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 , , , , , , ,

SmarterTrack 8.x BETA Available Now

March 27, 2012 by 19 Comments

SmarterTrack 8.x is turning out to be the largest and most important release of SmarterTrack since we originally released SmarterTicket, its precursor, back in 2004. We’ve always been committed to building products that offer enterprise-level features without the enterprise-level cost, and SmarterTrack 8.x is no exception. We took into account the feedback we’ve received from our customers through forum posts, feature requests and even face-to-face discussions and are pleased to announce the next release of our popular helpdesk and customer service software.

Getting started with the BETA

If you’re interested in getting your hands on the BETA, please visit the SmarterTrack 8.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 (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

Fully integrated softphone

SmarterTrack 8.x will have one of the most integrated SIP-compliant VoIP softphones of any helpdesk on the market and even includes multiple brand support. The softphone is configurable from within SmarterTrack, allowing all settings, profiles and agent information to be pushed to any desktop or laptop an agent logs into. This full-featured softphone includes the ability to transfer calls, automatically create call logs, displays incoming and outgoing communication history for a caller; can record incoming and outgoing calls; offers complete call analytics and allows businesses to keep all customer communications (tickets, live chats and call logs) in one location.

Trending Cloud

View trends with the trend cloud

Easily discover trends in a department’s tickets and live chats. Since SmarterTrack indexes everything, the trend cloud will automatically pull trending words or phrases and present them to agents. Agents can also exclude words so that only the most relevant topics are available and in front of them. For example, if a company has an issue with a particular product or server, that name will appear in the cloud automatically as tickets and chats come in. Plus, all the tickets and live chats that contain a specific word are available by simply clicking on the word in the cloud, so agents have instant access to all helpdesk communications on the selected topic.

More user information

SmarterTrack 8.x continues to expand the amount of information about each customer by associating all communication within the helpdesk to a user’s email address and phone number. In addition, complete user statistics help you understand the frequency and method in which a customer communicates with your helpdesk. Finally, user comments have been added and can be displayed across tickets, live chats and call logs to help agents better assist customers.

Custom Fields

Easy access to custom fields

Custom fields are an incredibly powerful part of SmarterTrack. Some companies set up their helpdesks to: require users to provide answers to questions prior to starting tickets and live chats and store that information in custom fields; integrate with their existing billing systems and provisioning systems which automatically populate custom fields; allow agents to set custom fields based on information in ticket, live chats and call logs. With SmarterTrack 8.x, custom fields can now be placed in the communication area of tickets, live chats and call logs allowing the most critical of custom fields to be easily viewable and accessible. And as always, all custom fields can be associated to the Event system and can be fully reported on.

Completely revised task system

We’ve dramatically enhanced the tasks system. Tasks can now be assigned statuses like approved, in progress, on hold or completed and you can use the task scheduler to automatically create recurring tasks. Plus, managers can easily view global tasks by status or agent to get a better idea of what’s being worked on and when.

Customize with CSS

Customize your help desk without making changes to configuration files or changing skins! SmarterTrack 8.x allows system administrators to override CSS styles and customize the portal or management interface any way they want. So go ahead, move modules, change fonts or add a splash of color. Heck, redesign the whole portal. With custom CSS, you have the power to make your own design.

Simplify common actions into one click with manual events

Built upon SmarterTrack’s extensive event system, events can now be defined as manual. This means that instead of the system automatically triggering an event, a manual event can be created with specific criteria and actions that can be executed by an agent on a ticket, live chat or call log. Manual events can significantly increase the productivity of agents by eliminating the need to perform common actions individually; instead, multiple actions are performed with a single click. Here’s an example of how you might use this feature: you may want to transfer a ticket to another department, send a canned reply to the customer, adjust the custom fields in preparation to track the ticket, and SMS the agent that will receive the transferred ticket. Instead of an agent having to perform all of these actions separately, manual events can make all this happen with just one click!

