Today is the day we open up beta live. Up until now we had an old copy of the database where customers could log into staging and see how we were progressing with the new version of our software. We are excited to let all of our customers know that you can now enable beta on your account, by individual user. Not all users have to turn on beta to use it. We set it up so each individual user can turn it on or off at anytime. Here are the instructions for turning it on.
Go to Settings=>Company=>Manage Employees=>click on employee name.
Then edit employee and down near login access you will see a checkbox to try beta interface. Check that box and update your settings. That will prompt you to login under beta with your same username and password.
To go back to the current version just edit the employee and uncheck the box and update the settings. It’s that easy!
A few things to note here.
1. This is a beta release for all customers and is not final. There are still bugs we are working on from our testers, but it is far enough along that all new customers that sign up with us are on the new version. So enter at your own risk! :-)
2. One of the major improvements to the new version is the navigation. Take it for a spin and use the gear box on the far right to access all of your settings and hover over the tabs at the top to access your favorite pages you use everyday.
3. The next upgrade made was to our repeating jobs module. This still has a few tweaks to be done, but in general works really well. If you have a lot of repeating jobs in your company you might want to wait for our migration process to take effect which should be later in the month. We will migrate all of your repeating jobs over to the new way we do it, which is a lot easier to manage. If you move over now it won’t hurt anything but might require you to do some set up which we will help you with. Expect some videos later this week on how to do that.
4. We are using a new support program for beta. We would appreciate it if all tickets regarding the new program are logged on the support tab located on the right of the screen. This new support program is a community based program where we will encourage more users to help each other out. There are some users out there, that are power users, and would love to share their knowledge. Our current program fell short on getting that community going. We are very excited about this new feature for all of our users.
5. The new version is still called Kickserv beta. We want to make sure we complete some more development on the customer and job pages that we are very excited about. Once we have gotten plenty of feedback and a majority of the users have switched then we will turn off the current version and beta will become the only version. This could be a few months away, or sooner if all goes well.
6. We will soon be switching the domain name from mycompany.servicesidekick.com to mycompany.kickserv.com and will give everyone plenty of notice so you can make changes to your shortcuts and icons that automatically log you in. When we do switch there will be a period of time where both login addresses will work so don’t worry that one day you won’t be able to login. We will give you plenty of notice.
Well, that was a mouthful. I could go on and on about all of the improvements but will save that for the day when we move everyone over to the new version and have the new feature set finalized. We appreciate all of your patience while we worked on building this new version. I wish it could have been done faster, however as the old saying goes, it will always cost more and take longer.
Happy New Year!
-The Guys @ Kickserv
