WHMCS CEO Matt Posted December 29, 2009 WHMCS CEO Share Posted December 29, 2009 December Newsletter Well, here we are in December, another year almost gone and here at WHMCS it has been a busy and exciting year with many new developments and improvements to our products and services. It's been a few months now since our last newsletter and so we have lots to tell you about but first I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your support, feedback and contributions throughout the year and to wish every one of you a successful and prosperous 2010. Your business is the key to the success of WHMCS and we look forward to that continuing in 2010! Contents In brief, here's what we've got in this newsletter: V4.1 Review V4.2 Preview iWHMCS iPhone App PCI Compliance from just $99! Remote Card Data Storage KashFlow Integration Featured Community Addons WHMCS Version 4.1 Back at the start of November, we had our last stable release (4.1.2). The 4.1 version introduced some much requested new features, highlights included: Server Groups – allowing you to assign certain products to specific groups of servers, for example keeping shared and reseller users separate, along with the ability to have round robin provisioning on them Disk Space & Bandwidth Overage Billing – supported for cpanel, directadmin & plesk, the overage billing allows you to charge a base price for your hosting and then an additional $x.xx per MB of disk space & bandwidth used over the regular allocation Configurable Options Hide + Quantity Limits – over time your product offerings can change and with configurable options, that meant deleting options and therefore not seeing the selection for past customers. Now however, outdated options can be hidden on the order form but preserved for legacy users. Also added were allowable limits for quantity based options Client Files – this new feature allows you to upload files such as documents, contracts and other files that relate specifically to the individual clients account. Files can be designated as admin only or accessible to the user from the client area. Additional Mass Mail Filter Options – new filter options were added to make fine tuning mass emails simpler and more effective along with the ability to select multiple matching criteria rather than a single item Custom Field Descriptions – custom fields often require some specific information or values that can sometimes be hard to convey in a field name along so support for descriptions was added to allow you to guide users on what should go in the field Bulk Pricing Update Utility – when updating products pricing as you’ll be aware existing clients pricing doesn’t change. Normally that is desirable but we understood from your feedback that there were some cases where it was necessary to alter even existing clients so a price update utility was added to allow that. Addon Auto Activation & Welcome Emails – addons have not had any automation until now, but with this new feature you can now assign welcome emails to send on payment and run activation which you can hook into with your own code Additional API Calls – many more api calls have been added, mostly for data retrieval, but also a new XML response format is available for greater extensibility And of course many other smaller new features, tweaks & enhancements as always. If you haven't yet upgraded and would like more information, please see the release announcement @ http://forum.whmcs.com/showthread.php?t=23908 What's coming up in Version 4.2? Our next version is well on course to be another great release for WHMCS! Just a taste of what's to come includes support for Tiennial (3 Year) billing, sub-accounts for the client area, usability enhancements for multiple invoice payments, extended promotional abilities, improved billable items functionality, the ability to define custom ticket statuses, and more... Look out for a beta in late January/early February 2010! Announcing the iPhone WHMCS Application Here at WHMCS we like to take advantage of new & popular technologies and so earlier this month we announced our new iPhone Application for WHMCS - called iWHMCS! The iPhone app for WHMCS lets you manage your business in a truly mobile way. Fully integrated with the main online version, but specifically designed for the iPhone, iWHMCS lets you stay in control even when you're away from your desk. Functionality includes: An overview screen showing your income stats, pending orders, online staff & personal notes Searching of Clients & Viewing/Editing of Profile Data The ability to create invoices & apply transactions Support Ticket Management allowing for monitoring, viewing, replying and adding of notes Order Management allowing you to browse, accept and reject orders Quick links to send emails or call clients automatically Also displays other staff online and provides access to browse the Activity Logs For iPhone users, this app offers a really easy & convenient way to access & utilise their WHMCS system while on the move. And for users of other mobile devices, the standard browser based mobile edition is still available (http://www.whmcs.com/mobileedition.php). We