We are pleased to announce the release of PhonePad Version 5.60.0.

New Firewall Rules Application

When doing remote support for some clients and trial users, we found that a few of them were experiencing problems connecting to their PhonePad Server.

In a lot of these cases it was due to the connections being blocked by a firewall.  Even though firewall rules are created when PhonePad is installed, PhonePad was still being blocked.

Most of the time these connections issues were resolved by reapplying the firewall rules for PhonePad.

This release includes a new FirewallRules application that allows you to easily reapply the firewall rules yourself on your Server and workstations.

Changes in This Release

• NEW – FirewallRules application makes it easy for you to reapply firewall rules when something is blocking connections to the PhonePad Server.
• ADDED – MessageSender Settings can now be accessed from within PhonePad.
• ADDED – PhonePad Server automatically corrects issues with the configuration file which can happen after a server update fails to complete due to anti-virus software.
• IMPROVED – ControlCenter improvements.
• FIXED – Follow Ups for Outgoing messages not appearing when selecting a message.
• FIXED – Follow Ups for Outgoing messages have a weird selection colour when they don’t have focus.
• FIXED – In some some situations, when registering a new CloudMail account the correct information was not being passed to the CloudMail Server. This only affected a small number of users.
• Minor fixes and improvements.

Installation Information

Please note: Server Updates must be installed on your Server or Host PC, not your workstation (unless your workstation is also the Host PC) – they cannot be installed directly on your workstations.  Make sure all users are logged out of PhonePad as the PhonePad Server will be stopped during the update and then restarted once it has completed.  Workstations will be automatically updated when PhonePad 5 Workstation is started on each workstation. Important: When downloading and installing an update from your My PhonePad account, make sure it’s actually the update and not the server setup program.

How Updates Work

You do not need to install every update between this one and the last update you installed.  PhonePad uses a smart update system that compares your current PhonePad system with what’s in the update, and then works out what changes are required, then makes those changes.

Updates and Anti-Virus Software

Depending on the anti-virus software you use, when you install a Server Update your AV software may class the updated software as a different program due to the change in binary signature.  If you experience speed or freezing issues after an update, you may need to reconfigure your AV software to stop real-time scanning of PhonePad.  This may need to be done on the both your Server or Host PC, and your workstations.

Downloading the Update

You can download the update from your My PhonePad account or by selecting Server Updates from the System Admin menu and clicking Check for Update (you will need to log in as an administrator). If you are a trial user you can also download the update by selecting Server Updates from the System Admin menu and clicking Check for Update (you will need to log in as an administrator). Please contact Support if you have any problems or questions.

Installing Updates

You will need to have a current Update Plan to install this update.  If your Update Plan has expired, you will need to renew it before you can install this update.5.58.0

We are pleased to announce the release of PhonePad Version 5.59.0.

Changes in This Release

• ADDED – PhonePad Server now handles multiple IP Addresses.
• ADDED – PhonePad Workstation now handles multiple IP Addresses from Server and cycles through them, looking for a connection.
• IMPROVED – Control Center now handles multiple IP Addresses.
• UPDATED – Control Center: The Scan IP has been removed because this is now done automatically.
• FIXED – Control Center: Error when retrieving server sessions.
• FIXED – When marking a message for Follow Up, the wrong icon (Completed) was being displayed (until the Inbox was refreshed).
• FIXED – Automatic reconnection when the connection to the server was lost was not working.
• FIXED – Server Access Key was not updating IP Address.
• FIXED – Log Viewer was not reading trace files.
• Minor fixes and improvements.

Installation Information

Please note: Server Updates must be installed on your Server or Host PC, not your workstation (unless your workstation is also the Host PC) – they cannot be installed directly on your workstations.  Make sure all users are logged out of PhonePad as the PhonePad Server will be stopped during the update and then restarted once it has completed.  Workstations will be automatically updated when PhonePad 5 Workstation is started on each workstation. Important: When downloading and installing an update from your My PhonePad account, make sure it’s actually the update and not the server setup program.

How Updates Work

You do not need to install every update between this one and the last update you installed.  PhonePad uses a smart update system that compares your current PhonePad system with what’s in the update, and then works out what changes are required, then makes those changes.

