Dead-Simple Software for Small Business

The Email Center Pro Product Team has been quiet lately, on the Dead Simple Software blog and the Email Center Pro Updates blog, but it’s not because there isn’t anything to talk about. We’ve all been very busy keeping up with the growing demands of an active service and working on what we’re calling the 1.5 release - the next major update for Email Center Pro.

The 1.5 release is going to be packed with new features. In fact, the 1.5 release is so feature packed that we’ll be releasing it in phases over the next few months. Advanced search tools, new tagging tools, and account metrics are just a few of the things we’re working on for the 1.5 release. We’re really excited about what we’ve got coming and we think you’re going to love it. Thanks to all of the users that have contributed to the new features we’re developing by providing us with constant feedback.

I have more good news. We’ve hired a dedicated Product Marketing Manager for Email Center Pro. Jason Gallic (email: Jason Gallic twitter: @jasongallic) will be working hard to spread the word about Email Center Pro. We’re very happy to have him on the team. Expect to hear a lot from him in the future.

You’ll be hearing a lot more from us as we start rolling out the 1.5 revision. Until then, keep the feedback coming.

Thank you,

Cale Bruckner
Senior VP Product Development

Tags: ecp update, Email Center Pro
Posted under Email Center Pro on July 25th, 2008 | No Comments »

Since the official public launch around 45 days ago, we’ve been working hard to continue to optimize the performance and user experience of Email Center Pro. A couple highlights:

• Upgraded to the latest version of TinyMCE for improved text editing.
• Implemented a caching layer between ECP and S3 to speed up message loading time.
• Integrated Amazon’s Simple Queue Service to greatly decrease latency of POP mail delivery.
• Implemented a background sending process so that users don’t have to wait for messages to send, they can get right back to work.
• Added paging for viewing long threads with a quicker load time.

We’ve also responded to all of our hundreds of feedback messages from early adopters, with many of those requests making it into the application, and many more planned for a near future release. We’ve aggregated all the requests and have compiled a feature list for the next big release of ECP, which we’re working on now. The set of features is exciting and is going to be a great supplement to our current offering. And we’re going to continue to tune performance across the board.

Alex Boone
Senior Software Design Engineer

Tags: ecp update, Email Center Pro
Posted under Email Center Pro on June 4th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

When I tell people what I do here as Senior Software Design Engineer at Palo Alto Software, I sometimes get the glazed eye look when I explain that I make business planning software. Unless you’re a business major or have a need for business planning, it’s a rare event for people to get very excited over business planning software. But designing and writing Business Plan Pro has been anything but boring! Everyday I’m challenged with new problems and need to think outside the box to deliver what is hands down, the best business planning software on the market. I get to use the latest cutting edge technologies and learn new things daily. To me programming is my art as I always strive to the point of obsession for a clean, robust and efficient design; taking great pride in the success of our products.

I could be writing the latest version of Halo for the Xbox and I honestly think I would be having just as much fun and even learn many of the same things. Programming is largely transferrable to many different types of applications. I can write a module for Business Plan Pro and if designed well, could easily reuse it in a huge variety of applications. Almost no part of our application is so specific to Business Plan Pro that it couldn’t be reasonably used in a multitude of contexts.

Which is why I love when I have time to share some of the techniques I’ve used while building our software with other coders. The piece of knowledge I was able to share with my fellow programmers most recently had to do with some conclusions I came to while making our application responsive and user-friendly during long operations. If you’re as geeky as me you can go off to the site and read the article. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/progress/ProperProgress.aspx

The nice part about this article was that I was able to prove to myself just how useful the things I develop for Business Plan Pro are and can be to other developers because the other day, my article won an award as best VB.NET article of the month on CodeProject (the premier site for sharing code, tips, and techniques amongst developers). Besides winning over $4,000 in software prizes, I now have the honor of knowing that my experience has helped the community in some way.

Stay passionate about whatever you do and we can all grow from each other’s knowledge,

Tim Greenfield
Senior Software Design Engineer
Palo Alto Software

Posted under Business Plan Pro on May 15th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Email Center Pro, a product of Palo Alto Software, is one of the sponsors for tomorrow’s CrunchNetwork Meetup in New York City.