will continue to develop and extend the functionality in both apps in the future. You can find and download iWHMCS in the regular Apple iTunes store, and then order the required addon for your WHMCS license to unlock all the functionality from our client area (priced @ $39.95 one time). Please visit http://www.iwhmcs.com for more information & screenshots. McAfee Secure PCI Offer If you need to validate your compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard (or are looking for an easier way to do it than last time), we've got a great new offer for you. The payment card industry (PCI) mandates PCI compliance for everyone that captures, processes or stores credit card numbers. So as a WHMCS user, PCI applies to you if you use a merchant gateway account to accept payments such as Authorize.net, BluePay, SagePay, etc... Through our new relationship with McAfee, Inc., you get access to a complete PCI compliance service using technology McAfee originally developed for Visa International. Sign up through us and pay only $99/year – a 65% saving off McAfee’s regular price! McAfee® PCI Compliance Service is a simplified, easy-to-use system optimized for smaller merchants (Level 2-4) that need to successfully complete PCI requirements. It includes: Automated state-of-the-art scanning Online self-assessment questionnaire McAfee Technical Assist (extensive technical support) PCI Wizard to help manage compliance activities Reporting options to deliver compliance reports directly to your merchant bank Tens of thousands of organizations--large and small--around the world trust McAfee to audit their initial and ongoing PCI compliance status. You'll find McAfee’s system highly accurate and their customer support second to none (except ours, of course!). For more information, or to sign-up, please visit http://www.whmcs.com/mcafee.php Remote Card Storage Gateways Over the past 6 months in the WHMCS V4 and 4.1 releases, we’ve been working hard to make the gateway module structure as flexible as possible to work with the new services being released by various gateways to help reduce your PCI compliance requirements. With this in mind, at the start of this month we released our first new module for Quantum Gateway Vault which is one of the first gateway providers to have come up with a completely transparent off site solution to recurring credit card processing. Using this module means you don't need to worry about PCI compliance at all. However, more and more gateways are starting to offer methods for at least remote storage of card details which while not removing PCI compliance requirements entirely, do still greatly reduce them. We will therefore be releasing modules for Authorize.net, BluePay, PayPal Pro & SagePay in the new year to allow you to take advantage of these external card data storage solutions while still maintaining the ability to do repeat charges. KashFlow Accounting Software Integration KashFlow is a web-based accounting system that shares our core focus of being easy to use and providing great customer service. It is now integrated with WHMCS so that your customers and invoices are automatically inserted into your KashFlow account. Using KashFlow you can keep track of all of your company sales and expenditure, file VAT returns and much more. You can try KashFlow for free for two months. You don’t need to enter your card details so if you don’t like it you just walk away. Also as an introductory offer KashFlow are offering existing WHMCS customers a 20% discount. Enter the code WHMCSPROMO after registering here. http://www.kashflow.co.uk/starttrial.asp?code=WHMCSPROMO Featured Community Addons When we launched the addons directory back in June of this year, we could never have anticipated how popular it was going to be! Developers have contributed many great addons & modules since then and below are the top 10 most popular contributions: Client Area Home Page - Layout changes to display more info including server logins for each hosted... PayPal Balance on HomePage - Display your PayPal Balance on the admin homepage and view recent transacti... Official Free Trials Mod - This action hook allows you to provide free trial products which expire aft... Plan Comparison - This mod will enable you to display a product comparison page with the valu... Admin Upcoming Domain Renewals V4 template - Show Upcoming Domain Renewals on the Admin V4 homepage that will expire in ... SMS Addon - Use Clickatell SMS gateway with your whmcs installation and improve your qu... Free Emails Ban - Allows you to ban the most commonly used free email providers from being us... Sparkys ErrorPages - Ever wanted to incorporate those 404 error pages into your website to make ... DEFSPARK Cart Template - This template is a highly modified version of the default cart template tha... Feedback Emails - This module will send an email to a client x days from the date they signed up. Yo... Visit http://www.whmcs.com/members/communityaddons.php to browse and download any of the addons you're interested in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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