Category: Support

Next week on Tuesday 12th June the WMS user interface will be upgraded as mentioned in our previous blog posts (06/06/12 and 08/05/12).

The video below (which lasts under 5min) compares the current version of the WMS and the new user interface and highlights the changes:

1. WMS Login Page

2. WMS Dashboard Page

3. WMS Site Page

Also not shown in these videos – your website favicon (if your website has one) will be displayed in the WMS Site page when you access your site in the WMS.

Improvements to the WMS interface and support ticket system

For the last few months we have been working on some improvements to the design of the Ezone WMS. We have also changed the system we use for support tickets. Both of these upgrades will be ready for release on Tuesday 12th June 2012.

So what are the changes? Well…

• For changes to the WMS User interface please see our recent blog post for more information.

• For the support ticket system change please view this previous blog post.

We will be in touch with more information later this week which will include a short video outlining the main changes in the WMS User Interface.

As part of the upcoming WMS User Interface upgrade we are also launching a new WMS Support ticket system.

This will have the following improvements:

– Email based Support Tickets – The whole support ticket discussion will be visible within each ticket email notification from WMS Support. You can reply to the support ticket by replying to these notification emails. Therefore a support ticket discussion takes place just like a normal email discussion.

–WMS Support through Social Media – With our new support ticket system you can open tickets using Facebook or Twitter. We can respond to tickets on these platforms so the whole support discussion can take place in Facebook or Twitter through to ticket closure.

–Improved Email Notifications Acceptance – The occurrence of our support ticket email notifications going into your junk mail will be minimised.

And at our end: 
 – Improved ticket management features – we can deal with your tickets more efficiently which will improve our WMS Support service

We will continue to provide the Knowledge Base of articles on using the WMS. This will be called “Solutions” on our new support ticket system.

Watch this space for more news as we near the release date…

Whilst there has been considerable debate as to what is an acceptable way to address these changes in the law there appear to be three solutions commonly being implemented:

1. To simply have a prominent link to your privacy policy on your home page and to provide detailed information within the policy regarding what cookies your site uses, what they do and how the user can adjust their settings regarding what cookies are allowed to be placed on their computer.
   This seems to be quite a popular solution as it is the least disruptive to the browsing experience for the user.
   Examples: http://econsultancy.com, http://www.waitrose.com and http://www.dominos.co.uk/
2.  An ‘opt-out’ setup whereby the user is prominently informed on the home page that cookies are being used and given a link where they can opt-out of the cookies being used (or in some cases select what sort of cookies they want to allow).
   These also include links to a detailed privacy policy.
   Examples: http://www.magiq.com/,  http://www.bt.com/ and https://www.gov.uk
3. A full opt-in plugin. In this case cookies are disabled by default and the user must choose to opt-in to enable them. This also includes a link to the privacy policy with details of what cookies will be used if the user does choose to opt-in.

You get used to your website being up and available, no problem for a couple of years until one day when you type your site’s domain into a browser and its not there! Your domain has expired and your site is down.

This happened recently to a client of ours. The reminders were going to an old email address and the domain wasn’t set to auto-renew. We had contacted our client to give a “heads up” but other day to day matters had monopolised their time. On Friday afternoon we received a support ticket reporting the site as down but we were seeing it as still up. The domain was in the process of lapsing and the site was on its way down for the weekend – not ideal for a hotel website to say the least.

So we got in touch with our client and after a couple of calls between us we managed to track down who held the domain and who had the login details to renew online. The site went back up later that night and was available over the weekend.

To prevent this happening the WMS as a courtesy service tracks all the domains registered within it and we get in touch with clients when domains are due to lapse. Also if your domain is about to lapse you will see the following when you edit your website in the WMS:

“The domain for this site will expire soon! See “View Domain Info” in your Site Properties for more details. “

So while we don’t manage your DNS directly we can help remind you about domain renewal dates. You can also access your domain info yourself at any time in the WMS:

WMS > Admin > Manage Sites > Domain Info > DomainTools Whois

For all involved on this occasion it was a much nicer feeling to go home for the weekend a little later but with the site safely up again. But to avoid situations like this we recommend checking when your domain is due, heeding the WMS warnings and watching out for our reminder emails.

Best Wishes

Stuart Ferguson – WMS Support

Hello Valued WMS Support User!

We at WMS Support would like to get some feedback from you on your experience of using WMS support with the following 10 question survey.

This information is important to us to help us improve the WMS support service and experience for you.

Therefore please don’t hold back if you have any criticisms! However also let us know where we are doing a good job so we don’t try and fix something that isn’t broken 🙂

Here is a link to the survey: Click here to take survey

If you have any questions about this survey either prior or post answering it – please contact [email protected].

If you are able to fill out the survey then thanks for taking time to participate! If not then thanks anyway for being a WMS Support service user. We understand people don’t always have the time for surveys – although this one may help us to tailor WMS Support more to your needs.

Thanks

Stuart Ferguson – WMS Support