Effusia Blog

Twitter, the “microblogging” and messaging platform, got a big break last month when it was used by Dell in their Global Mobility Event. Since then, the United States Security and Exchange Commission has hopped on the Twitter bandwagon and CNN has asked for feedback via Twitter on air. The overall impact of this application of Social Media Channels (SMC) has yet to be seen but Twitter may be an effective new way for companies to engage themselves with the ever growing Web 2.0 world.

The major advantage of using SMC in this fashion is engaging the public. Twitter, like blogs before it, is putting an end to the traditional press conference and one-to-many broadcast. We’re continuing on the path to a new era in which the anyone can be a participant and have a voice in what used to be exclusive events. Who knows, maybe 10 years from now when Google is celebrating its 20th birthday, we’ll all be invited to the party, at least digitally. At a minimum, we can tweet about it to all our friends.

The topic of this week’s Fantastic Features! - Alerts!

Effusia offers two types of alerts: Status Pop-up and Manual Alert. You may be asking yourself, “Effusia Blog, Which type of alert should I use?” The answer is… it depends. If you need to be continuously aware of a person’s online status then a Status Pop-up would be the best decision.

The Status Pop-up is a non-intrusive pop-up window with information about a person’s online status as it changes and is ideal for the people that you communicate with the most. This feature can be turned on in Effusia Settings->Contacts->Other Options.

However, the Manual Alert would be more fitting if you only need to know about someone’s status occasionally or for specific reasons.

The Manual Alert will draw more attention to the alert because of the size of the pop-up window and includes the option to start a conversation immediately from the window. This feature can be turned on in My Effusia->Contacts->Setup Alert.

Have you ever wanted photographic memory? Well now you can have it! With Effusia Business Messenger you can remember every detail of every conversation your ever have using our Message History feature. No longer do you have to send embarrassing messaging asking the same question over and over again. With Message History you can harness the power of the past by looking up previous conversations.

“Impossible” You say? Quite possible actually. All you have to do is go to the My Effusia menu and select Message History. You’ll have full control of the past with flexible search and sorting options. You can drill down by user, date, message type or message text. You can even keep several sets of search results open at once with our tabbed interface. Once you’ve found what you’re looking for you can sort, print or filter even more with a simple right click.

Message History can save you time and energy when retrieving information! Learn it, Use it, Thank us later.

Recently Facebook and Myspace introduced Instant Messaging (IM) to their sites. Annoyed bloggers aside, it will be interesting to see if the use of Social Networking Site (SNS) IM takes off. There certainly is big potential since there are over 80 million active Facebook users and 110 million active Myspace users.

This new development has a potential impact on your business. Even before the introduction of SNS IM, there was already plenty of discussion about the pros and cons of social network usage at work. The problem with this new feature is that employees could use SNS IM to discuss potentially sensitive company business. Unfortunately, SNS IM poses many of the same security threats as public IM in addition to other concerns like a lack of archiving.

As always, we recommend taking a careful approach to dealing with potential public IM threats. You may choose to try to block these services outright, which is possible but can sometimes be difficult. Whether you block or not, make sure to educate your employees on the potential risks of SNS IM. A chat in Facebook or Myspace is no more secure then one on a public IM.

We recently relocated our offices. Our new mailing address is:

Liquid Communication Systems, LLC
133 Fayetteville Street
Suite 210
Raleigh, NC 27601

Our phone number and all other contact information will remain the same. Using our online form is the best way to contact Liquid.

Today we’re releasing Effusia Version 4.4.2. We’ve made several significant updates in this release:

1. Added support for non-latin language characters
2. Increased Offline Messaging performance
3. Improved stability and performance for the Effusia Console

Non-Latin Character Support

Prior to v4.4.2, many non-Latin characters were not well supported in the auditing & reporting features of the Effusia Server Administration Application. Messages were saved to the message history but non-Latin characters would often display incorrectly. In 4.4.2 we’ve updated the Admin Application to fully support UTF-8 encoding of all characters in the Unicode set for reporting and searching of messages. If your business uses non-latin characters, we highly recommend 4.4.2. As you can see in the image to the right, the Effusia Console also supports Unicode characters as well.

Offline Messaging Performance

Effusia 4.4.2 includes a set of back-end changes within the Effusia server which greatly improve the performance of Offline Messaging. If your organization makes extensive use of Offline Messages directly or sends MemoMessages to users who may not be online, these improvements will mean much faster message delivery. The performance increases will be especially noticeable when sending MemoMessages to a set of online users and a set of offline users. The online users now get priority in message delivery so they will see the MemoMessage instantaneously.

Effusia Console Improvements

We’ve received comments from a small set of customers regarding isloated occasional lock ups in the Effusia Console. Because we want to ensure that every customer has a great experience with Effusia, we decided to delve deep into the internals of the Effusia Console and do extensive testing to find anything that might be causing these issues. In 4.4.2, we’ve made a number of tweaks under the hood to resolve a handful of potential issues discovered in our testing. If your organization has experienced any locks or other issues with the Effusia Console we highly recommend that you download 4.4.2.

