We believe in strong security, this is why we've added U2F as an extra optional security step for admin access to your Comet servers.
What is U2F?
U2F is an open authentication standard created by Google and Yubico that enables users to securely access any number of online services with one single security key instantly and with no drivers or client software needed.
We're pleased to support this additional security measure for admin access to your Comet servers. This is very simple to setup with Comet - when logged into your server, select 'My Account' then register your FIDO U2F Token.
Then rerun the setup wizard and on the 'Admin Accounts' step, select the user and enable 'Password and FIDO U2F together'. Done!
We've recently done some work to make it easier for you to integrate Comet into your back-end processes through providing a PHP SDK for the Comet Server API. This also will help if you are creating your own custom signup forms for your backup service.
The Comet Server API allows you to create and manage customer accounts on your Comet Server.
It's been a journey to get Comet to where it is now. One place that it's really visible is in the visual evolution of the client. In this post we go behind the scenes in the client and our considerations. Enjoy!
Comet 0.0.20160225 (2016-02-25)
This was our pre-pre-pre beta. This was our first development milestone. Although, most basic features were functionally working.
This version of the software was written in C#, instead of our current Qt interface. Originally, we were going to make separate Comet frontends for each platform, using native technologies (WinForms and C# on Windows, Cocoa and Objective C on OSX), but when prototyping the Qt version for Linux machines, we became very happy with Qt’s cross-platform design on all operating systems.
Comet still retains its frontend / backend design, so if there are other more diverse operating systems to support, we can develop a dedicated GUI and still retain most of our technology. For example, mobile devices might benefit from a completely custom mobile-first interface, while still using the core Comet technology.
We were also considering licensing the GUI source code, so MSPs could make more radical customisations. It’s all possible because of the split GUI and backend design.
Protected Items (“Sources”) showed up as icons, rather than in a list.
This dialog looks somehow familiar even today.
A lot of the terminology hadn’t been standardised yet. We used “Sources” and “Destinations” as the names for a long time. These old versions of Comet Backup are still API compatible with current versions of Comet Server, and you can see this old terminology in some places in the API.
Comet 0.0.20160301 (2016-03-01)
The top box was going to be a web view for MSP news.
Compared to the C# prototype, we lost the concept of multiple tabs. We kept the idea of buttons that greyed-out depending on the selection context.
Comet 1.0.0 (2016-03-30)
The bar on the left has a more modern design, and could be dragged up to the top.
A lot of the dialog windows still look the same today!
Comet 1.1.0 (2016-04-05)
Just a small evolution. But we spent a long time tweaking this design.
Comet 1.3.0 (2016-04-29)
Around this time we had hit a stagnant point with our UI design and wanted to innovate by trying something quite different, that would simplify the common operations.
The right-hand side of the screen animates over when you click on it:
Or, you could click the first “cog” icon to play the animation.
Comet 1.5.0 (2016-05-31)
The UI was overhauled again. This also introduced the third-generation application icon (the current Comet logo is our sixth-generation icon).
The interface was tweaked further, but kept this basic design for a while.
Comet 2.4.0 (2016-10-11)
This is an example of a more modern interface from this time period.
The box for MSP news has disappeared. It didn’t really make sense if you could only see the news in the login dialog, which would log in automatically anyway.
MSP News would eventually return as a feature of the main interface, built-in to Comet Server, rather than a web view.
By this time, the interface had been simplified to only show operations when you hover on the row.
At this point we went much wider and bolder on the graphical design for Comet:
Our main problems with this initial pass was that it felt very 'busy' with all the buttons and just wasn't right.
Comet 2.8.0 (2016-11-28)
We introduced this brand-new theme to more MSPs.
Actually, we got pretty close to the modern design, on the first try.
The history page showed all jobs in the top section, and job details in the bottom section. This is how Comet had been since the early 1.x releases. Nowadays, the report views open in a popup window.
The Account page didn’t yet have its modern design.
Through some further refinement (removal of buttons on protected items and a few other tweaks) we landed at where we are today:
With the upcoming launch of the next major Comet release, Luna, we will be running a webinar to recap a busy year of development. We will be concluding the webinar with a live Q&A towards the end. So please join Mason, Mike, John and Josh from Comet for this lively discussion.
We get asked often by our users what can they do to sharpen up their backup marketing and overall messaging in the face of rising competition. To answer this best I turned to Nicola Devine over at Tanker Creative to not only answer how you can improve it and attract more customers but for actionable steps that any busy backup provider could undertake. Below is part 2.
