Sperry Software

I spend a fair amount of time looking for ways to help improve our customers’ experience while they use our products.  Sperry Software has been wanting to improve the help system we have online to help customers get the answers they need in a timely manner.  One of the options we have had for a while is to implement a knowledge base.  Not only will the knowledge base have as much information as possible, it will have an advanced search feature to help the user find the information they need. 

I have found a package that I believe will greatly enhance the customer’s experience while looking for information on our site.   The package includes many features that one would commonly find in a knowledge base.  One of the nice features is the contact form it provides.   If you are unable to find the information you need, you can choose to contact us.   While you are typing in your question, the application will search your text and the knowledge base to find any possible solutions.  If one of the solutions works, you don’t have to submit the question.  If it doesn’t solve your issue, you can continue with submitting your question.  The greatest thing about this is that we are not asking you to do anything more than you would currently have to do to email us your question.   Just start typing your question and if the system can find a related article, great!!, if not, submit the question and our tech support team will respond.

The new knowledge base is not set to go completely live until July 1st.   We are doing a beta until then for anyone that would like to test it out.  Please keep in mind that the system is new so we are still working diligently to get as much information online as possible.  New content will be added as much as possible.  To access the knowledge base please go to http://www.sperrysoftware.com/kb. 

  We’re back from Tech Ed 2008! 

  It was a great event - the venue (Orlando Convention Center) was terrific, not to mention the largest building I’ve ever been in.  Shown in the image is James, along with our display booth.

  We’d like to thank the customers that stopped by to see us, like Majestic Realty and Con-way,  among others. 

  We’d also like to thank all the potential customers for coming by the booth.  We received several ideas for new add-ins, as well as feature requests for existing add-ins. 

  Remember that if you received the Tech Ed 2008 20% discount code, that it expires at the end of the month.

  Thanks again! 

  Mike Sperry

  http://www.SperrySoftware.com 

  Find 37 Outlook add-ins that can make a difference!

The first full day of TechEd completed last night at 9pm.  There were a lot of attendees that stopped by the Sperry Software booth.  I have found that it is actually pretty difficult to give a quick presentation about what Sperry Software offers because we have 37 products.  It is difficult to quickly determine what each attendee is looking for in a product so we never know which products to mention. 

The day was split into two sessions.   A session in the morning from 10am - 1:30pm and then an evening session from 6pm - 9pm.  The morning session was busier than I had expected.  I thought that while the classes were in session, there would be a slow down in visitors.  We actually didn’t have much down time at all.   We had a pretty steady flow of attendees during the entire session.  The evening session was a lot more relaxed. There were small appetizers and beer served during this session  The first part of the session was a little slow because everyone was more concerned with eating the food than talking to any vendors.   It slowly turned around and we were again pretty busy the rest of the night. 

We have already received some great feedback from the people we have spoken to.  I encourage anyone with thoughts or suggestions to provide those to me.   I am always willing to listen to what concerns you have. 

When creating a newsletter or some other form of mass mail, a lot of users prefer to use Microsoft Publisher as the editor.  To send the emails to the intended recipients, users prefer to use the Send Individually add-in from Sperry Software.  This add-in allows the user to create one email and easily send that same email, separately, to all the recipients.  At this time, the Send Individually Add-in for Outlook will not work when Publisher goes to send the email.   This happens because Sperry Software only has the Outlook add-in and a Publisher add-in would be needed in this situation. 

Thanks to a response from one of our customers, there is a way to get around this limitation.   The customer sent them Publisher template to themselves via email.  Once in Outlook, the user then forwarded the email to their recipients using the Send Individually function.  Before sending the email, remove the FWD: from the subject and any other text indicating a forward.  The result was that the recipients received the email and it appeared formatted correctly. 

We appreciate any tips or workarounds that customers provide us when they use our products. 

Will you be at Tech Ed 2008 in Orlando, FL this year?  If so, stop by our booth and say hello!  Since this year’s Tech Ed event is broken up into two parts (a developer’s conference and an Exchange administrator’s conference), we will be at the second half only - June 10 through June 13. 

If you haven’t made plans yet and would like to go, please contact us because we have a discount code good for $400 off the normal regular entry fee.  This offer is on a limited, first come, first served basis.  Just email sales@sperrysoftware.com to get the details on how to obtain your full conference attendee pass for just $1,595.

If you’ve ever wanted to meet us, please come by booth 430.  We’re excited to be there and to meet you as well.

 

Microsoft Outlook has some security built in to help prevent external applications from accessing its internal data.  This data consists of your contacts, email addresses on emails, and others.  This is meant to help prevent a virus from harvesting information to then spread itself to other potential victims.  Where does leave the legit companies that provide extensions to Outlook?

There are a few different tricks that can be performed on the Microsoft Outlook client computer than can attempt to circumvent the security warnings that the user sees.  These techniques have their limit, however, when the client is connected to Exchange Server. 

If the client is connected to Exchange Server and they are getting security prompts from an installed add-in, the only solution is to trust the add-in from Exchange.   There is a great write up about this at SlipStick.  SlipStick has a lot of information regarding Outlook and Exchange.   If you are experiencing the security prompts in this environment, check out the SlipStick site.