Live Chat Agent Avatars

Get personal with avatars

Now you can add a personal touch to your tickets and live chats using agent avatars. Customers feel more at ease when they can see whom they’re dealing with. By using pictures of your agents, or even adding company or agent-specific avatars that are displayed during live chats and in tickets, you can help ensure your customers and end users stay in the right frame of mind throughout the entire support pipeline.

Custom RSS feeds

Feeding frenzy

Have a few RSS feeds you’d like to get in front of your customers? Perhaps you have separate RSS feeds for your blog, company news and social media accounts and want to make them easily accessible from one place? With SmarterTrack 8.x, you can centralize all of your important information in one location. You can even include feeds of your favorite news or industry blogs, further turning your portal into a true communication hub for your end users.

Better knowledge base management

We’ve revamped the knowledge base to make it easier to identify where articles are in the creation process and who is responsible for them. Now you can assign articles to agents, view a list of articles with broken links and quickly moderate customer feedback or ratings. Plus, see the path customers take as they browse your knowledge base: if they viewed another article prior, it’ll be listed as a referrer.

Improved helpdesk security

In an effort to build upon the need to fully separate different brands and departments, as well as to assist with the overall security of your helpdesk, agents now only see and interact with only those items that are assigned to their specific departments. In addition, take the security of your help desk up a notch by enforcing minimum password requirements for employee logins and enabling a setting that protects your system from brute force attacks by temporarily locking a user account if there are too many failed login attempts.

Improved categorization and organization

SmarterTrack 8.x introduces master categories. Configured by the system administrator, master categories are available on time logs and tasks to help managers see where an agent’s time is spent or to organize tasks related to a specific project.

Is that it?

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

  • Ticket responses can now be saved as drafts, so agents can come back and work on them later.
  • System administrators can now exclude response times that elapsed outside of business hours to ensure more accurate reporting.
  • The last agent to sign out of live chats or go AFK can now receive a warning message to lower the odds that your helpdesk goes unmanned.
  • Brand management is much simpler, even for companies with only one brand!
  • We made many more changes to the interface to increase the speed and responsiveness on both desktops and mobile devices. We also made modifications to regain much needed real estate, which is especially noticeable on tablets (like the new iPad) and on Android devices.

Filed under SmarterTrack 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

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HostingCon – July 16 – 18
Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA
http://www.hostingcon.com/

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

SmarterTrack’s Mobile Interface “In Action”

July 18, 2011 by

Below is a video that demonstrates some of the enhancements to the SmarterTrack 7.x interface. While these changes were made to accommodate mobile devices (like the Apple iPad, Asus Transformer, iPhone, Windows phones and other Android devices), as SmarterTools builds products that use web browsers for all of their functionality the changes will also benefit desktop and laptop uses as well. Ahh, the beauty of building for the web versus building application-based products (see more of our discussion about this here: In the Mobile Battle, the Browser Will Win)…

This post was written by Derek C., vice president of marketing and communications for SmarterTools. If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the SmarterTools Blog so you don’t miss an update.

Filed under SmarterTools, SmarterTrack Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Integrating VoIP with Your SmarterTrack Help Desk

April 5, 2011 by

Since releasing SmarterTrack 6.x earlier this year, the single new feature we’ve seen the most customer interest in is VoIP integration. In fact, most of our sales inquiries regarding this new feature asked the same few questions, which I’ve answered below…

How can our company benefit from integrating our VoIP phone system with our help desk software?

Speaking broadly, managing your Web and phone channels from a single program will help you increase sales, screen leads and improve overall customer satisfaction. More specifically, by implementing SmarterTrack’s VoIP feature, you can ensure all calls are logged and any necessary follow-up action is taken in a timely manner. This is because SmarterTrack will automatically populate call log fields like the subject, customer phone number, customer name, email address, assigned group and agent fields whenever your agents receive a phone call.

Filed under SmarterTools, SmarterTrack Tagged with , , , , , ,

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