We are pleased to announce that PhonePad Version 4.11 has been released and is available for immediate download.

There are some new features as well as some bug fixes. For complete details please refer to the announcement in the support forums.

This is a free upgrade for all licensed PhonePad users.

Unfortunately we were not able to implement all of the new features we had planned for this release due to limitations in the architecture.  These features will be included in PhonePad 5, which is currently under active development.

We are currently experiencing problems with our support systems.  Apparently one of the web hosting providers we use had a catastrophic failure over night, which has affected all of our support systems. 

Fortunately our main web site is hosted by a different web hosting provider and our automated ordering system is hosted by yet another, so these things aren’t affected.

You will not be able to download the latest version of PhonePad from our website so please use this link instead.

We apologize for any inconvenience but this is beyond our control.  We are working with the service provider to get this resolved as soon as possible.

For the first time in 11 years we are taking a two week break, from Saturday 10 May 2008 to Saturday 24 May 2008 (inclusive).

Orders will be processed as normal, however, during this period there will be limited support available.  We will still be responding to support requests but it may take us a little longer than normal.  Due to our location, Internet bandwidth will be restricted so we will be unable to provide any remote support or online chat support – only email support will be available.  We will also be unreachable by telephone.

Please check the Frequently Asked Questions and Knowledge Base in our support forums at www.cybercom-software.com/forums.  It’s possible that there may already be a solution or answer available. In any case, we will respond to this support request as soon as we can.

This will all return to normal from Sunday 25 May.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your understanding.

Cybercom Software Support

We have released a new version of MessageSender, the free add-on for PhonePad.  Version 4.10.0.4 has new configuration options to enable it to work with a wider range of mail servers.  You can download it now.  For more information on the new settings, please read this Knowledge Base article.

We had a little surprise today when we tried accessing our support systems and got the following message:

What the??  To give you a little background, we actually use 3 web servers, each hosted by different web hosting service providers.  Two of the servers are in the US and one is in the UK.  Our main website is on one of the US servers while we have various support systems, our ordering system, license server, etc. on the other two. 

Imagine our shock when we discovered that our account had been suspended on the other US server we use because of one of the following reasons: “Warez, Rude behaviour, Blackmailing, Harassment, Threatening, Offensive behaviour with other company’s employees, Other”.  Hmm, don’t remember doing any of those.  Being a software company we definitely don’t have anything to do with warez.  And I don’t believe we have committed any of the other alleged reasons.  At least not in regards to our customers. 🙂

Turns out the reason was “Other”. There was a technical problem with the commercial mailing software we use.  For some strange reason it caused a spike in CPU usage on the web server, which resulted in our account being automatically suspended by the system.  Apparently it’s all sorted out now.  It’s unlikely you were presented with this message too but, if you were, please accept our apologies.  We promise not to be naughty again.

We have just introduced live chat support to our website.  If you want to talk to sales or support staff live just click on the icon, which is visible on most pages, and you’ll be able to talk to someone in real time.

If live support is offline you can leave a message and we’ll respond as quickly as we can.  We’ve also recently implemented an issue management system for support requests we receive.  This allows us to track their progress and make sure that none fall through the cracks. 

We previously used email software and a separate support application, and it was getting difficult to manage.  The new system has integrated email management and maintains a complete history of communications, which makes things a lot easier.

The system automatically adds an “incident report” number to the subject of your email. It’s important to leave this number intact as the system uses this to identify your request and to maintain a history of it.

We’ve also recently completed a major upgrade to the software we use for the support forums, knowledge bases and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).

All of these support systems are part of our strategy to continually refine and improve the support we provide to you.

As it’s been a while since we have done a minor release I thought I’d let you know that Version 4.11 is currently in the works and we hope to release it early next year (2008). There will be quite a few new features so it will be worth the wait.

Watch this space. 🙂

We finally resolved all of the issues with moving ClientCentral to the new web hosting service. It is now back online and ready to go. The new link is http://www.cybercom-software.net/cgi-bin/clientcentral2.isa .

After several attempts we managed to restore the support forums.  Not sure what the problem was with the PHPBB software because is took 9 tries to get it to restore the data.  Everything seems to be working fine now though.  The forum address has changed to www.cybercom-software.com/forums.