We recently started work on SupportTrio 3.0. Version 3.0 will be a major update to the SupportTrio Help Desk product.
We will be incorporating hundreds of changes and additions including such things as:
Rewriting the majority of the backend code
Improving the speed and responsiveness of the entire application
Leaving 99% of the source code unencoded
CSS Based admin/public interfaces
Escalation system
SLA Management
External Login Sources
Much more….
While we have our development plans - we still want to know what you want to see in SupportTrio 3.0.
Let us know what you want changed, what you wish was added, general feedback & comments, etc… Your feedback is greatly appreciated and will be taken into consideration for SupportTrio 3.0.
Are you looking to have your own custom email template for your email campaigns? Our template customization services are here to assist you with that. We can create a appealing email template and ensure that it will work in the majority of email clients!
KnowledgeBuilder 3 has been released. If you haven’t heard what’s new, go ahead and review the list of new features.
I’ll touch on some of the interesting ones here.
Let’s face it. It’s hard to get excited about knowledge base software. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be made into an intelligent, well-designed product. KnowledgeBuilder is just that. The front-end includes a major facelift, and the back-end has been completely re-written for much easier extensibility and ease of maintenance. Not to mention - more control for you, the user.
Themes
Right out of the box, you can customize KB to your liking. We prefer our subtle design (and have spent many hours adjusting the CSS), but we understand that it’s impertive users can change the design to fit their organization’s scheme. Changing the theme of your KB is as simple as creating and maintaining a CSS file.
Interface
Regardless of what styles you use, you can be certain your KB interface will behave in effective ways. KB 3 uses Ajax in many areas, in order to create more usable, flexible interfaces. Ajax allows for live-editing, drag-and-drop, and extremely subtle content processing, to name a few. That means a more fluid experience for you.
Search engines
As well as a better experience for users, we’ve also allowed search engines a better avenue to your KB content. Search-friendly URL’s allow your content to be indexed in a more effective manner.
Exporting
We like to think KnowledgeBuilder helps you organize content in effective ways. However, we know sometimes users want to organize it in their own way (like with custom CSS), and this is why we made exporting an important objective for version 3. Included is enhanced PDF export support, as well as export to HTML. Also, you can use the new RSS feeds to aggregate and organize your KB content in your own feed readers.
Importing
Speaking of export, how about import? You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to bulk import articles into KB. You can also do this for Glossary and Word Index terms.
User controls
You’ll enjoy more fine-tuned user control in KB 3. Creating user groups lets you designate privileges as a whole, or to each individual. This provides a much deeper application, which can handle many users while still maintaining the sensitivity of the articles.
There are some exciting changes occurring at ActiveCampaign. We have a number of new updates in the works, KnowledgeBuilder 3.0 is about to be released into beta testing, and we are making some changes in the way you are able to customize all ActiveCampaign products.
The ability to customize ActiveCampaign products is of great concern to us. Customizing sections of the software can be crucial for the product to fit a specific use or direction. Throughout the years we have increased options such as easy branding settings, smarty templates, central language files, a selection of unencoded files, and more. And now….
All future major updates of ActiveCampaign products will be 99% unencoded.
You will be able to modify each and every part of our product. The less than 1% of files that will be encoded only takes care of installing, upgrading, and general licensing. The need for Zend or Ioncube support will remain - but it will not hinder your customization efforts.
We hope this will assist our clients who need custom solutions and are excited to start releasing the major updates of all products with the new 99% unencoded format.
P.S. The first product to be released 99% unencoded will be KnowledgeBuilder 3.0
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.