aaronsimmons, Author at Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

What You Don’t Need To Worry About, And What You Should Look Into You’ve probably been hearing quite a bit lately about a security flaw, called Heartbleed, that was recently discovered on the internet that impacted several big sites on the web. And we’ve started to get questions from you about it. We’ll keep it simple: Your website with WebsitesForPrinters.com was not vulnerable to this bug, and no action is required of you or your customers to protect your accounts. However, our email service partner was affected by this bug. They patched it within 24 hours of the bug being announced, leading to some down time earlier this week as they patched their server. As a result of that change, some of our customers had to update their server settings in their email clients. Meanwhile, several large internet sites were affected. Here’s a list of the biggest sites that were vulnerable as of April 8th: Vulnerable sites report If you use those sites, it’s advisable to change your password (after you’ve confirmed with them that they’ve patched this, that is). And, as usual, it’s always important to use a different password for each website you use.

…And Three Years of Excellence Are Just Beginning! Today, we released an extremely rare production alert to our Dingbat/Coffee Break newsletter subscribers upon learning that it mistakenly reports the day the Golden Gate Bridge opened as May 27, 1981. We’ve corrected the error and uploaded new files to the server. This marks the end of a two-year streak of error-free newsletters across all of our Ink Inc products — but we’re certain it won’t be the last two-year streak, because we have a secret weapon: our bounty system! In our bounty system, every newsletter gets reviewed by every employee, and they get a $5 bill for every error they find! As you might expect, we catch a lot of errors this way. We even catch things that aren’t technically errors but can be improved. So we’re all the more shocked that this absolutely obvious error made it past all those motivated eyeballs! Maybe we just need to brush up on our history? And so, thanks to our bounty system, we now enter the beginning of our next error-free streak for Ink Inc products.

On April 1st, we made some updates to the website’s notification system that sends email updates of website activity to you and your customers. (An example of such an email is the “Order Placed” email received when a customer places an order.) The updates were created to allow the system to function better with our growing portfolio of fully custom websites. Unfortunately, those changes also broke the functionality for all notification recipients except for the designated Customer Rep for printshops, companies, branches and individual contacts. If you’re waiting for the obligatory “April Fool’s”, we’re sorry to say it’s no joke. This file was in place for approximately 26 hours, beginning April 1st at about 8:30 AM CST. The good news is that your customers were unaffected by this error, and the system also delivered all notifications to the customer reps assigned to any printshop, company, branch or individual contact. However, any additional users (other than the customer rep, that is) assigned to the notifications lists in the Control Center did not get their notifications. The error was repaired April 2nd at approximately 10:00 AM CST. Now the notifications system works for our standard Level 2 and Level 3 sites as

About a month ago, our entire company completed the popular DISC analysis to help improve our interpersonal communications and grow as a team. On Wednesday, we shut off the phones for a company-wide meeting to learn more about what our DISC profiles mean. For those of you who may not know, one aspect of the DISC personality test stresses the importance of understanding what makes your coworkers tick — and more importantly, what might tick them off! By speaking to each other in ways that best account for how we process information, we can communicate more effectively, work more harmoniously, and get more done with less mistakes due to miscommunication. Of course, we’ve already been working together effectively, harmoniously and with rare miscommunication…this process just helps us do that even better. So we had some good laughs and some good food. Then, most importantly, we got back to work serving you.

