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Customer Portal Enhancements

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

Hosting.com Engineering group is always looking for improvements on the overall experience and user satisfaction. Based on your feedback we are happy to present some of the new changes to our Customer Portal (https://customer.hosting.com).

Clean Design


Customer Invoice Detail View

The new Portal design is simpler and direct. The information is organized to provide a logical order and easy ability to navigate, making it fast to find what you are looking for. Some new design elements like colors, typography, consistence and cross-browser compatibility were also considered to provide a more user friendly experience.

Navigation


Primary and secondary navigation

The site navigation is now simpler, clear and consistent to maximize engagement. Its pleasant design allows users to identify the current information and provide context. The primary navigation grouping has now fewer options to help users to find information more intuitively and it’s always available for quick access.

Performance

One of the Portal biggest changes is the improved usage of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a file responsible for the look and formatting that helps reduce the size of the HTML pages and speed up the loading time. Another advantage of the CSS file is that is downloaded just once by the user’s browser reducing the bandwidth requirements ensuring faster pages.

Feedback

As always, your feedback drove our efforts, we are always looking for feedback to continue making improvements so please let us know what you think about the new look of our portal.

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Posted in Hosting.com Customer Portal, Software Engineering, customer portal | 1 Comment »

Hosting.com at InterOP NYC: A Gradual Migration to the Cloud

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, Platform Product Manager

During the last webinar I presented a comment was made that bugged me a little bit. The comment was that the presentation seemed to much like a sales pitch. Delivering the sales message is important, but the reason that I enjoy communicating directly with other organizations (our customers, potential customers or even people that won’t ever be Hosting.com customers) is that I want to ensure the great work being done in our engineering organization gets communicated directly to our customers and benefits from direct customer feedback.

When this engineering blog was little more than an idea one night after work Matt and I agreed to do it original on the premise that we would be able to speak directly, without direct oversight by sales or marketing. We value that direct channel to the world and it is the reason this was worth spending our time writing. Since I’ve assumed a new role in the organization I haven’t had as much time as I might like to post here Matt, Trent, Derek, Aaron and other have kept the initial idea of very direct communication alive in my absence.

Next week, at Interop NYC on Wednesday, October 20, 2010, 2:20 PM-2:40 PM, I will be presenting an all new material entitled “Look Before You Leap: A Gradual Migration to the Cloud”. I would invite everyone in the area to join me for the talk and provide direct feedback. I’ll also work with our internal Marketing/Communications team to get a webinar with my new material in the coming weeks. Keeping with the spirit of improving on the feedback I received this material will focus on a way to leverage cutting edge Cloud technology options to improve your organization’s IT infrastructure in a realistic path (rather than taking the plunge all at once).
Please know that while we might not respond to every individual piece of feedback, it is greatly appreciated – and taking to heart. We want to hear from you often and in depth so that we can provide the most value resources possible to the community at large.

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Upcoming Events: Cloud Solutions Roadshow (Chicago and Atlanta)

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, User Experience Manager

I wanted to make a quick post regarding some upcoming events we will be having in concert with VMware. Folks that should consider coming out include:

  • Any VMware/Hosting.com clients
  • VMware clients interested in extending/augmenting their datacenter to a service provider’s cloud for disaster recovery, scalability and test/dev environments
  • VMware partners that want more information on how they can/should connect with vCloud service providers
  • Those considering virtualizing their data center
  • Companies who want/need a general understanding of cloud
  • Those approaching a server or infrastructure refresh or consolidation. Learn how Redwood might impact your business
  • Companies that want to reduce server capital expenses and management costs

On July 20th, we will be hosting an event in the Atlanta area with lunch provided at the Ravinia Club and Spa.

On July 22nd, I will be speaking in Chicago at Lloyd’s and we will also have free breakfast for everyone getting up early with us.

We would love to have you come out and join us if you are in either area. Obviously, I’m partial to our Chicago event and would love to see as many folks as possible (we all know breakfast is the most important meal of the day) – but I’m sure Jim will make a great presentation (over an equally delicious free lunch) in Atlanta.

Hope to see you there!