Cale Bruckner, Sr. VP of Product Development and Alex Boone, one of the developers behind Email Center Pro will be on hand at the event.

If you are one of the lucky few that scored some tickets to the event, be sure to drop by and say hello!

‘Chelle Parmele
Palo Alto Software

Posted under Email Center Pro on April 30th, 2008 | No Comments »

Business Plan Pro now takes advantage of the robust nature and high speed bandwidth provided by Amazon S3 to serve its web updates. Palo Alto Software gets a smaller bill for bandwidth and one less feature running on our server farm to have to maintain. While at the same time, our customers get reliable, high speed service for our downloads. It’s a win/win situation for everyone but our ISP.

Business Plan Pro has a great feature that allows users to opt to automatically check for updates to the software every time they run the application. This ensures they will always have the latest and greatest version of our software on their machine and helps minimize the impact of bugs our developers and QA missed. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe that even our world class team of developers and testers still release software with bugs from time to time And with the time it takes a CD ROM to enter production and make it to the shelves of our retailers, it’s more common than not that there will be a newer version available on the web at the time the user first runs the application. So the auto-update saves the day, allowing users to never be the wiser about bugs already having been fixed but still lurking in the software they were about to run.

Business Plan Pro, by virtue of being the decisive leader of Business Planning software in the world — applaud goes here ;), has great demands on bandwidth for its updates. Without disclosing confidential figures on the size of our user base, I can tell you that thousands of updates are served per week. And each update ranges anywhere from 4 MB to 40 MB. This kind of strain accounts for a significant portion of Palo Alto Software’s total outgoing bandwidth needs. Therefore, moving the services to Amazon S3 is a significant change.

The good news is that because of the way the web update feature was designed, we were able to seamlessly move our updates to Amazon S3 mid product lifecycle. Business Plan Pro hits a web service on our ISP which returns the URL to download the software thru. Easily enough, going live was as simple as modifying the web service to issue Amazon S3 Urls to the client instead. All the changes to implement this feature were server side and so now customers get even better update service without having to get an update first .

Tim Greenfield
Senior Software Design Engineer
Palo Alto Software

Posted under Business Plan Pro, Marketing Plan Pro on April 29th, 2008 | No Comments »

During our Email Center Pro launch party, we asked a few of our local beta users if they would talk a little bit about the product and how it’s helped their business.

The first one we’re going to showcase is from Palo Alto Software’s own Alex Boone, who also happens to be the creator of Email Center Pro.

Posted under Email Center Pro on April 29th, 2008 | No Comments »

Last night, we had our official launch party for Email Center Pro!

Everyone from PAS came - as well as some of our local beta testers. We had great shirts to wear and good food to eat.

For more pictures, check out the Palo Alto Software Flickr account. And some other’s from Cale Bruckner’s Flickr account.

Later on, Tim Berry, the President of Palo Alto Software, gave a little speech.

A fun time was had by all!

‘Chelle Parmele

Posted under Email Center Pro on April 24th, 2008 | No Comments »

Today, I’m happy to announce that we’re officially launching Email Center Pro (ECP). This morning we pulled down the Email Center Pro beta logos and enthusiastically transitioned www.emailcenterpro.com out of beta mode. Welcome to Email Center Pro Launch Week!

The office is buzzing with activity and we’re all looking forward to helping small business people tackle their email tsunamis. A lot of fun stuff is happening this week and next week. Here’s a taste of what we have on the schedule.

• Press release hits the wires
• Scheduled calls with journalists and bloggers (chelle@paloalto.com to get on the list)
• Launch party at Bel Ami
• Flying to New York for CrunchNetwork Meet-up - ECP is a Gold Sponsor

We still have a lot of work to do to spread the word about Email Center Pro. The marketing task we have in front of us is is going to be a challenge. Additionally, Email Center Pro is far from being done. We’re already working on a 1.5 feature list and there are always things we can do to optimize the product and the experience for the customer.

If you missed the chance to grab a beta account, don’t freak out, you can still kick the tires by signing up for a FREE account.

