entp hoth blog - Everything ENTP

3744

2010-03-09T20:30:00Z

3,744 — the record number of updates to a single Lighthouse ticket. Whoa!

Naklab iPhone apps bring Tender to a new level

2010-03-03T08:00:00Z

Good customer support and the ease of user feedback are critical to the success of any indie developer. Aral Balkan, founder of Naklab, is no stranger to this. Aral uses both Tender Support and Lighthouse to maintain a streamlined workflow, making things as easy as possible for for him and his application's users.

"Tender has several killer features. The most important, for me, is the rich integration options Tender has: the API, Lighthouse integration (and, in turn, Lighthouse's Github integration). Beyond that I love how customizable it is: I make it look exactly as I want. And, of course, it just works. It has all the characteristics I try to imbue my own apps with." - Aral

Aral’s iPhone applications, 'Avit and Feathers, bring customer support and user feedback to the front line by directly integrating with Tender Support.

/END Press Release Robot Voice

Seriously though...

Earlier today, Aral pinged us on Twitter:

"Dear @entp peeps, Feathers is being featured by Apple, and I'm sure it's in part due to having @tenderapp support built in" - about 3 hours ago via Feathers for iPhone

We're always stoked when we get to see our service have this kind of reach. Aral has done and awesome job and we're sure each user is equally as thankful.

As I was writing this, I got a chance to ask Aral what his favorite feature in Tender is.

"More than any one feature, it's the whole user experience that I love. As an interaction designer, that's probably the biggest praise I could give it." - Aral

Needless to say, we all blushed a little after reading that.

As an added bonus, it looks like we'll finally get to hang out with Aral at the Chirp conference in San Francisco this April!

Update: A double added bonus, Matt Newberry has an Objective-C Library for the Tender API for integration with iPhone and Mac applications, OSS and all -- http://github.com/MattNewberry/Tender. Awesome.

Open Source and Indie Hip Hop

2010-02-22T01:50:00Z

"Everything I Learned About Open Source Development I Learned From Indie Hip Hop"

http://bit.ly/9b1WJy (feat. Corey Donohoe)

Corey's talk at Aloha on Rails is totally worth the Silverlight installation required to view it. Seriously, check it out!

New in Tender: Filters

2010-02-17T10:39:00Z

We just deployed a new feature to Tender Support called Filters. Filters let you automatically sort and apply actions to new discussions that come in to your Tender site.

We also cleaned up the form views, improved syncing reliability with multiple Lighthouse projects, added versioned CSS to avoid conflicts with UI updates for those running custom CSS on their Tender site, added custom email templates and put a little bit of polish on the discussion cacheing code.

Filters in action

Tender Plus accounts allow for up to 10 filters. Tender Premium accounts allow for up to 30 filters. Filters are not available on Tender Basic accounts. (Update: you can now have 2 filters on the Basic plan) Note: you can create more filters than your plan allows, but it'll only run the filters up to your limit.

If you are unable to bump up the volume and listen to my beautiful screencasting voice, you're in luck since I'm going to reiterate the contents of this screencast in the rest of the post.

A quick overview on Filters

To get to the new filtering options, go to your Site Settings in the Support Dashboard, then select Filters from the left sidebar.

There are two sections of the Filters form. The first is the Search Criteria, which are the search parameters that you will be using to filter discussions by. The second is the Actions area, which defines what will be done with the results of the search criteria.

Search Criteria

Category: Filter discussions based on the category they were submitted in.
From (name or email): Either a users name, or email. Use a comma to separate multiple users.
Subject: Contents of the discussions subject line.
Message has the words: Contents of the discussions main text body.
Company: Based on a users Company association.

Once you have entered the fields for the desired search criteria, click the Run a test search option to run a check through previous discussions in your Tender site. This allows you to make sure that the search criteria is working correctly.

Actions

Add to queue: Will automatically add filtered discussions to the selected queue.
Mark as read: Mark filtered discussions as read.
Resolve discussion: Resolve filtered discussions.
Mark as spam: Mark filtered discussions as spam.
Delete: Delete filtered discussions.
Notify an email: Notify a specific email address of a filtered discussion.

After a filter has been created, all new discussions coming in to your Tender site that match the search criteria will be automatically filtered according to the action you have set.

If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to fire off an email to support@tenderapp.com or hit us up on the innerweb at http://help.tenderapp.com.

