SmarterMail is a feature-rich Windows mail server that brings the power of enterprise-level functionality and collaboration to businesses and hosting environments. SmarterMail provides 98% antispam, robust antivirus, detailed reporting, events/notifications, throttling, email archiving, intrusion detection/prevention, and advanced synchronization with Microsoft Outlook™ and over-the-air support for BlackBerry™, iPhone™, and Windows Mobile™ devices.

SmarterMail delivers an industry-leading Webmail interface for accessing email, calendars, contacts, tasks, and notes as well as complete server administration. The optimized AJAX Web interface will be intuitive for Microsoft Outlook™ users as it makes use of drag-and-drop, keyboard shortcuts, pop-up windows, snapping panes, splitters, and tab controls. Full collaboration functionality and shared calendars, tasks, notes, and folders are available as well as reminders and alerts—bringing the features and performance of a desktop application to the Web.

SmarterMail provides robust collaboration features that most people associate with more expensive mail servers such as Microsoft Exchange™. Collaboration features—such as folders, calendars, contacts, tasks, and notes—can be fully synchronized with Microsoft Outlook™ and mobile devices (BlackBerry™, iPhone™, Windows Mobile™, and more). SmarterMail is built from the ground up to be a foundation for a complete communications platform.

Users have the ability to fully utilize Microsoft Outlook™ beyond the capabilities of most mail servers. Users can “two-way” sync between the SmarterMail Web interface and Microsoft Outlook™—allowing changes and additions to folders, calendars, contacts, tasks, and notes to be concurrently available in both applications.

SmarterMail includes the SyncML protocol to achieve Over-the-Air synchronization of contacts, calendars, tasks, and notes. Users can send and receive email messages directly from their mobile devices. Most devices are supported, including BlackBerry™ (Curve™, 8830, etc.), iPhone™, and Windows Mobile™ devices (Motorola Q™, Palm Treo™, Samsung BlackJack™, etc.). Not all functionality is available on all devices. Additional information is available on the SmarterTools Website.

SmarterMail delivers all of the coordination and communication functionality that you expect from your office desktop—to any pc with an internet connection—anywhere in the world through a familiar and intuitive Web interface. Users have access to shared calendars and the availability of their co-workers to schedule appointments. Tasks can be assigned and emails managed 24/7 with accuracy, speed, and security.

SmarterMail provides the robust collaboration features that most people associate only with more expensive mail servers such as Microsoft Exchange. SmarterMail provides each user with the ability to share contacts, email folders, calendars, tasks, and notes between co-workers and across enterprise organizations. Global Address List (GAL) functionality allows Enterprise edition users to accurately coordinate across large project teams.

Effective out-of-the-box antispam protection is not just a possibility—it has been achieved, without requiring the purchase of additional modules or hardware. SmarterMail utilizes a structured, multi-layered strategy to achieve 98% protection with exceptionally low false-positives. Technologies such as SpamAssassin, Greylisting, and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) are only a few of the techniques employed. SmarterMail can also be integrated with third-party solutions (e.g., Barracuda™, Message Sniffer™) to enhance protection, if desired.

SmarterMail's antispam technologies allow for customized levels of protection with flexible configurations on multiple antispam processes, including:

• SpamAssassin
• Greylisting
• Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
• DomainKeys
• Custom Headers
• Bayesian Filtering
• Reverse Domain Name Server (DNS)
• Real-Time Blacklist (RBL)
• Blacklist/Whitelist
• SMTP Blocking
• Per-user Spam Weighting
• More...

SmarterMail is equipped with effective and self-updating ClamAV antivirus protection right out-of-the-box and the capability to support many additional 3rd Party solutions. When using ClamAV, full reporting is available on antivirus activities at the system, domain, and user level. For more information about the built-in antivirus measures of SmarterMail, visit the Security Section.

System and domain administrators can extend their protections by adding distributed SpamAssassin servers, gateways, and networked devices. SmarterMail integrates with industry leading 3rd party hardware and software antispam solutions, including:

• Barracuda™ Spam Firewall
• Declude
• Trend Micro™
• More..

Effective, Accurate, and Timely

SmarterMail introduces the new STReportingFramework which uses real-time mail server statistics, historical summary reporting, and detailed trend analysis to create one of the most flexible and robust reporting capabilities on the market.

SmarterMail comes pre-loaded with literally dozens of available standard reports for System and Domain Administrators to help them monitor their systems. Administrators and users can create custom reports that deliver the information important to them and can save those reports for future use as Report Favorites.

