has been a while since the last major update of KnowledgeBuilder. For the last couple of months we have been working on a major update.  A core part of this update is a complete rewrite of KnowledgeBuilder’s backend.

We’ve optimized the database to handle much more data with greater speed, no more slow pages when there are a lot of articles and/or categories. Speaking of articles and categories, icons and tags can now be added as well as SEO urls: all categories and articles will have “search friendly” URLS that include article/category titles.

KnowledgeBuilder will include better management features including simplified importing and syncing as well as improved content management. Ajax enabled features will eliminate the need to reload pages for minor actions, meaning increased page optimization and usability.

The admin side of KnowledgeBuilder is almost done and we’re working to catch up on the public end. A major new feature on the public side is live edit, you can double click the article title/content (or category’s title/description) and edit it right there!

Signup for the beta

We are in the process of starting work for 1-2-All 5.0.  This will be a major update to the 1-2-All Email Marketing product.

Many updates and new features have already been planned.  You can expect a great deal of improvement in managing the entire system (all users/lists), many usability updates, and many new features that will be announced at a later date.

While we have our plans for 1-2-All 5.0, we really want to know what YOU want.  Please take a couple of minutes to let us know what you think.  Let us know what you would want changed, what you wish could be added, general feedback/comments, etc..    Your feedback is greatly appreciated and will be taken into consideration for 1-2-All 5.0.

• Click here to let us know what you would like to see in 1-2-All 5.0

If you should have any general concerns or questions please let us know at info@activecampaign.com

Thanks for your continual support of ActiveCampaign!

Jason F. VandeBoom

By popular demand we now offer both yearly phone support contracts AND per-incident phone support.

This would be in addition to our quick and efficient free web support included with your purchase.  For more details, click here.

It’s an accepted wisdom that maintaining an e-mail list and sending out regular e-mail updates is a good idea for your business. But let’s think about why this should be.

Of course, it’s a good idea to have an open channel of communication with your clients, because it keeps them from forgetting about you. A professional newsletter can also increase recipients’ perception that you are familiar and established, and so makes it easier for them to buy from you. But in the end, like everything else in business, it comes down to the payoff. What is the final objective of your e-mail campaign? Better yet, what is the objective of the very next e-mail you’re going to send out?

If the objective is to win a sale, then you’ll already be very clear on this. But often, maintaining a mailing list involves sending out a number of messages with less decisive agendas. You can improve your e-mail marketing campaigns immensely by doing three simple things:

1. Set a goal for every message you send out.

What would you like for this particular newsletter to accomplish for your business? Do you want to inspire your recipients to click through to your web site? Are you hoping to get them to forward your newsletter to their friends so you can grow your membership? Do you want them to fill out a survey? Do you simply want them to trust you more?

2. Think of a couple of different ways you might accomplish this.

If you’re trying to get your message recipients to trust you, then your job is very easy. All you have to do is give them information that is both authoritative and immediately useful to them, and ask for nothing in return. Of course, you’ll have to have this type of information first, so this type of goal is excellent if you are an authority on the topping of your newsletter.

If you’re aiming to induce a specific action, your strategy will be similarly rational: in most cases, you’ll just ask them to do what you want them to do. That isn’t really as simple as it seems, of course. Is it better to ask at the beginning of a message or at the end? In the middle? Should you give them a whole paragraph to pitch the action or just set it aside in a colored box apart from your content? These variables will be different for every newsletter based on the preferences of your demographic and the nature of the information you’re sending out. How do you determine which is best for your purposes?

3. Test them against each other.

Just set up your A/B Split test in 1-2-All and send out your mailing. Then pay attention to the results and note them for future mailings. See how easy that was? Now you know something about your client base that you never knew before–you’ve learned a little something about how to induce them to perform a specific action. In your next newsletters, you can keep right on putting that technique to work, or (and here’s the real secret) keep testing. Do a split test every single time you send out a message. It’s just a little more work, and the results can scale exponentially. Use the insights of all of your previous tests to design each of your next tests, so that your knowledge of your customers snowballs into… dare I say… absolute power. Or, at the very least, you can get more people to forward your messages to their friends

Don’t think small with these insights either. Everything you learn about getting someone to click through to your site is also an insight that can potentially be used to win a sale. Knowledge is money.

We’re excited and you will be too about the release of 1-2-All Email Marketing 4.80. This is a significant update that will enable you with multiple sending methods whereas as you were limited to a single sending method in the past. Now admins can add more SMTP servers and 1-2-All will loop through them. Sending orders can be changed, and every sending method / smtp server has its own limit of emails to send before moving on to the next sending method/smtp server. One obvious advantage to this is if your web host restricts you to a set number of emails that you are allowed to deliver per hour. Before this meant that you would have to slow the rate at which you send emails to be compliant with your sending limitation. Now that you can set up multiple SMTP servers you can move to another SMTP server or another sending method once your limitation has been met.