Customize your Tender emails

2010-02-17T06:55:00Z

We just shipped a new custom email feature! This lets you define your outgoing comment notification emails to customers, one per category (or share them, one for multiple categories).

Why is this useful?

Keep all your support in email by not displaying the "View this online" URL link. Your customers don't need to see Tender at all!
Add a more human touch to your company's support.
Translate it to your actual language, rather than mine.
Put in that footer stuff, including address and contact phone number.
ASCII Art!

It's pretty straightforward: go to your dashboard, site settings, email setup, mail templates. There is a default template we give you with all the variables. It uses the Liquid templating language. Just make sure you keep the ========== line and the rest is up to you.

Next!

Introducing Companies and the User Inbox

2010-02-02T00:01:00Z

We just rolled out an update to Tender Support which includes two new features and a little bit of style polish to the supporter dashboard.

So what's new?

Companies
User Inboxes

For more details on the new features, please continue reading.

Companies

The Companies feature allows you to add a company that groups users together, creating a shared discussion environment.

Once a user has accepted their company invite, they have access to the other company member discussions and can even invite others to join their company.

We are really excited about Tender sites that have products and services shared between groups of people who will benefit from this feature.

The User Inbox

The User Inbox gives a user one click access to all their support discussions. What's even cooler is that comes stock with a counter that displays the user's unread discussions count.

From a user perspective, it's a huge win. They can simply click the Inbox icon and see all of their unread discussions right away.

Inside the Inbox UI, a user can toggle between unread and all discussions. If they are a member of a company, an additional option is added that will let them view their company discussions.

One more thing...

In the coming days we'll be rolling out a new filtering feature. This will allow you to create custom filters that organize discussions in your Tender site automatically. It will also be coupled with simplified discussion states for the supporter dashboard. Stay tuned!

Send us your feedback!

If you have any questions or feedback about Tender Support, please feel free to let us know on http://help.tenderapp.com. You can also follow @tenderapp on Twitter for status updates and news.

Scheduled server maintenance for Jan 24

2010-01-22T22:58:00Z

Tender Support and Lighthouse will undergo server maintenance at 10 a.m. PST (-8 UTC) on Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010.

The services will be unreachable for approximately 2 hours. All incoming emails will be reprocessed once the systems have been brought back online. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Follow @tenderapp or @lighthouseapp on Twitter for live updates during the maintenance window.

Updates

2010-01-24 @ 12:45 PST
We're back up. All emails that came in during the maintenance window have been processed and everything on the systems look good. If you experience any issues, please let us know. Thank you for your patience.

A fresh round of Tender improvements

2010-01-12T22:48:00Z

We recently finished up a big push for better Tender integration:

Multiple Lighthouse Projects
Webhooks
Updates to Multipass integration
More API docs

Multiple Lighthouse Projects

Yes, you can now setup multiple Lighthouse projects for a Tender site. For instructions on how to set this up, please see the documentation.

This not only lets you integrate with multiple projects, but it allows you to use your own personal credentials. No more robot accounts!

Tender also remembers your preference per category.

Webhooks

Webhooks allow you to integrate your services into certain Tender events with a webhook. Whenever a user signs up, or a discussion is created, Tender can notify the service of your choice.

To get you started, we support App Notifications, Notify.io, and Prowl out of the box. Desktop growl and iPhone push notifications have dramatically decreased our support response times.

Updates to Multipass integration

Over the holidays, I worked with several people having some weird issues trying to integrate with our Multipass SSO system. It all boils down to boring URL escaping issues that I really wanted to avoid. I updated the Multipass spec to use URL-safe hashes. If you don’t know or care what that means (I sure don’t!), we have supported ruby and python versions libraries available. Full backwards compatibility has been kept, so don’t worry if you’re still using the older Multipass format.

More API Docs

I refreshed the documentation all over, and added information about authentication, and FAQs.

We’ve already received a lot of great feedback from early adopters on these features.

Thank you to everyone that worked closely with us.

New Lighthouse improvements

2010-01-06T21:49:00Z

We’ve recently deployed a few updates to Lighthouse:

Ticket Previews
Message Notifications
Sortable Columns in the Ticket Listing

as well as some minor improvements. For more details, continue reading.

Ticket Previews!

A much-requested feature in Lighthouse, you can now preview the formatting on your tickets before posting. We’re also working on adding this to Messages and Pages.

