Custom Messaging System

Once the killer internet application, email is becoming less and less useful for business messaging purposes. It is time consuming, not secure, not integrated with your-company.com, it is not reliable and it is clogged with SPAM, pornography and security threats that can shut down a business. Also, mail servers are under attack by hackers and are often down. Unfortunately email communication is still needed for some things so you must find a way to live with it. It is definitely not practical to use email for internal your-company.com communication - a custom messaging system is much better. Thus there are two roads to be traveled: Make email manageable, safe and quick and deploy a custom private messaging system for internal use.

Making Email Manageable

Security: Modern email clients like Microsoft Outlook have tons of features. Unfortunately that means tons of ways for hackers and viruses to exploit. Do you honestly want a virus to infect your-company.com office computers and turn them into zombies that spew out pornographic messages to the internet? Functionality is actually the enemy of security. Webmail is slow. What is one to do? The answer is of course FAST WEBMAIL! What is webmail? It is a webpage that knows how to login to an email messaging server with a user name and password. It provides tools for you to control that server (read, write, delete messages).

Digitalfire can write you a custom webmail system (like hotmail) that can delete a thousand messages in seconds! It can display a hundred subject lines on one video screen full. It has only the features you need and no more to slow things down or provide security holes (for example, if it cannot download a file then obviously employees are not going to be able to get a virus via a message).

Integration and capability: I can integrate a custom web email client into the administration and public sections of your-company.com. I can make it display emails received from many POP or IMAP servers on one page. For example, one click can open a complete history from a people database for the person who has emailed. Another could generate a serial number message. Another could subscribe them to a newsletter, send them to a payment page, send an automatic email telling them how to login, etc. There are many ways to integrate a custom messaging system with the people, sales, testimonial, downloads, newsletter, etc. databases.

Speed: If email is stealing a lot of time from employees you need to do something. A better way of handling it can pay for itself in days. The secret is to have an ISP account that is fast or your own server. There is no reason why the first hundred emails should not display within a couple of seconds. Which checkboxes in front of each subject you can quickly mark the ones to be deleted. A delete button can remove them all and redisplay in a couple of seconds. Since it is webmail you can check for email from any computer anywhere and send email and FAXes from any internet connected computer.

Security: Email brings in the vast majority of threats to the computers of your visitors and of your server and website. Uneducated employees and fancy email programs are a true threat to your business and deserve a lot of careful consideration. The best way to deal with this is a custom written messaging application that is constantly evolving. Various levels of password access and degrees of integration into the rest of your-company.com can be written in.

Visit-triggered Messages: Sites like Ebay, Amazon, the banks, etc. no longer send out emails related to any security or registration issue because there is so much fraud and spoofing going on (e.g. criminals create shadow websites and send out messages designed to fool people into going to those shadow websites and logging in and thereby revealing their login information). Ebay or your bank waits till you visit and then catches you up on all messages they need to deliver and actions you need to take with regard to your account.

SPAM: SPAM filters are getting more and more picky about what they will allow through. People often create subjects for their emails that look suspicious to the filters and sending addresses are unfairly blacklisted and so the email servers block the message. It can actually be better not to filter and have a human use custom software tools to eliminate the email SPAM.

A Custom Messaging System

What exactly is this? Traditional email depends on servers (e.g. POP, IMAP) that store messages and release them to configured accounts by password. Email programs like Outlook and Eudora know how to talk to and negotiate with these email servers. It is all completely open, any email address can send a message to any other and millions of emails are flying around on the internet at any given time. A custom private messaging system is completely different. It is a program that runs on a server and presents a login page with tools to send and receive messages. Only visitors and company workers with login accounts can send and read messages. It is completely self contained and messages are stored on the server, no message ever leaves to travel around the internet.

Consider some of the advantages of this type of custom approach.

Complete control: The web pages that people use to interact with the system and its capabilities and integration with other parts of your-business.com are completely under your control.

Guaranteed delivery and security: If you write a message to an associate it will not get lost in a river of SPAM. It SPAM free.

Audit Trail: There is no end to the ways in which you can track the history of emails coming and going.

Speed: Since it is self contained it will be much quicker. If you choose to use an inhouse server the user interface can be almost instant.

Links to Management Pages: The messaging control site that your employees use can provide one-click links to take them to invoices, quotes, purchase orders, account information etc. of someone whose message they are reading. It can give them one-click ability to add an account. This can result in huge time savings and grow your customer list much faster.

The custom written login page is an ideal place to maintain a messaging system for your group.

Since everyone has to login page to the administration part of your-website.com anyway then they are guaranteed to see a message. Here is what a custom login page might look like. When you click on a message it displays in the box below and you can key in a response above and route it back to the sender or to anyone else on the popup recipient list.

A Hybrid Unified Messaging System

The above can also send the subject lines with links to a remote webpage that passes a valid user and password. Thus a dashboard or administration page could show email from multiple POP/IMAP servers as well as messages from a private messaging system. It is a unified approach.

Custom Contact Page

Your-website.com should have a "Contact Page" where people can send you a message. As noted, this should NOT USE email, it should be internal to the website, storing the messages in a database and presenting them on an administration or control page. When you respond, your messages to them will of course be sent as email. This guarantees that you get the message and it eliminates SPAM.

Summary

It is hard to imagine anything more important for an administration website than to enable communication and messaging between participants. Email is a poor answer for this and the idea of having employees login to hotmail to get company message is really crazy. Custom messaging applications are surprisingly easy to write and deploy. More than any other kind of application you want something that is exactly what you need, fast and uncomplicated, woven into your entire dreamsite. Obviously this it is not something you can buy off-the-shelf, it needs to be custom written to evolve with the rest of your-company.com.

Only custom-written web components can go down any road you choose!

Suite 407, 1595 Southview Drive SE, Medicine Hat, AB T1B 0A1
Answering Machine: (406) 662-0136, FAX: (866) 223-7132