MailChimp’s mascot Freddy – sending emails from all corners of the globe
Last time I was here I threw some light on the basics for websites, today is all about MailChimp. Intrepi**d mascot Freddy (above) and MailChimp has been around since 2001, and is a gem for small businesses wanting to get the word out to clients via branded email. Infact, they send over a billion emails out daily – so jump on the email train and let’s go for a ride.**
Why MailChimp? For starters exercising your marketing muscle with MailChimp can be very cheap – free forever even – if you have a database of under 2000 email addresses and send less than 12,00 emails per month. They’re professional and helpful. MailChimp want you to have a great experience, so there’s plenty of online support to help you through the emailing process and make sure it’s easy for you comply with best practice and spam laws. It’s also simple to design emails. They have pre-made templates and you can build your emails (they call them campaigns) using super easy Drag+Drop functionality. Sold? Let’s have a look at the different MailChimp zones so you can fall in love even more.
Once you’ve signed up and logged into your account one of the main areas you can explore is Lists. This is were your database action happens: you can add, import and manage contacts, as well as create signup forms for your website or social media channels.
And once you’ve got your lists ready to go have a think about their whether you’re going to be sending emails to particular locations, departments or interests groups (for example). You can add these as extra fields to your lists to segment them in the future.
Once you’ve got your list under control it’s time to sort a generic template design that you can use over and over for email campaigns. MailChimp has super simple Drag and Drop functionality that makes it quick and easy to load up content. When you’re developing a templates there’s a few secrets to success. Top of the list is that oldie but goodie: Keep It Simple! Your template will be generally be viewed on multiple screen sizes, devices and email apps that’ll want to do all sorts of formatting tricks. Next on the Must Do list is Brand Consistency. Use your website as your inspiration – colours, fonts, buttons should all be matchy-matchy. Third big kahuna of template commandments is Balance. One sure-fire way to get caught up in a spam filter is to over do it on the text – or have image-only content. Make sure you mix it up!
CAMPAIGNS
Now we’re talking! Once you’ve got your lists and templates locked down, shit gets serious! Head over to campaigns (or Champagnes as I call them) and select the Create Campaign button. MailChimp will guide you through the process to get your email out. If you’re just starting out a Regular campaign is the way to go, then you’ll be asked to decide what list, or segment to sent it to; your campaign name (for your reference only); a subject line – worth reading up on best practice tips; a snippet of preview text; a from name that’ll be instantly recognisable to your list (company names are often a good idea); and a from address – you'll want to use your business domain, so The Chimp will need to send you an email to get verified. Now you’re too legit to quit. After that mission you can choose a template, kinda handy that you already have a saved one… and finally, you’ll be ushered onto the content utopia that is the designpage. Once you’ve added your content – keep those piccies to a max of 600px wide, people – you can preview, send up to six test emails and use the link checker to make sure all your images, text links and buttons are going to the right place. Once it’s all looking like a true masterpiece we’re onto the final confirm page. Here’s where MailChimp runs through your subject line, from, etc settings and allows you to schedule to send in the future, or if you’re not one to muck about, then you can press the button and be damned. Actually, if you change your mind you can step back from damnation and cancel after sending but there’s a few conditions you’d better read up on first.
Once your campaign has been sent it’s time for some data geeking out behaviour. MailChimp reports can be an Aladdin’s Cave of helpful intel: from open rates over the first 24 hours, that can give you a hint of other times for optimsing sending; to hard and soft bounces; who opened when and how often – through to clickthrough rates and the nifty lil clickthrough map which can tell you a lot about how readers are behaving: if your content is too long or if you’ve forgotten to link your images (do it if you can!). This is the type of info that will help you to continue to refine your design and content to appeal to your readers. And if you feel the need to share you can even download a customised report.
And that’s a wrap for today. Make sure you head back here next week for when I’ll be getting off-the-chain about LinkedIn.
Originally trained as a graphic designer in the 1990s, when iPhones were still a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye, Nicola has been involved in both print-based and interactive media since her time studying at Wanganui School of Design.
Tanker Creative, Nicola’s design and marketing her business, was founded in 2003, and works with a mix of corporate, luxury and creative clients on strategy, development, implementation and reporting.
Nicola is an avid follower of new technology in marketing, design and communications. She is also a contributor to Design Assembly, an organisation promoting conversations in graphic design. Her claim to fame is being on a train in Spain, on the plain, in the rain.
We get asked often by our users what can they do to sharpen up their backup marketing and overall messaging in the face of rising competition. To answer this best I turned to Nicola Devine over at Tanker Creative to not only answer how you can improve it and attract more customers but for actionable steps that any busy backup provider could undertake. Below is part 1.
Blogs, Websites, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, SnapChat, MailChimp, Facebook, Instagram – woah Nelly! So many channels, so, sooooo time consuming simply to work out which one/s to use and how to wield their weapons of choice whether hashtags, boosts or meta tags – it’s enough to cause a collective rumble of global eye rolling.
Let’s make it simple right now and focus on the most important online channel when it comes to marketing your business, building credibility, awareness, educating visitors on your offering and providing a way for them to engage your services or purchase your products. Your website.
