Multi-Brand, Multi-Urls And Single Backend?

[webjive]

Its great to see that Blesta can be multi-company/multi-brand. What we're looking for is multiple brands with URL's but, just one backend URL to manage support and billing from. Can Blesta do this?  The reason I ask is, switching between backends for support people adds to the headaches.

 

Thanks

[Michael]

Hello mate,

Yes you can, for example account.whatever.com and account.hello.com are different completely. But you can log into account.whatever.com and click the dropdown and select Hello company and manage that, then switch back on one window. As shown on: http://www.blesta.com/2013/05/02/blesta-3-0-multi-whaaat-video/

[Paul]

As Mike said, you can switch companies as an admin with a simple dropdown at the same URL. Each company is very much separate in terms of the UI, so you'll only see Company A when Company A is selected for example.

 

One other major advantage is that your staff members can have different roles at different companies. Let's say you have a staff member named John, and you want him to handle support in Company A, Billing in Company B, full access to Company C, and NO access to Company D, E, and F. You can do that, and they can switch between companies they have access to, having just those ACL permissions you set for them, and the permission options are extensive.

 

This goes beyond what most people see as "multi-brand" because of the separation and ACL permissions. When you are "in" a particular company, you see only that companies clients, services, transactions, reports,.. everything. And, you can customize your dashboard, and billing overview widgets separately too.

[webjive]

Thanks. Not quite what I was hoping for. The multi-brand we are looking for (I could be way off base on expectations) is a multi-brand frontend with an admin login where you don't have to switch between companies. For instance, when you go to look at invoices, your seeing all invoices for all brands and they are highlighted depending on which brand or client group they belong too. The most important is when a communication goes out, that it's completely branded as well.

 

This way operators don't have to switch between backend brands and can see everything from outstanding ticket, invoices, etc.

 

I'm not sure but, with your approach, you would have to switch in the backend to see any new tickets, correct?

[Paul]

Communications are completely branded yes, as each company has its own set of email templates. Each company/brand in Blesta is completely unique in terms of branding and settings, they are as close to separate installations as you can get without having separate installations.

 

You would need to switch from Company A to Company B to see tickets in Company B with Blesta multi-company. It's possible to have different support departments, different email addresses for those departments, different ticket importing (pop/imap/piping), different staff access levels to departments, and more, across companies. Different predefined responses, and different staff signatures for tickets too.

 

It sounds like you want a sort of hybrid between multi-company and multi-brand. It would be possible, with changes to the code, to allow the support manager to display tickets across companies but not without compromise.

 

Perhaps a sort of "Company Overview" widget would be useful, where you could see an overview from any company of all the support tickets open in each company, and click to switch companies to view them. This would give you a birds eye view without having to switch companies to see what's going on. This could be implemented as a plugin, and we are open to these kinds of ideas.

 

We see multi-company as so much more than multi-brand and it's been very popular so far among those displeased with the existing half baked multi-brand options out there.

[webjive]

Agreed, they present their challenges. A dashboard widget would probably solve the issue or, maybe a bar across the top of the page (see attached image) since you have a lot of unused real-estate. The you could have a birds-eye view of all open tickets. That's where we spend a majority of our time, tickets. When its out of sight, it's out of mind for staff.

 

[Michael]

Agreed, they present their challenges. A dashboard widget would probably solve the issue or, maybe a bar across the top of the page (see attached image) since you have a lot of unused real-estate. The you could have a birds-eye view of all open tickets. That's where we spend a majority of our time, tickets. When its out of sight, it's out of mind for staff.

 

Not sure about that from my point of view too cramped, maybe the widget like the system overview like Paul said but Company overviews or a Tab saying companies and you can see stuff there, I use Multi-company and I feel as a customer one of them would be good for your idea .

[webjive]

Yes, something like a dashboard so you can see outstanding tickets, invoices, and other relevant info so that operators aren't having to be proactively switching around to find open items.

[Paul]

The layout is fluid, so the amount of real estate in the header varies, and in terms of UX I prefer to keep things clutter free. A dashboard widget would be preferable, and also.. plugins can create overlay menus which could appear on every page, for example in the bottom right of the browser window. There's a lot of options but the important thing is that the branding for each company is completely independent and customizable. 

[webjive]

I had some time to think about this over the weekend... For us, having multi-brand is important which is why we're using WHMCS and Intouch from GoHigherIS.com. Now, this solution isn't optimal but, what it has taught us is the importance of having a backend that makes it easy for support and management to keep up with activities. Here's what I mean by that..

 

Right now Blesta has you switch between brands/companies via a dropdown whereas WHMCS/InTouch differentiates clients via Client Groups. IMHO, this is method is better than a widget showing numbers then having to again manually switch to the company you want to manage on the backend. 

 

Dropping the company selector on the backend and using coloring to differentiate clients would be way easier on support and billing staff IMHO, OR having the admin seamlessly switch when clicking links to handle tickets, then have a HOME link somewhere to take you back to a master admin screen for all company views. Another way to handle this make company switching seamless depending on the task (support, invoices, emails, etc). and use template overrides to color the headers differently so that you know which company your operating in.

 

The whole single admin, client group approach has grown on us with WHMCS, even if it isn't true multi-brand. Trust me, we're all looking for that unicorn to help us break the WHMCS monopoly...

 

Thoughts?

[Michael]

The whole single admin, client group approach has grown on us with WHMCS, even if it isn't true multi-brand. Trust me, we're all looking for that unicorn to help us break the WHMCS monopoly...

