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Posted on July 8th, 2009
dror
Sign up to try the new 6zap
Until now 6zap was focused on communication within your organization: email, calendar, contacts and file sharing. With the upcoming new release, 6zap provides you with advanced customer care features. We’ve added the following:
Admin Panel
- Sub-domains
- Helpdesk
- Email marketing
The easiest way to show how all of these work together is to walk you through fictitious case study of using 6zap.
Let’s pretend that Acme Project Management, APM, uses 6zap and see how it affects the company’s interactions with Jane Doe who’s looking for a project management product for her company.
Jane’s works for a 5 person web design company and while looking for a SaaS project management solution comes across APM. She signs up for a trial account. When the signup is finished APM’s server creates a 6zap contact using the 6zap contact API and adds her to the contact group Prospects.
As a result, 6zap sends Jane an email “Thank you for signing up with APM …” that welcomes her and provides her with information to get her started. As is often the case, Jane gets distracted by other tasks and forgets about APM.
Creating the Welcome Email on 6zap
A couple of days later 6zap sends her a new APM email. “You’ve had a couple of days to evaluate APM, here are some additional tips …” This reminds Jane to go and check out APM again. She takes a deeper look this time, it looks quite good, but she has a couple of questions about the product.
She emails her questions to sales@apmproj.com which shows up in APM’s helpdesk on 6zap and Jim, an APM employee, picks up the message. The icon next to Jane’s shows that she’s in the contacts db, and Jim quickly sees that Jane has signed up for an account a couple days earlier. One of Jane’s questions is asked frequently and Jim inserts one of the “canned responses” that APM has, and manually answers the second question. Jane has a follow up question, and this message is automatically assigned to Jim and they correspond back and forth.
At one point Jane has a question about being able to import data into APM. Jim doesn’t know the answer so he assigns the message to Jeff. Jeff gets an email that a message has been assigned to him, adds a note to the message to let him know that this feature will be available in the next release, and assigns it back to Jim. Jim checks out the note, and replies to Jane. He then adds Jane to the group notify_V3.2Beta which means that when the Beta is ready Jane will get notified.
Jane likes the product and is impressed with the prompt customer support from APM and decides to sign up for a couple of accounts with APM to try it on a larger scale. A couple of weeks later, APM uses 6zap to send out their monthly newsletter that includes “Project management best practices” as well as information about new features in the release that just came out.
Let’s now look at the new 6zap and how all these pieces work together.
Admin and Sub-domains
Helpdesk messages
When you sign up for a 6zap account you now have your own sub-domain xxxx.6zap.com where xxxx is a name you choose. You are the admin for this sub-domain and here are some things you can do.
- You add, update and remove users as well as assign the admin role to other people.
- You add, update and remove workgroups. Workgroups provide contacts, calendars and mailing aliases that are private to specific groups like support or sales.
- You manage the preferences for your helpdesk, including who are the people that are allowed to access the helpdesk module.
- You manage email marketing campaigns. I’ll describe in detail how this module works.
Helpdesk
Using the helpdesk module different people can view the email queue to addresses like support@yourdomain.com and sales@yourdomain.com.
Helpdesk messages
Features
- Familiar email interface with advanced features such as pre-viewing image attachments, drag and drop to folders, etc.
- Multiple people can view the helpdesk and assign tickets to each other
- You can switch the view to see only your tickets or everyone’s open tickets.
- Assign priorities to tickets
- Sort by date, priority or assignee
- Get notified when a ticket is assigned to you
- Add a note to a ticket
Email Marketing
There are two kind of campaigns you can create using the email marketing module: one time campaigns and drip campaigns.
Creating a newsletter
One time campaigns
One time campaigns are emails that you send at once to a group of people. Usually they’ll be announcements, newsletters and other messages that you want to send to a wide audienc
Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are triggered by an event adding a contact to a group. They can be launched right away after the user has been added to the group or after a number of days have passed since the user was added to the group.