Updates and Anti-Virus Software

Depending on the anti-virus software you use, when you install a Server Update your AV software may class the updated software as a different program due to the change in binary signature.  If you experience speed or freezing issues after an update, you may need to reconfigure your AV software to stop real-time scanning of PhonePad.  This may need to be done on the both your Server or Host PC, and your workstations.

Downloading the Update

You can download the update from your My PhonePad account or by selecting Server Updates from the System Admin menu and clicking Check for Update (you will need to log in as an administrator). If you are a trial user you can also download the update by selecting Server Updates from the System Admin menu and clicking Check for Update (you will need to log in as an administrator). Please contact Support if you have any problems or questions.

Installing Updates

You will need to have a current Update Plan to install this update.  If your Update Plan has expired, you will need to renew it before you can install this update.5.58.0

Yep.  Looks like we were a bit too optimistic about our Internet being stable.  After everything looked like it was working the way it was supposed to, we had more connection issues yesterday and today.

At the risk of jinxing ourselves, our Internet is mostly working.  We do have the occasional dropout but most of the time it seems to be working okay.

We are working through the support requests that were received by our online helpdesk system while we weren’t able to connect to it.  If you’ve been waiting for a reply then please know that we will get to you as fast as we can.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

If you haven’t had a reply to your support requests from us over the last 3 or 4 days it’s because we had no Internet.

We have had issues with the Internet since the end of last week.  Sometimes we could get connections but most of the time we couldn’t – well, we could but they wouldn’t go anywhere due to DNS problems with our ISP (a couple of days ago there was a well publicized national outage).

Over the last couple of days we have been unable to get a stable connection – we had frequent drop outs (eg. every few seconds).  This made it impossible to do anything, including uploading a new release.  This was very frustrating as I’m sure you can imagine.

Things seem stable as of right now so hopefully we’re back in business.

We are pleased to announce the release of PhonePad Version 5.58.0.

Changes in This Release

• ADDED – Auto-Refresh button to MessageSender Queue in Control Center.
• ADDED – Date column added to MessageSender Queue in PhonePad and Control Center.
• ADDED – SQL Performance Monitoring has been added to PhonePad for use by administrators.
• FIXED – “ERROR E127: spGetGroupFoldersForUser: Field ‘FolderTypeID’ not found” and “ERROR E828: TdmMain: spGetGroupFoldersForUser: Field ‘FolderTypeID’ not found”.
• FIXED – Some contact files would not import.
• Minor fixes and improvements.

Installation Information

Please note: Server Updates must be installed on your Server or Host PC, not your workstation (unless your workstation is also the Host PC) – they cannot be installed directly on your workstations.  Make sure all users are logged out of PhonePad as the PhonePad Server will be stopped during the update and then restarted once it has completed.  Workstations will be automatically updated when PhonePad 5 Workstation is started on each workstation. Important: When downloading and installing an update from your My PhonePad account, make sure it’s actually the update and not the server setup program.

How Updates Work

You do not need to install every update between this one and the last update you installed.  PhonePad uses a smart update system that compares your current PhonePad system with what’s in the update, and then works out what changes are required, then makes those changes.

Updates and Anti-Virus Software

Depending on the anti-virus software you use, when you install a Server Update your AV software may class the updated software as a different program due to the change in binary signature.  If you experience speed or freezing issues after an update, you may need to reconfigure your AV software to stop real-time scanning of PhonePad.  This may need to be done on the both your Server or Host PC, and your workstations.

Downloading the Update

You can download the update from your My PhonePad account or by selecting Server Updates from the System Admin menu and clicking Check for Update (you will need to log in as an administrator). If you are a trial user you can also download the update by selecting Server Updates from the System Admin menu and clicking Check for Update (you will need to log in as an administrator). Please contact Support if you have any problems or questions.

Installing Updates

You will need to have a current Update Plan to install this update.  If your Update Plan has expired, you will need to renew it before you can install this update.5.58.0

We get asked these questions a lot: “Do you have a calendar program?” and “Will you be building a calendar”.

