Office improvement (part 2)
The office improvement goes pretty well. Some rooms look very chaotic and dirty for some time:
Articles tagged with ‘software’
No Skype Extras System anymore
Skype has just announced today that the Skype Extras System will not continue. This means no more third-party applications for Skype will be certified and no new extras will be added to the “Tools” -> “Extras” menu in the Skype client. All existing entries will not be removed until the certification period expires. This does not include the Skype Public API which allows third party software to connect to Skype and control some functions and do things like call recording etc. Skype says this API will be maintained in future.
But this shut-down also includes the Skype Credit payment, which will be switched off shortly. No third-party software will then be able to accept Skype Credit payments.
So how does this affect Scendix/PamConsult products? The simple answer is: not very much.
Team grows again: welcome new employees
The PamConsult Team grows again: please welcome our latest two new employees with me. They will both extend our team in our development office in Ebstorf, Germany.
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!
Test Pamela Professional 4.6 RC with new video recorder system
Today we release a Release Candidate version of Pamela Professional 4.6. Release Candidate means that unless we find a serious bug, this version will go live in the next days, replacing Pamela 4.5.
So, what are the big changes? First of all we completely redid the Skype video recording module. This was used a lot in Pamela since introduction in 2006 but since then evolution of the software world has caused more and more issues with it. So we decided to completely re-write the recording part.
We have managed to create a very low resource recording, this is especially critical as any video application already uses considerable resources. We also wanted to make the settings very simple. In Pamela 4.6 you will see only three main settings regarding video. FPS, the captured Frames Per Second. This impacts file size and quality of the video. Then there is the size of the video file (320×200 up to 800×600 including a YouTube setting). This obviously impacts size of the recording too. And then there is the audio quality starting from “low” to “highest”.
The output file is default WMV format and with Pamela 4.6 we’re doing away with all the complex codec configuration.
In addition there is a video custom recording option which will just record anything from the webcam.
If you have Pamela Professional you can just download and install which will update your Pamela to 4.6. If you do not have Pamela Professional or another Pamela version you will have Pamela Professional in trial mode (full functionality for 30 days).
UPDATE: Pamela 4.6 is now released as final version. Download from www.pamela.biz
Testing Windows Home Server
On our search for a good file server and centralized backup solution, I stumbled across Windows Home Server. The description sounds very good and seemed to be the perfect solution for our office: this server system automatically backs up Windows clients over night and has a unique data-storage system, which makes it possible to add and remove different harddrives to the storage, making it larger without the hassle of moving files from one drive to the other. It’s a kind of software raid (stripe).
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?
Best wishes for the holiday season
Dear customers, partners, affiliates and fans, we at PamConsult all wish you a great festive season, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
2008 has been a fanstastic year for us. Some of the highlights…
- Increased revenue by more then 100%
- Completed company consolidation, all software products are now sold via Scendix Software GmbH and all consulting is concentrated in PamConsult GmbH
- Expanded our staff
- Improved our IT infrastructure for future growth
- Major PamFax infrastructure update done in January 2008
- PamFax reached 130.000 users
- In Q2 2009 we plan to release PamFax 2.0 with fax-in and Macintosh support (yeah!)
- Our Pamela for Skype products have seen great user growth with a total of over 5 million downloads
- Pamela for Skype version 4.5 is almost ready to go with exciting new functions and improvements
- Implemented a new and professional shopping platform on PamFax, Pamela and Scendix websites
- mcePhone, the Skype integration tool for Media Center, made it to version 3.0 and will be out of beta soon
- In June we received the Ebay Innovation Award for our Jaast for Wii solution which provides you with Ebay access from your Wii
- With our annual charity BBQ we raised €400 which we double to €800 and give half/half to the “Tafel” in Ebstorf and Freising. These are voluntary projects which provide food supply for poor(er) people.
It has been a fun year. We want to thank you for your continued support and are looking forward to an exciting and successful 2009.
Dick Schiferli & Christoph Bünger
Products
On our blog we write a lot about our products and services, but where are they you may ask. So here is a page that summarizes where is what and how to get it. Check back regularly as we update according to our product/service release schedule.
Software Products
PamFax – www.pamfax.com
Pamela for Skype – www.pamela.biz/download
Pamela Call Recorder – www.pamela.biz/download
Jaast – Digital Home Solutions – www.jaast.com
mcePhone for Skype – www.scendix.com/mcephone
mceAuction – www.scendix.com/mceauction
mceContacts – www.scendix.com/mcecontacts
mceWeather – www.scendix.com/mceweather
SyncFolder – www.scendix.com/syncfolder
TapiRex – www.scendix.com/tapirex
Services – Consulting – Development
PamConsult – www.pamconsult.com
Contact
Should you have any questions, ideas, comments or things you wish to tell us that do not fit in a comment to a post, then please use this page to contact us.
Note that technical questions about our software and solutions are not answered here. Please refer to the support site of the product for help.
Pamela now part of Scendix Software
Beginning this year we have founded the “Scendix Software GmbH” which focusses on selling our “off the shelf” software products like Pamela, Call Recorder, mcePhone, etc.
As of October 1st, Pamela has been switched over to this new company. In addition we upgraded the Pamela Store to a complete new solution. After 2 years of working with the old store, we now have a real solid platform. The PamFax store already uses the new system.
The new store provides a much better shopping experience as products are grouped better with detailed descriptions, requirements and direct download possibility. Now we are able to offer license packs for all products. Support for multi currency is built in. The new system provides you with an account login area where you can retrieve your activation code as well as download an invoice. Upgrading Pamela is also a lot easier. In addition the new platform allows us to do promotions and affiliate deals much simpler, so stay tuned!
Welcome new team members
Our company continues to grow: welcome to our two newest team members in our development office in Ebstorf, Germany:
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.