Features
- Creating either campaign is very straight forward
- Create the message either from scratch or using one of our templates
- Choose the groups of people you want to send the message to
- Send a test
- Send the campaign.
API
The 6zap contact API gives you full access to your 6zap contacts. You can add, update and delete contacts as well as assign them to specific groups to trigger drip campaigns. This means that you can easily integrate your application of your purchasing process so that anyone using your application or buying your product shows up automatically in 6zap.
Contact management
The contact management module is not new. What’s new is the ease of adding, editing and viewing a contact from the helpdesk and the ability to add an event to a contact, consolidating all the info about the contact in once place. You also use the contact groups in the Email Marketing module, so it’s very easy to create the different buckets for different groups of people you are reaching out to.
Update: I was asked about pricing for this. We haven’t yet determined the pricing, but it’ll be free for 1-2 people and quite affordable to bigger groups.
Sign up to try the new 6zap
Follow us on Twitter
6zap: http://twitter.com/6zap
Dror: http://twitter.com/drormata
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Posted on June 22nd, 2009
dror
As the architect of 6zap, I instigate most major features and often I need to go beyond text or a screenshot to describe my vision. This is specially true since our development team is in the Ukraine and they can’t just pop their head in the door and ask me to clarify things.
I use a mockup/wireframe to show how I think the user interface should look. Check out the following two examples. As part of our new helpdesk module we’re providing a way to add notes to an email message.
In the example above the notes are shown and inserted in a popup. The popup and the background are part of the application, but the white area is a mockup created using Balsamiq. Notice that the look and feel is kind of sketchy. It doesn’t look like a reall application. That’s done on purpose to make it clear that this is just a mockup.
In this second example, again created with Balsamiq, I experimented with inserting the notes after the email message. This, by the way is the solution we went with.
There are several elements in the above mockup. There’s a text area, there are labels and there are links.
Comparing Balsamiq and Flairbuilder
What’s similar
Overall the programs have a lot in common. They both use Adobe AIR which makes them cross platform on Windows, Mac and Linux, the user interface for using them is similar and the basic approach is similar. With both products, it is incredibly easy to create a simple mockup. You drag and drop elements, in Flairbuilder’s case from the right side, in Balsamiq’s from the top, into your canvas. I found Flairbuilder slightly more intuitive to use. When you insert an image object, for instance, you see right away “Choose” to choose the image to insert. With Balsamiq I had to hunt around the control area for the object, try all the different icons until I found in the drop down menu “Import image”. Still, with both programs I was able to create mockups easily in very little time, and I had to spend very little time figuring out how to make things work.
Also, I should note, that both programs were written by really nice European young men. Peldi, the author of Balsamiq, is not only a great developer, but he really has a nack for using social media to market his product. He’s gotten tons of press by openly documenting in his blog the steps that Balsamiq went through including revenue numbers. I encountered Cristian online and was impressed by his openess to feedback. Quite soon after my suggesting it, he implemented context/right click menus for objects that provide an additional way to perform operations on them such as sending them to the background.
What’s different
Flairbuilder’s components look like real components that you can actually use, and in fact, you can, but more about that in a minute. Balsamiq’s components look more like back of the napkin drawings. That’s on purpse. The idea is that when you show the mockup to a customer, it’ll be clear that it’s a mockup so that they don’t have
Balsamiq has been around for quite a while, and has an incrisingly large library of objects, where Flairbuilder is a younger product that has most of the necessary elements, but not some of the more exotic one, though in the short times I’ve used it I saw a significant increase. The place where flairbuilder shines is in the ability to create a mockup where you can look at several pages in one mockup. Check out, for instance, the mockup I created for our new Email Marketing Module. You’ll notice that it’s a flash animation rather than an image. Click on the different tabs on top, on the checkbox and even type in some text. This approach has several very significant advantages over static images.
- You get a much better feel for the user experience. You can click on the different elements and see how they behave.
