Net Data Design, LLC Blog

A few weeks back I started testing and evaluating SmarterTrack 5 and I’ve been pleased with what I’ve found. And not just with the software, but SmarterTools themselves. First my finding with the newest (soon to be released) SmarterTrack 5 (ST5).

ST5 has, as I’ve mentioned previously, some welcomed new features. SmarterTools says they’re moving toward making ST a CRM application. The new set of features certainly put it on that path. The Call Log feature is a great addition allowing for other forms of communication besides email. Although the Call Log feature is a great asset to the application, the big one for me is the Follow-Up feature.

The Follow-Up as implemented in ST5 allows for agents and admins to place follow-ups on tickets. Follow-ups are incorporated with the system events allowing notifications to be sent to the agent as well as admins. These can be (and should be) assigned at the ticket level, not the agent themselves. Should a ticket be transferred, so is the follow-up.

Even though beta, other than a few bugs the application worked as expected. ST has never been the most intuitive software, but once you start working in it it becomes very clear. The newly added features fit directly into the ST interface, making them easy to deploy and use for agents.

Now, on a more personal note and an observation about SmarterTools employees. I mentioned in my last post I was having difficulty with a web service for single sign-on (SSO). This web service was to integrate DNN and ST logins. Shortly after the beta was released, I was contacted by SmarterTools. They wanted to assist in getting the web service issue resolved so that they where confident in the new web services in ST5. They even went as far as looking at my source code to verify it was not there service (it was my error).

Andrew handled my ticket, he was professional and did a complete analysis, for free!  And yes, he followed-up too. You don’t find many companies willing to spend time and resources on an issue raised in the self-help forum.

They’ve one me over and I highly recommend ST5. And by the way the new ST5 Web Service document can be found here.

While the newest DotNetNuke release (5.2.1) is primarily a stabilization release, it does pack a much needed new caching provider that allows the application to run much better under load with improved performance. There have been a few cases, from what I can see, with some minor upgrade issues but as a whole this is a worthwhile upgrade.

The major highlights are:

• Fixed issue where banners were not properly rotated according to the specified views/clicks.
• Fixed issue where upgrades could fail if the the user account did not have permission to update objects in some db schemas.
• Fixed issue where list values were visible outside of the Portal where they were created.
• Fixed issue where caching providers were not rendering unicode characters properly.
• Fixed issue with missing Telerik assembly in the source package.
• Fixed issue where Ajax HostSetting was not properly set on upgrade from 4.x installations.
• Fixed issues where upgrades would fail with a unique index violation.
• Fixed issue with the Starter Kit which was missing HTML module files.
• Fixed issue where page templates were not working correctly.
• Fixed default settings for the module and output caching providers.
• Fixed issue which prevented Blog module from working after some upgrades to 5.x.
• Fixed issue when creating a new module in the Module Definition Wizard if the .ascx extension was not specified.
• Fixed issue where localization was not working if the application virtual directory name was also part of the module name.
• Fixed issue where the FriendlyName for Schedule Items was not being saved.
• Fixed issue where GetUserCountByPortal was making excessive database calls instead of using cached values.
• Added binding redirect setting in web.config to prevent versioning issues with Telerik assembly.

Providers:

• FileModuleCachingProvider 05.02.01
• MemoryModuleCachingProvider 05.02.01
• SchedulingProvider 05.02.01

WordPress has released version 2.9 of their popular blogging script WordPress which can be downloaded from the official WordPress website. Users who have configured automatic updates can also upgrade to the new version of WordPress from within their blogs. It is however recommended to backup the files and database before initiating the update.

The new version comes with over 500 bug fixes, changes and enhancements which makes it a recommended download and install. Some of the new features include:

• Trashbin: Posts that are deleted are now moved to the trash instead of being deleted irrecoverably. It is possible to recover posts from the trash at a later time.
• Image Editor: A basic image editor that can be used to edit, rotate, scale and crop images.
• Batch plugin support: Update up to ten plugins at once.
• Video Embeds: video embeds for popular sites have become just a tad easier as it is now possible to simply paste the url into the post which will be turned into an appropriate viewer by WordPress automatically.
• Automatic database optimization which can be enabled by adding define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true); to the WordPress config file.
• Post Thumbnails options which can be used to display thumbnails in every post if the theme supports it.
• Better SEO thanks to rel=canonical.
• Custom galleries with the ability to add pictures from several posts.

WordPress version 2.9 is getting closer to it’s “RTM” release. Now that the RC1 build is available, the community of developers should start hitting the keyboards.

If you’ve been waiting for your moment to pitch in, it’s now. First we need tech savvy testers to upgrade their blogs and kick the tires, make sure everything is rolling like you expect it to. Here’s a list of all the fun and geeky new stuff in 2.9 to try out. Second, and more importantly, we need everyone to test out their plugin compatibility.

If you’re a user of plugins, there’s a groovy new compatibility feature on the plugin directory where you can vote on whether a plugin is compatible with a version or not and it’ll get registered in the new plugin compatibility checker. This is as a replacement to the old wiki-based lists we’d do before. To see it in action check out this Akismet plugin page, as you can see 14 people have already registered that it’s compatible with 2.9.