Have you installed one of Sperry Software add-ins but all of the buttons do not appear correctly?  You can see the "Sperry Software Add-ins" button, but the "Send Individually" or "BCC ON" buttons do not appear when you create a new mail message.  I will attempt to provide the reason for this and a solution.

Most of the Sperry Software Outlook add-ins also have a Microsoft Word add-in included with them behind the scenes.  This is necessary when the user is using Microsoft Word as their email editor.  This option is set by clicking Tools…Options…Mail Format.  A Word add-in is required to provide the Outlook add-in functionality because the Outlook add-in is unable to control Word on its own. 

Changing the mail editor to "Not" use word will usually result in the buttons now appearing.  That is not a very good solution because we do not want to block people from using Word as their editor.  Fortunately, there is a solution.

Follow these steps:

1. Close Word and Outlook down.
2. Open Task Manager by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del.
3. Select "Task Manager"
4. Click the "Processes" Tab.
5. If OUTLOOK.EXE or WINWORD.EXE are running, end the process.
6. Download the Uninstall Toolbar Tool from http://www.SperrySoftware.com/Outlook/Tools.asp
7. Run the Uninstall Toolbar Tool.
8. Restart Outlook and create a new mail message.
9. The buttons should now be appearing.

We believe that the issue is caused by Word running while the user installs the add-ins.  This situation does not allow the toolbar to be added to the Word Documents.  Uninstalling the Toolbars forces Word to create the toolbar the next time it is started.

Distribution Lists were created to make it simple to send email to a group of people without having to search through the contacts folder to add each contact.  Although this adds a convenience factor to sending mass email, it has some limitations.  I will describe these limitations and provide some workarounds.

Limitation # 1

Distribution Lists have a size limitation.  This is the biggest gripe I hear regarding distribution lists.  A distribution list is not limited by the number of email addresses contained in it, but by a byte size factor.  This technical detail makes it difficult to determine how many contacts can be added to each list.  If the email addresses are shorter, then you may get one or more then a list with long emails.  Most users should find that their list will max out at around 120 entries.   The good news (if you can call it good) is that this can be overcome.  I will discuss the solution after the second limitation.

Limitation # 2

By default, a distribution list does not contain all the same data that a contact card would have.  This causes limitations on the fields that you can pull from a distribution list.  Using the Send Individually add-in as an example, it is not possible to substitute by anything other than Full Name with a distribution list.  This limitation is due to a distribution list not containing a property for the name’s individual parts like a contact file does. You may also see this type of limitation with doing a mail merge with a distribution list. 

Solution #1  (Fixes Limitation #1)

I mentioned that the distribution list is not limited by the number of email addresses, but by the byte size of the distribution list.  This works in our favor because it allows us to do list nesting.  What I mean by list nesting is that you can add multiple distribution lists to another distribution list, just like you would contacts to a distribution list.  This creates a list of lists.  The master list would then be limited to approximately 120 distribution lists.   This situation grows exponentially but provides a way to create a large distribution list, made up of smaller distribution lists. 

Solution #2 (Fixes Limitation #1 and Limitation #2)

A feature that is greatly overlooked within Outlook is the categories.  Categories provide a lot of functionality for organizing email related items.  You can even sort your contacts by category.  So now, you can assign a category (or multiple categories) to each contact.  The category could be your pseudo distribution list.  When you want to send an email to that category of contacts you would follow the below steps:

1. In the Navigation Pane, select "Contacts"
2. Change your view to sort "By Category"
3. Select the Category that you want to send an email to. (you do not need to select the contacts, just the category header)
4. In the main menu, select Actions…Create…New Message to Contact
5. Click Ok
6. You will see the names added to the "TO:" field of the email.  Complete the email as you normally would and send it.

Not only does this solve the size limitation, but in the example above with Send Individually, you can now select the contacts to send to and gain full Substitution capabilities.  This is because you are using actual contacts and not a distribution list.   This opens up substitution to items like First and Last name, making the email more personable. 

On Friday, Sperry Software added a new feature to our website.   Visitors will notice that on all of the add-in pages, there is a new chat logo.   This functionality is provided by Live Person and provides visitors the ability to ask a quick question without the need to pick up a phone.   I believe that this will be a great benefit for customers looking for a trial version or an answer to a quick question.  The sales staff is trained to answer your questions about our products.  I understand that the information pages may not answer all questions and personally feel that this complements our other means of service.   I am constantly looking at ways to improve our customer’s experience with Sperry Software.  Look for more new features coming in the future.We request that technical support questions still go through email or the community forums at http://www.sperrysoftware.com/Community.  The chat service is reserved for pre-sales questions at this time.  Â

Today, the development team has updated a display error that was occurring in Send Individually.   It was apparent that when the add-in was loaded that some users would see an error at the bottom of the configuration window regarding "Error 512".  Although this was just a display issue and did not effect functionality of the product, it was confusing customers.  We apologize for the message appearing in the first place.  The issue has been resolved in version 2.0.16.  If you have purchased within the last 2 years and want to upgrade, you can do so by using the original link you received when you purchased.  This is not a required upgrade.