Effusia Blog

A few months ago there was an article that really caught my eye and I am finally getting around to blogging about it. The US Senate was working on a bill that would retroactively grant immunity to e-mail providers, search engines, Internet service providers and instant-messaging services. Yes, you read that right. Those IMs that you might be sending over the Internet are, and always have been, out in the open. Now the federal government wants direct access to them from your public IM service, no questions asked and regardless of the legality of the request.

Granting public IM services immunity removes the company’s accountability over the privacy of the information you are sending through their network. A request not signed by a judge may just be a request from some government employee abusing the system. Such was the case when Benjamin Robinson, a Departmet of Commerce special agent, used a Department of Homeland Security database to stalk his former girlfriend. How long before we have federal employees committing identity theft, bribery, or any number of crimes with the sensitive data they received from the public IM service you use? It may be going on already since all they had to do was ask.

So if you are still using a public IM system for your company’s internal messaging (and I truly hope you are not), make sure you are not sending out personal information about yourself, others in the company and especially not your own customers. Also, if you are using secure internal IM already, like Effusia, make sure any IM traffic going outside of your network is encrypted by enabling SSL. If you aren’t sure or aren’t sure how to do that, feel free to ask us.

We’re officially announcing the release of Effusia 4.4. The new features in this release reflect the great feedback we’ve received from our customers. I want to thank all our customers that have offered compliments and constructive criticism over the years. Effusia is a better product because of you. So keep it coming and let us know what you think at our Contact Us page. So what’s in store for you with Effusia 4.4?

Quick Reply

We’re very excited about our new Quick Reply feature. Ever needed to ignore a message for a second but you still wanted to respond with a quick “I’m busy right now”? I think every IM user has. Well, Quick Reply makes it easy to setup and send one of a list of canned responses with just a click or a keystroke. All you do is setup some Quick Replies like “I’m on the phone” or “Be with you in a minute” in our Quick Reply editor. (Effusia 4.4 comes with 3 of them conveniently setup for you.) Then when you receive a message you don’t quite have time for, you can send a quick reply by clicking on the little down arrow by the send button and selecting one of your replies. Just pick one and it sends automatically! For those of you out there who like even more efficiency, you can just type Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, etc in the message field and it will send any of your first 9 quick replies.

Quick Reply Menu

Better Message Indicators

If you’ve got a conversation open in Effusia and a new message arrives, it’s always flashed the icon on the conversation window’s task bar button. Some of our customers told us they thought that that wasn’t enough to easily get people’s attention. With that in mind, we’ve enhanced the flashing when a new message is received. Now, the entire task bar button for the conversation will flash to let you know there’s a message waiting. This works well even if you have the “Group similar taskbar buttons” property turned on in Windows. If you have multiple conversations open and they’ve been grouped by Windows into one button, the whole group will flash to let you know there’s a message waiting.

If you like this new stuff, give the rest of our great features a try and download a free trial. For you customers on a maintenance contract out there, we’ll be in touch soon to get you setup with your free upgrade to Effusia 4.4. And keep the comments coming for 4.5!