Effusia Blog

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”.

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!