Posted by Luca on August 13th
Over a week and no post, I guess you will all want to know what we have been up to! Well last week the British Summer finally came (and went) so we were catching a few rays. We have also been working hard as well to add a few new features including suggested replies, attach other files and the brand new design that James showed in the last post!
This post isn’t about any of that though, this is about our backup solution (for now) which uses Amazon S3. Every night (around 2 in the morning) we have a nice little shell script that runs that backs everything up and stores it on S3. It is powered by some not-so-fancy Bash scripting and the Amazon S3 PHP Toolkit (phps3tk). It is nothing fancy - it doesn’t even delete old files so we have to do that manually. This isn’t really a problem though, and it gets the job done!
Anyway, I guess you will want to know how much this all cost? Well as we were backing up a mighty 30mb per day and it was running for half a month it was rather expensive. A grand 5p - yep 5 pence, or for you Yanks 11 cents!
There was also a hefty 1c tax….
We are happy with this, it is a nice reliable solution at a very cheap rate! One thing that may put some people off is that Amazon don’t provide any guarantees that data stored is safe. You get what you pay for though, if you want a guarantee your data is safe expect to pay a lot more!
Posted by James on August 4th
Just an update to let you know whats going on in Camp Juvely.
In the next “major” release there is going to be alot of new functionality, heres a quick overview of whats going on.
Suggested replies
This is a feature that I am quite fond of, it has two main purposes, firstly is what is suggests, it will search through the ticket message and suggest replies based on what content it finds, secondly, you’ll be able to add custom replies via the Manage section, so if you are constantly getting asked the same questions, your replies will be a click away.
Attach existing files
This is a great feature which will allow you to either, attach files that have already been uploaded before (saving you from uploading the same files over again) this will save on your disk space usage alot and it will also allow you to pre-upload files via the manage panel which will always be available to attach on all of your replies.
Live chat
You can expect the normal features of any Live Chat application but we feel that we have really speeded up the work flow by the way we have designed the UI’s, once you are on the chat page itself you’ll be able to search for files, transcripts etc and chat all at the same time. Eventually a couple of types of widgets will be included, firstly the standard “Click here for live chat” pop-up style, then an integrated chat, so customers do not have to navigate away from the page they are viewing on your site to talk to you, we have a couple of other ideas up our sleeves but nothing we want to report yet.
The application
Most other helpdesk services either offer a fully loaded super-duper-mega application or non at all. We wanted to keep it simple. The application is going to act as a Notifier which will do basic things such as notify you of activity and will be used for Live Chat so that you don’t always have to have the browser open to be able to talk to clients. It is also going to use an open API, so if you don’t like our app you can go ahead and write your own!
The user interface
Although the look ad feel of the app will generally be the same, we feel that we needed to make the app look more polished, the older UI’s were a bit of a rush job.
Here are a few “in-development” screenshot’s of the new UI’s. Would love to hear what you think!
Posted by Luca on July 31st
Well you have all had a chance to play around with Juvely and test most of its features, but we assume that most people don’t really want clients to access our not-really-yet-whitelabel client centre. The main way that people will want to allow clients to get support is via email. Well guess what - we can do that already!
All accounts already have an email address setup which can be used for this purposes. This is support@[your-account].juvely.com. If you send an email to this address a new ticket will be opened - go on, try it! If a member of staff replies to the ticket an email will be sent to the client. The client can then add a new message to the client by replying to this email!
Another thing we guessed people wouldn’t want is to tell people to email support@[your-account].juvely.com, something like support@[your-company].com would be better right? Well guess what - we can do that too!
To set this up first enter the address into the Account Settings page in the Manage section. Once this is done all emails send by the system will have this address as the from address. To get emails from support@[your-company].com into the system just setup your email server to redirect them to support@[your-account].juvely.com! Sorted! Forwarding will probably work as well as long as the original from address (of the client) is kept in place! You may also want to disable the client centre otherwise URLs to it will appear in the emails sent to users.
We have decided to do this for our support address, now when you email that all your messages will be handled via Juvely!
