Dear ThePlanet,

Over the years you know I've been nice, and I've even made some friends with the the tech team just from contacting you guys so often. But right now, I have to lay it down how it is. And with Orbit2, I'm completely disappointed and I'm going to explain what was done correctly, and what wasn't.

Orbit 2, Review.

Orbit2 (Generally Speaking)
The Bad: A lot of settings didn't get transferred over. The main one being the server escalation features. Normally if a server is down, I would get all call per the escalation procedures. The problem is that now they're blank.

I used to be able to see the deals going on right on the main page of orbit, why can't I see these anymore? Are you trying to lose sales?

The Hardware section of the Orbit2 control panel shows the status of hardware as always UP. This doesn't make any sense, and I know it's not correct because I've rebooted the server, and during the downtime, checked that page.

Invalid Characters while opening a new ticket. There was an issue we had the mail servers a while ago, and I couldn't open a ticket when I copied the mail logs to the ticket because there was "invalid characters" in the post. I went over to the Orbit1 panel, and I was able to open that ticket no problem.


The Good: It's not boring to look at?

The Menu
The Bad: Thank god you got away from that horrible blue before the launch, but the submenus are all wrong. They should be visible on mouse over, I shouldn't have to make an extra click just to get to a subsection of another section.

The Good: The titles of each section where picked very well, it's extremely easy to find exactly what I'm looking for.

Ticket System
It's all bad here, sorry folks.

The Bad: The new ticket system is a complete flop for me, just irritating in every angle. This is the part of the control panel which should have been upgraded, not the other way around. How? Let me explain..

First of all, opening a ticket is a hassle, mainly because I can't specify which server the ticket is for. With Orbit 1, I had a nice little drop down menu and I could just pick a server. But now I have to do a search, which almost always gives me an error.

The big one.. I can't reply to a ticket without scrolling WAY down the page to the edit button, which of course can be up 50 replies down, knowing my tickets.

What should have been done, was added pages via ajax to the tickets so I can scroll to the next page. There should be an edit button on the top and the bottom of every ticket. And adding a reply to a ticket shouldn't redirect the page twice, it shouldn't even reload the page at all, add the reply via ajax, or just add the reply and reload back to the first page, or ticket if pages don't exist.

It's very hard for me to distinguish which reply is which on the tickets without actually reading something in the alternating colors. Take a look at how forums manage replies on topics, it's very easy to see who replied where and when. But with the Orbit2 ticket system, I just can't tell who's replied and sometimes it's hard to read because of the colors. It's just a bad idea to do it like this. Split the replies up, use some padding and make it stand out a little more, make the text easier to read.

Edit: Can't open tickets in a new tab because the links are handled by javascript.

The Good: I can open a ticket from another ticket. I can hide the huge list of replies to the ticket, but only after I already scroll down and click the edit button.

---
There's more, but the little stuff isn't worth fighting about. I hope this get's traken seriously and someone forwards my review to the correct department.

Thanks for taking the time to write out some of your thoughts XGhozt! A few of the folks on the development side are looking into it, and they'll pass me some points to post back here within the next day or so.

Agree with all the feedback. Another annoyance is that you can not open a ticket in a new window/tab as it is pointlessly using a script to open links.

Its very annoying if your trying to cross reference tickets.

I also do not like the links for the individual tickets. Sometimes I want to refer to another ticket or look at two tickets side by side. In firefox if I middle click or try and open a ticket from the list in a new tab or new window the link is javascript so it doesn't work. The java script:WebForm_DoPostBackWithOptions just results in a new blank tab.

You're right, I forgot about that. There's a few other aspects of the site which cause the same problem.
Added to the topic post.

I also don't like the way they are handling the links, it just makes the page slower (at least for me) and impossible to open multiple pages.

And the one-to-one server bandwidth view isn't working on my Orbit 2.0, I already reported this issue some weeks ago (more than 3...) and it isn't fixed yet.

I'm sure they roll out updates all at once instead of fixing them as they come, be patient.

Here's a quick rundown to at least touch on each of the concerns ... It doesn't make the project any less of a work in progress, but at least it gives some context.

1. Escalation Procedures: We’ve got a little different format for escalation procedures in Orbit 2. The one shown by default is the General Escalation Procedure while the procedures for each specific device are listed on a tab within the details for that piece of hardware. Customers who have a General procedure will see this at the start while those who only have procedures assigned to hardware will have a blank General Escalation Procedure.
2. Current Deals: I’m sure we can easily add the current deals to the side bar on the right of the Home page!
3. Hardware Status = UP: The Hardware Status shown as UP is actually showing the Provisioning status. So when a machine is actually DOWN, it shows as UP in this field because it’s not actually the machine’s power status. We are currently reviewing how to address this issue but you can currently see your machine’s true power status by going to the Remote Management tab within that server’s details and check the ‘Current Power Status’ field.
4. Invalid Characters in a Ticket: We’re doing a revamp of the ticketing page and updating the accepted characters is on that list. It’s in testing right now.
5. Visible Menus on a Mouse-Over: This is a nice idea and I’ll add that to the list of suggestions!
6. Hardware Drop-Down Selection: We’ve gone back and forth on this one because of our customers’ needs. Larger customers with many, many servers cannot use the drop-down because it’s just not feasible. However smaller customers liked its ease of use more than the search. There is no simple answer for this debate, which continues.
7. Edit Ticket button too Far Down: In the ticket revamp is an update to the page so the Edit Ticket button will be available at the top and bottom of the page, so massive scrolling is eliminated.
8. Ticket Comments Hard to Identify: I’ll add this request to the list of suggestions as well.
9. Opening Multiple Tickets: This feature is also covered in the ticketing revamp.

Thanks for the update Kevin! Especially pleased about #9.

Great! Thanks for update. As per #6, the answer is simple. Add an if statement, if the client/user has 10 or less servers, then display the drop down menu, else do the other thing. It's a win-win.

Here's an example of what the menu should be in Orbit2: http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/exampl...izontal-subnav/

http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/exampl...izontal-subnav/ looks great -- the only thing I wish is that there was a touch of delay before the menu disappears or a slightly bigger mouse over area than the visible so it never accidentally disappears on you if you're a bit sloppy with your mousing from a to b. That looks great though and my comment is just a tiny nitpick.

In the demo they have it set to hide when the mouse moves away from the menu. That can easily be disabled.

I'll agree with the comments regarding popping links in new tabs - i did this the other day to see the bandwidth graphs of all our servers, and having then clicked on 'rtg' to get the graph showing, i was presented with the same graph over and over. Rather than the graph per server. I have just reported this as a bug to the email provided.