At IPS not only do we create market leading products, we also use them heavily ourselves. In doing so we often identify problems and needs in the software very early on. Two of the minor changes we've introduced with Nexus 1.5.8 are a direct result of management and support staff feedback during their use of the product internally.
Separating Outgoing Email Addresses
In the next release of IP.Nexus we've introduced the ability to set up separate outgoing email addresses for billing and support related notifications. these in turn are also separate from the default suite outgoing address. What this means in practice is that you can set up your community with a "noreply@" address where replies are not desirable and you want to avoid having to deal with bounced emails. Your billing notifications could be set up from "billing@" and ticket notifications from "support@". Replies can then be received via email and directed to the appropriate departments automatically.
Account Credit Increase Item
Businesses often have a primary contact and a separate billing contact. For accounting purposes, it is easier for them to add 12 months worth of account credit to the main account. Currently, in order to do this an invoice needs to be generated for a miscellaneous charge. The alternate contact has to then log in and pay this invoice then notify us that they've made payment. Finally, we have to look up the invoice and then manually add the credit to the account.
In IP.Nexus 1.5.8 we have added a new invoice item type in the ACP.
When an invoice containing this item type is paid, the customer's account credit will be automatically increased without further intervention from a staff member.
These types of real world usage scenarios and feedback are vital when developing all of the products in the IPS Suite. Your feedback as well as our internal usage help us to build products based on what our customers actually require rather than what an isolated group of developers may think they require.
Do you have suggestions for any other other workflow improvements such as these? However small or seemingly trivial you think they may be we are always interested in hearing ways in which we can make these tasks that little bit easier.