For some time, users asked us if we could create a Voice & Video Conferencing tool, and apply the same level of privacy and secure communication strategy to it, as we do with everything else that we do. A certain virus, a rise in home office activities and the popularity of online ‘after work’ partys made the request even more compelling; we re-focused our efforts to this task, and here is the result.
’tis the season to be jolly, and at Kolab Now we certainly are. 2020 has been such a smooth year, with only a few minor issues on the international scene, that we decided to do something good for once. Santa is working on his own schedule; we can’t count on him to deliver presents (You can track him here), but here are the presents – from all of us to all of you…
In September we moved to a new and smarter user account administration tool. Just navigate back a few entries in the blog to read about that event.
This new tool was built with new technology and more modern models, and the team was rethinking the architecture from the ground up. The new module, which has taken a more central position in Kolab, makes it easier to make changes and improve the feature sets. It has put us in a position to move forward faster and more effective than ever before. The cockpit (also sometimes referred to as the dashboard) will become the central hub for a variety of new features that we’ll add over time.
This is of course no news. As mentioned above, we have been babbling about that for a while on this blog. The news in this post is that we have made a change. Based on feedback from User Experience specialists and (mostly) You, our customer, we have made a change to the menus in our systems. Let’s take a look at the changes:
It’s time!
If you followed our blog over the latest months, surely you have seen that we are working on our new user management module (called HKCCP). This is the module that manage your cockpit; it is where you login when you want to set and change the features supported by your subscription such as Mobile Connectivity, 2FA, Disk space’, etc..
We are now in a position to release and deploy the first production iteration of the module, and we therefore announce a service window for:
Sunday 13th of September 2020, between 07:00 UTC and 11:00 UTC 17:30 UTC.
During that period the cockpit will be unavailable for a short period, but there will be no impact on other feature or functionality of the service. If you are not working with the cockpit during that time you will not experience any issues at all.
This happened.
I lost my phone. It happened. In modern days fast paced life on the road you lose your phone.
But this is not about me losing my phone or how sad I was. It is about how my Kolab Now account helped me to recover fast and effective…
For a long time we planned to migrate user data and move over to the new account management this coming weekend (29/30 of August, 2020). Many cogs were spinning and we worked hard. Our application worked well in our test environment. Much effort went into assuring that the new payment methodology and preparations for upcoming improvements worked well and that your data really could get migrated without troubles. As we moved into the transition phase however we realized that the preparation and deployment into the production environment was going to need a few more iterations of innovation. We have this thing with what we do: We do it right, or we do not do it at all!
Hence we decided to move the release day back a week – into September.
More information to come about that very soon.
Kolab Now is a paid online service, where users can pay for their subscription and used resources via credit card, PayPal, bank transfer (and in the future, bitcoin). It is the task of a centerpiece module called the Hosted Kolab Customer Control Panel (HKCCP) to manage and administer the subscriptions and payments (among other tasks).
Over the years we have received feedback from users with constructive, honest criticism about the level of flexibility in the payment system. Users have wanted greater control of when to pay, and the actual services and resources paid for. As we always strive to improve the user experience, we listened and made accommodating changes to the payment system in the new updated HKCCP.
You may have seen that we had some issues with our website front page ‘https://kolabnow.com/’ this afternoon, and that it was on and off a few times.
Yes! We did some updates on the themes and color pallets. We had the new update up for a short while, but found out that our designer had ‘made a boo boo’. It took a little time to fix it and get the colors right, but everything is ok up and running again now.
During this update we did not touch the actual service ‘https://kolabnow.com/apps’ or anything even close to the data – only the front page ‘web blah’. If you were just reading your mail and going about using the service, then everything was just working as it should. Chances are, that you did not experience any issue at all.
If you were looking for anything on the front page at exactly that moment where we were moving things around, then we apologize for the inconvenience.
DISCLAIMER: No bits died or were hurt during this update.
Late Sunday night at 21:31 CET we were alarmed by lost connections. Symptoms seemed to point to a networking issue in the datacenter. Our datacenter provider was alerted, we sent our own emergency team onsite to assist in resolving the issue, and to deal with any fallout.
A faulty firewall was recovered, and mail started flowing again at around 00:10. Our ops team is now investigating why the firewalls didn’t fail over as they are configured to do in such situation.
At about 04:15, long after the system had recovered from the firewall issue, one system started to throw disk errors, which was leading to some users not being able to access the data in their folders. As this was a separate issue, the symptoms were only discovered at around 06:45, as it was assumed to be recovery issues from the previous outage. As soon as the disk error issue was realized, it was fixed and recovered. Connection to data was available again for all users at 07:10.
Where as we are still investigating the root cause for both of these issues, we can state, that no data was at risk at any time during the events.
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
In the beginning of the week we got a list of reports from users of iPhone connected via IMAP. These users reported that they were unable to list their mail folders. You can read about this issue in a previous blog post on this blog.