Ex-Phoneslips customers, and soon-to-be ex-Phoneslips customers, in particular ask these questions a lot.

The answers are “No” and “Yes”.

Here’s a sneak peak of an appointment calendar we are building for PhonePad as an add-on application (much the same as MessageSender is an add-on).

The new program, cleverly named Appointment Calendar 🙂 , will tightly integrate with PhonePad and the PhonePad database, avoiding unnecessary repetition of data and effort.  This will also result in some really cool features that only an integrated system can provide.

A couple of things to bear in mind.  The main user interface shown in the screenshot may change as development progresses.  In fact, this is the 3rd or 4th user interface we have made, scrapping all of the ones before it.  It’s possible that the final version may look completely different.

The other thing is we don’t have a definite time frame for release.  You wouldn’t believe how complex it is to develop a good calendar system.  Lots of time and effort, and a tremendous amount of head banging and hair pulling is involved.

It’s one of those things you think to yourself “why on Earth did I ever start this project?”. 🙂  But never fear, we’re committed to getting this done. There’s no backing out now.

Stay tuned for further updates.

If you tried to access our website over the last couple of hours and your browser reported that our website was not secure, it was because we had some issues with updating our SSL certificate.

The SSL certificate has now been updated so everything should be back to normal, but please let us know if you experience any issues.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

We are pleased to announce the release of PhonePad Version 5.57.1.

This is an important update for some clients.  The issue fixed in this release doesn’t affect everyone as it only occurs in certain situations.  If you are getting this error message when starting PhonePad then please install this update.

Changes in This Release

• FIXED – When searching for a PhonePad Server, in some situations PhonePad incorrectly reported that the Auto-Discovery port was blocked.
• Minor fixes and improvements.

Installation Information

Please note: Server Updates must be installed on your Server or Host PC, not your workstation (unless your workstation is also the Host PC) – they cannot be installed directly on your workstations.  Make sure all users are logged out of PhonePad as the PhonePad Server will be stopped during the update and then restarted once it has completed.  Workstations will be automatically updated when PhonePad 5 Workstation is started on each workstation. Important: When downloading and installing an update from your My PhonePad account, make sure it’s actually the update and not the server setup program.

How Updates Work

You do not need to install every update between this one and the last update you installed.  PhonePad uses a smart update system that compares your current PhonePad system with what’s in the update, and then works out what changes are required, then makes those changes.

Updates and Anti-Virus Software

Depending on the anti-virus software you use, when you install a Server Update your AV software may class the updated software as a different program due to the change in binary signature.  If you experience speed or freezing issues after an update, you may need to reconfigure your AV software to stop real-time scanning of PhonePad.  This may need to be done on the both your Server or Host PC, and your workstations.

Downloading the Update

You can download the update from your My PhonePad account or by selecting Server Updates from the System Admin menu and clicking Check for Update (you will need to log in as an administrator). If you are a trial user you can also download the update by selecting Server Updates from the System Admin menu and clicking Check for Update (you will need to log in as an administrator). Please contact Support if you have any problems or questions.

Here’s some good news!

After posting this post a few days ago about getting your Update Plan extended by 2 years for free, we have had many requests asking if we could provide a little more time.  Many businesses are only just getting back on their feet as COVID-19 restrictions are gradually lifted, and they need time to get organized.

Being the really nice people that we are (patting selves on our backs), we have changed the requirement to get the free 2 years.  Instead of needing to have a current Update Plan on June 15, 2020, we have changed it to be between June 15 and June 30.

So, if your Update Plan is current between June 15 and June 30 (2020), we will extend your Update Plan for another 2 years.

That means, if your Update Plan has already expired, or will expire between June 15 and June 30, then you will need to renew your Update Plan by June 30 to get the extra 2 years.

At midnight on June 30 (or shortly afterwards), we will automatically extend all current Update Plans by 2 years at absolutely no cost to you!

This is a one-time offer so now is the time to act.

Of course, if you have just purchased PhonePad 5, purchased it less than 12 months ago, or will purchase it by June 30, then you will have a current Update Plan and so will get the extra 2 years for free too.