Websites are awesome for most businesses for many reasons: First up because your content is not in an channel such as FaceBook or Instagram that you have little control over when it comes to the content, imagery, functionality, random upgrades… your website is your best opportunity for an awesome gig.
To get things running smoothly when it comes to websites consider a few things. Number #1 – get something up! Even if it’s one page with your logo, contact details and an email, and build from there. #2 people are nosy – make sure you have an About page, start loading up your products or services, and add a News page.
News or Blog pages are great on a couple of levels and worth committing to. You know that thing about people being nosy? Well they also like the latest goss, so adding a news post at least once is a great idea, that way, when people come back to your site they know there always be something new to check out. Google also loves it when you’re adding new content to your site – it’s helping your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Install an SEO plug-in like YOAST and fill out your snippets and keywords. And make sure you incluse your keyword in your text a few times too.
There’s a lot of talk about how much content to write, but aim for a minimum of 300 words. Other studies say anything from 1500 to 3000 is optimal!
Consider design. Don’t make your news post a wall of words. Break it up with some different elements such as graphs, images, bullet points, bold text, italicised text, text in a coloured or framed box, quotes. Bring a hierarchy of information to the page so that even if someone only has a minute to look at it they’ll see the most important take aways.
Add a call to action at the end. You’ve provided some information, inspiration even some badass attitude. Invite the reader to continue the conversation – whether it’s to contact you for a cuppa, come back again soon or sign up for a service or product.
Get the hook ups to Google Analytics and check out what your visitors are doing. That data is cool and it’ll help you refine your website further.
And that’s a wrap for today. Make sure you head back here next week for when I’ll be giving the downlow on MailChimp.
Originally trained as a graphic designer in the 1990s, when iPhones were still a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye, Nicola has been involved in both print-based and interactive media since her time studying at Wanganui School of Design.
Tanker Creative, Nicola’s design and marketing her business, was founded in 2003, and works with a mix of corporate, luxury and creative clients on strategy, development, implementation and reporting.
Nicola is an avid follower of new technology in marketing, design and communications. She is also a contributor to Design Assembly, an organisation promoting conversations in graphic design. Her claim to fame is being on a train in Spain, on the plain, in the rain.
One of our challenges early on was ensuring that we had clear visibility to potential customers and we maximized our impression to them. For our traffic, the number one priority was to focus on our image and accessibility of our information. If we didn't pay proper attention to this then we were only doing a disservice to our brand, product and ability to sell. It could have been tempting to just give this 50% effort and put the remainder into our product but we challenged ourselves to ensure we didn't let this happen.
When it came to our website and it's considerations we spent a lot of time debating and ensuring that we covered three main areas: Website, Social, Pricing. The importance of these areas and doing them well, I would argue, relates to the idea of being accessible and making important information clearly visible to those seeking information about your business.
You are accessible through your website and social, so this has to look good and be relevant.
Your offering (features, benefits, pricing) has to be clearly visible, why make this difficult to find/see?
The below is our underlying rationale for how we approached these decisions. These are applicable to any business so feel free to use them to challenge your business accessibility and information visibility.
The importance of a property optimized website and social media that's up to date
How many times have you been looking for something and found it, but been turned off because of how generally bad the website looks and feels? These days your website will get more traffic than if you had a physical shop front. But if you had one would you let the paint crack and fall off? Would you have a door difficult for your customers to open. What does that imply to potential customers?
"First impressions matter to customers and your website is no exception."
When the customer comes to your website they are coming there for a purpose, they are evaluating your company and service. A sharp website that is to the point, up to date, loads and functions correctly and is relevant will help with reinforcing your company to your brand. Even if you don’t have a lot of content to display it doesn’t matter, just keep it relevant and to the point, don’t be tempted to use copious amounts of filler.
Social Media
When it comes to your preferred social media channels are they active or is a tumbleweed hangout? Everyone loves the idea of social media but it is something that you have to do consistently. If you can't manage to keep it fresh and lively - get rid of it or cut down the amount of channels and focus on what you can manage. Nothing looks worse than a twitter account with last years' Merry Christmas tweet as the most recent.
Clearly explaining pricing
How many times have you looked up a product or item, found it on a website but there was no price or you’ve had to create an account to login to view it? Frustrating isn’t it. You’ve probably bought it instead from the next website that just displayed the price. There is a mindset of some companies to treat their pricing like it is a state secret.
This is stemmed from concerns such as “what if people copy my pricing or undercut” or “this isn’t done in our industry/country”.
Let’s address those:
“What if people copy my pricing”
If people can’t see your pricing when they are on your website searching for it then you aren’t part of the price evaluation process. To be part of the decision process for the customer you have to make it easy by giving them an idea on pricing. Even if the customer fires back that the pricing is too high, you are now having a discussion that you wouldn’t have had before.
“My pricing is being copied!”