 

I know what your saying but WHMCS is made for one system, it's not really multi-company, it's more of just changing the theme. ?systpl=whatever2

 

It's a bit like GoDaddy, they own Media Temple now (mt) they are separate identities and are completely different, so if you was to use Blesta the main guys at the top would be able to in one place manage both companies without having to remember two usernames / passwords, etc. But the customers see a billing system branded for them, and the staff don't know any difference.

[webjive]

Somewhat agree.. Just as much effort goes in on the support side of the system and when mistakes happen, or things get missed, customers get angry. Having the Blesta admin be more multi-company cohesive would cut down on this. The more manual steps you have, the easier it is to overlook small things or make mistakes. We've made our share!

 

I agree that Blesta has a true multi-xxx offering but, having to switch between them on the backend isn't optimal in a support/customer support role. The support staff's experience is almost as important as the customers... 

This is a good discussion and I hope the take-away opens up the door for a better admin solution. I just don't think widgets are the full answer for the support experience. It needs to be more seamless with visual queues as to what client/company your working with either via template overrides or content highlighting or other visual queues.

[mrrsm]

I think that there are good ideas here, it seems like the main issue may be in support as you may want to hire support people to manage all the companies at once.

If the support manager could combine all of the relevant customer data for the companies they have permission to see they could manage everything in one place. 

 

Personally I would want to have billing, transactions, etc separate but having the combined support would be useful.

Edit: maybe even a special support plugin for multi-brand installs to do this

[Paul]

Personally I would want to have billing, transactions, etc separate but having the combined support would be useful.

Edit: maybe even a special support plugin for multi-brand installs to do this

 

Yep, the spectacular thing about this is that the support system is a plugin. Tweak it, write a new one, etc. You can make it work any way you want, without changing the core. We may do something in the future to bridge the gap between companies where it makes sense, and support is one of those areas that it seems could benefit from this. Still, what we did was boil down multi-brand to the lowest common denominator and the result was multi-company. The other guys would have to redesign their entire software from the ground up. We know, because that's what we did. Multi-company was part of the plan before a single line of code was written, it's part of the foundation of Blesta.

 

We appreciate the feedback!

[ServZoo]

@webjive has some good points and I can see where that might be important to some hosts (glad to see you on the forum.) However, for me, it actually works better the way it's designed out of the box. I run several companies and some of them don't share staff. For instance, my SSL brand doesn't share staff with my shared hosting brand. I like the fact that it's separated based on what their user group allows to access.

 

What I like about Blesta over WHMCS is that is modular, like Paul said, you can swap out the support system without having a major meltdown. It has taken me awhile to get accustomed to Blesta as I am a WHMCS convert, but it just works for me now and I can't imagine going back. The things that used to make me say "why does this not do X?" actually make more sense. 

[webjive]

@servzoo, I think what we're seeing is that we both have different needs for our respective businesses. Right now our model is multi-brand with shared staff, under one company. After being in IT and management for a few decades, I can see where some things would fall through the cracks if we don't have visibility into all tickets, etc. from a central spot in the system in a shared staffing model.

 

This is why we invested in having InTouch built for WHMCS, to have a single backend with multiple customer portals. GoHigherIS, the developers, have taken it way beyond what we had originally scoped out with them based on customer feedback and it's in the sweet spot right now.

 

But, where WHMCS falls short is actually being able to handle true multi-brands on the frontend via multiple URL's. Even that scenario has its challenges when it comes to SSL certs since all the code lives in a single cPanel account. That presents another set of challenges.

 

What I would be discouraged to see is that Blesta sticks with a single model, which would make some companies forgo switching to another system because there's no latitude to consider other business models.

 

 

[ServZoo]

I see where you are coming from and I can see the benefits. I know you and I have chatted before on Twitter and you have invested in a number of customizations to make it work for you. It might be the same thing with Blesta in terms of making the backend for you since it's modular and can do what you want with a bit of tweaking. I, personally, would much rather do that then work with the hack of WHMCS' front-end modifications.

 

I can't imagine it would be that difficult to accomplish what you need with a bit of custom development. It's the front-end that needs to work in general. I mean, what I'm getting at is that WHMCS is not and has not been designed for the purpose you are using it for. Blesta is designed for it, just not handling certain parts the way you would want. You can fix those parts to your liking and know that the overall system is stable.

 

Just my two cents for the day! 

[webjive]

Agree totally, WHMCS is a single company billing product and we are shoe-horning that functionality onto it. The big challenge we face right now with the switch is all the WHMCS add ons we run. One biggie is cPanel extended, which we just paid for more customization for Modules Garden to add the ability for clients to restore previous days (restore points) form the WHMCS client area instead of logging their cPanel to do it. The reason for all these customizations is that our support calls are way higher when we have clients trying to deal with cPanel vs WHMCS's client area screens that we can tweak, unlike cPanel screens.

 

I feel that by the time BLESTA hits 3.4 or better, it will be closer to feature parity with WHMCS and we can start looking into a move, if it makes business sense. But, with companies like Modules Garden turning out high quality add ons for WHMCS, it's hard to break the "lets fix it" with another add-on mentality. I wish there were another development company with the pockets that Modules Garden has that would dedicate time to Blesta to create more of these powerhouse add ons. Also there doesn't seem to be a Blesta page where developers can list their addons so that we have companies to reach out to.