- You can have several pages tied together in one mockup. If I had to use images, I’d need to create a different image for each tab. Here’s it’s easy to see them all and see how they interact with each other.
- You can actually have events that will trigger actions. You can have a link and when the user clicks on it, you display a message. I haven’t experimented too much with this, but it seems that FlairBuilder could be considered with this feature a prototyping tool rather than just a way to create a mockup
Conclusion
By now, you can probably tell that I think that FlairBuilder is the better tool. I can tell easily since I haven’t used Balsamiq since I got FlairBuilder other than for this review. There’s one arena that I think Balsamiq is more appropriate. With some customers, if you show them an advanced mockup or even a prototype, they’ll assume that it’s really easy to build the product. In that case, Balsamiq makes it crystal clear that this is just a rough example and a lot of work is needed to get to a real product. For my purposes, though, Flairbuilder is the clear winner. But don’t take my word for me. Download both products and try them for yourself. They both offer trial downloads and you can see for yourself which works for you.
Balsamiq: http://www.balsamiq.com
Flairbuilder: http://www.flairbuilder.com
Follow me on Twitter
Dror: http://twitter.com/drormata
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Posted on March 19th, 2009
dror
6zap is a Web 2.0 Email, Calendar, Contacts and File sharing application. During the last 10 days we’ve seen a nice increase in traffic.
Before I get to the traffic spike, I’d like to point out a few things.
- All these numbers are still quite small. The most visitors we got to 6zap.com is 2000 a day.
- Traffic to 6zap has been increasing at a nice pace even before the recent spike. As you can see the left hand side of the graph is growing.
- We’re not getting significant traffic from any single site anymore, yet traffic is still more than double what it was before the spike. This is really important! If you get a spike and then things fall back to the level they were before, it means that people aren’t sticking around to use your application. Driving more traffic in won’t help until you solve this issue.
So what triggered this traffic? We submitted our app to two sites, KillerStartups and Feedmyapp within a few days of each other, and it happened that they both published the review around the same time. That’s it, that was the magic. From there a number of other publications picked things up and did their own reviews. Check out the full list. The list includes reviews in English, French, Japanese, Italian Spanish German and more. This encouraged us to move faster on our translation efforts and the next release of 6zap, coming out in the next couple of weeks will include a translation module.
The importance of analytics
We watch our analyitics quite carefully and use several tools to keep track of the progress. We use Google analytics to analyze traffic and trends.
This image, for instance, show the rank of various sites that brought in visitors.
It’s crucial to figure out which is the actual page that sent the visitors to your web site so you can read what was said and possibly comment, but it’s a little convoluted in the Google analytics interface:
- Click on Traffic Sources
- Click on Referring Sites
- Click on the domain you’re interested in, for instance genbeta.com in the 3rd position above.
- Now click on the little icon to the left of the URL and it’ll open the page in a new tab/window.
We also use awstats which analyzes the raw log data. The interface is not as nice, but it has the advantage of being able to look at all pages and tell you things like the amount of bandwidth your site generated, 404 page not found, etc.
The last tool in our arsenal is a collection of scripts that spit out data from the database. They tell us how many people signed up per day, how many people logged in every day, etc. After all, all the traffic is useless if people don’t sign up and use the application.
Twitter
While we got the coverage on the various sites, we also got quite a few tweets.That helped but not nearly as much as you’d think. I suspect that it’s a signal to noise ratio issue. On one hand it’s easy to get mentioned on Twitter so we got quite a few mentions, on the other hand, it’s quite easy to get mentioned on Twitter so we got lost in the other few billions tweets.
Moving forward
At the end of the day, all these social networking strategies can help you only if you have a good product and keeps evolving. We expect to have our next release ready in 2-3 weeks which includes these major new features:
- Workgroups: the ability to share contacts, calendars and files with anyone in your group
- Notes: the ability, not only to create notes, but to attach them to a contact or email
- Translations into languages other than English. Please let us know if you’re interested in helping translate 6zap.
