New help desk system on Aurigma

by Andrew 5/19/2008 10:05:00 PM

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! Cool 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.

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Image Uploader licensing FAQ

by Andrew 1/6/2008 7:01:00 PM

We have noticeable reworked a portion of website related to Image Uploader pricing and licensing. Since Image Uploader licensing plans became more complicated, we have created a separate section which contains well-structured FAQ describing all possible options:

http://www.aurigma.com/Products/ImageUploader/Licensing.aspx

Also since a number of Image Uploader related online store items are getting exceed all reasonable limits, we have grouped them on the purchase page: 

http://www.aurigma.com/Products/ImageUploader/PricingLicensing.aspx

As always, I highly appreciate any feedback. If something is unclear here or you have any additional questions, do not hesitate to inform me. I will try to explain it better.  

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Image Uploader | Website

Old Aurigma products are getting discontinued

by Andrew 12/29/2007 5:34:00 PM

For more than 5 years we developed a number of different products. Unfortunately we are not Microsoft-scale company and cannot afford to develop multiple completely different products in the same time. As a result some products was not modified several years. In these several years a lot of much better competitor products appeared. But it is not fine for us to offer customers any products which we do not deem to be the best. That's we we decided that it would be fair to remove these old products. Instead of it we will concentrate on our flagship products and do our best with them.

Discontinued Products 

Let's see which products will not be available anymore:

  • Media Gallery
  • All ActiveX components (all of them have .NET siblings - they are still alive!):
    • AVI Processor (ActiveX)
    • Media Processor (ActiveX)
    • Graphics Mill for ActiveX
  • FlashChart 

Of course if you have already built an application where some of these products are used and need to distribute them, we will provide it to you. But it will not be available on our website, we will not market it, and moreover we will not develop it anymore. However if existing customers will discover any problems with it, just contact our support guys, we will try to help.

Existing Products

You may wonder which products we still support and develop. We start year 2008 having two product lines, each consists of two products:

  1. File transfer browser extensions:
    1. Image Uploader
    2. File Downloader

  2. Imaging solutions for .NET apps:
    1. Graphics Mill for .NET with all its addons
    2. PhotoEditor

We are going to make great improvements in these products, moreover perhaps we will try ourselves in new directions, but... These plans are subject for separate topics!

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Graphics Mill | Image Uploader | Website

New forum

by Andrew 12/16/2007 4:07:00 PM

On these weekends we have migrated to new forum platform - Yet Another Forum (yes, this is an application name :) ). The main benefit for it is that site and forum users are merged now. Single login is used both for online store and forum. Also, this forum does better job when you attach files or insert code snippets.

We have migrated all content and users more or less seamlessly. But for some users we had to reset passwords. So if anyone have difficulties to login, just try to restore the password using appropriate page.   

 

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