The solution in this situation is not to start a pricing war, instead focus your promotion of the value and advantages of your offering. Your other option is to innovate or improve your offering to keep moving ahead further of your competition. Remember that the key to good innovation is that it is aligned with what the market wants, so utilize your key customers feedback for this.
“This isn’t done in our sector or country”
Perfect, then you’re going to stand out. Being different with something that no one else is doing becomes a unique point for your business. Unless there is a very compelling reason not to, I wouldn’t let this be an excuse to not set yourself apart.
It seems simple enough – organize tasks into their priorities and start from there. Easy, right? But what happens if everything on your list is considered urgent, critical, must be done ASAP etc?
Remember:
"When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority."
Early on we were heading in that direction with our own development prioritization. We had a massive list that spanned every area of our business.
Legal
Engineering
Marketing
Sales
HR
Strategy
Distribution
Each of them we considered a high priority with their own individual priorities inside. It was clear that we needed to take a serious look at this huge list and refine it further. The way we attacked this was via internal debate and evaluating based on the outcome.
This is method is something that we've described further in a previous blog post about our internal culture. We broke this down by each of us explaining and pitching the areas we were responsible for and the justifications for our prioritization decisions, this was followed by robust discussion.
The benefits of this process came in three forms:
Clearer understanding
The first and most useful outcome was that we were able to see a full picture of the work at hand in greater detail. Secondly we had a much better understanding of where each other of us were at, what was important and what each of us were going to be working on. This allowed us to coordinate across roles, offer help and to provide suggestions for areas we might not have previously known about.
Rationalizingactions
We had a couple of points which appeared like we were going to complete 'B' before 'A' because that was the best course of action at the time. Re-looking at them we were able to be more critical with a clearer rationale that if we were going to complete 'B' before 'A' there had to be a very compelling reason and clear gains from this action.
Things felt easier
Now that we had a finalized and re-prioritized list, with clear objectives and a sound understand of what each of us were working on things just felt better. Sure we still had a huge list to complete, but we felt that we had a much better focus and it didn't seem as huge because of the way that we were approaching it.
I hope enjoyed the first part of this, if you have any questions about this feel free to leave a comment. Part 2 coming soon discussing 'time allowances'.
Whether you are a full-service MSP or a dedicated backup company a solid customer onboarding process can start a new customer relationship off on the right foot.
Below we'll cover 6 key areas of a basic onboarding process.
1. Customer business goals
At the start of the relationship it’s important to take the time to understand the goals of your customer in relation to your service. This is so not only can you align to meet them but it also works to help you define and lay out your internal processes, such as what reporting you need to meet them.
2. Standardize the internal process for your own team members
When time = money, efficiency is key. You can start to promote this type of thinking by evaluating your own internal systems and processes with the goal of standardizing for your team. First stage standardizing may simply be creating a checklist of the processes and setups that your team members can follow each time for configuring a new customer.
Not only does this promote consistency across your customer base but when trying to identify or resolve problems it can lead to a much quicker diagnosis.
3. Setting customer expectations
This is as simple as running through the service they are engaging you on, what they receive in it and how things will operate. This action looks to manage and properly align the customers' expectations of you which subsequently allows you to ensure that your internal systems and processes can match the outlined expectations.
4. Educating your customer
One thing that often gets overlooked when onboarding a new customer is educating them on what you are doing and more importantly why you are doing it. If you are configuring a backup service for a customer, explaining how it will work is another avenue of setting customer expectations. It also ensures that the customer understands the value of your service and what you are doing for them. This direct type of education can be another avenue for demonstrating your expertise.
5. Ensure reporting is in place
Depending on what service you are offering for your customer, the ability to regularly report to them about what you provided or achieved helps to solidify the relationship. If you are only communicating with your customers when it’s time to pay your invoice what does that represent to the customer?
It’s easy for a customer to take for granted what you do behind the scenes so being able to demonstrate weekly/monthly/annually exactly what you have been doing and how they have benefited from you is a strong way to demonstrate your value.
6. Uncover the gaps in their business
When you are onboarding a customer it’s easy to glaze over that you’re hearing a lot of additional valuable information. You’ve probably heard their:
Overall business goals Their working environment What is critical to them
The opportunity here is to add further value by providing additional services to fit the gaps that you have heard. Alternatively this gives you the opportunity to recommend or introduce them to other businesses/people/services that would fit.
This type of action for a customer not only demonstrates that you were listening to their requirements but also puts you in the position where you could be looked to for further value than just your initial contract.
Summary of the 6 steps you can start to work on today:
Understand your customer goals
Standardize your own internal processes
Set your customer expectations
Educate your customer
Ensure that there is regular reporting/communication to the customer
Listen for gaps in their business that you can assist with/recommend
Question for you - What's your thoughts on the onboarding processes? Is it something that is an essential part of your business?
