Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.

As YippieMove has grown a lot in the past few months, we’ve come to a point where simply sharing a mailbox among the Support Team just won’t cut it anymore. We needed retire the ‘shared mailbox’-approach for a more sophisticated and modern ticket management system.

After spending numerous hours researching various open source support solutions, we realized that none of them were really up to for the challenge. Most of them felt very outdated and cumbersome (like OTRS). A few of them looked promising, but lacked the maturity to use in production. We reached the conclusion that we could not use any free tool, so we started looking into the next best thing — A modern SaaS Help Desk.

It did not take very long until we realized that there was one solution that fitted our needs better than all the other options, namely Zendesk. After signing up for a free trial, we were completely sold. The modern interface, the ability to integrate it into YippieMove with a sub-domain (support.yippiemove.com) and ability to customize the look and feel really impressed us. What made us even more impressed was how easy it was to integrate it into our existing system. It took us less than 6 hours to switch from our old system to have a production ready help desk that even features Single Sign-On (thanks to Jon Gales Django hack). Quite frankly, Zendesk exceeded our expectations.

The only thing we could possibly complain about Zendesk is the pricing (it a bit steep) and the lack of SSL in the lower-tier plans.

Screenshots

Single Sign-on Admin Home
Single Sign-on with YippieMove
Administrator home
End-user Start
End-user start
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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.
Mar
12.

About three years ago, when we first installed our mailserver, we decided to give Postgrey a shot. It worked pretty well for about two years. It did pretty much what we needed it to do — block SPAM. Since everyone here uses either a Mac or a Linux setup, we didn’t have a big need for scanning incoming emails for virus. Well, the situation didn’t change much, but the amount of emails going through our system did. We’ve started to see more and more SPAM going through the graylisting as spammers become more sophisticated. However, over the past few months, we’ve received a few complaints from customers about emails that did not go through (only a few, but that is serious enough). Hence we needed to take action.

Since our system is pretty straight forward (Postfix + DBmail), our conclusion was that it was the graylisting that caused us trouble. We took a fresh look on the market and realized that SpamAssassin probably was the best way to go. Thanks to FreeBSD’s ports, we were able to replace Postgray with SpamAssassin in less than an hour.

This morning when I woke up, I took a look at the maillogs. SpamAssassin seems to be doing it’s job pretty well, as it caught a bunch of SPAM. Bye Bye Postgrey. Welcome SpamAssassin.

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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.
Mar
04.
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Comments
Category: Technology

Yesterday we experienced a bit of downtime. The blog was down between 3:30 AM to approximately 5:30 AM PST. The reason for this is a bit higher volume of traffic than normal, as we got featured on Slashdot (again). The server we run this blog on is certainly capable of handling the load, it was just a misconfiguration in Apache (MaxClients set too high). We did tune Apache in the past, but the MaxClient-value probably got overwritten when we upgraded till Apache 2.2 last month. Hence, when the Slashdot traffic started to drop in around 3:00 AM PST, the server started to swap heavily and eventually became almost entirely inaccessible.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience.

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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.

‘If Joomla! is Linux, then WordPress is Mac OS X. WordPress might offer only 90% of the features of Joomla!, but in most cases WordPress is both easier to use and faster to get up and running.’

Over the course of the last few years, I’ve been in charge of putting up a number of websites for various companies, often as favors for friends. In most cases, I’ve ended up using one out of two solutions: Joomla! and WordPress. While both of these projects have evolved greatly over the last few years, they are vastly different. Joomla! has always been intended as a ‘fit-all-your-possible-needs’-kind of CMS solution, while WordPress was developed as a blog with CMS capabilities. Recently WordPress has opened up to allow its users to set up a site with static-only material (with the option of a blog-page), without having to hack the code. Hence it’s one step closer to being a direct competitor to Joomla!.

Joomla!’s Control Panel
WordPress’ Dashboard

I will probably step on a few peoples feelings here, but I will argue that Joomla! is an example of a poorly managed open source project and that WordPress is a very successfully managed one. Certainly I don’t mean that Joomla! is a useless piece of junk, but that the lead developers have quite a bit to learn from WordPress. The main thing that Joomla! is vastly behind on is usability. While it is true that Joomla! 1.5 is a step in the right direction, it is still light years behind WordPress. Let me illustrate with two examples of common tasks.

Example 1: Create a blog-post with an image

Joomla!

  1. From the ‘Control Panel,’ click ‘Add New Article.’
  2. There are two image buttons. If you use the wrong one, you won’t be able to upload an image (as you will only browse the existing images). You must use the one below the text field.
  3. Select a ‘Title,’ the right ‘Section’, and then the right ‘Category.’
  4. Write the content and save.

WordPress

  1. Select QuickPress in the Dashboard.
  2. Click on the image icon and upload the image.
  3. Select title, write your content and press publish.
‘Add New Article’ in Joomla!
‘QuickPress’ in WordPress

Example 2: Create a static page accessible from the menu

Joomla!