In the Enterprise edition, standard and custom reports can automatically be sent to multiple recipients via email on a fixed schedule. Users and administrators can determine which reports, when, and how often they should be run and who should receive them.

The STReportingFramework provides the ability to drill down into new data levels for every Domain or User on the systems allowing System Administrators and Domain Administrators to detect sites or individual accounts that have become abusive or gone inactive. Administrators can run System Summary reports to identify trends, manage costs, and effectively allocate resources all the way down to the individual user level.

Real-Time Dashboards

Two detailed, real-time dashboards supply important statistic on-the-fly, including:

• Service Started
• Service Uptime
• Memory
• SMTP Connections
• POP Connections
• IMAP Connections
• Delivery Threads

Detect, Prevent, and Limit

The new SmarterMail interface adds a new Security Section to support the existing security features and includes even more protections. With the introduction of these new features, the security scheme will often be referred to as the "DETECT, PREVENT, and LIMIT" foundation.

SmarterMail comes pre-loaded with ClamAV antivirus installed and ready to go, out-of-the-box. ClamAV is a premier, open-source project offering superior protection that resides on the mail server, or in high volume environments on a remote server helping to reduce the burden of the SmarterMail sever. SmarterMail also supports third-party real-time and command-line solutions.

SmarterMail boasts intrusion detection, harvest attack and denial of service attack prevention, SMTP authentication, malicious script filtering, and more.

Other security features available within SmarterMail are:

• Supports SSL/TLS connections
• DomainKeys
• Connection Blocking
• Whitelisting/Blacklisting
• Active Directory authentication
• Optional alternate SMTP port
• Many more

SmarterMail features Web-based administration that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the mail server from one convenient interface whether they are system or domain changes. SmarterMail now includes mass propagation capabilities at both domain and user-level, making business policy changes simple and fast.

SmarterMail was built from the ground up for ease of administration and automation in businesses and hosting environments. Automation with web services allows organizations to create efficiencies and reduce costs by providing developers and/or System Administrators access to “code to” the SmarterMail interface to perform automated actions, such as:

• Adding domains
• Determining domain-specific bandwidth usage for billing
• Setting details on a specific domain or server
• Setting up mailboxes
• Updating domain information
• Testing services added to the Web interface
• Much more....

Literally hundreds of functions are made available for automating virtually all actions on the mail server allowing larger companies and hosting environments to efficiently manage tens of thousands of email users per server.

Throttling is new to SmarterMail and allows System Administrators to limit the number of messages, amount of bandwidth, and/or the number of bounced messages that will be allowed to or from a domain, user, or mailing list in a given amount of time. This is a vital new tool to prevent the abuse of your email system. Actions can be automated based upon the throttling parameters to prevent abuse in real-time

System Administrators now have the ability to manage email delivery more effectively than ever before by setting Priorities. Now, mailing lists and other process-intensive email can be assigned a lower priority allowing regular email to avoid unnecessary delays. Notifications can be given higher priority to make sure that important information is delivered in a timely fashion.

SmarterMail has the ability for system-wide email archiving. System Administrators can designate an archive folder which will contain copies of every inbound and outbound email sent each day. At the end of each day SmarterMail will take that folder and compress it for archival storage. This is a great feature for companies which need to keep records of inbound and outbound communication for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory agencies.

SmarterMail now makes reviewing log files quick and efficient by eliminating the need for multiple tools or applications to view the files from their systems. System Administrators now have the ability to respond to users more quickly by being able to view logs from anywhere in the world using the SmarterMail Web interface. This unique feature, unmatched by other mail servers on the market, allows organizations to save valuable time, money, and resources. System Administrators also have the ability to save and keep records by downloading log files as a .zip file directly from SmarterMail.

The One-Stop Customer Service Solution

SmarterTrack brings all the functionality of a Help Desk, Ticket System, Live Chat, WhosOn, Cost Analysis, Data Mining, Reporting, and Knowledge Base in one software application—delivered through one elegant Web interface. The Event-driven architecture in SmarterTrack empowers organizations to develop and automate SLA policies to optimize customer service efforts into a powerful multi-channel communication portal that delivers value, efficiency, and increased satisfaction. Advanced features such as WhosOn, detailed Data Mining, and a Live Chat invite system enhance marketing performance and dramatically increase conversion rates.

