I wrote a web-service that allows a user to login to the DNN site and carry that authorization to the support site (ST4) if needed by the DNN user. ST4 recognizes the authorization fine using the External Provider, but there is a problem. Even though ST4′s External Provider is set to grant authorized users e the ‘Registered User” role, ST4 is not setting it. I have asked ST for a little help, but nothing has materialized. So my hopes where that this was fixed, unfortunately, it’s not yet.

What I did find however are some really nice new features, some would lead you to believe that ST5 is starting down the CRM path. Here are some of the newly added functionality:

• Call logging allows companies to track all incoming and outgoing calls and relate those calls to any tickets or Live Chats in the system, allowing businesses to track all communications regardless of the channel used.
• The task management system allows managers and agents to create tasks and track work associated to a specific ticket, call, or Live Chat, helping them to manage work that may need to be done after the call or Live Chat is completed.
• With follow-ups, companies can keep in constant contact with both existing and new customers. Integrated with the events system, follow-ups notify agents when customers haven’t responded or need additional service.
• Although not available at the beginning of the BETA, SmarterTrack 5.x will provide managers with the ability to monitor agents’ tickets and allow agents to manage their tickets and Live Chats via mobile devices. The WAP interface uses the new Web services available in SmarterTrack 5.x and will work across all major mobile phones, including iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry.  The WAP interface will resemble the phone’s interface, so iPhone users connecting to SmarterTrack will notice the mobile interface has the same feel as an iPhone application.

ST5 Agent View - Click for Larger Image

These list was taken directly from the SmarterTrack Website:

• ADDED: A call logging system that can be used to track and report on incoming and outgoing phone calls and associate them with tickets and Live Chats.
• ADDED: A new licensing manager for future functionality.
• ADDED: A setting specifying whether the portal loads the Knowledge Base in browse mode or search mode by default.
• ADDED: A task management system that allows employees to track tasks
  associated with tickets, Live Chats, and calls.
• ADDED: Agents can now send files to end users through Live Chat.
• ADDED: Agents can now upload files to a ticket without sending a
  message.
• ADDED: An option to hide specific folders when searching the Knowledge Base via the portal. Searches of parent items will still include articles in child folders.
• ADDED: An user information external provider that allows for custom information to be returned and displayed with tickets. Companies can implement this provider to give agents access to company-specific information or links to internal systems.
• ADDED: Auto-responders now include a link to the Knowledge Base in the body of the responder if no related articles were found during the auto-search.
• ADDED: Bulk operations for managing the privacy and status of news items from the grid.
• ADDED: Bulk operations for managing the privacy, status, and folder of canned replies from the grid.
• ADDED: Bulk operations for managing the privacy, status, and folder of Knowledge Base articles from the grid view.
• ADDED: End users can now send files to agents through Live Chat.
• ADDED: New system-level and agent-level Live Chat events.
• ADDED: New system-level events for POP and SMTP errors.
• ADDED: New Web services for tickets (service2/svcTickets.asmx), organization (service2/svcOrganization.asmx), and the Knowledge Base (service2/svcKB.asmx)  that replace and greatly extend the old Web services.
• ADDED: The ability to configure company holidays to identify days when Live Chat should automatically be disabled.
• ADDED: The ability to configure multiple shifts and business hours for each day of the week.
• ADDED: The ability to create multiple root-level folders in the Knowledge Base.
• ADDED: The ability to make the anchor title of text-based Live Chat links different from the text or description of the link.
• ADDED: The ability to mark a ticket for follow-up, which will allow the ticket to reactivate after a specified time period and prompt the agent to take further action.
• ADDED: To improve usability, attachments and uploaded files for a ticket or live chat are now displayed in a new Files tab in addition to the Communications tab.
• ADDED: To improve usability, various tabs in the management interface now display the total count of items within the tab.
• ADDED: Several enhancements to streamline and improve the organization and navigation of the Knowledge Base in the portal.
• CHANGED: If there are no Knowledge Base articles in the system, the area will no longer display in the portal.
• CHANGED: Knowledge Base articles displayed in the portal now show the total number of times the articles have been viewed.
• CHANGED: Knowledge Base articles now display more consistently throughout the portal.
• CHANGED: Knowledge Base search results are now be grouped by folder and organized by relevancy.
• CHANGED: New social networks have been added for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and more. Discontinued social networking sites have also been removed.
• CHANGED: Numerous usability enhancements to the management interface and portal.
• CHANGED: Revised the names of items in the Workspace and Manage tree views for consistency.
• CHANGED: SmarterTrack now asks for confirmation when an agent clicks on the End Chat button.
• CHANGED: The Agents page in the system settings has been renamed to Employees.
• CHANGED: The option to display the agent’s name when a Live Chat invitiation is sent is now on the Live Chat settings page.
• CHANGED: The option to enable an agent to push a webpage to a customer via Live Chat is now on the Groups settings page.
• CHANGED: The options for activating a license or performing a self-diagnostic are now in the Activations folder in system settings.
• CHANGED: The portal now displays Knowledge Base articles on a single page.
• CHANGED: The Spools page is now a root-level item in the Manage tree view.
• CHANGED: The warning message for disabling user logins on the portal settings page no longer applies and has been removed.
• CHANGED: To improve formatting and display of tickets and Live Chats, resolution search results no longer have line breaks.
• CHANGED: To improve usability, Knowledge Base articles displayed in the portal now appear with an icon next to them.
• CHANGED: To improve usability, Knowledge Base searches performed in the portal now display the top 40 relevant results.
• CHANGED: To improve usability, the login form now displays on every page of the portal.
• CHANGED: To improve usability, the related items grid has been redesigned.
• CHANGED: Users can no longer change the sort order of Knowledge Base articles in the portal.
• EFFICIENCY: Various performance enhancements were made to decrease database calls and increase page load speed.
• FIXED: Deleting a Knowledge Base article or news item now immediately invalidates the cache and updates the portal homepage appropriately.
• FIXED: System administrators and agents can now delete Knowledge Base articles from the portal if they are logged in, even if they are not logged in to the management interface.
• FIXED: The details tab of a ticket now loads properly inTturkish installations of SQL server.
• FIXED: Tickets that are deleted or marked as spam now cannot be transferred without first restoring them.
• FIXED: Tickets that are deleted or marked as spam now cannot have their status changed without first restoring them.
• REMOVED: Because active Live Chats now display in popup windows, the setting to control whether Live Chats are managed in the main window or a popup has been removed.
• REMOVED: Because ticket responses now display in a popup window, the reply mode setting that controls whether ticket responses are created in the main window or a popup has been removed.

