Chris Fullman is hosting a panel at SXSW on How to Be an Emergency Response Technician (ERT) and he's got some Lighthouse and Tender Support accounts to give away!

Tuesday, March 16th at 5pm in the Austin Convention Center room 7:

For many small businesses, the need for an IT person (aka “Emergency Response Technician” or “ERT”) often falls on one employee who primarily has non-IT responsibilities. This humorous presentation will offer valuable tips and philosophies to improve the productivity, prioritization and sanity of that often-overwhelmed individual.

http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/5233

Good customer support and the ease of user feedback are critical to the success of any indie developer. Aral Balkan, founder of Naklab, is no stranger to this. Aral uses both Tender Support and Lighthouse to maintain a streamlined workflow, making things as easy as possible for for him and his application's users.

"Tender has several killer features. The most important, for me, is the rich integration options Tender has: the API, Lighthouse integration (and, in turn, Lighthouse's Github integration). Beyond that I love how customizable it is: I make it look exactly as I want. And, of course, it just works. It has all the characteristics I try to imbue my own apps with." - Aral

Aral’s iPhone applications, 'Avit and Feathers, bring customer support and user feedback to the front line by directly integrating with Tender Support.

We just deployed a new feature to Tender Support called Filters. Filters let you automatically sort and apply actions to new discussions that come in to your Tender site.

We also cleaned up the form views, improved syncing reliability with multiple Lighthouse projects, added versioned CSS to avoid conflicts with UI updates for those running custom CSS on their Tender site, added custom email templates and put a little bit of polish on the discussion cacheing code.

Filters in action

Tender Plus accounts allow for up to 10 filters. Tender Premium accounts allow for up to 30 filters. Filters are not available on Tender Basic accounts. (Update: you can now have 2 filters on the Basic plan) Note: you can create more filters than your plan allows, but it'll only run the filters up to your limit.

If you are unable to bump up the volume and listen to my beautiful screencasting voice, you're in luck since I'm going to reiterate the contents of this screencast in the rest of the post.

We just shipped a new custom email feature! This lets you define your outgoing comment notification emails to customers, one per category (or share them, one for multiple categories).

Why is this useful?

• Keep all your support in email by not displaying the "View this online" URL link. Your customers don't need to see Tender at all!
• Add a more human touch to your company's support.
• Translate it to your actual language, rather than mine.
• Put in that footer stuff, including address and contact phone number.
• ASCII Art!

It's pretty straightforward: go to your dashboard, site settings, email setup, mail templates. There is a default template we give you with all the variables. It uses the Liquid templating language. Just make sure you keep the ========== line and the rest is up to you.

Next!

We just rolled out an update to Tender Support which includes two new features and a little bit of style polish to the supporter dashboard.

So what's new?

• Companies
• User Inboxes

For more details on the new features, please continue reading.

Tender Support and Lighthouse will undergo server maintenance at 10 a.m. PST (-8 UTC) on Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010.

The services will be unreachable for approximately 2 hours. All incoming emails will be reprocessed once the systems have been brought back online. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Follow @tenderapp or @lighthouseapp on Twitter for live updates during the maintenance window.

Updates

2010-01-24 @ 12:45 PST
We're back up. All emails that came in during the maintenance window have been processed and everything on the systems look good. If you experience any issues, please let us know. Thank you for your patience.

We recently finished up a big push for better Tender integration:

• Multiple Lighthouse Projects
• Webhooks
• Updates to Multipass integration
• More API docs

We are getting ready to roll out one of the most highly requested features on Tender Support, multiple Lighthouse instances per Tender site.

Tonight, at 9:00 pm PST (-8 UTC), we will be implementing the first of a two phase process required to add the new feature.

Yesterday, we encountered strange job queue behavior that resulted in discussions being delayed with the indexing, assets were not processed, and an isolated case where incoming emails were not processed.

The issues are now resolved.

User feedback is an essential part of software development. For many of us, it's the lifeline that polishes our products.

This post is to share what is currently in view on the roadmap for Tender Support.

It’s too easy to let the little things slide by unnoticed. Bug fixes, tweaks, and additional minor functionality are pushed to Tender Support all of the time.

Below are the most recent changes and additions to Tender.

As most of you are well aware, we’ve spent the last few days troubleshooting heavy response times on Tender Support.

Current status

As of 4:30 p.m. PDT, the brunt of the problem appears to be behind us. In the meantime, we’re keeping a close watch on things for when traffic escalates on Tuesday morning. We’re also still going through the data to double check that nothing was lost. So far, all data has been kept intact and delivered.

We would also like to formally apologize about the severity of the issue. We’re just as dependent on our support system as our users and felt their pain every step of the way.

For those of you curious as the the specifics of the server issues, as well as what steps we are taking to prevent it from occurring in the future, please continue reading…

After a weekend of troubleshooting in response to the Tender Support server delays on Friday, Monday has shown no mercy as usage picks back up to normal.

Currently, the servers are suffering from extremely heavy response times, causing frequent timeouts and delay in email processing.

Over the weekend we took extra precautions by adding additional resources to the server as well as some extra caching measures.

We are currently working side by side with our host to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

You can also follow us on Twitter for continuous status updates

Early this morning, I was woken up with some urgent Tender news: requests were taking an abnormally long time to run.