New vPanel BETA Release

[VOIPoTim]

We're very excited to announce that we will be opening up our newly redesigned vPanel for everyone tonight.

To access the BETA release of the new vPanel, you'll simply use your existing login info at the new panel URL. The initial release is only for residential and small business customers. In the future, we will migrate resellers and cloud/express customers to the new design as well.

Remember, this is a BETA release so there may still be bugs in it and it still will lack some polish. For the time being, both the old and new vPanels will be accessible so if there is a bug in the new one, simply report it and use the old one.

vPanel: https://secure.voipo.com/

New vPanel BETA: https://beta.voipo.com/

The new vPanel BETA will be accessible at 11:59PM Pacific Time tonight.

[VOIPoTim]

The new panel is now accessible at https://beta.voipo.com for anyone that wants to try it.

Please remember that this is a BETA release and still needs some work. It will very likely still have problems. We're going to be going through it page by page over the next few weeks to polish it and finish up any cosmetic changes.

We're also going to be adding documentation to each feature page. Documentation is an area we've been lacking in and with the new panel, we are actually going to document every feature right in the control panel so the information is very easily accessible.

It definitely still needs a good amount of polishing and tweaking, but even with that, it's miles ahead of the old one. We feel it's ready for everyone to begin testing since most of the remaining changes are cosmetic.

The #1 complaint about the old panel was the navigation and "menus within menus" due to multiple levels of subnav. The biggest change you'll notice in the new version is that the navigation is all alphabetical and organized into just 4 categories (Account, Features, Support, BETA). Within those categories, all options are alphabetized and accessible on every page. There is also a pop out "sitemap menu" on the left which has ALL pages linked (again grouped into the 4 categories and alphabetized).

In the BETA area, some new features have been added such as the ability to enable SMS for sending/receiving text messages on VOIPo numbers. Currently, SMS is available on about 80% of our numbers. We're working with our carriers to get it enabled on the others and hope to have it available for nearly all of them.

There is also a new SMS Control feature which allows you to register a mobile device with us and then text our shortcode 27061 simple commands like "DND OFF" to control various features.

There are quite a few more subtle feature changes throughout the panel as well with more on the way. An example change is "Caller ID - Outgoing" now lets you submit a name for insertion in the Caller ID database. Before we did not offer Outbound CNAM.

We'll be posting more details about the design/nav changes and all the new features during the coming weeks and months in the forum thread the OP linked to. There are still a few more we plan to add as well. We'll be able to roll out new features and documentation easier now because before there's always been this hesitation with new features because "we're going to have a new vPanel soon" and if we do this, we'll be redoing it next month. Now that the new design structure is there and in place, we can more rapidly roll things out.

Both panels will run for the time being. The old one at secure.voipo.com and the new one at beta.voipo.com. They use the same data so you can use both. At this time this panel is ONLY for our residential/small business customers.

Eventually once we're confident all bugs in the new one are squashed, we'll phase out the old one and at that time roll it out to the other account types (cloud/express/reseller) at that time.

Overall, we're very excited about the new panel and think it will be a HUGE enhancement for everyone. I can agree that it's very overdue.

If you're a VOIPo customer, please help us test it out and use the "Report Bug" link in the header of it to report anything you run across. We have a list of bugs we know of and we'll be going through page by page for the formatting/cosmetic issues, but it's better to have too much info than not enough when it comes to bug reporting. Worst case...you may report something we already know of.