At that point we’ll go back to all of the sites above and mention all these new features. We’ll also go to the foreign sites and ask for help in translating to other languages.
Conclusion
- Things move very quickly in the Web 2.0 world and it’s important to have your finger on the pulse.I haven’t heard about Killerstatups and Feedmyapp until pretty recently. Feedmyapp is growing fast and Killerstartups has more than half a million visitors a month. Clearly, they’re becoming an important resource both for users and startups.
- You have to keep an eye on your analytics. It can be as little as 10 minutes a day, but keep an eye on where people are coming from and check any articles that are written about you.
Follow us on Twitter
6zap: http://twitter.com/6zap
Dror: http://twitter.com/drormata
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Posted on March 6th, 2009
dror
We saw a 400% spike in the last 24 hours in the number of visitors and signup on 6zap. Looking at our web analytics we saw that we’ve been reviewed or mentioned in the following places:
http://feedmyapp.com/p/a/6zap-web-2-0-e-mail-calendar-file-management-and-contacts/8835
http://www.killerstartups.com/Comm/6zap-com-open-source-communication-platform
http://www.genbeta.com/web/6zap-plataforma-de-comunicacion-integral-open-source (spanish).
Nice to get some exposure. All three places have a way to post a comment, but http://www.killerstartups.com/Comm/6zap-com-open-source-communication-platform
provides a way to vote. Please vote for us there, and add a comment in any of the postings.
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Posted on February 27th, 2009
dror
6zap currently has limited sharing capabilities. You can, for instance, share your calendar with other people, both ones that have a 6zap account as well as the public at large.
Our next version is going to add significant sharing and collaboration features by introducing worgroups, groups within your organization that work together. Click on the image to see the larger version of initial create workgroup dialog.
When you create a workgroup, you choose which 6zap modules: email, calendar, contacts, files are going to be enabled for this workgroup. Some groups are going to have their own private areas in all modules while others don’t need their own calendar or their own contacts.
Another important feature of workgroups is that they are hierarchical. Let’s say you have the following hierarchy in your team:
- Staff
- Sales
- Marketing
- Development
- HR
Joe and Jane are automatically part of the Staff group since sales are part of staff. This means that when you add or remove a person from your team, you can do it in one place.
We’re interested in hearing other people’s good and bad experiences in implementations of groups/workgroups in software like Outlook, Lotus Notes and others.
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Posted on February 19th, 2009
dror
Offline Mode
Read and reply to your 6zap Email while not connected to the Internet! Not only does 6zap download your email and let you view them, you can even view and add attachments to your outgoing email. No other web based Email program lets you do that.
Check out the flash movie to see how it works.
Multiple Accounts
You can now handle multiple emails under your 6zap account.
Forward your work mail, your gmail mail, or any other accounts into 6zap and you can read them all in one place and 6zap will automatically respond with the appropriate account.
- Click on Settings->New and click on the “Add New” button.
- Enter your email address.
- Go to that email account (work, gmail, etc), and confirm by clicking on the link in the email.
- Click on “Reload from server” in 6zap and you should see the new account.
Now whenever you compose an email you have a drop down to choose which account your email originates from and when you reply to an email, it will default to the address it was sent to.
Other New Features
- New look and improved capabilities in file explorer including drag and drop of files.
- Ability to attach files from the file explorer
- Improvements to contacts including the ability to search
- Display free/busy info for all your calendars. See http://www.6zap.com/app/calendar/public.php?uid=3ae834d845a7da92d5838c96f074b20c
- And many other smaller fixes and bugs squashed in this release.
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Posted on December 18th, 2008
dror
As part of my twitter explorations, I followed Guy’s advice and set things up so I automatically follow whoever follows me. But to do that I had to signup with a service. Today I wanted to turn the feature off but I couldn’t remember which service it was. Hate it when that happens.