Message Notifications

We’re working on improving Lighthouse’s Messages feature. The first in a series of improvements is notifications. Like with Tickets, you can now choose people to get email notifications when a Message is posted or a comment is added to the message. You can also reply to these emails to reply to the message. This is a great way to communicate about things that don’t need responsibility and state tracking.

Sortable Ticket Columns

Click on any header in the ticket listing to sort by that column. Click again to reverse the sorting. The arrow will indicate which column the tickets are sorted on, and in which direction.

File Upload Quota Messages

If your account has gone over its Attachment Quota, account members who are not admins will now see a message explaining why they can’t upload files.

Multiple Ticket Modification Commands in Ticket Emails

In your replies to ticket emails, you can use keywords like [state:open responsible:"Matt Lyon"] to modify your ticket. Previously, if your email had multiple sets of brackets, only the keywords in the last set of brackets were used. Now, any valid keyword inside a set of brackets are used.

Web.AppStorm Lighthouse Giveaway!

2009-12-21T01:00:00Z

The Web.AppStorm crew have done it again! This time, they're giving away a few 1 year Lighthouse accounts for their advent calendar.

For more details go HERE

Web.AppStorm Tender Giveaway!

2009-12-09T20:10:00Z

Web.AppStorm, one of the many awesome sites brought to you by the crew over at Envato, is giving away a few 1 year Tender Support accounts for their Advent Calendar!

For more details and to enter, go HERE.

Hurry though! This is just a one day thing!

Tender Lighthouse integration Pro

2009-12-08T23:47:00Z

We are getting ready to roll out one of the most highly requested features on Tender Support, multiple Lighthouse instances per Tender site.

Tonight, at 9:00 pm PST (-8 UTC), we will be implementing the first of a two phase process required to add the new feature.

The first phase, migrating the existing Lighthouse configuration data to the new system, will take about 30 minutes to complete.

The update will have a very small window of downtime, which will only affect the Lighthouse integration feature. While the data itself is being migrated, the existing Lighthouse integration options will be in read-only mode. Everything else on the Tender sites will be fully functional.

We’ve completely rewritten the Lighthouse integration from the ground up, keeping the following features in mind:

You can integrate a Tender site with multiple Lighthouse projects.
You can setup user-specific Lighthouse tokens so tickets are created in your name.
Existing Lighthouse tokens will be shared, making them available to everyone on in your Tender site.

Assuming the migration goes smoothly, we’ll be rolling out the second phase later this week with updates to UI, putting the new feature in play.

You can follow the Tender Support Twitter account, @tenderapp, for live updates during system maintenance.

Tender Job Queue Issues

2009-12-01T19:35:00Z

Yesterday, we encountered strange job queue behavior that resulted in discussions being delayed with the indexing, assets were not processed, and an isolated case where incoming emails were not processed.

The issues are now resolved.

We had a few symptoms:

A beta feature was pushed out over the weekend, increasing the number of jobs that go through the system.
Certain rare conditions were causing the queue to halt.
Indexing slowed down, due to some large documents.

To fix things, we pushed the following changes:

Jobs were rearranged so more important jobs (asset processing, bulk edits) are being processed ahead of less important jobs (indexing)
The job queue was patched so the certain rare conditions quit halting the queue.
Full indexes are done more often now, keeping the partial indexes from growing too large.

Rick Olson, starring in The Hack Pack

2009-11-30T22:13:00Z

Rick just got this in the mail, courtesy of the AWESOME folks over at Engine Yard

A fresh round of Lighthouse updates

2009-11-19T22:53:00Z

Last night we deployed a number of updates and tweaks to lighthouse which include the following:

Tagging now includes autocompletion
Milestone views now show closed tickets
Pagination now added to tickets with a high number of comments
Fixed attachment URL's in atom feeds
Bulk Edits have a working link in the event feed

For more details, keep reading.

Tagging with autocomplete!

Tagging now features autocompletion. Just start typing the desired tag and once it's highlighted, hit the enter key and wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am.

A little UI love was also included.

Milestones view now showing closed tickets

Previously in Lighthouse, milestones only showed open tickets. Now when you're looking at your milestone, the bottom of the page now shows all closed tickets.

Note: This only will apply to ticket states updated after the update

Paginated ticket comments

It's an extremely rare case. If you are one of the FEW who have oodles of comments in a single ticket, paginated ticket comments are going to squash a lot of those troubles.

Bug fixes and tweaks...

Fixed attachment URL's in atom feeds
Bulk Edits have a working link in the event feed