Charles

We just wanted to thank BoxerPals (http://www.boxerpals.org) for sending us that lovely box of cookies and fudge. You know how to go straight to our staffs' heart. We occasionaly get thank you gifts from customers and it's always appreciated.

Everyone has actually been quite busy lately even with the lack of Blog and News announcements. We thought it time to post something here so you knew we had not all decided to take a month off or something. After any large release there is a lot of "clean up" work to do like starting on small updates to fix issues or going back to some neglected projects and finishing them up. Our staff has been working hard to do just that and are nearly done and ready to move on to more exciting things. As stated in a previous entry: we are working on the IPS Beyond enhancements and are quite excited about getting IPS Beyond upgraded. More on that in the coming weeks. Don't forget that we are hiring! See the job postings announcements for details. There is a lot of development resources being focused on the IPS Business product line. We will be posting the first official preview of this product line in the coming weeks. We are extremely excited about our approach to business services and are looking forward to releasing this entirely new product line. Thank you to everyone who has given feedback and noticed our recent customer service improvements. We have another round of customer service improvements that will be phased in soon so expect things to continue to improve. We will also be posting a survey next month for existing customers and hope you can give us ideas. That's all for this update - we will be posting again soon. Thanks!

Just a quick note on support response times for those not on a guaranteed SLA: We recognize and apologize for the recent slower than normal response times to support tickets. The release of IP.Board 2.2.0 is causing a huge increase in volume. The influx of new tickets is starting to calm down and things should be returning to normal soon. To speed resolution for your support tickets please be sure to include your login information in your original ticket. If you do not, the tech support team is forced to move on to another ticket which slows down the whole process. Thanks for your understanding! We're working on catching up now. As an example: from the date of this post, in the last 24 hours the tech support team has sent out 731 replies.

Now that IP.Board 2.2.0 is out and being well-received we are going to turn our focus to IPS Beyond. If you are not familiar with IPS Beyond already it is our official customer resource site. At IPS Beyond customers can enjoy an informal atmosphere in which they can receive customer-to-customer technical support, chat about the products, share tips and tricks, and more. There are also modifications available for download to extend the feature set of your boards. Many ask why they should use IPS Beyond when tickets are available and the short answer really is: it's up to you. You can certainly use our ticket system if you want the response times quoted under your license type or if you prefer your assistance made in private directly with our staff. IPS Beyond is great for people that want to take our products beyond (har har) what they would normally do or need help in areas not covered by our official support. Ok, definition done, now here are the upcoming plans: The web site will become... a web site, so not all the features are interlinked with the forumsComponents provided directly from IPS! Some free some low cost.Premade skins directly from IPS to start off your forum customizationsGreater recognition and rewards for those active members of our community who help others and provide modifcations/skins.Tighter integration between IPS Beyond and our company forums Work has already started on the revamp. We will keep you updated. There are lots of details we are still sorting out so give the IPS Beyond team time to get the pieces together... you should be quite pleased.

After literally years of paperwork and waiting on the government's United States Patent and Trademark Office to do its thing we have, at long last, a registered trademark. While our logo and name were always a trademark in the ™ sense they are now a registered trademark in the full on always fun

Already? Didn't we just release IP.Board 2.2.0? Yes and yes. Ah, the nature of product development. We knew we would have to do an IP.Board 2.2.1 release right after releasing 2.2.0 so it is no surprise. Although we tested IP.Board thoroughly before release there is never a way to know what will happen once a product is released out into the world. On the whole it's been very stable and we are quite pleased. Lots of odd little errors or issues specific to special server configurations. Some patches for specific conditions (like running on PHP 5.0.4) have already been added to our knowledge base. We are also going to add more clarification in 2.2.1 for frequently asked support questions that are not bugs but just confused areas. While 2.2.1 isn't exactly an emergency we will die if it isn't released sort of thing, we will probably release it sometime during the week of Dec 11 so those people with the "odd" issues can be sorted. Also, the technical support team would probably welcome some integrated help on areas that are confusing some users :) And speaking of support: the flood of requests with the release is starting to calm down so if you are waiting a bit longer than usual for ticket replies that should start to show improvement very soon.

We had several meetings over the last couple months on improving the upgrade system for IP.Board 2.2 and it certainly has improved. The system is generally safer and warns you if something doesn't go right. Not to mention IP.Board itself will scan your database and report problems in the admin area. Now that IP.Board 2.2 is released we are finding that although the upgrade routine works there is still some confusion. Particularly the manual upgrade routine. So... note that if you check the manual upgrade option when running the upgrade system, the upgrade system will tell you what SQL queries to run. It will not run those queries for you as you told it you wanted to do them manually :) Keith from the tech support team and Brandon from the development team will be getting together tomorrow and work on better explanations of the difference between the manual and automatic upgrade modes. The current plan is to implement the changes to the upgrade as a hot fix to 2.2.0 as the changes will just be instructions (not code changes) so no bugs could be introduced. We always ask you to report bugs you find in our software but feel free to report things that work but are just a little confusing in our feedback forums. Part of making good software is also making it friendly to manage :)

As most of the world now knows, we have released IP.Board 2.2.0 along with all its components (IP.Gallery, IP.Blog, IP.Downloads). The latest rounds of releases took a bit longer than the previous round as we took extra time in beta testing and being sure all of our proverbial avians were in an ordered queue. We think taking this extra time has paid off. In one day we did all this: Released IP.Board 2.2.0Released IP.Gallery 2.1.0Released IP.Blog 1.3.0Released IP.Converge 1.0.0 PB 1Launched our brand new web siteUpdated our IP.Nexus-powered client areaReleased the new IP.Board documentationManaged to keep our sanity during the processWe decided this time to release the products "silently" the night before the official release day so those people who frequent our site and forums would get a jump-start. Of course it took all of 30 seconds for everyone to notice it was out. And people wonder why we do not publish release dates :). So far probably our smoothest release especially considering all that happened in one day. Good work to all the IPS staff involved. It's our goal to keep this company blog up to date between official announcements so everyone knows what is going on. We will also publish sneak peaks of upcoming software and services. Thank you for your business and interest!