Have a look:

If you like, come in for a coffee and visit us to see how we work.

At that point you really get hit hard by reality again and that you can’t do anything in our job without internet and power.

After another 2 hours, the electrician found the problem: a new lamp that was just attached the day before in the corridor had some cabling issues that only came out now as the lamp was switched on the whole day and got warm. If we would have not had this lamp on for so long, this problem might have never occurred!

So the guy who attached this lamp will get fired immediately! I will check twice when attaching the next lamp so such a thing could not happen again.

Yes, redecorating the offices can be a fun thing…

The new floor was already put into some rooms:

One large office room is already completely done:

Isn’t that looking great? A very nice office to work and give our best to improve our software and services.

Next update will follow.

Some pictures of the work in progress:

After all this improvement has finished, we will be even more innovative and will work harder and longer in this nice environment

I will share some pictures with you of the progress.

Matthias is a developer who worked in web development before. He will be part of the web development team and will work on projects from our customers as well as on PamFax, the websites, etc.

Tobias is a new apprentice who will learn software development in the next 3 years in our company. Through his existing knowledge, he will also help developing our products and projects.

So, welcome!

The new server build version is: .8 (In the PamFax application you will see the version as: 2.0.8.15). Note that we did release a new application version which fixes a scanner issue in Windows but we are not pushing the version to the existing customers. You can update easily by just downloading the installer package from www.pamfax.biz.

One major workflow change we made is that when you install PamFax for the first time you are asked to define a password for direct PamFax portal access. In the past we’ve learned that asking for then when users access the portal creates confusion so we added this to this release. This way PamFax users will always have a password to access the portal. Users that did not have a password will be asked for at next start of PamFax.

The changes we made today are:

Feature: A fax to multiple recipients can be canceled/deleted in the PamFax Portal
Feature: Define PamFax password on first start

Bugfix Mac: Skype language detection in PamFax Mac could hang PamFax
Bugfix Windows: When sending a document via “Send To”, via printer driver or Office toolbar the upload could fail

Bugfix: Added improved support for right to left languages on cover page
Bugfix: Minor IE8 issue fixed when cancelling/deleting faxes from the PamFax Portal
Bugfix: Upload button broken in IE7 and IE8 when clicking “back” on number entry page
Bugfix: In PamFax for Facebook clicking on “Send Fax” triggers “Launch Application” dialog instead of sending the fax

We also added the usual minor fixes and improvements. As we have more and more users submitting multiple recipient faxes we added a function to the portal which allows you to cancel these faxes at once. Till now you had to delete each individual number which could be a very tiresome task.

Kay will strengthen our developer team in the German office. His main focus will be developing web-applications like the upcoming PamFax 2.0.

Welcome him in our team and be gentle to him, he’s “the new one”

As we have loads of work in the queue, he will for sure not be the last new employee this year…

It also comes with a handy administration console, which can be accessed from every client machine. This console can be extended easily with addins by third party software developers. As some TapiRex customers already asked about a Windows Home Server console addin for TapiRex, it was a good point to get started trying this new Windows Server operating system.

So I tried to find it in the MSDN Subscriber downloads, as we have several subscriptions to MSDN Universal, which theoretically includes all Microsoft operating systems and all other software. As I was unable to find a download there, I googled the web and found out that Microsoft decided not to make Windows Home Server available in MSDN Subscriber downloads. Urgh. So we pay lots of money to not be able to get access to a Windows operating system to develop new addons for it. What a decision…

So I just ordered a Windows Home Server license from eBay, which was delivered quickly and did only cost around 90 Euros.

Installation

When installing the Windows Home Server incl. Power Pack 1 (which is based on Windows 2003 Server) on one of our servers in our server rack, it stumbled upon our 3Ware RAID controller, which is installed with 2 x 160GB harddrives as system drives in a mirrored array to speed up the operating system. I was able to load additional drivers for that controller from an USB stick, but when the system rebooted after the first installation step, it has forgotten about the driver.
Googling for this issue, I had to find out that this is a bug in the Windows Home Server installation . As the text-based setup does not have access to a USB stick to reload the drivers, I had to go out to buy an external 3.5″ USB disk drive, as the setup only accepts additional drivers from the A: drive. Do you remember 3.5″ disks? It was not that easy to find a disk to store the driver to get past this installation step. These disks have gone so rare here in the office . Previous installations of Windows 2003 did not have this problem…

But after that, setup was pretty easy. I was able to install all hardware components and to setup the Drive Extender. After setup, you have to install a small client connector software on every client machine that should backup to that Windows Home Server, which was pretty easy as well.