Customer Service Software and More

• Do you need a powerful and measurable Live Chat solution for your Customer Service, Sales, and Management teams?
• Do you need an effective way to report the costs associated with your products, services, teams, or agents?
• Would you like to experience the convenience and power of providing all of your Customer service communications channels though one, track-able interface?
• Do you want to monitor customer traffic on your site and to interact with those customers in real time?
• Do you see value in delivering Knowledge Base articles and News Items to your customers as they need them?
• Would you like to leverage your existing customer information in separate database and applications for authentication or to easily access that information during the Customer Service cycle?
• Would you benefit from a training and coaching solution that will allow managers to monitor and support agents live?

Server and Shared Installations

SmarterTrack can be installed onto a local or co-located server using the standard install download. Additionally, SmarterTrack can be utilized on Shared Hosting accounts at thousands of Web Hosting companies that provide Microsoft Windows™ hosting and SQL Server or MySQL support—allowing for additional flexibility and reduced costs.

Parallels customers can download/install the free edition of SmarterTrack from within Plesk control panels by using Parallels' new Application Packaging Standard (APS). Coming soon, SmarterTrack software will be available as a service (SaaS).

Portal Interface

SmarterTrack includes a Portal Interface that is optimized for search engines and is fully skinnable to match your company's look and feel and to function as the central hub for your customer service channels. Whether you allow anonymous communications, require customers to self-register, or authenticate against your own database, SmarterTrack is the solution.

Leverage assets like Knowledge Base Articles, News Items, and custom fields to pre-qualify customers and to prevent unnecessary Tickets and Live Chats. SmarterTrack accomplishes this dynamically as customers interact with the Portal—reducing agent workload.

Management Interface

The Management Interface is designed to provide agents and managers with a fully functional workspace to manage all aspects of communication, system management, and agent monitoring. Tickets, Live Chats, WhosOn, and Knowledge Base Articles are all within easy reach and fully searchable. SmarterTrack utilizes snapping panes, keyboard shortcuts, pop-up windows, and other intuitive AJAX controls—bringing the features and performance of a desktop application to the Web.

Agents and managers have access to robust reporting tools to monitor performance and costs by agent, department, or the organization as a whole. Additionally, real-time monitoring allows managers to observe all aspects of the system and gives them the opportunity to proactively address issues from the same, intuitive interface.

Inherent Power of Tickets   SmarterTrack incorporates a powerful Ticketing System that exceeds stand alone Ticket products. Through SmarterTrack, Ticket submission and response can be made into a powerful information gathering and distribution tool for customers, agents, and administrators. SmarterTrack will display the complete history of the Ticket emails, transfer notes, associated chats, and comments giving agents a global view and command of all communications related to that Ticket. Resolution Prior to Submission SmarterTrack was built upon the STIndexingEngine to provide virtually instantaneous results to customer queries. KB articles and other information can be displayed automatically for customers as they type into the Ticket submission interface. Key words and tags are searched in milliseconds to provide instant relevant information delivering answers before the question is fully submitted. Reporting on Custom Fields In SmarterTrack, creating custom fields to retrieve additional information about a customer’s issues is easy. Unlike competing products, the ability to report on that information is just as simple. Let your agents benefit from additional information provided, whether it be directly from the customer or automatically linked from an existing customer database. Intelligent Ticket Management SmarterTrack utilizes intelligent routing to distribute Tickets. This concept assigns Tickets to agents who are best positioned to answer them in an efficient manner, as opposed to traditional round-robin distribution. Administrators and managers can assign weights to agents, giving certain individuals more or less of a workload. Managers can also receive each reply an agent sends to a customer by using the quality control feature. The Tickets system is fully extensible allowing for SLA policies or additional distribution methods. Power of Information As agents receive Tickets, SmarterTrack can deliver suggested solutions and responses from related KB articles and previous Ticket resolutions. Agents also benefit from custom fields and pre-qualifying questions that were completed during Ticket submission. Additional features and methods can be utilized to further increase the performance of agents and the organization. Available Anywhere, Anytime Agents can not only respond to Tickets through the Management Interface, but from anywhere in the world. SmarterTrack can be configured to accept and respond to Tickets through email including Blackberry™, Smartphones, and many others devices. This provides agents and managers the ability to deliver top notch customer service without being chained to their desktops.

SmarterTrack incorporates a powerful Live Chat system that exceeds stand alone products. Live Chat represents a great opportunity to provide the appearance of a large organization, the ability to reduce or eliminate long distance calls and charges, and to improve the number of customers that can be serviced concurrently while accumulating information about the customers for reporting. The Customer Portal allows customers to initiate Live Chat and the Management Interface allows agents and administrators to interact with any number of customers from within a Web browser.