But now that 6zap has Zcounts it’s a piece of cake. Clicked on Zcounts tab in 6zap, and saw that I signed up for SocialToo, and went there and turned off “Automatically follow those that follow you.”
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Posted on December 2nd, 2008
dror
I’m glad to announce a new module in 6zap, Zcounts. Zcounts generate e-mail aliases giving you better control over spam from e-mail addresses provided to third-party entities. It also helps you track all your accounts created on the Web and improve personal security by generating random passwords 
that are stored in a central location.
Check out the Zcounts movie showing how to create a Zcount while signing up for a YouTube account.
To use Zcounts, you drag a bookmarklet, to your toolbar and whenever you go to a site that requires an email address, you create a new Zcount that include:
- An email alias to your main account
- Information about the Web site this alias is associated with such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc
- Optionally, a randomly generated password
At any time you can delete or suspend an alias giving you control over which the sites that are allowed to send you email. As an added benefit, you have a list of all the places where you signed up for an account. and the username you used.
With Zcounts no more
- What login name did I use for this web site?
- Did I already sign up for this?
- Which passwords of my 4 regular passwords did I use?
- Who has been giving away my email to third parties?
- And most important, how do I stop getting email from these people?
Other 0.15 Changes
New Features
ARGOS-1233 Highlight events in mini-calendar
ARGOS-1237 Import contacts
ARGOS-1779 Notes to folders
ARGOS-1799 Different icons for different filetypes
ARGOS-1866 Email handling of signups for different accounts
Improvements
ARGOS-1210 Improve contacts navigating
ARGOS-1058 Ability to select/deselect all contacts in the current view
ARGOS-1242 Show all contact details when it’s clicked
ARGOS-1476 Clicking on preview image should open a new window/tab with this image
ARGOS-1567 Photo field in contacts
ARGOS-1637 display loading icon while loading message
ARGOS-1642 Unify setting and profile
ARGOS-1689 Duplicate email controls
ARGOS-1730 include all recipients from original email on reply
ARGOS-1738 Improvements to Contacts UI
ARGOS-1774 Improve mail search
ARGOS-1790 Use SORTARRIVAL instead of SORTDATE
ARGOS-1803 Show size of files in HRF
ARGOS-1833 Search by several words
ARGOS-1846 open download attachment page in new window
ARGOS-1897 Do not show files in the left panel
ARGOS-1904 Actions that should happen after upload has finished
ARGOS-1918 put focus into “search” field when opening search window
ARGOS-1949 Mail interface optimizations
ARGOS-722 we need to be able to tell to server that certain email is or is not a spam
ARGOS-949 Sending email should finish faster
Bugs
ARGOS-1264 When folder structure changes – alert appears twice
ARGOS-1348 Tree node does not change its name after rename
ARGOS-1479 failed to edit message with doctype present
ARGOS-1493 Email look ugly if message body is empty
ARGOS-1539 Unread message in virtual folder does not becomes read
ARGOS-1549 Paste menu item should be disabled when no file has been copied
ARGOS-1775 Alerts for recurring events created during summer time are displayed with 1 hour delay during winter time
ARGOS-1801 Rename shows incorrect current name of the file
ARGOS-1810 Make login and signup verification using @DOMAIN context
ARGOS-1871 Size of the file is not shown
ARGOS-1876 when forwarding message – CC is copied from original message
ARGOS-1877 Mail sent is failed if “To” field is not filled even when “CC” field is filled
ARGOS-1917 search results does not refreshes when deleting message
ARGOS-1958 Single message is not deleted from virtual folder
ARGOS-1980 “from” email address is displayed wrongly
ARGOS-2013 Edited draft is not deleted after sent
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Posted on November 12th, 2008
dror
Last week we deployed version 0.14 of 6zap. The main feature that we introduced in this release is the new file module. You can upload your files and save them online within 6zap in different folders. There’s a familiar file explorer similar to the one on your desktop. In the next version of 6zap we’ll also provide ways for you to share files.