Imagine this – a client connects to your server, clicks on your featured video, watches 5 seconds of it to realize they have no interest in watching further, and move on to the next video.

In those 5 seconds, the server could have sent out 5 minutes worth of the video, and you paid for 5 minutes worth of bandwidth! With the Bit Rate Throtter + media bitrate detection, the server would only end up sending a little over 5 seconds worth, and you would end up paying only for what was used.

Bit Rate Throttling (BRT) is a module plug-in for IIS 7 0r IIS 7.5. It’s an extension of the IIS Media Service. The IIS7 Bit Rate Throttling module was first announced at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show last April as part of the TCO advantage for Silverlight.  Enabling Web masters to throttle the delivery of any file based on the file type. It also has additional functions for digital audio/video files. Throttling can be set at the following levels within Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager: server, site, virtual directory, and file.

BRT contains the following features:

• Fast Start – the ability to send the first part of the media file without rate limiting, to seed the playback buffer in the player and make sure that playback can begin as soon as possible (most players try to pre-buffer a certain amount of the video, often 5 seconds, before starting playback). This also insures that if the connection suffers a hiccup, the playback can continue uninterrupted.
• Disconnect detection - when the client stops watching the video, goes to another page, or closes the video, the BRT detects the connection closure and stops sending the file.
• Built-in support for detecting the playback rate for common media formats, including .asf, .avi, .flv, .m4v, .mov, .mp3, .mp4, .rm, .rmvb, .wma, and .wmv.
• Ability to configure static throttling rates, and media auto-detection rates at any configuration level.

It should also be noted you can configure the BRT module to handle static files as well, such as a large [progressive] .jpg file. So, if you feel you need to trim the bandwidth, Bit Rate Throttling module is a great place to start.

In the next segment I’ll focus on the Smooth Streaming IIS 7+ features and capabilities.