SmarterTrack was built upon the STIndexingEngine to provide virtually instantaneous results to customer queries. KB articles and other information can be displayed automatically for customers as they type into the Live Chat submission interface. Key words and tags are searched in milliseconds to provide instant relevant information delivering answers before the question is fully submitted.

In SmarterTrack, creating custom fields to retrieve additional information about a customer’s issues is easy. Unlike competing products, the ability to report on that information is just as simple. Let your agents benefit from additional information provided, whether it be directly from the customer or automatically linked from an existing customer database. More information is available in the Reports and Customization sections.

As agents receive Live Chats, SmarterTrack can deliver suggested solutions and responses from related KB articles and previous Ticket or Live Chat resolutions. Agents also benefit from custom fields and pre-qualifying questions that were completed during the Live Chat submission.

Chat aliases have been included to enable one agent to operate in multiple departments, groups, or escalated situations under multiple identities. This feature provides organizations the ability to give a larger, more professional appearance and a more distinct separation between duties. Agent monitoring and reporting is not affected by the use of aliases.

In addition to standard round-robin and cherry-picking distribution methods, SmarterTrack utilizes an intelligent, configurable routing methodology to distribute Live Chats based upon agent capacity and unique attributes. The Live Chat system is fully extensible allowing for SLA policies or additional distribution methods. SmarterTrack allows managers to monitor all active Live Chats on the system, in a department, or by agent—including the ability to view or search for old chat sessions. Managers can monitor Live Chats in real time—offering “co-chat” or coaching assistance when needed. All Live Chats are maintained in the system and can be searched and recovered for training or

Nothing Overlooked

Although SmarterTrack has substantial features and is equivalent to many independent products, usability features have not been overlooked! An important situation that is often overlooked is how abandoned or lost internet connections for Live Chat sessions are handled. SmarterTrack gracefully tries to re-connect with either the agent or customer, until a connection has been restablished. In situations where a connection can’t be restablished with the agent, SmarterTrack will reassign the Live Chat session back into the queue for the next available agent.

SmarterTrack also includes distinct notifications (visual and audible) to alert agents when a new chat has been put in their queue and to help ensure the best response time. When certain, configurable idle thresholds have been surpassed, the visual notification will begin blinking rapidly and different tones will be heard by the agent to provide intuitive indications of urgency.

Agents can utilize an Away from Keyboard (AFK) feature. The feature gives agents the ability to have a temporary reprieve to catch-up or take a moment for other job responsibilities. Events and Notifications can be assigned to AFK actions so that managers and administrators can be notified immediately.

WhosOn your Website?

The integrated WhosOn feature included within SmarterTrack gives businesses the ability to track customers as they navigate the website in real-time. Agents and managers can invite or “force” customers to a Live Chat—increasing conversions and expediting service. Visitors can be filtered based upon the page(s) they are viewing in order to differentiate between those who are ordering, seeking support, or simply looking for information. Notifications and actions can be created based upon dozens of visit attributes—specific pages reached, time idle, etc.—turning a static website into an interactive marketplace.

WhosOn collects 36 distinct attributes that can be viewed in the active WhosOn page. Each agent and management interface can be individually configured to display different attributes. The Events system can be used in conjunction with WhosOn to trigger automated notifications or to automatically queue Live Chats with visitors based upon any combination of these attributes and additional criteria, including:

• IP Address
• Visitor ID
• Host Domain
• Session Started (time)
• Hits
• Duration (time)
• Idle (time)
• City
• Region
• Country
• Language
• And dozens more

Imagine the options for detailed analytics, reporting, and conversions made possible by the implementation of WhosOn in your Customer Service environment.

Custom and Email Reports

Custom reports allow you to define a report once which can then be delivered on a regular schedule to the executive team, marketing department, sales force, or who ever needs the valuable information. Email reports can be delivered as simple text data or can include intuitive charts.

Experience the power of SmarterTrack’s industry-leading Event-driven architecture as it frees your organization from restrictions found in competing products. For the first time, a fully event-driven Customer Service solution has been created making it possible to automatically escalate, notify, and manage customer service functions and so much more.

• Use automation to establish and manage custom service level agreement (SLA) policies.
• Establish notification profiles to deliver relevant and actionable information to related teams and subject matter experts (SMEs).
• Ensure quality and customer satisfaction by creating QC-related events based upon time and/or content.

