Update on New Office & Development (We have moved!)

[Varun Shoor]

Hi,
Our new office is now complete after six months of hard work and planning. We moved in last week and everything is settling down nicely. Its been quite a while since an update was posted so I will be using this post as an oppurtunity to let all of you know where exactly we are heading to.

[Scroll below for photographs of our new office, Discussion Thread: http://forums.kayako.com/showthread.php?p=38187]

As many of you might be knowing we have had numerous delayed support issues in the past which were a result of lack of foresight and planning combined with an accelerated growth our company has had. We were not planning to move into a bigger facility till atleast next year but the level of urgency required a dedicated call center for Sales, Support, Billing and Resellers. Our earlier plan was to setup a basic office for 25 people which was cancelled mid way taking into consideration future growth, this delayed our move and setup by three full months. It was then decided that we proceed with a setup with provision for atleast 80 people with Support/Sales staff having two shifts catering to our clientele all around the world. As you will notice in the photographs below we now have dedicated sections along with different team leaders for each department.

Now that we have moved in and the hiring process in place, our immediate goal is to bring support responses to within 12 hours time frame and slowly improve upon that. During the training phase you will notice gradual implementation of Live Chat with 24/7 Live Chat for Sales in place within a period of two months. We will then be expanding upon this to include 24/7 Live Chat for Support and other departments. We will not be providing phone support or sales till this phase is complete to prevent any drop in quality of responses but will provide a number to our users for any emergency queries. To sum it up, the immediate effect will be in quality and time of responses which will later mitigate into a dedicated 30 minute SLA guarantee for our clients.

Apart from this, we are forming a team of four UNIX professionals to complete any installations or piping issues within the guaranteed time frame. These people will be working in two shifts to make sure we meet the guarantee. We have already hired two people in this regard who are undergoing training and will start taking over their responsibilities within the next two weeks.

Right from the start we will be instructing each employee to monitor forums on regular basis which will allow us to merge forums as part of our support plan. Access to forums will not be restricted in any way but you will soon be seeing responses by our staff to almost any issue you raise. Due to training of fresh people it will take us some time to make sure every post is replied to in due time but its part of our end goal.

That pretty much summed up all things except for future development and release of new products. Development on v3.1 had pretty much stalled in past 4 weeks due to the planned move and hiring of people for our pilot batch. You will notice resumption in this with a new v3.00.95 build released shortly with new features like Follow Up and around 60 bug fixes. Follow Up basically allows you to schedule certain set of actions to be executed later at any given date, you can create both recurring and static actions. These can be things like opening the ticket automatically after one week, adding a note to a staff and replying to a client every one month, the possibilities are endless.

We are all excited about the completion of the move which we have been promising for I think almost eight months now and I think so will be our clients. You can provide any feedback or ask questions regarding the above changes or our new office at the following thread which I will be personally monitoring for atleast two-three weeks: http://forums.kayako.com/showthread.php?p=38187

Additionally, We have just pushed out a major update to all of our Win32 applications and SWIFT making them all support native unicode with 100% compliance. Here are some screenshots of the LR application showing unicode text:

LiveResponse Winapp Main Window
Notice the Unicode Text in Chatter ID, Operator and Online/Offline Staff Tree





LiveResponse Staff Chat Window
Supports 100% UNICODE to-fro communication




LiveResponse Client Chat Window
Supports 100% UNICODE to-fro communication





This update is currently available only in the CVS build. There is now also a new SyncWorks build available with a complete working Configuration tree allowing you to specify exactly what kind of data you want synchronized. We have also resolved almost all pending issues with the SyncWorks <> Teamwork protocol.

Well, Below are photographs of our new office. We are still working out the kinks but so far its pretty much done with:


First up is our Reception, Apologies for the blurry photograph the area is heavily lighted up and we are all still amateur photographers


Moving forward towards the main offices and cubicles. Notice the freshly mopped floor and our RFID system.


Further moving forward you can notice the HR & Accountant Bays and the Developer and Unix Cubicles on the right side.


A View of our Conference Room


Moving into the Conference Room


View of the UNIX & Developer Cubicles from the Conference Room


View of Executive Office Workstation. You can partially see the HR bay in this photograph.


View of Executive Office Main Desk


Moving forward you can see our main Printer along with view of Conference Room and Executive Office. The fax wire had to be brought down temporarily from the ceiling.


View of UNIX & Developer Cubicles from the same position.



View of HR & Accounts.


Corridor towards the Support Hall (Right in front), Sales/Billing Hall (At Right) and Training Room (Left).



Our Training Room


Moving into the Sales/Billing Hall. This area will be staffed 24/7 along with a team leader for each row. You can partially see the Team Leader office in the background. Total seating for this area is of 20 people.


Same hall from another angle.


Team Leader Office.


View from the Team Leader's Office.


In the Support Hall. The entrance is towards the forward left of this photograph. You can see the team leader offices in this photograph, each TL is assigned a complete row to manage.


View of same hall from another angle.


Look towards the back fire escape doors.


Cubicles visible during entrance.

Misc. Items

Server Rack which will house our Cisco 2800 Router and Switches along with 1.2TB Backup and Asterisk Boxes.


Our 20kva Online UPS which can provide backup of upto 30 minutes for 60 machines. This coupled with 125kva genset makes sure that we never go down due to any electric supply disruptions.

Regards,

Varun Shoor

[Ryan Lederman]

After lengthy delays and several intermediate test builds, we are PROUD to announce that a new build, 3.00.95 is now available! This build contains many fixes, including:

WinApp-specific:

1. ALL languages are now supported in staff-to-client and staff-to-staff chats. This is accomplished through the use of UTF-8 encoding and HTML entity encoding.
2. Many bug fixes and improvements to the ViewShare system. Now contains an option for manual override of the server's IP address for those of you with a non-standard network setup.
3. SIP Phone add-on support is now part of the official build.
4. A better spell-checking mechanism has been integrated. Dictionaries for several languages are available.
5. Connection retry mechanism: Failed connections are retried up to 20 times before any error is displayed and the application is brought in to offline mode.
6. Push URL is fixed
7. "overtyping" bug in chat windows is fixed (ugly font in chat text box)
8. Tray icon can show the exact number of visitors up to 99.
9. Support for Internet Explorer proxy settings (will mimic IE settings)
10. Now uses version 10.20 of CodeJock's XTP
11. Displays version # and build type (ANSI/UNICODE) in the about dialog

InstaAlert-specific:

1. All languages are now supported through the use of UTF-8 encoding.
2. Connection retry mechanism: Failed connections are retried up to 20 times before any error is displayed and the application is brought in to offline mode.
3. Uses version 10.20 of CodeJock's XTP
4. Support for Internet Explorer proxy settings (will mimic IE settings)
5. Displays version # and build type (ANSI/UNICODE) in the about dialog

SyncWorks-specific:

1. Many, many bug fixes in the synchronization process
2. Outlook 2003 crash is fixed
3. Extended configuration is now enabled
4. All languages are now supported through the use of UTF-8 encoding.
5. Support for Internet Explorer proxy settings (will mimic IE settings)
6. Displays version # and build type (ANSI/UNICODE) in the about dialog

Fixes and changes apply to all products, so when you install this new package, the server software AND client add-ons (WinApp, InstaAlert, and SyncWorks) should be updated. It is not recommended to install only the server software or only the client add-ons, as this could cause incompatibility problems.