SmarterStats 8.x BETA Now Available

January 24, 2013 by

We’re excited to announce the BETA of the next version of our popular business analytics product: SmarterStats 8.x. Over the last few major releases we focused on providing a Web interface for SmarterStats that administrators and end users would find as simple as it was powerful.  With this latest release, we kept the same look and appearance but rewrote the underlying architecture with the latest Internet technologies to dramatically improve the speed, reduce the size and increase compatibility with all the latest Internet browsers and tablets.

In addition, SmarterStats 8.x brings several new features, server side optimizations and fixes that continues to make SmarterStats compatible with the latest Internet trends.  As with all releases, we worked closely with customers and partners and while we couldn’t incorporate everyone’s ideas into this release, we prioritized our users’ wants to create a new version of SmarterStats that we think you’ll really like.

So let’s take a look at what’s new…

Tremendous Performance Increases

We spent a great deal of time benchmarking SmarterStats and then making changes to increase the level of performance across the board. In many instances we’ve seen increases of 70% or more in the speed and responsiveness of the SmarterStats 8.x interface. We’ve also seen huge decreases in memory and CPU usage, not to mention much faster importing of log files, even under extremely heavy loads. All of this means that the product runs much quicker and much more efficiently than previous versions. Some of the changes we’ve made include:

  • Re-factored and completely re-wrote many areas of the web interface to reduce the amount of JavaScript code, CSS and HTML, making the entire web interface much faster, much more responsive and much lighter weight.
  • CSS files have been converted to LESS, making stylesheets much smaller and more efficient.
  • The button bars were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
  • The context menus were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
  • The date pickers were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
  • The tree view controls were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
  • Greatly increased the performance of the Web interface.

As we mentioned in a blog post late last year, we feel efficiency IS a product feature, and SmarterStats 8.x really proves that point.

Auto-detection of Log Files

One of the major hassles with setting up a site in SmarterStats is accurately labeling the log file type that the site uses. This is especially a problem when managing a mixed-platform environment: Linux and Windows servers. SmarterStats 8.x greatly simplifies the process of adding in new sites as it will now auto-detect the log file type when the site begins processing. Having SmarterStats auto-detect the log file type will make setting up mixed-mode sites much easier for most System Administrators.

New Support for Rotating Logs

It’s no surprise that log files can take up a lot of valuable disk space. In some environments, particularly those running Linux and Apache, System Administrators conserve system disk space by rotating log files. That means they will allow a log file to grow to a certain size or for a certain time, then move it and rename the file (most commonly by adding a date stamp) and instruct the web server to begin writing a new log file for data. While it is a simple way to conserve space, it can be difficult to report on those rotated logs. SmarterStats 8.x now fully supports the rotation of log files and can easily manage, import and report on rotated log files.

Greater Support for International Customers

SmarterStats is a truly international product. With customers in well over 120 different countries, support for languages other than English is a priority. In addition, as SmarterStats’ adoption across the globe continues to rise, support for non-Western character sets is also essential. With SmarterStats 8.x we’ve not only included support for right-to-left languages in the management interface and on the portal, but we’ve also gone through the entire product and greatly simplified our language strings to make things much easier for automated translations and for customers who create their own translations files.

Is that it?

Of course not! SmarterStats 8.x has many more features and improvements. You’ll find them in the release notes we’ll post in the SmarterStats 8.x BETA forum, but here are a few more that might be of interest:

  • The list of sites sites can now be filtered by server in SmarterStats Enterprise, making it much easier for administrators to review sites from server to server.
  • Geographic reports now include Unique Visitor counts.
  • Email reports will now wait until data is available before they are sent out.
  • SmarterStats will now detect the integrity of SEO searches, and update automatically if search engines change.
  • Status messages and tip text now drops down from the top of the page and no longer disrupts the page flow.
  • Geographic database updated with new IP information.
  • Renamed or compressed log files will no longer be re-imported as if they were new.
  • Exporting report data now saves the file as the report’s name rather than “ExportedData”.