SmarterTrack 3.x allows organizations to use event items to trigger an unlimited number of possible actions and notifications

Events can be configured to perform important automated actions to speed information delivery or streamline operations. For example:

• Secondary groups or individual agents can be added when load or wait times exceed company standards automatically bringing fresh resources to where they are needed most and balancing workload.
• Tickets can be automatically escalated when the number of responses or idle time reach certain parameters ensuring quality performance.
• Automatically transfer a Ticket based upon keywords or based upon domain so that one agent or group develops a relationship with a customer segment.
• There is no limit to the possibilities the events system can be configured upon.

Notifications

Alerts can be sent via email, on screen pop-up reminder, and/or SMS messaging. Imagine being able to:

• Know instantly when certain keywords are entered into a Ticket (e.g. “system down,” “quote,” “virus”).
• Identify if an important customer has contacted your sales or support team.
• Be notified when sales and/or support load is going up.
• Receive an email if wait-time exceeds company standards.
• Limitless possibilities.

 

 

Organize Your Organization

SmarterTrack gives administrators and managers the ability to step outside the limitations of pre-defined configurations and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to build their organization. SmarterTrack can help managers to create custom standards, metrics, and structures to suit their individual needs.

Monitor Your Organization

SmarterTrack’s seamless, AJAX Web interface allows for effective management and administration from literally anywhere in the world all in real-time. Settings can be changed, agent activity can be monitored live, and automated and manual adjustments can be easily navigated through the Management Interface.

Automate Your Organization

By utilizing the revolutionary Events system within SmarterTrack, administrators can set the actions field to escalate any issue automatically based upon defined parameters, such as:

• Key words in the subject line
• Number of responses
• Idle time
• Username
• Custom Fields
• Many more individual or combinations of triggers

Definable Structure

SmarterTrack allows administrators to define their company structure departments, groups, and agents in ways that are best suited to specific environments. Agents and administrators can exist in multiple departments or groups, and policies and events can be customized to each. SmarterTrack can be built in either dedicated and shared environments and migrated effectively between the two to provide complete flexibility as your operational needs change. Database functions can be linked to either SQL (Server 2000 or higher) or MySQL (4.1 or higher).

 

Manage Knowledge Resources

SmarterTrack gives users and agents the ability to access the SEO friendly Knowledge Base and News items. The Knowledge Base is organized by category and supports full natural search capabilities to help utilize the KB articles more efficiently. KB articles and other information can be displayed automatically for customers as they submit Tickets through the Customer Portal. Agents can work concurrently on multiple KB articles with the use of pop-up windows.

Find What People are Not Finding  

Administrators and managers can use the advanced reporting features to locate statistics and information on Knowledge Base searches. Managers can know what terms are being searched for that are not yielding results, as well as the number of articles that are found but not relevant to the customer performing

Flexible To Fit Your Unique Needs

Customer Service organizations have unique requirements and SmarterTrack is designed to accommodate them. Custom fields can be required at the Portal and/or be populated from other databases and applications to better deliver vital data and enhance reporting and data mining efforts. Exposed Web services enable the automation of virtually all functions and operations and make them accessable from popular control panels. In addition, the Portal and Management Interface can be custom skinned to maintain brand identity and consistent customer experience.

Custom Fields

Custom fields take life in SmarterTrack:

• Collect important information about your customers and their systems prior to creating a Ticket.
• Deliver accurate and relevant solutions to your customers based upon the information you collect.
• Report on the costs or effectiveness of supporting a particular service or product…made or delivered on a certain day…from one specific data center or distribution point…all through one Web application.
• Provide your agents real-time information into the specific needs and configuration of each customer in a myriad of configurations.

SmarterTrack uses the power of custom fields to accomplish all of this and more.

SmarterTrack is flexible enough to access external databases for user/customer authentication and to populate custom fields based on that data. Customers and agents can now use common log in information and customer-specific details to have data displayed, confirmed, and used in real-time without changing screens or worrying that the data is up to date. Agents can now give detailed responses and solutions based upon the individual specifications and requirements of each customer, reducing time and costs.

SmarterTrack was built with custom configuration and automation in mind. System Administrators have the ability to access the SmarterTrack application via exposed Web services. These allow for the automation of a variety of different tasks:

• Retrieve ticket information
• Query a Ticket(s)
• Create and reply to Tickets
• Monitor the number of active Tickets for your organization
• Much more

SmarterTrack was built using the STInterfaceFramework so both the Customer Portal and Management Interface can be custom skinned to project a consistent customer and agent experience.