Join Mason and Josh for a webinar focusing on all that is API related in Comet. In this we will run through the API, how to get started using it and some demo examples of usage. We will conclude the webinar with a live Q&A for API related questions.
Already this year, Comet has flown past Mars and its two moons. The next large object in the solar system is Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, discovered in 1801. Ceres’ radius is only about 2/5ths that of Pluto; but because it’s so much closer, it appears 10x to 200x larger in the night sky.
The latest long term Comet release, Ceres, is now available. Bringing 17 new features and 42 enhancements this release is packed full great improvements for your Comet environment.
18.11.0 (2018-11-19)
Changes compared to 18.9.9 Voyager
- Feature: Optional columns for current Protected Item and Storage Vault size on the Users page in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Always exclude /dev/ directory on Linux and macOS
- Fix an issue with not retrying on some network errors to S3 and S3-compatible storage
- Fix an issue with "null" when adding or editing email addresses for a user in the Comet Server web interface
- Fix a cosmetic issue with extra outlines when switching tabs on the user page in the Comet Server web interface in Firefox
- Fix a cosmetic issue with overflowing field lines when editing Schedule settings in the Comet Server web interface in Firefox
Changes compared to 18.8.7 'Deimos'
- Feature: Support FIDO U2F keys for two-factor login to the Comet Server web interface as administrator
- Feature: New custom email report system
- Feature: Support scheduled email reports for customers
- Feature: Support configuring default email reports via Policy
- Feature: Custom job search queries in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Policy option to prevent users enabling/disabling the "Allow administrator to reset password" option
- Feature: Option to disable sending scheduled email reports
- Feature: Optional columns for current Protected Item and Storage Vault size on the Users page in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Allow uploading branding files directly in the Setup Wizard in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Allow browsing snapshots for restore in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Allow defining a job filter for email reports
- Feature: Allow defining multiple email reports per recipient email address in a single user account
- Feature: Allow editing existing Mandatory Exclusions in policies in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Allow administrators to change their own security settings, passwords, and U2F registrations on the My Account page in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Diagnostic option to separate devices that were incorrectly identified as the same on Windows
- Feature: Display email queue length and success/failure statistics on the About this Server page in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Add optional "simple" mode to Comet Server stats API endpoint, to coalesce some redundant data points
- Enhancement: Support importing schedule names from Ahsay v6
- Enhancement: Support SQLNCLI11 provider to connect to Microsoft SQL Server instances
- Enhancement: Support MSOLEDBSQL provider to connect to Microsoft SQL Server instances mandating TLS 1.2
- Enhancement: Allow selecting multiple files in the "Add single file" dialog for "Files and Folders" Protected Items in Comet Backup
- Enhancement: Allow searching jobs by duration, time since started
- Enhancement: Allow editing existing email addresses in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Allow maximising the restore dialog window in Comet Backup
- Enhancement: Minor performance improvement for loading the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Improve performance for locating data within Spanned backends
- Enhancement: Improve performance of loading the dashboard homepage in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Improve performance and reduce memory usage for saving index files into Storage Vaults, particularly during retention passes
- Enhancement: Improve performance of loading the Protected Item editor, Storage Vault editor, and Setup Wizard in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Improve performance of starting Storage Vault operations in Comet Backup
- Enhancement: Improve performance of reusing existing tree objects in repository and of managing temporary pack files
- Enhancement: Improve performance of loading the "Select files" screen in Comet Backup
- Enhancement: Reduce memory usage required for compressing large index files
- Enhancement: Reduce memory usage needed for email reports
- Enhancement: Reduce memory usage needed to construct backup job report emails
- Enhancement: Reduce memory usage needed to load index files, construct file and directory trees during backup
- Enhancement: Reduce memory usage needed to browse files for restore in Comet Backup
- Enhancement: Change the default Requestable Destination name to "Storage provided by (your company name)"
- Enhancement: Cosmetic unify the Setup Wizard, Protected Item editor design in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Cosmetic redesign the My Account page in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Cosmetic redesign the web-based restore dialog to more closely match the Comet Backup app
- Enhancement: Cosmetic add text label to column-selection button in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Cosmetic redesign email security options in the Comet Server Setup Wizard to match more common Outlook/Thunderbird option values
- Enhancement: Cosmetic display measurement timestamps, refresh progress for bucket sizes in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Cosmetic remove TOTP box on login form (TOTP will be prompted if required)
- Enhancement: Cosmetic simplify the job query filter interface
- Enhancement: Support additional fallback methods for finding Exchange Server install directory
- Enhancement: Improve SFTP server compatibility
- Enhancement: Default to showing the most recent page of server logs in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Show fractional quota bars in the Storage Vault table in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Use newer Qt library on Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 and later. The Comet installer includes both versions and will choose automatically.
- Enhancement: Show tray icon at all times, even when Comet Backup is not logged in or only running in the background (app locked)
- Enhancement: Unify Comet Backup login credentials across all OS user accounts
- Enhancement: Add plain-text URL as extra information to AdminAccountRegenerateTotp API
- Enhancement: Record the name of your token hardware when registering U2F tokens in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Display icons for Protected Items and Storage Vaults in the job filter bar in Comet Backup
- Enhancement: Reduce CPU usage when calculating data chunk positions
- Enhancement: Hide Comet Server web interface from search engines
- Enhancement: Always exclude /dev/ directory on Linux and macOS
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.
The technical specifications are hosted by the open-authentication industry consortium known as the FIDO Alliance. U2F has been successfully deployed by large scale services, including Facebook, Gmail, Dropbox, GitHub, Salesforce.com, the UK government, and many more.
How it works:
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.
\Comet\Server classWe're pleased to launch our public repository with this and look forward to sharing more.
Click on the Octocat below to be taken to our repository!
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:
Missed the live 'Luna' webinar? Don't worry! it's available here:
Join us as we discussed the first 9 months of launching Comet, CometGo!, Cloudview and more.
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.
Webinar: Wednesday 29th at 10.30am Pacfic/Auckland time (Here's a link to a handy time conversion site)
The agenda for this webinar
Incase you cannot make this live broadcast, this will be recorded and posted on our Youtube afterwards.
We look forward to seeing you then!
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
By Nicola Devine, Tanker Creative
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.
MailChimp are seriously serious about subscriber permission. Before you start importing or growing your list, it helps to a look at these articles about their default, double opt-in process for signups, and other best practices for list management.
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 design page. 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.
The Tanker Universe… it’s not that complicated
By Nicola Devine, Tanker Creative
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).
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.
Below is the second part of a very candid 5 part overview from our journey of developing Comet.
MAXIMISING VISIBILITY
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.
Missed part one of this series? read about how we approached prioritisation here