I have a client (to be named later) that had a need to deliver high-quality videos without breaking the budget. By budget I mean in terms of bandwidth, encoding, and preparation. We also host this clients website which was recently moved to a new server running Windows 2008 R2, with IIS 7.5. So in looking for a solution I came upon Silverlight, which is a natural fit with IIS 7.5′s  Media Services and Smooth Streaming.

To make this scenario work, you’ll need Microsoft’s Expression Web 3 or Microsoft’s Expression Studio 3. The Expression Encoder 3 is bundled with those packages with sell from (estimated) $150 to $500 dollars. Both packages offer a wide array of tools that will help in your video encoding as well as many other tasks such as website development and desktop applications.

With Expression Web 3 alone, you be able to code in PHP, HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, all using standards-based code (yes, I checked), however Expression Encoder is the key. It’s not only easy to navigate and use, but allows you to drop in QuickTime, AVI, MPEG, and other formats into the encoder, and utilize the latest quality and speed improvements to the VC-1 or H.264 codecs, choose a Silverlight template (or make your own), and publish directly to a web server using Expression Encoder Publishing Plug-in. It should be noted that the video can also be published locally and viewed.

Smooth Streaming is the production version of a technology first used by Microsoft to deliver on-demand video of the 2008 Summer Olympics for NBCOlympics.com. By dynamically monitoring both local bandwidth and video rendering performance, Smooth Streaming optimizes playback of content by switching video quality in real-time.

Using Smooth Streaming, visitors with high bandwidth connections and modern computers can experience full HD quality streaming, while others with lower bandwidth or older computers receive the appropriate stream for their capabilities. The result is visitors across the board enjoy a compelling, uninterrupted streaming experience, which ultimately lead to extended visitor stays and increased revenue opportunities.

In my next installment of this topic, I’ll cover the nuts and bolts of Bit Rate Throttling and Smooth Streaming.

To Oracle’s credit, they have published  a press release stating their commitments regarding their acquisition of MySQL by way of acquiring Sun. Personally, I’m not buying it.

For years Oracle worked, behind the scenes to discredit MySQL and tried hard to understand how their customers could ever consider using such an “immature” product instead of their lead product. In fact, it was so important to Oracle that they offered some very substantial discounts to customers who were using MySQL and Oracle. The good news is that this strategy didn’t work. MySQL had and has a staunch following that has always been a little leery of Oracle.

I’ve been a CTO at two locations that used Oracle and have found their practices to be cut-throat, sometimes bordering on ruthless. Is Oracle a serious threat to the open-source community? In my estimation, it certainly is, more than most of my colleagues, although a huge percentage of them would agree that this acquisition is not good for MySQL. Does Oracle participate in the open-source community? Sure, in a manner that supports themselves through commercial offerings. This is not the true spirit of open-source and leads to a slippery slope.

I’ve posted a poll on the right of this post, feel free to participate.

This probably isn’t anything earth shattering to most, but it certainly beats our old system of taking back-up tapes and DVD off-site every night. That method had too many short-comings to say the least.

Recently, for one of our secure document storage web applications, we started incorporating a data provider that utilizes the S3 API. Setting a search provider for S3 proved to be a bit of a challenge, but so far it has worked out fairly well.

So lets get back to the topic at hand. For the SMB looking for a cost effective way to keep file storage organized and highly available, I’m hard pressed to come up with another viable solution. If you’re the owner of a SMB or work for one, what options have you explored? What method of [off-site] back-up are you using? I’d really like to hear from you…

So, it’s down the stairs I go to crank up the laptop and what did I see? You guessed it, emails! It wasn’t the world that came to a stop, it was my Blackberry email service! You never know how dependent you are on something until it’s not available.

While I was still able to make phone calls (the first being to my phone carrier), browse the Internet and send and receive text messages. It was the phone call to my carrier that confirmed my suspicions about the email outage.

Research In Motion’s (RIM) service is normally very reliable, but it centralized approach mean a small issue can affect millions of Blackberry users. Maybe it’s time to rethink the architecture.

For myself the outage appears to lasted about 7 hours, but while I was awake, the 3 hours seemed like a much longer time. So, any other BB dependents go through withdraw? Maybe the nickname Crackberry fits!