6zap File Module
We’ve also added and Agenda view to the calendar where you can see your events as a list. On the admin side we now provide a way for the administrator to create users. Our technical users will be happy to hear that we now concatenate all the javascript files reducing the number of http connections required to load the page. Our non-technical users should know that it’s just a fancy way to say things load faster 
.
All in all, there were 253 issues in this release. The following is the list of the most relevant ones.
- New Feature
- ARGOS-1232 – New Agenda/list view
- ARGOS-1273 – Dynamic check of user name availability
- ARGOS-1481 – Admin create new users
- ARGOS-1652 – New file manager module
- Improvementr
- ARGOS-1051 – when creating new event – put focus into “Subject” field
- ARGOS-688 – Replace second+ occurrence of “RE:
- ARGOS-1061 – Ability to delete group in Contacts
- ARGOS-1209 – Email search should be indexed
- ARGOS-1393 – UI improvements
- ARGOS-1445 – Restore after failed folder refresh
- ARGOS-1475 – Make preview image clickable
- ARGOS-1482 – Add autocomplete to group field when editing contact
- ARGOS-1511 – when replying on my mail – change assignee
- ARGOS-1529 – Download a file automatically
- ARGOS-1657 – Show url for sharing
- Task
- ARGOS-985 – minimize the sources
- ARGOS-1508 – Create Developers Manual for Contacts
- ARGOS-1524 – Quick installation guide for “files”
- ARGOS-1619 – Readme file for file explorer
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Bug
- ARGOS-553 – in plain-text messages convert URL into hyperlinks
- ARGOS-1002 – It is possible to create contact with all the empty fields
- ARGOS-1071 – new public.php for showing public calendars
- ARGOS-1106 – Merge all JS files into single file
- ARGOS-1159 – Server returns badly escaped utf chars
- ARGOS-1178 – Alarms do not work for recurring events
- ARGOS-1223 – Long search query causes broking layout
- ARGOS-1249 – Memory allocation error
- ARGOS-1269 – Exceptions from recurrence stopped to work
- ARGOS-1284 – User should not be able to delete not empty folder
- ARGOS-1329 – refreshState request goes twice per minute
- ARGOS-1331 – Current message does not hide on empty folder
- ARGOS-1352 – Useless “\n” symbols are added to the end of the message
- ARGOS-1357 – grid dependant operations cannot be performed in search results
- ARGOS-1378 – Long lines are not wrapped
- ARGOS-1385 – JS code is being added to message during spell check
- ARGOS-1413 – Search in box search in whole mail body
- ARGOS-1432 – Missing some recurring events in the day view
- ARGOS-1449 – Make server run not through the proxy
- ARGOS-1458 – clicking on rich text editor should focus it
- ARGOS-1499 – Message shouldn’t scroll left and right
- ARGOS-1522 – Password with length 1 can be used
- ARGOS-1525 – “markAsRead” should not be called for drafts and sent messages
- ARGOS-1598 – No thumbnails in IE
- ARGOS-1621 – Events before 1970
- ARGOS-1645 – Can’t create a recurring event prior to the year 2000
- ARGOS-1653 – DND Highlights events
- ARGOS-1675 – There is ability to move and edit read only events
- ARGOS-1676 – Public view shows time for all-day events
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Posted on October 29th, 2008
dror
This morning I found out the Zimbra is now offering their product in the cloud. Zapatec has been offering 6zap from day one in the cloud, so I was curious to see what Zimbra offers.
It turns out that Yahoo who owns Zimbra is launching its own cloud computing platform on top of which the product will be offered. It also seems that it’s going to be more of a hosted solution than real cloud computing. With 6zap you launch the AMI on Amazon. We don’t have access to that AMI, and unlike a standard hosted solution can’t touch or see your data.
Additionally, where 6zap is open to anyone, the Zimbra offering is only for academic institutions
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