We sent out the first edition of the new Printer@Work 2.0 today. Overall, it went well, but with one big error: we have become aware of several issues of the newsletter delivered with broken links. Links that should be going to pages on your own website appear to have been randomly associated with other sites in our database! Here’s what we know so far: Printer@Work 1.0 is unaffected. All Printer@Work 2.0 issues set to basic delivery are affected. (Printer@Work 2.0 custom issues are not affected.) The broken links are the “Send this article to a friend” links and the “Click here to visit the Ideas Collection” link. Navigation links, Fun@Work links and the subscribe / unsubscribe links function as expected. We are still in the process of working out a plan for mitigating this issue. Since this involves email, the links in the emails that have already been sent cannot be updated. We are in the process of working to develop the best redirect strategy that we can, so that when users click the link going to the wrong site, we redirect them to the correct site (ideally), or anywhere else but another printer’s website. Please accept our most profound

Here’s some good news for our current Level 1 website customers looking to upgrade, as well as those who’ve upgraded from a Level 1 site in the past: All Orders Can Now Be Reordered On Level 2 and Level 3 websites, customers have always been able to place reorders for their document library items. However, orders placed using the Place an Order, Request Estimate, Send File and JobReady order forms on your Level 1 website could not be reordered because they were incompatible with the new system. But thanks to some updates to our system, it is now possible to allow your customers to reorder any orders that were placed on your Level 1 site, no matter what order form they used. This is just one more way to make it fun and easy for your customers to buy printing from you. By Request This process requires some heavy lifting, so it’s not automatically part of your upgrade. But if you’d like us to open up all of your previous orders for reordering, just let us know. There is no cost for doing so. Already upgraded your website? That’s not a problem. We can still convert your order history to

Scheduled Maintenance We’ve received word from our technology partner that the DesignEdit servers will be getting an operating system update. Therefore, the DesignEdit tool will be temporarily unavailable March 15th, beginning at 6 AM GMT (that’s 1 AM Eastern, Midnight Central, 11 PM Mountain, 10 PM Pacific). The technicians anticipate the updates will take around 4 hours. Thank You For Your Patience We know it can be an inconvenience to have software unavailable for any length of time, and would like to thank you in advance for your patience.

This is a special announcement for our Canadian customers: we’ve now added Canadian sales taxes to the Level 3 Website’s ecommerce suite! This update to the sales tax calculator is a major piece of the ecommerce puzzle for our Canadian customers, adding another tool to help make it easy for their customers to buy printing. This feature operates the same way as it does for sales taxes in the United States. All you need to do is go to the taxes section in your Control Center and click the Province that you are to charge sales taxes for, and the calculator will do the rest! For more information, please see the “Setting the Tax Rate section” of our Knowledgebase article, 08 – Pricing.

Printer@Work 2.0 Is On The Way When we introduced the Level 2 and Level 3 websites, we knew it was time for the Printer@Work newsletter to get a face-lift. Printer@Work has had the same basic design for…well, for as long as any of us can remember! It’s served us well, but it’s showing its age. Have you ever had one of those projects that you keep wanting to do, but can’t seem to get to because even more important projects keep springing up? In our case, that’s been the Printer@Work project. But the wait is almost over! In March, we’ll be releasing the new and improved Printer@Work. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak so you can see what’s coming: On The Road We’re going to be at the National Print Owners Association 2014 Annual Owners Conference next week in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Be sure to stop in and say “Hello” — it’s always a nice change of pace to speak to our customers in person!

Jason’s Many Lunch Adventures We thought it would be fun to include you in a curious phenomenon at our office: Jason from our support team has an uncanny ability to get delayed during his lunch time! We’d think he was making it up, because the reasons he gives are sometimes just too crazy. But since we can see the main road to our building, we’ve actually witnessed several of these things taking place right outside our window! Here’s a sampling of the things that have conspired to keep Jason from getting back from lunch so far: A funeral procession Another funeral — during a blizzard A flock of geese crossing the street A guy chasing his dog in the middle of traffic An extra-long flatbed semi delivering a wind turbine blade, stuck at a corner and blocking 4 lanes of traffic A house blocking all traffic (It was being moved out of a flood-prone area.) But Jason hasn’t seen everything yet. He expects to be blocked by the following in the near future: The Fargo Marathon A zombie attack An alien invasion A giant robot battle A Russian paratrooper sneak-attack Perhaps we should start an office pool on what the

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