Frank Haywood

On Tuesday 18th March, it’s my intention to pre-launch my help desk software Ticket Desk Pro.

There have been various changes to it made along the way.  I’ve been using it to handle support this last three weeks, and it’s now at a point where it can be released.

David (the developer) has been working on it for 2+ years on and off, and has recently added all the new features I’ve requested – he’s been working on the new bits since November 2007.  After the first release, there will be other releases every so often as we add requested features.

But right now, it’s really nice.

In fact it’s better than nice, it’s excellent.

The features are:-

• Multiple departments and multiple users.
• Multiple departments (CTRL-click selectable) per user.
• Multiple users per department.
• Moderators, Super Moderators and Administrators.
• Allowed attachments which you can specify e.g. .jpg|.gif|.doc|.txt.
• Auto zip attachments.
• Open tickets which can be filtered in real time.
• Filters for department, priority and awaiting response by.
• Search tickets by key word, department, priority, status and date.
• Multiple standard responses which can be selected, added and edited.
• Merge similar tickets.
• Frequently Asked Questions by department.
• System tools function to purge old tickets and attachments.
• Ability to contact other help desk staff by email.
• Ban filters by email address, IP address and key words plus wild card support.
• Email notifications to both customers and support staff.
• Choice of PHP mail or SMTP to send emails.
• Signatures for staff replies to customers.
• Captcha codes.
• Auto close tickets.
• Time offset where the server is not in your time zone.
• Multiple languages via language files (only English initially).
• Last but not least, LIVE SUPPORT (operator – customer chat) with optional captcha codes.

I’ll be launching it as a nickel sale because I want as many people to start using it as possible in as short a time as possible.  And most importantly, I’ll be looking for affiliates.

The nickel sale will start at $5, increase by 5 cents with each sale, run for a week or two and then be removed and the real site will go live.

After the nickel sale is over, the initial price will be $47 and it will be promoted via ClickBank with a restricted free version on the front end, and the purchase of the full script offered to those that take the free version.  After a month the price will go up to $97, which reflects its true worth.

When we set it up through ClickBank, the affiliate commission will be 50%.

Like all scripts you can expect to be released by me, this is premium quality software.

So you’ll be getting 5 star software for under ten dollars if you’re quick.

THIS IS A PRE-LAUNCH.  Maybe not everything in the sales process will be perfect, but it will be good enough.  The software is complete and fully functioning.

When the nickel sale starts, the first people to be notified will be those that bought resale rights to SmartDD LITE.  They’ll get an hours start.

The next group that will be notified will be subscribers to this blog.  You can subscribe on the home page at the top right by entering your name and email address.  Blog subscribers will get 3 hours start on everyone else.

Finally, 4 hours from launch I’ll send out an email to my remaining lists.

So I’m rewarding buyers first, then subscribers to this blog, then everyone else gets told afterwards.

The start time will be at some point on Tuesday 18th March.  I can’t give you an exact time yet due to circumstances beyond my control, but Tuesday will definitely be the pre-launch day.

I’ll be doing the pre-launch using the newly updated nickel script, which is also developed by David.

In fact, he’s just making some changes now as I type this, to finish an admin panel to search orders, re-send links and ban customers who you don’t want to deal with, such as serial refunders.

More on that software when we’ve battle tested it next week, but you can be sure we’ll be releasing that too, likely in a nickel sale, and likely within a month.

Again, it’s premium quality 5 star software.

-Frank Haywood

It’s been a week now since I pre-launched SmartDD LITE with resale rights, and it’s been a bit of a nightmare.

Don’t get me wrong, the nickel script was fine and actually did more than I expected it to considering it was a first prototype.  There were a couple of tiddly bugs in it, but they were fixed almost immediately by David.

The nightmare was because of all the support issues.

(BTW – if you have a problem, raise a ticket at:-

http://www.Vendiva.com/support/)

The support tickets pretty much broke down into two groups.

#1 – I haven’t had my download email.
#2 – The zip file I’ve downloaded is password protected.

NEITHER of these were caused by the nickel script.

#1 Was because of email providers routinely blocking business email, I’ve mentioned this before.

http://www.frankhaywood.com/internet-business-taken-seriously/
http://www.frankhaywood.com/does-your-email-work/

#2 Was a doozy.

To make things easier (hah!) my SmartDD developer, Paul, wrote a bit of code to zip up the SmartDD Lite package on the server and automatically insert your affiliate ID into it.

He used standard code to do this, nothing out of the ordinary.  We tested and tested it with and without an affiliate ID, and it worked perfectly for us.

But for some people, they couldn’t read the file because according to Windows it was password protected.  This completely puzzled us, as it most definitely isn’t.

In the end one of our customers said they’d been trying the built in Windows utility, and when he installed an unzip program instead, it all started working as it should.

Aha!

It turns out Windows was the culprit.  It can’t read all zip types.

So we had a fix.  Except…

Some people still had the same problem but finally got it to work by reading all the files out of the zip and then re-creating it themselves again.  Even so, one person just couldn’t get it to read and opted for a refund.

This has been really frustrating for both sides, and I’m now looking at an alternative (but messy) method of allowing you to embed your affiliate ID.

Anyway…

Back to the nickel script.

I gave David some feedback and said it could do with this, and a bit of that, and some method of doing this other thing.

So I got an email this morning saying he’d not only implemented my suggestions, but also added in some other stuff too.

I already know how good this script is, it’s amazingly easy to use.

It uses flat text files to gather all the order data, has a web page templating system with placeholders, and is a complete doddle to set up.  Just create your web page, add your placeholders, stick it in a secret templates directory, edit the config file, and you’re done.

It really is that easy.

What David has now done is add a whole pile of functionality into the back end for handling orders and customers.

Incredible.  I can’t wait to see it, because yes, he hasn’t sent me a copy yet because he’s still working on it.

I’m just really excited at the prospect of seeing it all in action.

See, I know how good the admin panel on our new Ticket Desk Pro (TDP) software is, and if David has applied the same attention to detail to the Nickel Script, I’m talking about a VERY high quality piece of software, a really useful tool in anyone’s arsenal.

Speaking of TDP, I’ll have an announcement to make in the next couple of days, so watch this space.

One last thing.  The sales page for SmartDD Lite has come back from the designer, so I’ll be putting the sales copy in there ASAP, and updating everyone who bought a copy.

Watch out for that too.

-Frank Haywood