How often do you find yourself typing a response to a customer or affiliate and thinking, “Boy, how many times will I have to explain this?”
Email Center Pro lets you save a response as an email Template, so you can re-use it the next time the same question comes up. It’s more convenient, and because templates are accessible to all users, it helps you make sure everyone is answering the same question in pretty much the same way.
- Click the Template tab, then New template to create a template from scratch
- OR, after typing a reply, click the down arrow next to Send and choose Send and Save as Template to create a template based on your reply
Tags: ecp update
Posted on November 18th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Account owners can now adjust the spam tolerance for the entire account to automatically send more or fewer messages straight to the Spam folder of the relevant mailbox.
- Find the login links at the top of the screen (Logged in as…)
- Click the Account link
- From the Account Settings dialog, click the Account (Billing) tab
- Under Spam Score, use the arrows to adjust your spam tolerance up or down. A higher number lets more mail into the Inbox; a lower number delivers more mail straight to the Spam folder.
- Click Save (top right)
- Close the Account Settings dialog
Tags: ecp update
Posted on November 13th, 2008 | No Comments »
On Thursday, your Email Center Pro account got a whole lot more useful.
The Dashboard can now be customized with a variety of fun and useful analytic widgets. Go ahead, click on any widget (that’s a technical term) like “My Mail” and drag it to a new location on the Dashboard.
You’ll see an option to “Add More Widgets” at the top left of the Dashboard, giving you access to a bunch of additional analytics to help manage your email process. Widgets available vary by account level.
Here are a couple examples of what you’ll find in the new feature pack for Email Center Pro:
Mailbox Breakdown
Make sure no one user is being overloaded with email assignments. This pie chart shows the breakdown of unassigned and assigned messages (by user) for a given mailbox. You can customize this by mailbox, or choose “Any Mailbox” to see assignments across all Inboxes.
Mailbox Response Time
See a running average of your email response time. Customize this histogram and detailed table by user, mailbox, and date range. This is an essential management tool.
We’ll be releasing more feature packs over the next several weeks, so stay tuned!
Tags: ecp update
Posted on October 31st, 2008 | No Comments »
From the Dashboard view, the Recent Actions area on the right side of the screen shows you the latest log-ins, notes, replies, and assignments. Click the links in this area to jump to the relevant conversations and immediately get up to speed.
For more detailed information on this and the many other features in Email Center Pro, check out the help file.
Teri A. Epperly
Documentation Manager
Tags: ecp update, Email Center Pro, Tips and Tricks
Posted on October 20th, 2008 | No Comments »
With our recent launch of Email Center Pro 2.0, we’ll be posting “Tips” and “How do I?” instructions here to individually highlight what’s changed and what’s been added in. Here’s our first Tip. Stay tuned for more to come…
Can’t remember where that important email was? No problem. Email Center Pro 2.0 has more flexible and specific search criteria to help you find any conversation, every time.
- From the Dashboard tab, find the Saved Searches area on the right.
- Click the New search link.
- Use the drop-down menus in the Search tab to choose search criteria like “Body contains” for full-text searching, “Action date is newer than 3 days,” or even “Attachment name ends with…”
- Click Add Additional Criteria to further narrow the search results
- Click on a conversation from the list to open it.
You can also use the fields at the top of the Search tab to Name and Save your search for future reference, and to Share it with other users.
You can see an example of Saved Search in the Email Center Pro Feature Tour.
Tags: ecp update, Email Center Pro, Tips and Tricks
Posted on October 16th, 2008 | No Comments »
“We can make your email better.”
No, really.
I can just picture the reader rolling her eyes as she immediately hits delete. It is incredibly hard to write an email intended to sell a product and not have it read like spam (of course maybe an email selling something is, by definition spam, but I’d like to think not).
What if you could make people’s work easier, but you needed five minutes of their time to do it? The answer, it seems, is that you lose. Logitech did a study that found that users typically have six applications open on their computer at any given time, and generally will only stick in one window for 50 seconds. Not that this should be surprising to any of us. As I write this I have more than the average number of applications open and I’m beginning to think my four-year-old nephew has a better attention span than I as I flit between them. Actually, I’m lucky if you’re even still reading this.
Here’s the rub. My job this summer was to try and sell Email Center Pro, which is (not that I’m biased) a great product. Seriously, it solves a lot of small business email woes (again I picture the rolling of the eyes). The problem is I couldn’t explain it well to anyone in less than fifty seconds. Does that make the product unsellable? Can we only sell products that fit our short attention span culture? I’d like to think not, but it certainly gave me lots of trouble. Hard enough trying to sell a product by catchphrase, but this one doesn’t reduce well to a simple slogan.
Are there other products out there that could solve some of our problems, and we just can’t be bothered to take the five minutes to hear about them?
If you know of any, please don’t hesitate to share. But only if I can read about them in fifty seconds.
Megan Berry
Palo Alto Software Intern
Tags: ecp update, Email Center Pro
Posted on September 12th, 2008 | 3 Comments »
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 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 on June 4th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
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 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 on April 18th, 2008 | No Comments »
