Hi there,

Last months (and especially last days) we had a lot of work: we prepared a major website update. Old website structure was pretty inconvenient, and some texts are inaccurate and outdated. It was caused with legacy reasons - we maintained that website structure for years, and it was not flexible enough to reflect changes.

That's why we made a decision to create the website from a scratch. We did our best to make it modern, convenient, and of course, informative.

Now we completely separated it into two websites:

• http://www.aurigma.com - Image Uploader related website
• http://imaging.aurigma.com - Graphics Mill related website

All changes are too global to describe it in this blog, so just Feel free to visit it and take a look. :-) 

The second news is that we released Image Uploader Flash - Flash-based sibling of our Image Uploader ActiveX/Java product. Of course, Flash does not allow to implement the upload component with all those features that make Image Uploader Dual so great and unique. But we did our best, and at my opinion this product is still great. 

As its old Dual sibling, it is able to upload multiple files at a single click and resize photos before upload. As any Flash-based app, its look-and-feel is much more customizable, and it is much easier to fit it to any website design.

Check out Aurigma Image Uploader Flash

And last but not least: we have released a number of Image Uploader based plugins for different CMS and e-commerce system - Drupal, Joomla!, VirtueMart, Zen Cart. To tell the truth, we had these plugins earlier, but now we have released them as full-fledged products. 

Check out Aurigma CMS plugins

Any feedback is highly appreciated. Feel free to drop your impressions or thoughts to info@aurigma.com.

A little bit later I will post more details about new releases. So, stay tuned! 

Hello everyone,

Several years passed since I have about Twitter for the first time. All this time it was unclear to me why it created such a big hype. However now I felt that it is a really impressive communication channel. That's why I decided to create a Twitter account for Aurigma. 

Follow us on Twitter to get latest information about our products and our plans, and of course to communicate us. :)

Hi guys,

On this week we are launching help desk system on Aurigma website. In fact it is already available, and you can start submitting support cases. But before we start using it into full force, we would like to test it and see how people take it. Also, some bugs still may encounter (for example, today one of our customer reported about problems with Mac which we have successfully fixed). So we do not like an idea to shut down our existing support system.

Currently we are using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0. It has a service module which we use to track all issues submitted by our customers. When we have implemented this module about one year ago, it solved certain problems, but now we face new challenges. In particular:

• Email-based system is not reliable enough. From time to time we suffer from problems with spam filters, blocked attachments, corrupted emails (during conversion from email to CRM record).
  
• Microsoft did a great job, but this system is overcomplicated for such small company as Aurigma. Too much IT expenses and other headaches.
• It is not integrated with our website. It was not a problem at the first time, but we want to move forward. Of course, we could customize it, but, firstly, it would require a bunch of coding, secondly, there are some licensing issues.
  
• Microsoft CRM is not the best thing from usability point of view. On one hand this is a matter of habit, but on another hand bad usability = more time to spend to carry out some operation.
  

So we analyzed how we could overcome these problems, and found out that we need to implement some web-based help desk system instead of CRM.

Our first idea was to find some out-of-the-box solution, implement it on our website and integrate with it. But surprisingly we did not find anything which would work fine for us. All these system would require too much customization (time expenses comparable with creating it from a scratch). So we thought - we are software company after all! Couple weeks of development, the same amount time of testing and the new Aurigma help desk system is ready to go.

Let me outline concepts of this help desk system briefly:

• Single access point to customer's issues. We will shut down support@aurigma.com, and all support requests should be submitted into help desk system. It will make life easier both for customers and for us.
  
• Self-service system. It will try to suggest useful information whenever possible. Customers will be able to find solutions for most wide-spread issues without waiting for Aurigma support representative response.
  
• User-friendliness. On one hand the system gives the user hints what information we need to be able to help to overcome the problem, on the other hand, it does not require to fill in huge counter-intuitive questionaries.
• Satisfaction rating. We always tried to provide premium-quality support to everyone. That's why we need your feedback so that we could improve our support service if something is wrong at your opinion.
  

So we finished this system and to tell the truth, I like it. It looks capable to solve all goals we determined for it: decrease time necessary to solve issues and improve support quality. So let's see it in action, and I sincerely hope you will love it as strong as I do.