SmarterMail 9.x Beta Available Now!

October 21, 2011 by 28 Comments

The BETA for SmarterMail 9.x has arrived and there’s something for everyone in the next iteration of our world-class mail and collaboration server:
  • Revised interface and back-end programming to increase speed and performance and to enhance mobility
  • Even better synchronization of email, contacts and tasks using Microsoft’s latest synchronization technology
  • Better integration with Microsoft Outlook 2011 for Mac and Outlook 2012 for Windows
  • Instant messaging brings instant communication
  • Simpler and smoother installation and setup process

Getting Started with the BETA

If you’re interested in getting your hands on the BETA, please visit the SmarterMail 9.x BETA forum, where you’ll see how to:

  • Sign up for the BETA
  • Get a special BETA license key
  • Download the latest BETA release – it’s being updated regularly
  • Communicate with other users and the SmarterTools development team
  • Follow the latest BETA release and stay  up-to-date on the latest release notes

Sign up for the BETA

SmarterMail wen interface shown on an Apple iPad

Focus on the interface – increasing speed and mobility

Are you ready for an incredibly powerful and fast web interface that can be used across desktops and tablets (including iPad and Android)?  Now you have it! With SmarterMail 9.x, we have optimized the web interface for even the slowest of tablets while making it “XOOM” on desktops.  We believe users deserve the full SmarterMail experience across all platforms, whether your using a mouse or a touch interface.

Outlook interface synchronized with SmarterMail through EWS

Outlook and SmarterMail!

SmarterMail 9.x is one of the only mail servers (including Microsoft Exchange) to support Exchange Web Services (EWS).  EWS is Microsoft’s new technology allowing Microsoft Outlook to connect natively and seamlessly with a mail server.  Currently, Microsoft Outlook 2011 for Mac supports EWS and the upcoming Microsoft Outlook 2012 for Windows will support it as well.  EWS is intended to replace the old and antiquated MAPI technology, allowing for much faster communication and access to the latest technologies, and joins the existing methods already provided for connecting Microsoft Outlook and SmarterMail together!

More SYNC friendly

Ice Cream Sandwich, iOS 5, Mango, Lion and more!  The industry is ever evolving and so is SmarterMail as it continues to focus on improvements in supporting the latest technologies.  Whether you or a user wants to try a new mobile phone, tablet or OS you can be assured SmarterMail will meet your needs.

SmarterMail instant messenger interface

Email is good
but instant is GREAT!

No matter the size of an organization, the ability to communicate securely and instantly is crucial.  SmarterMail 9.x integrates an Instant Messenger seamlessly without any additional configuration.  Whether you’re logged into the Web Interface or would like to use a Jabber client on your desktop, tablet or mobile device, communicating with other users in your organization is great!

Simpler, smoother
installation and setup

Although SmarterMail is one of the easiest and more lightweight mail servers on the market, we have not stopped improving the process to get new servers installed and setup!   SmarterMail 9.x introduces an updated getting started wizard with multiple walkthrough videos to help simplify the process.

Is that it?

SmarterMail 9.x has many more features and improvements.  Below is a quick overview of some that may be of interest:

  • Outgoing Mail Quarantine – messages flagged as spam or as a virus can now be quarantined for review to better understand why they were blocked and who was blocked.
  • Appointment Conflict Notification – when making appointments from Web mail, SmarterMail automatically notifies you of conflicts between your attendees.
  • Administrative logging – all system and domain setting changes are now logged for auditing purposes.
  • Sender Match to Authenticated Address – a heavily requested feature to require the authenticated email address also be the email address used as the sender’s “From” address. 
  • APS Integration – SmarterTools is now providing APS packages for Parallels’ control panels for more comprehensive integration
  • Web Services – additional web services have been made available to further automate the provisioning and configuration of SmarterMail

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What to Expect from SmarterStats 7.x

October 21, 2011 by

 Good products improve, but great products evolve.

With that in mind, we’re pleased to announce that the beta of SmarterStats 7.x will begin Tuesday, October 25, and with it we’re going to once again re-define what the term “web analytics” means. Gone are the days when a site owner relied solely on views, visits and hits. Now they expect a full suite of tools to manage their entire online presence, a product that offers a more all-encompassing set of analytics for insight into how their business is performing on the Web. These include:

  • Search Engine Optimization analytics
  • Site optimization and performance analytics
  • Visitor and traffic analytics
  • Search engine spider and bot analytics
  • The ability to fully mine data and create customized analytics

SmarterStats 7.x is the answer.

Getting Started with the BETA

If you’re interested in getting your hands on the BETA, the first step is to visit a special topic we set up in our community forum specifically for the SmarterStats 7.x BETA. In this forum post you’ll see how to:

  • Compete the BETA sign up process
  • Get a special BETA license key
  • Communicate with other users and the SmarterTools development team
  • Follow the latest BETA release and stay up-to-date on the latest release notes

Sign up for the BETA

Your site’s broken – now what?

