It is a question that comes up frequently at our Tech Support – OK, the email was blacklisted by the Sender Blacklist, but which item triggered the blacklisting exactly?

The upcoming ORF release will offer three handy improvements to help answering these questions.

Predecessors of ORF 5 already support entering optional comments with IP, email, keyword, etc. expressions and these are logged on a hit. This can help identifying the expression in question. Due to a technical constraint, however, these comments were logged as “(Unicode comment cannot be displayed)” if they contained any characters outside the 7-bit ASCII table, which is pretty much the Latin alphabet and numbers only. We overcame this constraint in ORF 5 and now the logged comments are fully Unicode-compliant. Let you speak Russian or Danish, you can use your national alphabet without limitation.

Expression comments are sadly omitted in many cases, though, and ORF has nothing to log. Nothing is lost either; we have two features for these cases.

The first one is very simple: one-click sortable lists. Remember the Sort button next to the lists in ORF 4? It is gone. It really should not have been there in the first place. Bad, bad Sort button. Lists are ought to get sorted by one click in the header, because that is the maximum effort to be exerted to make order and find things.

The second one is a bit more exciting: the Test button that took over the place of the Sort button (which is, again, gone, forever) for every major list. Say you want figure out which Sender Blacklist expression blacklisted emails from my-bosses-best-friend@example.com (ouch!), but the log did not reveal any further information. Just click Test, enter my-bosses-best-friend@example.com and you will get a live, editable list of expressions matching that address. Like *@example.com. Turns out it was not the best.idea.ever, but hey, now you can fix it.

Stay tuned, we are coming back with more next week.

One of the biggest changes on the website coming with ORF 5 will be the introduction of a brand new Client Portal which will replace the Customers Area currently used on our website. The online services will add number of features and integrate others. Some features are a direct result of changes in the licensing while others are usability improvements to improve your ORF experience. Here is a quick summary of 2 key features:

Managing multiple companies

First some technical background. After the launch of ORF 5, customer accounts will be disassembled into individual user accounts and company accounts. This will allow role based management of company accounts and management of multiple company accounts by a single user. In order to facilitate this, users managing multiple company accounts will be able to select which company they want to work with within the Client Portal.

In the screenshot above, you can see the website header which will be the basis for navigating through your companies where ever you are on the website. Clicking the “Change” button (2) will show a dialog where all manageable companies are listed with some key information in order to make identification easier. From then its just a click of a button to make the selection the active company on the Client Portal.

License Management

A separate licenses page will give an overview of the licenses handled by your company. The list is ordered by date and the individual license details can be opened and closed using a simple chevron mechanic. An overview of the licenses can also be found on the My Company: Overview page as well to give you a quick glance at the status of your licenses. If one or more of the licenses are within the renewal period, you can renew your license from here with one click of a button.

This concludes the quick sneak-peek at some of the features of the Client Portal. Stay tuned for more next week.

In this sixth article of our ORF 5 series, we look into two minor improvements the new ORF release will offer.

Noticed that blue thing below the menu? That is the brand new and shiny toolbar, implemented in all three administrative tools of ORF.

True to the role of toolbars, this one brings the most frequently used actions right under your fingertips (1). The dropdown design also acts as a secondary shortcut menu, making the tools more discoverable and faster to use (2).

You will find the the connection information here (3) which helps identifying which ORF installation your are currently working with.

The toolbar also hosts another new feature, the Notifications button (see screenshots below).

Basically, this is the entry point of ORF’s new asynchronous notifications system. This is meant to eliminate situations when you get interrupted by randomly popping up dialogs like “Hey there’s a new version available!”, “You really should do something about these waiting items!” or “Look, I can create dialog boxes out of nowhere HAHAHA isn’t it great?”. There are many background operations in ORF, from checking for updates, to querying the status of the Transport Agents. All these operations may required your attention occassionally but from ORF 5, they are all neatly line up here.