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New Cloud Enterprise Ordering

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, User Experience Manager

This has been a crazy week at Hosting.com. We spent the early part of the week getting everything sorted out with the Newark cloud after a storage issue and things are moving as quickly as ever on the engineering side of the house. I’m pretty excited that we are starting to get the first modules for our portal developed by our groups internally and by our partners. The portal team has started the process of integrating these modules while we address a few bugs that have been reported by our staff and customer. The other major initiative underway is getting a private version of our Cloud Enterprise offering out the door. It looks like the settled product name will be Cloud Private and the idea is that you will have all the same functionality in the portal as a Cloud Enterprise customer – but have your resources provisioned on dedicated hardware nodes that only contain your Virtual Machines.

A few weeks ago now, I recorded a Customer Portal demo to give everyone a feeling for the Cloud functionality in our portal today. I turned it over to marketing and product management but I imagine they are still working it through their internal processes, so I wanted to get it out there in front of everyone here first.

I have some higher res versions that hopefully they’ll use when we get this formally posted to our site. As always – feedback welcome and I love hearing from our customers or prospective customers.

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Customer Portal Architecture

Monday, April 19th, 2010

From: Don MacIntyre, Vice President of Software Engineering

We’ve been talking a lot about our new Customer Portal here on the Engineering Blog.  As previously mentioned, we’re very excited about the modular aspect of Portal and how we can have partners add modules via our Software Development Kit.   I’d like to take a moment to talk about some of the highlights of the Portal’s software architecture.

The Portal architecture has three distinct layers: The Portal user interface, the middleware that contains all of the business logic, and the external services provided by Hosting.com or our partners.

The Portal UI is based on Microsoft’s Web Client Software Factory (WCSF).   WCSF is a great choice for a modular environment such as our portal and is easy to deploy.  We have designed the portal to be easily extendable.  Over time you’ll see the number of modules available continue to grow as we determine what our customers would like to see within the portal.  Our goal is for the portal to offer real value to our customers while helping them manage and monitor their environment.

Microsoft’s Entity Framework is used for data abstraction, allowing developers to focus on the application rather than the database.    The Portal’s modular architecture allows each module to be self-contained. These modules call the web services exposed by the Provider Clients that are part of our middleware.

The middleware layer is modular as well.  We refer to these modules as Provider Clients and this is where the business logic for the module is contained.  Since we are dealing with asynchronous services (services which may not provide us with immediate feedback) we have opted to use Microsoft’s Message Queue (MSMQ.)   MSMQ is an enterprise quality fail-safe message queue.  This means that all transactions can be controlled in a predictable and reliable manner.   When dealing with provisioning tasks that may take a few minutes or a partner’s service that may trigger a number of events on their systems, a highly robust messaging system is extremely important.  We also developed an event notification system to inform users when asynchronous events are complete.

We are very proud of the technology behind the Portal and confident we can scale it out to meet the demands of our customers.

We’re also proud of the Software Engineering practices that our team has embraced.  More about that in another note….

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Cloud Enterprise in Portal Beta

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, User Experience Manager

Attention all current (or prospective) Hosting.com Cloud Enterprise customers. I am looking for a few of our Cloud Enterprise customers to get early access to our completed Cloud Enterprise ordering and management in the new portal. I would really love a mix of our power users and more casual cloud users in this preview. If you would be interested please contact me as soon as you can. As always, my e-mail is my first name at hosting dot com. I’ll likely be able to throw in some freebies for people willing to participate (no promises). Minimal time required (likely a survey) and this will be going on in the next few weeks.

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What would you like to see?

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, User Experience Manager

The Portal team has been busy preparing for a release, originally scheduled for yesterday (Monday), however due to some finishing touches we wanted to include (and a last minute bug fix) it will finally launch tomorrow morning (Wednesday).

One of the things we discussed today was trying to release more frequently. When I started my involvement with the Portal effort we set a goal of one release a month. At this point it has been far longer than that and as a result preparing this release has been a much larger task than expected for the team. We have agreed tentatively to try to make one small release every sprint now. Our sprints are two weeks at a time so that would be roughly two releases a month.

This coming week I’m heading out to our corporate headquarters in Denver, CO to do planning with our Product Managers and the Platform Engineering team. Today I had a conversation with one of the Platform Engineers about some of the exciting new functionality we will be launching for our Cloud in the near future. The platform guys and our production support folks have finished most of the backend of these new features – we plan to get them integrated in the portal in short order.

We have a Sprint Planning for our Portal team scheduled on Monday – so if you could add one feature to our Customer Portal today, what would it be? Feel free to answer publically in the comments below or privately by e-mail (my first name at hosting dot com).