Other minor changes in 4.80 include bug fixes, updates to the subscription forms, and updates to sending filters.

Multiple SMTP Screenshots:

We just released TrioLive version 1.58.  This update includes an updated interface and a number of adjustments and bug fixes.    Some of the changes include:

• Top 10 Entry/Exit graphs now have improved algorithms.
• The search engine report no longer reports blank search engines.
• Custom fields in TrioLive are now managed by our modern custom field system used in 1-2-All, SupportTrio, VisualEdit and SwiftTraction.
• Chat usernames are now cached in a visitor’s traffic session, which should defeat the problem where what’s reported on the traffic list as a visitor’s last-used chat name is inaccurate.
• Update geolocation data
• We now cache the referrer in the traffic session table.
• Removed an option to define HIDDEN custom field as required
• Now passing more variables to Forgot Password emails

Here are some screenshots of the new version:

One of the ways that we increase the overall speed and security of our web-based software is by pre-compiling the PHP code. The tools that we use to do this are called Zend Optimizer and Ioncube. You actually only need one or the other in order to encode PHP scripts, and I’m not aware of any performance benefit that either one enjoys over the other. The only reason that we use both of these products is to provide maximum compatibility with all the different types of web hosts and servers that are out there. That’s why, when you visit the downloads page in our support center, you’re always asked which version of the software you’d like to download: Zend or Ioncube.

Most people who don’t produce or use a lot of web-based software have never heard of either of these products and get a little flustered when confronted with the question of which they should download. If you’re using a shared web hosting account or have an in-house server admin running your web server, then you have a simple one-step solution: pick up the phone, call the admin, and ask which one you can use

If you’re running your own server, it’s still very simple. The first thing to do is to find out if your server can already run Ioncube scripts, since if it can there are no additional steps for you. The way to find this out is to:

• download our test script
• unzip and upload it to your web directory
• and then open it up in a web browser

You’ll see something like this:

As you can see, my own local test server is not able to run Ioncube-encoded scripts without additional setup, because I’m using the latest version of PHP, which has broken dynamic loading. That’s no big deal, because I went ahead and installed the free Zend Optimizer with just a couple of clicks, and now I’ll show you how to do the same.

Download Zend Optimizer

If you find this part challenging, you probably shouldn’t be trying to run your own web server! 

What you need to do is to download the Zend Optimizer package onto your web server. You can get it from http://www.zend.com/en/products/guard/downloads, where you’ll need to select the appropriate package for your server. So first select the radio button labeled “Zend Optimizer” (not the one labeled “Zend Guard,”) and then you’ll find that the dropdown box becomes populated with a list of server types that Zend Optimizer is available for. The chances are very good that the type of server you are using is supported by Zend Optimizer. Remember, folks, you’re installing this on your web server, not on your own local computer (unless your web site is served from your local machine), so you want to be doing all this from the server, and to select the option that corresponds to the operating system running on the web server.

Before you are allowed to download, you’ll have to register for an account on zend.com on the next page. Once you’ve downloaded the software, all that is left is to install it on the server. The instructions for doing this will vary depending on the type of server that you use. If it is a Windows IIS server, just double-click on the installer .exe file and follow the instructions that appear on the screen. On any other type of system, including Mac OS X and any Linux or Unix variant, you’ll find that the installation package is compressed, so you first need to extract it.

On Linux or Unix servers

• Open up a terminal window or get yourself out to the command line. You can decompress the package by entering the following at the command line prompt:
  • gunzip -c <package name> | tar xf -
• Then, from inside the installer package directory that is created when the package is unzipped, type:
  • ./install.
• Now you’ll see a nice pretty graphical installation wizard that will walk you through setting up Zend Optimizer on your server.

On servers running Mac OS X

Installation on a server running OS X is a little more complicated that you might like it to be, but is still very doable. The most complicated part is basically just that you have to use the command line, which many OS X users are not very familiar with. However, you can find a very good tutorial for going through this process here.

Now put it to good use!

Once you’ve got Zend Optimizer installed on your server, you should be able to run Zend-encoded PHP scripts right away. So now just grab a copy of the Zend version of whichever ActiveCampaign software product you’ve purchased, and follow the installation instructions in the docs/install.txt file (you can also find the instructions in our knowledge base.)

If you run into any problems with the Zend Optimizer installation or if you get an error message saying that Zend Optimizer is not installed on your server, check the Zend website for troubleshooting tips.

We are now offering our 10 Template bundle of email templates for only $97!

Click here to view the templates and order!

We just released SwiftTraction version 1.51

This new version has a number of bug fixes and a new deign.  It should now be easier to track time and view reports.  For a full list of changes click here.