We’ve also decided to sneak in some additional features to more fully round out this latest version. In addition to the features announced previously, we are pleased to be able to announce the following enhancements to the Device Manager.

1) Improved Server Metrics
Now, summary information is presented along with the device view, and additional metrics such as Disk I/O activity is tracked and graphed.

2) Monitor alarm snoozing.
Doing maintenance on a customers infrastructure? A particular server? Want to put it into ‘maintenance mode’ for a few hours to that alarms don’t go off while service is interrupted? Go ahead and snooze the monitor during your maintenance activities.

3) Syslog integration
Many of our DE customers utilize syslog extensively. The 1.6 version of Ubersmith comes with a basic syslog module that will allow you to integrate Ubersmith with an external syslog server (such as php-syslog-ng).

4) General SQL speedups
With each release, Ubersmith is being used by larger and larger organizations. We’ve made some improvements and optimizations that help Ubersmith run faster for people with thousands of devices.

The bad news is that with these additional features and final testing, we’re going to be pushing our public release date back by two weeks. While we realize that this is frustrating since we haven’t put out a new release in a while, we hope the wait will be worth it, and we’re confident that it’s the right decision. We want to make sure that the latest and greatest from Ubersmith will still be as stable and bug free as our customers have come to expect.

Ubersmith DE 1.6 will now be publicly available to new customers on June 16th.

We will be contacting existing Ubersmith DE customers to coordinate upgrades starting June 12 2008. Further, starting June 2nd, private previews will be available to existing DE clients who want to get a sneak peak of what’s coming down the pipeline.

For any additional questions on new features, bug fixes, or to schedule your preview of the new feature set, please dont hesitate to contact us at 877-438-8237, or shoot us an email at support@ubersmith.com.

Bug Fixes and Tweaks

Client Manager

• When generating a manual invoice, if automatic credit card charging has been disabled, the interface will no longer offer it as an option.
• The quantity of a service will be listed in the services list in a client’s account page allowing for more accurate views of products with multiple quantities.
• Improved error handling when adding SSL certs.

Device Manager

• Support for Celsius, in addition to the current Fahrenheit in the environmental monitor interface.
• Improved automatic port conflict checking for remote reboot units.
• Proper handling of results of “0/null” in server metrics monitoring.

Support Manager

• Color coding of rows in the ticket list to improve visual recognition of ticket status.
• Inclusion of any CC and/or BCC addresses in ticket replies or follow-ups.

Order Manager

• Modification to Order Counts under a client account page to reflect orders in processing or completed, similar to the idea of Open or Closed tickets in the client manager view.
• Properly update activity stamp for order ticket follow-ups or replies.

New or Improved Features

Support Manager

• Ability to split single ticket into two tickets – This feature allows support personnel to properly “fork” a complicated issue or ticket that has multiple issues occurring.
• Ability to merge two tickets into one – The opposite of the above feature, this allows support personnel to merge two tickets that are covering the same issue.
• Ability to edit the subject and author of a ticket – This feature allows for graceful handling of mistakes (ticket is submitted by the wrong contact person or with incorrect description in the subject) without having to start a new ticket.
• Search within a particular client’s tickets – Quickly and easily find a information through support manager by limiting scope to a particular client.
• Reply to tickets via email – Support personnel will be able to respond to tickets via email (i.e. through their mobile device or email client) and retain the advantages of tracking all issues, responses, etc., through support manager and properly attached to a ticket ID.

Device Manager

• Per device type custom fields – A huge improvement in the utility of Device Manager, per device type custom fields will allow for “platforms” to be created and utilized more efficiently throughout the system. For example, administrators can define specific fields that are required by a switch of a particular model, but different fields are required for a server.

Client Manager

• Addition of Multiple Payment methods – Clients can define multiple payment options (i.e. multiple credit cards or checking accounts on file) and use them at their choosing. This will allow for an administrator to choose the proper payment method when applying a payment to an invoice.
• New Support for ACH – Support for eCheck services through SpeedChex.

System Wide

• Multi-language support –Client and administrative interfaces, as well as all communications handled by Ubersmith (support emails, automatic notices, invoices, device monitors) will fully support internationalization, including complex character sets.
• PHP 5 support – With the announced EOL of PHP4 and common, stable support for PHP5, Ubersmith will support PHP5 and MySQL5 natively. Backwards compatibility will be continued for PHP4 and MySQL 4.1+.

We are very excited about this release as it will add a lot of features that have been highly requested by our users. A similar announcement of Ubersmith lite/pro v5.4 will arrive in a week or two and will include many of the features listed here (most notably, php 5 support).

As you are probably aware, ProtX is changing the way they handle Pre-Authorization transactions. As such, we are releasing an updated gateway module to allow you to continue using ProtX after the first of August. We were made aware of this change almost immediately as it was announced by some of our very own users, giving us the time to prepare and test a new ProtX module.

Please see the following forum post for an updated ProtX module:

http://forums.ubersmith.com/showthread.php?t=754

Users running the hosted Ubersmith product have already been upgraded to the new module.

Regards,

Ubersmith Support

Of course there’s nothing wrong with this. It should be everyone’s goal to have money coming in the door with as little effort as possible. But, for every business I see with a bullet proof, completely hands off sign up process, I see a dozen who are devoting 10 times the amount of effort on keeping up on dead beat clients and shutting them down when they don’t pay.

This seems backwards. Wouldn’t you want to spend more time and effort on the clients who want to pay you for your services? Don’t you want to focus on the ones who appreciate quick and efficient service, than the ones who don’t respect your business enough to respond to your emails, let alone pay their bills on time? Any serious time spent on shutting down non-paying clients is just throwing more good money after bad. In simplest terms, it’s time and money wasted.

That time and money would invariably be better spent on getting new clients up and running, and making sure they’re happy with their service. Think about how much happier your clients would be if the effort spent on every overdue notice or phone call made chasing after a delinquent payment, were instead put into friendly welcome letters or calls to clients to offer assistance. I bet if you could do that, your overall client satisfaction would increase and they’d be more likely to pay their monthly bill. This, in turn, would cut down on the number of delinquent clients you have in the first place. Happy customers are paying customers.

The goal should be to reduce the amount of time spent dealing with the deadbeats. That’s where the idea of automation comes in. If you have a way to setup clients automatically, you should have a way to shut them down automatically too.

We’ve approached this idea with a new feature in Ubersmith DE (which will be added to Ubersmith Pro soon). We’ve added the ability for Ubersmith to suspend and/or cancel services automatically, if they go a certain number of days past due. When the daily automated script runs, Ubersmith will check all services in outstanding invoices. If they are past their threshold, the system will suspend or cancel the services so that they are no longer billed.

The beauty of this is that with the Service Module framework that we’ve built into DE, Ubersmith can easily be configured to carry out any action when a service is suspended or canceled. Anything from simply emailing the client to let them know, to calling out to a third party system to turn their service down completely.

Our first example of this is our CPanel module. If a CPanel service is suspended, Ubersmith is now able to actually suspend the account right on the server. The best part is, once the client pays the invoice, Ubersmith will call out and un-suspend it all by itself. Total time spent by your staff: 0.

That’s just one example of something we’ve got planned for service modules. It’s going to make a lot of things a lot easier to accomplish and it will make running your business even easier.

Even if you aren’t using Ubersmith, I hope you’ll think about what I’m saying about automation and come up with ways to put the man power you’ve got into making your paying clients happier, instead of always having to waste time dealing with the ones that don’t. Spend time getting money coming in the door, not on helping it go out.