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Coming soon to a portal near you

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, User Experience Manager

As Matt was nice enough to point out it has been a while since I’ve provided you with an update from the Software Engineering crew. One of our major focus items has been getting the new Customer Portal ready to support Cloud Enterprise customers. The team is a few weeks away from being ready to enable management of your Cloud Enterprise resources in the Portal – as well as a few additional gems that our Platform Engineering has cooked up in the mean time.

This is a portal milestone because our Cloud products have become a major area of growth for us and this will get our Cloud customers utilizing the latest and greatest in customer interface we have to offer. We’re pretty excited about this in the engineering group and hope folks will be happy with the results.

We are also working with our operations teams to plan some upgrades to our shared mail platforms and spam filtering offerings. The first phases of these upgrades have already started to roll out and we expect to have them completed for the next month or so. Most of these upgrades are infrastructure so if we it correctly, the only thing directly noticeable by customers will be improved performance for e-mail.

One of the final phases of these improvements will be migration to a new spam-filtering offering. Customers will receive notice specifically when we are further along, we will be migrating from offering Google’s Postini services to offering a new suite of services.

More to come in the near future, I’ll pull together some screenshots for my next post so you can get a feeling for what the future will look like.

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Don’t be shy!

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, User Experience Manager

Today I had the opportunity to speak to one of our customers regarding our Customer Portal and it’s future. This particular customer was a customer who originally signed up with HostMySite. He has a few dedicated servers and reached out his sales person and indicated an interest in discussing our Portal.

In this situation the customer was in the process of merging multiple organizations (much like we have been recently) and ended up having the account originally opened with us and one account with one of our major competitors. They had discussed things and decided they wanted to stick with us (primarily based on our support according to the customer). However, one of the concerns that was raised during their internal dialog was a number of things they would really like to see in our Customer Portal.

After Doug was introduced to me by his sales representative we scheduled some time to talk on the phone. Doug’s concerns mainly revolved around centralizing all of the information we send to customers during the set up process and various upgrades in to one single location. Luckily this was one of the major goals of our new Customer Portal, to create one single location for all interaction with our products.

It also turns out that Doug was still using one of our legacy control panels, and hadn’t really been exposed to our new Portal yet. Each one of Doug’s specific concerns were already things that we had scheduled for our engineering roadmap in the next quarter or two. For me, this was great feedback and a little validation for the direction we are moving in. Getting the chance to speak with Doug today was extremely beneficial for both of us.

I would love to hear from any customer (or prospective customer) that would like to discuss their thoughts about our portal, our services, or the customer experience and what they would like to see in the future. Please contact me (my first name at hosting dot com) and we will make time to talk.

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Posted in Software Engineering | 2 Comments »

Portal SDK: What does that mean?

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, Lord of the Acronyms

During the past several weeks we have been in the process of creating a Software Development Kit for our new Customer Portal. This kit is targeted at internal engineering teams as well as trusted partners to enable the rapid development of new functionality for our customers that can be easily included within the portal.

As the portal represents a key part of many of our upcoming product offerings we want to ensure that engineers outside the core portal group have the ability to develop the customer-facing interface in tandem with the products themselves. Rather than being developed after the fact we believe that the portal components of product offerings should be treated as an integral part of the offerings and often the best way to do that will be to allow folks that know those products the best from top to bottom to develop the portal modules themselves.

In order to ensure the highest quality for our customers, the core portal team will still be serving as the final quality assurance and ultimately the arbiters for what makes it in to our production portal. We believe that this new Software Development Kit will aide our new portal to quickly become a powerful single pane of glass into all of our product offerings. Customers can look forward to a rapidly expanding menu of services made available within one easy to use location with a common look and feel.

Another concept this will open up is the potential for partners to white label our proven portal framework to expose functionality directly to their customers without having to undertake the work of starting from scratch. Enabling this sort of functionality has been an architecture goal since we originally began this development effort.

We have begun circulating this kit internally to engineering teams and hope to have it out to the first set of partners within a few weeks. So far there has been an unprecedented amount of interest and we look forward to adding many more services to our portal in the weeks and months to come. If you are a Hosting.com partner interested in our portal SDK (or would like to become one) please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. You can contact me at my first name at Hosting.com.

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