Getting started with the BETA

To get your hands on the BETA simply visit the SmarterTools BETA forum, where you’ll see how to:

  • Sign up for the BETA
  • Get a special BETA license key
  • Download the latest BETA release (we update it regularly)
  • Communicate with other BETA testers and the SmarterTools development team
  • Stay up-to-date on the latest release note and BETA news

Sign up for the BETA

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Welcome Windows 8, Microsoft Surface, and the Future

October 26, 2012 by 1 Comment

Microsoft is releasing Windows 8 this week, their latest desktop operating system, as well as the Microsof Surface, their first tablet computer. This will be closely followed with the next versions of Office, their mobile platform and even Xbox advancements and improvements. All of these releases signal a significant change for Microsoft, one that, as experts and analysts have discussed at great length, will either make or break Microsoft moving forward.

As a software developer that specializes in Windows technologies, we couldn’t be more excited for these changes. We pride ourselves on staying up-to-date with technology and in ensuring our products work across as many platforms as possible. We do this so that customers who stay current with their software, either by keeping their upgrade protection current or by reinstating expired versions, can reap the benefits of the work we put into each release.

So what did we have to do?

Windows 8 presented its fair share of issues. If changes to their primary desktop operating system wasn’t enough, we also have the new Surface tablet to deal with as well as the recent release of Windows Server 2012. Therefore, it wasn’t a simple matter of just making our standard adjustments and releasing new versions.

The first challenge was that the security levels in Windows Server 2012 are much higher than in previous Windows server versions. This fact meant we needed to focus more on ensuring our installations didn’t throw odd security exceptions for administrators. Therefore, we needed a bit more finesse and attention to how our products install and how they interact with both our installers and the operating system in general.

Another issue was dealing with changes in Internet Explorer 10. Microsoft changed their Web browser just as much as they changed their operating system. While it was easy to make all of our products work by running IE 10 in compatibility mode, this in not the best solution. Therefore, we had to make changes to our interface as well as the inner workings of all 3 products in order to run them natively in IE 10.

Another challenge was Exchange ActiveSync. Windows 8 includes an email client, a calendar application and contact system within the OS itself. Windows Mail provides a user with a few options, one of which is Exchange ActiveSync. We had to re-work our EAS implementation to accommodate this as we noticed that the default applications tended to continually request updates rather than request updates on a specific interval. This caused problems with connections and impacted server utilization.  We made changes so this is no longer an issue.

Finally, we take pride in ensuring that all of our products work “right out of the box.” That means that we include a default Web server with each installation so that customers can get their applications up and running as quickly as possible. Getting that default Web server to install and run correctly under both Server 2012 and Windows 8 presented a unique set of problems that required an extensive amount of time to revise and test. While we were at it, we updated the Web server to be more robust, stable and faster.  Keep in mind, the internal Web server is still not intended to be a production Web server like Internet Information Server (IIS), but we had to make the adjustments to make it easy for customers to begin using our products.

All in all, we’re always up for a challenge as it helps keep us on our toes. We are excited to see how Microsoft’s new operating systems, not to mention their foray into tablet computing, are received and how they will help keep Microsoft on the cutting edge of personal and business computing.

All that being said, what are your impressions with Microsoft’s products or our integration? We’re always interested to hear your opinions, so comment away..

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterStats, SmarterTools, SmarterTrack Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Microsoft’s Problem(s)

April 17, 2012 by 15 Comments

Everyone knows Microsoft has lost its vision and direction in the consumer market and is years behind most industry leaders, with the Xbox as the possible exception.  But few know that Microsoft is facing the same loss of vision and direction with its server and enterprise business.

Microsoft is losing the battle of the Web

Microsoft's IIS is in red

Lets start with a little shock value: At the start of 2009, Microsoft’s IIS software was responsible for hosting about 35% of the websites on the Web. As of March 2012, Microsoft is now at approximately 13.5%. This is a 62% drop in the last 3 years and has had, and will continue to have, a significant impact on Microsoft’s future. This drop is even more dramatic when you consider the history of the Web and Microsoft IIS. As a former hosting provider myself, I remember starting my hosting business back in 1995 running Windows NT 3.51. It’s true that over the last 17 years, IIS suffered a number of issues. Today, however, it is a VERY solid and stable Web server platform. So why is Microsoft becoming as obsolete in the hosting industry as it has in the mobile phone and tablet industry? (Yes, Windows 8 shows some promise for tablets, but when it is released it will still be years behind iOS and Android in terms of availability and adoption – those are years it can’t make up). Microsoft has done a number of things to make Microsoft a viable platform and has overcome a lot of obstacles. However, in many cases each change for the better seems to precipitate a change for the worse.