How to get 4.4.2

If you are an active maintenance customer, please login to our customer extranet and download your free upgrade to Effusia 4.4.2. If you’re interested in trying Effusia, download our free trial.

Are you tired of seeing the boring usernames of all your Effusia contacts instead of something more descriptive? Do you wish the contact list said Davey, Scott and Sally instead of dchapel, soaks, and scrawford? Did you know you can change the way your contacts are displayed, both globally or for an individual user? Effusia allows you to globally change how your contacts are displayed. In addition to the default Username display, you can display your contacts by their First Name, their Goes By, Full Name or their Last and First Name. Changing this global setting is simple. On the Effusia Console, select My Effusia -> Settings and select the Contacts tab. On the bottom of the Contacts tab there is a section named Other Options and a drop down box labeled Default contact display: Simply select the way you would like all your contacts to be displayed and click OK.

Now all your contacts will show up the way you configured them to. Your contacts are not just displayed on the contact list though. They are shown using your preference throughout the Effusia Console including all message windows, message history, alerts and any other place contacts names are shown.

In addition to globally changing the way your contacts are displayed, you can also change the way each individual contact is displayed. Setting the contact display for a specific user overrides the global default.

Changing the display for a single user is just as easy as changing it for all users. Simply bring up the contact list and right click on a user in the contact list. From the drop down menu select Edit Contact Display. That will bring up a dialog that allows you to set the specific contact to show as the default global setting, as one of the other standard options or a custom name.

Now dchapel can be “Davey”.

The manila folder seems to always hold something timely and important. On one hand they are used by private investigators to reveal damaging information to clients. I bet Spitzer got one. On the other the folder is used by corporations to circulate important information. Stashed inside the manila folder the memo’s slow path is always the same.

Read memo. Spill coffee on it. Misplace for day. Sign. Pass. Repeat.

Effusia Business Messenger updates this slow distribution network with the memo message. Now users can send memos with Effusia to select individuals or complete groups of employees. Either select My Effusia>Contacts>Send Memo Message to choose individuals or right click on a group (or individual) in the console contact window and select Send Memo Message to send to the whole group (or individual). If the sender sends as Blind instead of Normal all recipients are BCC (blind carbon copy). Regardless of connection status users will receive the message immediately if logged in or as an offline message that appears upon logon to Effusia. And recipients can reply, reply all or forward the message too. Now everyone can be updated simultaneously without waiting for the dreaded manila envelope to make all the rounds through the office.

I hope the next manila folder that reaches my desk is not filled with phone bills or 8×10 glossies but instead has one of those new skinny Apple MacBook Air laptops. And yes Effusia is secure and runs on Mac OSX. But it can’t tell if you are being tailed.

I’ve not used the official AIM client in many years so I haven’t kept up with all its latest features and bloat. The last time I used it, the ads, extra annoying graphics, animations and sounds were just too much of a distraction to make it useful for real and serious communication. This week I spotted that they have included yet another feature that is also more annoying than useful: real-time IM.

“Real-time” meaning as you type ‘a’ they see an ‘a’. I don’t see this feature adding any value unless you are looking to get yourself in trouble. I wouldn’t want to count how many times I have typed things I never intended to send in a heated discussion or how many zillion words I have misspelled until the built in spell checking caught it for me. Everyone would see how terrible of a speller I really am. (Yes, many already know, but I like to keep it as secret as I can.) Having that little bit of a buffer there is the only room you have to proof read an already quick, stream of thought communication medium. How frustrating is it going to be on the recipients end too watching you type, delete, type, type, delete, type, delete, type?

I do see the value in knowing that the other person is typing though. A typing indicator is a feature that has been in many IM clients, Effusia included, for as long as I can remember. It is good to know the person on the other end of your conversation is paying attention to you and still in the conversation but real-time IM is just more bloat. Leave it to public IM clients who cater to teenagers to just keep adding more useless features like this.

So in partnership a partnership with Yahoo and RIM, Jet Blue plans to offer wireless access on their flights. So will this increase productivity and help others pass the time on a coast to coast flight or be a bigger annoyance? I cannot imagine sitting next to someone who is yapping on their Skype the whole trip. And many people that don’t normally bring a laptop aboard now would probably do so now that internet is available. Get ready for your aisle-mate surfing more YouTube and MySpace. There are no cubicle walls to shield you from someone else’s glaring laptop screen for hours on end. For me a flight is my rare chance to catch up on some reading or doing a crossword. Heck, maybe even carry on a conversation. I get enough daily internet intake to tide me over for an 3 hour internetless flight.

With that said we all know it that in-flight internet will be a reality soon.  Regardless, I think internet in the Friendly Skies should be limited to business class.   It would give fliers a choice as to their need for in-flight internet or not. If you allow it in coach then you can add bad digital manners to the already long list of potential nightmare flying personalities.

Just don’t forget to bring a great book for those multi-hour tarmac delays!