  1. From the ‘Control Panel,’ click ‘Add New Article.’
  2. Select a ‘Title,’ the right ‘Section’, and then the right ‘Category.’
  3. Write the content and save it.
  4. From the top-menu, select ‘Menu’ and ‘Main Menu’ (assuming you want to add it to the main menu.)
  5. Click ‘New.’
  6. Select ‘Internal link,’ and ‘Articles,’ and then finally ‘Article Layout.’
  7. Fill in the title of the object as well as the parent item.
  8. In the column to the right, you now need to browse your list of articles and select the desired article.
  9. Press ‘Save.’

WordPress

  1. From the Dashboard, click ‘Pages.’
  2. Select ‘Add New.’
  3. Fill in the title and contents.
  4. Select the parent item (if other than root.)
  5. Click ‘Publish.’
‘Add New Article’ in Joomla!
‘Add New Page’ in WordPress

Let’s step back for a minute and imagine the following scenario: you’re in charge of putting up a website for a company. They might want to put up about 10 or so pages with various information. According to my experience this is a pretty common situation. You can do this with either Joomla! or WordPress – both are fully capable of delivering this. Assuming you’re going to buy a template to solve the design issue, it will probably take you about an hour with either of the software to get to the first draft (assuming you’ve been working with them in the past.) So far so good. This is where they start to differ. With WordPress you’re pretty much done by now. However, with Joomla!, you’ll probably have to spend another hour or two just trying to re-organize the different modules to fit the template you bought (in many cases, just to get the basics to work.) Next you will end up spending even more time trying to figure out how to re-organize the different menus. You need to link up a particular document to a particular menu-entry (as illustrated above.) If you want a blog-feed, you need to set up a dedicated section or category (I still don’t really know the difference between the two.) Moreover, you need to select the ‘style’ of blog you want.

‘New menu item’
in Joomla!
‘Modules’ in Joomla!

Let’s say you managed to figure all of that out and that you got the site ready. Now it’s time to hand over the site to the customer. There will obviously be some training involved, and here’s another crucial difference between Joomla! and WordPress. Training someone to learn WordPress takes (in my experience) less than 30 minutes, and they truly understand it. Training someone to use Joomla! takes at least an hour, and they still don’t really understand it.

Again, I’m not saying that Joomla! is useless, it’s that WordPress is a more intuitive piece of software. Let me throw an analogy out there that will probably help you better understand my point. If Joomla! is Linux, then WordPress is Mac OS X. WordPress might offer only 90% of the features of Joomla!, but in most cases WordPress is both easier to use and faster to get up and running. I use and love Linux, it just doesn’t have that elegant touch to Mac OS X does.

To Joomla!’s defense, there are at least two scenarios I can think of where Joomla! is a better fit than WordPress. The first one would be eCommerce. If you install VirtueMart on Joomla! you can be up running with an eCommerce site pretty quickly. However, the problem is that it does not feel like it is a part of Joomla!, but rather as a 3rd party module that works in Joomla! (which is pretty much what it is.) The second one would be a site where you need to have multiple levels of permissions (ie. an extranet). WordPress only offers three levels of permission (public, private, and password protected), while Joomla! is much more flexible.

‘Global Configuration’
in Joomla!
‘General Settings’
in WordPress

Joomla! is not doomed. It just has a long way to go when it comes to usability. WordPress has really been developed by the KISS-principle, while Joomla! appears to have been developed to solve every problem on Earth (by engineers, for engineers). Going back to the two problems I mentioned above, where Joomla! beats WordPress. I think it would actually be less of a challenge to add support for eCommerce and more permission levels to WordPress, than it would be to improve the usability in Joomla! to reach WordPress’ level.

Just as a side note, a quick line-count on the latest versions of both software reveals that Joomla 1.5.9 has 350,975 lines of codes, while WordPress 2.7.1 has a mere 159,682 (might not be completely accurate, but that’s what ‘wc -l’ said). Hence, even if WordPress only offers 70% of the features of Joomla!, which I am pretty sure it does, their code is written much more efficiently.

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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.

WireLoad is proud to today introduce YippieMove Complete, the latest addition to YippieMove, which adds the missing piece of the puzzle for many small and mid-size companies (SMB) that are considering switching email provider. YippieMove Complete is a package that includes everything needed for a smooth transition, including:

  • Unbiased technical consulting. What is really the best email solution/provider for your needs?
  • Creation of user accounts on the destination server according to your needs
  • Redirecting the email from your old server to the new
  • Transfer of your old emails from the old server to the new server

Since we launched YippieMove, we’ve been contacted by many SMBs that are planning to change email provider for various reasons. Whatever your reason for switching is, YippieMove Complete can help you. We will do all the work for you and let you focus on what’s important to you – your business.

What does email downtime cost you per hour? If you’re an SMB, it’s likely that it costs you thousands of dollars an hour in lost productivity. YippieMove Complete can make sure that the transition goes as smoothly as possible, and in most cases, without any email downtime at all.

YippieMove Complete is starting at only $499.95 with 10 transfers included. If you ened more transfer than that our normal rate applies (including volume discount).

Requirements

The requirements are simple; we need access to your old email server and your DNS records. If you don’t know anything about this, our sales team can provide you with further details. We can even contact your provider directly as a last resort. The second requirement is related to the transfer of the old emails. In order for us to successfully transfer your old emails, the old email server needs to support IMAP.

More info

For more information about YippieMove Complete, visit the product page.

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