Changes for better and worse

  • While Microsoft was slow to adopt open source development technologies such as PHP and Perl, they DID adopt them into the IIS/Windows realm, which is something you can’t say of the open source community with relation to Microsoft technologies like .NET.  (The MonoProject does exist but has not been well supported).
  • They introduced the Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA), which made all hosting and service providers pay monthly royalties versus one-time expenditures. SPLA itself isn’t bad but there were some pricing blunders, like one in 2009 that could have doubled the costs for hosting providers (anyone remember the authenticated/non authenticated license fiasco?), that really put the fear of God into many Microsoft hosting partners. Some proposed upcoming changes may have an even greater effect on the viability of hosting Windows products, like changing SQL Server 2012 SPLA pricing to be based on the number of processor cores a server has versus the number of physical processors.
  • They had security vulnerabilities that made it difficult to isolate many customers on one web server for shared hosting. Over the last several years they have solidified the Windows server OS through the ability to set .NET permissions on app pools and made it easier to manage multiple single app pools sites on a a single server as well as mange resources by site, thereby increasing security and performance in higher density environments.
  • They were initially slow to respond to hosting companies and the hosting model. They tried to force their own ideal of Windows hosting onto the community without listening to existing Windows hosts. For a few years, however, they actually made an effort to start a conversation with Windows hosts. Nevertheless, I get the impression from talking to partners that his conversation is, once again, turning a bit one-sided.
  • And more recently, they started competing against their hosting partners with Office Live, Azure, Office365 and more. Microsoft always had a semi-contentious relationship with hosting partners. On the one hand they did what they could to make it easier on hosting providers but, all the while, many providers knew that Microsoft was going to benefit most from whatever changes were made. Whatever positive change Microsoft made for partners was closely followed by some other announcement, like when they announced that with every Office Live sign up users received a free website and free hosting for it, that was in direct competition to what partners were offering.

Many of these obstacles still exist but what Microsoft really seems to lack is a hosting division that really wants to commit to winning the “website count” battle. At one time the hosting division at Microsoft was VERY focused on this goal and we were often told that was how funding for the division was determined. I get the impression that this is no longer the case.

Hosting as a channel to the SMB

The hosting industry is an important channel for Microsoft as it allows them to access small and medium sized businesses, web developers and designers, and a number of enterprise customers. With a continued drop off in website count there will be a transition from not only IIS-based web servers but also many other server roles that are crucial to the hosting industry. This includes things like mail servers, application servers, cloud servers, virtualization servers and more. With the drop off, the impact on revenue for Exchange Server, .NET and Visual Studio, Hyper-V and Windows Server is clear but, bigger than that, will be the lack of a channel to reach the small and medium sized businesses and the design and development community, which is huge.

And I don’t think that Microsoft can make up for this loss by transitioning their focus to services like Office365. Microsoft is having an incredibly difficult time reaching small and medium sized businesses through their online services. Many SMB’s like the ability to have choice and go to hosting companies that may be local and close to their offices (or at least in their same city), that speak their language, that offer professional services beyond just hosting a website, that offer live and accessible customer service and support, and more. These are areas that Microsoft can’t compete. By focusing on the hosting market and by focusing on their hosting partners, Microsoft was spreading their technology and not only securing and increasing revenues on the server end, but they were also protecting their phone, tablet and desktop prospects.

What happened to “developers, developers, developers“?

The developer also plays a huge role in this. Microsoft has always done a great job creating opportunity for developers to build businesses around extending Windows and its overall platform. As Microsoft dwindles in its popularity the desire to work with Visual Studio, .NET and Windows in general will also decrease. As it is, many developers want to make the shift to OSX and want to avoid having to code to multiple machines and platforms. By moving to open source technologies such as Ruby, PHP, Perl, etc. they have this flexibility.