Site Tuning feature of SmarterStatsDid you realize that things like broken links, excessive linking or even using multiple redirects could hurt your site’s search rank? These problems, as well as many others, can adversely affect how your site is spidered by Google, Yahoo!, Bing and even international search engines and could lead to entire sections of your website being excluded from search results. SmarterStats 7.x offers new Site Tuning functionality that scans your site for over 20 different problems that are commonly found to hurt a site’s search rank, problems that are often hidden, even if a site’s content is fully optimized.
Graphs showing a page's performance statistics

SmarterStats interface displayed on an Apple iPad

Better, faster and more
mobile results

All of the information contained within SmarterStats 7.x is now truly at your fingertips. We optimized the reporting functionality, presentation of data and the entire interface to work flawlessly on both the desktop as well as on mobile devices. Page speed is significantly increased and all features of SmarterStats are fully compatible with touch screens so that you can view all of your crucial information regardless of where you are or whether you’re using an Apple, Android or even Windows mobile device.

¿Quien es?

Language selection for email reportsWant to explore your international reach? It’s easier with SmarterStats 7.x. Sure, SmarterStats always supported international search engines, but with international traffic, especially people coming from Asia or other locations that use non-English character sets, the traffic stats could get a bit muddled. With 7.x, URLs with foreign character sets, like Russian or Chinese, are fully supported and encoded properly. In addition, if you have foreign users you want to send email reports to, you can now send them in the recipient’s preferred language.
Geographic breakdown of website traffic

Significantly reduce space requirements

file compression diagramIt’s no secret that web server logs can grow pretty large and take up a lot of precious space on a server. SmarterStats 7.x can help reduce that space requirement by reading compressed logs in either .zip or .gzip format. For small businesses looking for ways to save money, allowing log files to be compressed to a fraction of their size, without losing the ability to glean crucial data from them, can mean thousands of dollars in savings over the course of a year.

And there’s more…

SmarterStats 7.x has a number of additional new features and product enhancements, including:

  • Pay attention to detail with new page views that make performance and traffic stats, as well as page tuning details, available on a page-by-page basis
  • Create page aliases – perfect for adding common names to unique page URLs – right from a page’s detail view
  • Easily retrieve lost user passwords with a new password reset feature
  • Greater detail means better understanding of your site’s popularity – we completely revamped the way SmarterStats 7.x understands a browser’s user agent, thereby giving you a better understanding of any new browsers, new devices or even new operating systems being used to traverse your website
  • More info at your disposal – we added in several new reports, including “bounce rate” reports that tell you when visitors come to your site then immediately leave without moving beyond their entry page and entry/exit page reports that tell you which pages are the most popular entry and exit points of your site.

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Why SmarterTools Eats Its Own Dog Food

October 12, 2011 by

Google Management's Public Use of Google+

Click for full-size image.

Although overshadowed by Steve Jobs’ death, last week’s revelation that Google’s management doesn’t use Google+ is a pretty big deal. So much so that Mashable’s Ben Parr called the technology giant out and challenged its senior managers to eat their own dog food in his op-ed, “If Google’s Management Doesn’t Use Google+, Then Why Should You?”

It’s an excellent question—one that the senior management at SmarterTools has asked since the company was founded in 2003. You see, everyone at SmarterTools, from our CEO Tim Uzzanti to our sales and support staff to our graphic designer, uses the products we develop on a daily basis. We send messages from SmarterMail, answer sales and support requests with SmarterTrack and evaluate our website statistics and SEO rankings with SmarterStats every single day. Call it what you want: “dogfooding,” “ice creaming” or “drinking your own champagne.” The bottom line is we do it. The next obvious question is: Why?

Well, our developers (and customers, for that matter) know that our management team has a lot of trust in our products when our day to day business operations rely on the quality and usability of our internal software. Since we use our software daily during all stages of development—from ALPHA to BETA to production—we’re able to test the products in real-life scenarios, which gives us the information we need to fix bugs faster, improve usability and identify potential features for future versions. As a result, we’re able to deliver a higher-quality production release to customers because we’ve identified as many bugs and improvements as possible in the pre-release versions of the products.

Perhaps more importantly, we’re delivering software solutions that actually fix some of the problems small businesses face. Believe it or not, SmarterMail, SmarterTrack and SmarterStats were created because our management team couldn’t find comparable software on the market that met our business needs. Odds were, they reasoned, other businesses felt the same way. And so, from the very beginning we not only developed software that we wanted to use, but that we do use.

And in the grand scheme of things, isn’t that the point? If you build something—doesn’t matter if it’s a house, a vehicle, or even a software solution—shouldn’t you use it yourself? Shouldn’t you be using it every day, kicking the tires, slamming the doors, and performing blank text field searches just so that you know, deep down, that what you’ve built is not only functional but that it actually does what you set out to do? Besides, wouldn’t you think twice if Alan Mulally, Ford Motor Company’s CEO, drove a Chevrolet? Would that give you any confidence in the company? At SmarterTools, we actually use what we build and we build what we want to use. Thankfully, a lot of other people think that’s a good way to set about building a company.

This post was written by Tiffany D., a marketing and technical communications specialist for SmarterTools. If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the SmarterTools Blog so you don’t miss an update.

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