Oh, I forgot to mention the cool shirts that are arriving this week for the launch party.

Thank you,

Cale Bruckner
VP Product Development

Tags: ecp update
Posted under Email Center Pro on April 21st, 2008 | 3 Comments »

In advance of Monday’s public launch, we released a couple of minor updates to Email Center Pro today.  The highlights are:

• Added NOT operator to the smart folder rules builder (example: subject is not “marketing form submission”, assignee is not Alex or Evan).  More work to come in this area, smarter smart folders are on the short list for post-launch features.
• Improved search results - order is now date descending (most recent on top), which should help you find messages easier, as the “relevancy” score didn’t appear very ordered to the user.  We’re working on some enhancements to the search experience to be released soon as well.
• Threading enhancements - responding to feedback from our beta users, we’ve updated the rules that define how messages get threaded.  Hopefully this will put an end to stacking up monthly newsletters, web site form submissions and some other use cases that were falling through the cracks.  We’ve also added a great “break from conversation” feature (located in the message menu in the top right of each message view), which will allow you to split messages out of a conversation if the system didn’t do its job.
• Help documents - inside Email Center Pro, help is just a click away.  The online documentation will outline each feature and use case in the system and provide tips for advanced users.  Context sensitive help is often available for dialogs, indicated by a “?” in the top right corner.

Thanks for all the feedback from our beta users!
Alex Boone
Senior Software Design Engineer

Tags: ecp update, Email Center Pro, feature
Posted under Business Plan Pro on April 18th, 2008 | No Comments »

We originally designed Email Center Pro to be used as an internal tool to manage and track email communication with customers. Then we realized other businesses could benefit from our solution as well. This software-as-a-service model required us to put availability, performance and scalability at the forefront of our design requirements. Amazon Web Services have provided us with the tools that we need to address those concerns easily while focusing our efforts on developing a great product.

Amazon Web Services are at the core of the Email Center Pro infrastructure. We started out by storing all of the message content using the Simple Storage Service (S3). This provides each of our customers with an infinitely scalable storage area for their emails, attachments, and templates. As a small business, it helps us to sleep better knowing that our users’ data is safely stored in secured, managed data centers, and that we’re able to leverage the reputation and trust that Amazon has built over the last decade-plus of business.

We were so happy with the reliability and cost-benefit of using S3 that the next step was taking our application from traditional managed hosting to a full Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform. We’ve developed a set of instance configurations that can be used to run any of the services that power Email Center Pro in “the cloud.” As a result, we can nearly instantly launch more computing power to balance load in times of peak traffic or mail volume. Another benefit of EC2 is that when we prepare to release updates, we can test them on instances running in an identical configuration to the production environment, parallel to the publicly accessible version of the application, and only when we need to test. For our relational database needs, we have been participating in Elastra’s beta program. They’ve developed a way to run database servers on EC2 using S3 for persistent storage. As a result, we’ve been able to decrease database latency, since the Elastra instances are running within the same network as Email Center Pro application servers. The only component of our application that does not run within the sphere of Amazon Web Services is our mail gateway servers- and it’s just because we need a valid reverse DNS entry in order to avoid blacklisting.

In its early days, EC2 was primarily used to handle batches of asynchronous, processing-intensive tasks, but Amazon has made strides recently with features that have turned it into a true hosting platform. New developments such as static IP addressing and availability zones allow us to provide great uptime to our customers and protect against any single point of failure. And in the event of a true catastrophe, we do maintain traditional on-disk backups and warm database servers to get us back up and running quickly. In the near future, Amazon will be releasing persistent storage volumes for EC2, which will improve our search infrastructure, caching and more. Just today, they released full-blown technical support contracts, making EC2 a truly viable replacement for managed hosting.

When people hear about Amazon Web Services, buzzwords like “scalability” and “reliability” abound– but the proof is in the pudding. Email Center Pro is an example that you really can build an application entirely on the Amazon Web Services platform with great results.

Alex Boone
Senior Software Design Engineer

Tags: amazon, ec2, ecp update, Email Center Pro, s3, technical, web services
Posted under Email Center Pro on April 17th, 2008 | 2 Comments »