In-day-usage

The good thing is that the backups worked pretty well. Also, some of the available plugins from third-party developers are very useful.

But there also were some problems:

Delays in accessing shared folders: we experienced some delays in accessing shared folders on the server. Every employee in the office has some drives mapped to shared folders on the file server. This includes a personal folder and some general folders for everyone. While browsing in these subfolders on these drives, there was sometimes a lag of several seconds that makes it impossible to work with it fluently. For example, we store our downloads company-wide in a folder on the file-server. But the “save file” dialog in the webbrowser sometimes hung up for up to 20 seconds before it was able to show the folder and save the file. Once the data transfer starts, it’s fast and reliable.

Bug in drive’s size-calculation: When you map shared folders on the Windows Home Server as local drives, Windows XP and Vista are unable to show the correct drive size. After searching the web and asking some experts in Windows Home Server forums, I found out that this a known bug in Windows Home Server and that you can’t do anything about it:

Popups on all client machines: when you have the client connector software installed, all warnings from the Windows Home Server or one of it’s clients is shown on every client machine. So every user gets popup messages like “Computer X does not have virus protection installed”, “Backup on machine Y was not sucessful”, and many more. I was not able to find a way to customize these popups so that there are not shown to our apprentices for example.

So, after nearly 2 weeks in production, I am currently installing Windows 2008 Datacenter on that server machine, as the problems shown above disturbed our daily workflow that much that it was not worth it. We will install Windows Home Server as a VMWare virtual machine instead to do some software development on it. A PamFax addon is also an idea for it. What do you think?

I will report back how this all worked with Windows 2008. Does anyone have a different suggestion for a solid and fast file server operating system + client backup possibilities?

Horst will do customer support for all products (Pamela, PamFax, Scendix Software) and will also be our “face” on fares and exhibitions. Some of you might already know him as he already worked from time to time for us at Cebit and other fares.

Michael is a PHP develeoper who will add his experience to various projects we are currently working on.

• PamFax Business Control Panel: With the PamFax Business Control Panel (also called “BCP”), you can group multiple PamFax users together and control the credits of these users from one account. This is perfect for companies, where only one user buys all the PamFax Credit and controls how many credit the employees get. You can manually send PamFax Credit to the users of your BCP and also set a minimum amount of PamFax Credit your BCP users need. So now, your employees never run out of PamFax Credit and do not need to hassle with payments on their own; all payments can be done through one administrator Pamfax account.
• PamFax Vista Sidebar Gadget: With this gadget, you can see the status of your last faxes, access the PamFax Portal very quick and even start sending a fax more easy:
  
  
• Send to more recipients at once: you can now send a fax to more then 1000 recipients at once. The “multiple recipients” input box now allows to add more numbers and PamFax processes these recipient numbers much, much faster. Sending ads or invitations to lots of recipients is now a breeze with PamFax!
• New installer: We heard your requests about a more flexible installation and improved the PamFax installer: you are now able to select if you want to add desktop icons, install the PamFax printer driver and/or add the Microsoft Office toolbar buttons while installing. The installer is now localized to the major languages as well. So you should feel more comfortable when installing PamFax.
• Use Amazon payments worldwide: You can now use your credit card or other payment data stored in your Amazon account to pay for your faxes in PamFax from all over the world. This feature was introduced in PamFax only to US-citizens some time ago and is now available to everyone. Amazon payments is a very nice payment option, as there is no minimal payment amount and as it’s very secure: you do not have to give us any credit card data if you don’t want to. The payment is handled by Amazon, the faxes are processed and sent by PamFax.

We also analyzed hundreds of logs, test reports and requests to improve PamFax in a lot of minor functions. PamFax should be more stable than ever now and work faster then before.

The website was also updated: all screenshots and texts are up-to-date and the rates-page now also shows all the possibilities from the webshop and lets you select your currency. The FAQ system is currently overworked as well: expect a very flexible modern system that allows you to find the answers to your questions very easy. This will be updated on the website shortly.

Just let us know if you have any issues or other feedback.

Happy faxing!