What does this all mean for Microsoft? Well, they are losing from all angles. Although their enterprise division is reporting growth, these “website count” issues will start to impact that business over time. In addition, it will impact the development division and eventually their desktop and consumer divisions will feel the pinch. As it stands, Microsoft’s own online services are years away from replacing their hosting partners and the personal and customizable services that hosting providers offer to small and medium sized businesses.

That’s my take, anyway. What are your thoughts? What does Microsoft have to do to start regaining market share in the hosting business and avoid becoming obsolete?

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterStats, SmarterTools, SmarterTrack, Technology Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,

SmarterTools 2012 Conference Meetups

January 24, 2012 by

Photo courtesy of the HostingCon Flickr feed.

As many of you know, the SmarterTools ownership team came from the Web hosting industry where we provided services to almost 100,000 businesses worldwide. In those days, it was difficult to find solutions that provided the features that small and medium sized businesses required while offering the high availability, security and ease of maintenance that our fairly large-scale enterprises required.

For example, the mail server options available were expensive and incredibly unstable and often resulted in daily downtime. In fact, at one point we had employees whose sole responsibility was pushing messages through our mail server spools.

As for help desks, we couldn’t find any that were able to handle the amount of data we pushed through them and besides, they only offered a single function – we had to have different solutions for call tracking, email tickets and internal tasks.

Plus, there weren’t any stable and reliable options for providing customers with analytics on how their online businesses were running. The products that were available provided very limited information. There was no single product that offered features like data mining, search engine optimization and analysis and limited server health reporting.

As a result of all this, SmarterTools was born. We decided to build our own applications that provided small to medium sized businesses with the tools they needed for business communication and analytics, but that also had the ability to be provided through hosting and service providers. Over the years, the products we created have grown to offer a variety of features that are important to enterprise organizations while keeping with our focus on the small and medium business. In addition, our philosophy of being able to install and set up any of our products within minutes and keeping management/administration of our products simple and convenient remains intact and is a key component of our success.

Photo courtesy of WorldHostingDays.

Although we are no longer in the hosting business, we are firmly embedded in the small and medium sized business community. We use every one of our own applications and continue to enhance them based on our needs, to solve problems we see in the SMB market and to address the needs of thousands and thousands of customers. We continue to communicate directly with our customers through social outlets such as our community forums, our Facebook page and our Twitter account, as well as via various focus groups. We also enjoy meeting face-to-face with customers at conferences and local industry events.

This leads me to the point of this blog post. In 2012, SmarterTools is making a concerted effort to make ourselves available to you — our partners, customers and potential customers across all industries, including hosting companies, service providers and small businesses. To this end, we’ve compiled a list of the conferences we’re attending this year, along with information on where they are and the dates we’ll be in the area. We’d like to set up face-to-face meetings with as many of you as possible, whether it’s at the conference or even at your place of business.

So don’t be surprised if you receive an email asking if you’d be interested in sitting down with SmarterTools CEO Tim Uzzanti, our Manager of Internal Development, Grady Werner, our Manager of SmarterMail Development, Bryon Grosz, or even me, Derek Curtis, the Vice President of Marketing and Communications, and other SmarterTools development staff. We’d love to talk about your business, your goals and how SmarterTools can help get you to where you want to be. If you’d rather not wait for us to contact you, simply send us an email at sales@smartertools.com and we’ll set up a place and time to talk.

We look forward to meeting you all and hope to see you at one of the following events:

Parallels Summit – February 14 – 16
Gaylord Palms, Orlando, FL
http://www.parallels.com/summit/2012/

WorldHostingDays – March 20 – 23
Europa Park, Rust, Germany
http://www.worldhostingdays.com/eng/index.php

FutureInsights Live – April 30 – March 3
MGM Grand Hotel, Las Vegas, NV
http://www.futureinsightslive.com/

Microsoft TechEd – June 11 – 14
Orlando, FL
http://northamerica.teched.com

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterStats, SmarterTools, SmarterTrack Tagged with , , , ,

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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