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.
Our terms of service state there’s basically no way for anyone to get any access to your data without us also being able to talk about the fact it happened.
Like the last time we declared having made a full eclipse around the sun at an arbitrary date, here’s our statistics for 2020.
’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.
With the new HKCCP, we are laying the groundwork for future improvements. It gives us a solid foundation to develop and deliver new features that would not have been possible or maintainable in the old system. One such feature is video conferencing.
We wanted to add a video conferencing to Kolab for a while, but we wanted to avoid the security and access issues seen elsewhere. COVID-19 has put it up in priority quite a bit. With our account management system overhaul reaching the final stages, we decided it was time to proceed working on it with more priority. The code can be found here.
Kolab Now provides mail and groupware services for privacy and security minded customers around the world. With decades of experience under our belts, we have become a well established part of the Swiss cyber security community. We are dedicated to providing a transparent and ethical service to the highest standards and our security track record shows for it. Recently, our CTO, Jeroen van Meeuwen, was asked to share his insights with Safety Detectives. Their interview series with players in the community is well worth checking out. Here is the link to the interview with Jeroen:
https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/interview-jeroen-van-meeuwen-kolab-now/
If you are interested in reading more of these kinds of personal perspectives on things, from the people behind Kolab Now, let us know at support@kolabnow.com.
In this series, we take a look at upcoming changes and features for Kolab Now. Part I gave a high level overview of our roadmap, Part II looked into changes to our payment system. In this post we are going to take a look at how users sign up for our service. We offer a 30 day money back guarantee for a while now. It has served us well in allowing potential customer to try our service without having commit to paying for a service that might not be a good fit for them in the end.
