We are pleased to announce the release of version 9 of the Control Panel. There are a number of improvements and features including:

1. New level of permission based ‘admin’ control panel
2. Revamped email and SMS notification platform
3. Customer reference
4. Revamped WLR invoice statements
5. Call logs summary page
6. New CSV download options
7. Cosmetic improvements
8. Olympic planning

1. New level of permission based ‘admin’ control panel

There have been three recurring requests that have lead us to develop another level of client control panel. They are typically:

a) Requiring a panel that allows you to specify what a user can see and interact with. Whether that be because they can’t be trusted with certain facilities, or simply that you want to keep things simple.

b) Whereby the existing control panel is suitable for some applications, but can be limiting when multiple parties need to access it (e.g. head office wants to see all the companies phones lines and calls, yet a cost centre really should only be able to see and access lines linked to them).

c) Resellers would like to give privileged access to some of their reseller facilities (e.g. the ability to place orders, or access to the line diagnostic tools), but don’t want to grant full access to everything else housed within the reseller environment.

The resulting panel (known as an ‘admin’ panel) should help deliver solutions which can be simple enough to use and manage, yet powerful enough to encompass a wide range of applications resellers may need to deliver now or in the future. It is optional, and to be used within conjunction with the existing ‘customers’ facility. You will still map hosting plans, broadband accounts, lines and other telecom facilities to a customer. The customer is fundamental from a billing perspective, and this new platform works alongside it to limit what the admin user can view and interact with. In practice this shouldn’t be as complicated as it sounds.

In summary here are some of the features we have developed:

• An admin user can have multiple numbers, lines, broadband, hosting, fax, SMS, and customers assigned to them.
• Permissions allow you to specify what an admin user can and can’t see and interact with.
• Permissions can be set as templates thus saving you time when creating admin users.
• Permissions can be tweaked on a per asset basis (e.g. you want to allow them to see a number, but give them very limited control over that associated asset)
• If permission isn’t granted for a feature (e.g. call records), this icon will not appear, so the user doesn’t feel that they are missing access to something.
• We make it very easy for you, the reseller, to see the assets assigned to an admin user.
• Admin users can be granted the permission to purchase / order services. This could be used for sales staff, and thus you don’t have to hand over the reseller login details.
• Utility permissions can be applied (i.e. allowing them access to tools such as the ‘obtain installation details’ or ‘tariff calculator’).
• It has a unique template which doesn’t mimic the traditional template. It essentially revolves around two pages: the home page, and the accounts / assets page. The assets page uses tabs to separate the services out. A tab will only appear if this asset is enabled. Thus admin users won’t see hosting for example, if you haven’t associated any.
• You can impersonate an admin user like you can with customers.
• We allow resellers to see the password set on an admin’s account. One of the very few times we allow passwords to be seen.

We very much welcome your feedback on this, and hope that this can prove to be a very powerful asset to your business.

2. Revamped email and SMS notification platform

We are aware that our existing email and SMS notifications have been poor at times, especially when system problems occur on our platforms. We have completely rewritten it to ensure that:

• We house a copy of this facility not just within our network, but securely on an external setup for resilience.
• We are able to send targeted emails depending on the fault or marketing offer in question.
• We have simplified the process of sending emails and SMS messages to help speed the process up.
• We now interact with multiple SMS carriers for increased resilience.
• Resellers can now add more than two SMS recipients in their control panel. Email updates will be sent to the ‘general / support’ address held within the ‘Personal Details’ section of the control panel only.

This revamp will help us provide better communication with you in the event of failure.

Please take this opportunity to login to your control panel, hover over ‘Help’ and select ‘Service Status’. Scroll to the bottom of the page and make sure we have up to date SMS details for you and your colleagues.

We welcome your feedback as to whether you would like this developed further for your own use. We could link this with your client control panels and data held in the ‘customers’ section. Ideas are very much welcome.

3. Customer reference

A small update, but worth noting. When you edit a ‘customer’ within your control panel you are now invited to add a customer reference. This has been requested by a number of resellers who want to link this to their accounting packages.

4. Revamped WLR invoice statements

Telecom resellers are encouraged to take advantage of a recent development to the invoice statement breakdown page:

a) Hover over ‘Admin’ and select ‘Invoices’
b) Scroll to the bottom of the page and select ‘Statement Breakdown’
c) Select a WLR statement

Here you can see a breakdown of the invoice we have raised each month. Beside the items you will find confirmation of our wholesale price to you, but we also now reference items including:

• Customer reference number
• Your retail price as per the tariff set for the customer

Hopefully by extracting this data you may find a quicker method of exporting the data for your billing run.

5. Call logs summary page

Some resellers may have already spotted this feature as it was released early. Hover over ‘logs’ and select ‘call logs’ to find a summary of all your phone numbers and their current call spend for this month. This should help spot any unusual spikes in traffic. A second tab is also provided to highlight any zero billing lines, whereby you may expect them to be making calls, however due to alternative CPS or override codes, the traffic isn’t appearing.

Further additions to this page are planned for future releases.

6. New CSV download options

Due to popular demand we have increased the number of pages within your reseller panel that allow you to download a CSV summary of the data shown. You will find the CSV icon beside the ‘search’ facility.

7. Cosmetic improvements

We have made a number of tweaks to the reseller and client control panels. These centre around:

• Coloured buttons linked to their action. This should help make it clearer which button to select, or the consequence of pressing it (e.g. red is primarily used for deletion or cancellation).
• Coloured information boxes are provided to highlight key information on a page.
• The menu bar in the reseller panel will now follow you down a page. This should make it easier to navigate on larger pages.
• Breadcrumbs have now been added to the ready made client control panels. Resellers with custom templates can add them with the addition of the <-breadcrumbs-> tag.

These new styles will work in all browsers, however you will find they show up best in browsers such as Chrome, Safari and the latest Firefox, as they have better support for CSS3.

8. Planning for the Olympics

The Olympics are almost upon us, and regardless of your take on them, it could impact on service levels. At ICUK we have already taken steps to increase the amount of bandwidth available to use from our broadband carriers. We have made sure that the burstable increase is significant, and we hope that no further increases will need to be made during the games. However, neither ICUK, nor our wholesale partners, can really predict how actual usage levels will change during peak hours.