Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed
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We've got Postcards up and running and overall it works great. Easy to install, messages work easily. So far, we've found two enormous limitations that seem to heavily impact being able to use it, however. Hopefully these are easy to address, but they are at least super important to know if you are going to install and use this.
One Number to One User: Each user can see and use only a single number and each number can go to only one user. So if you have a team that needs to monitor an SMS channel, they'd all have to log in as the same user, which defeats the purpose of users. This is, AFAIK, the most common use case of SMS in business, so this is pretty important.
Can Only Log In In One Place at a Time: To solve the problem above, you can create a shared team account and just share the password. Bad, but it should work. However, when you do this, whenever someone else signs in with the credentials, it kicks out everyone else (but doesn't alert them.) So this is just sort of broken. Even if you just need to be logged in to multiple places at once like I often am around the house, it's a big problem.
Address Book is Both Universal and Not: Yeah... so. User 1 adds Customer X to their address book. User 2 cannot see User 1's address mappings so doesn't know whose number they are looking at. BUT, User 2 can't add that user into their own address book because it's already in User 1's!
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Yup. These make it completely useless for a business.
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@scottalanmiller If you Refresh (F5) your browser while sitting at the Postcards user interface, you will have to re-login. This drove me nuts while trouble shooting and wondering if the sms had arrived but not rendered on the screen.
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@JasGot said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
@scottalanmiller If you Refresh (F5) your browser while sitting at the Postcards user interface, you will have to re-login. This drove me nuts while trouble shooting and wondering if the sms had arrived but not rendered on the screen.
Yeah, definitely seeing that.
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The 1:1 relationship between a user and a phone number is by design. We didn't build it to allow for more than one user corresponding on a particular phone number at a time (hence the can only login in one place at a time).
The Address Book should be unique per user, but user 2 not being able to add a duplicate value sounds like a bug.
Login persistence between sessions (the F5 annoying thing) is simply incomplete. So you can classify it as a bug for now, and will be fixed in version 1.2.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
The 1:1 relationship between a user and a phone number is by design. We didn't build it to allow for more than one user corresponding on a particular phone number at a time (hence the can only login in one place at a time).
It's the number one design change that we would request. It completely cripples it as a business system. I realize it's a demo, but that's the absolute top "how SMS is used" item. I can't think of any real scenario where the design it has now would be appropriate.
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@scottalanmiller said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
The 1:1 relationship between a user and a phone number is by design. We didn't build it to allow for more than one user corresponding on a particular phone number at a time (hence the can only login in one place at a time).It's the number one design change that we would request. It completely cripples it as a business system. I realize it's a demo, but that's the absolute top "how SMS is used" item. I can't think of any real scenario where the design it has now would be appropriate.
It is why I am not using it after going through all of the damned trouble weeks ago to get it set up.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
Login persistence between sessions (the F5 annoying thing) is simply incomplete. So you can classify it as a bug for now, and will be fixed in version 1.2.
But what about the same user on multiple machines, since the system is designed 1:1, that's a show stopping oversight.
It feels like artificial limitations being put in that block user functionality, why not leave it open to being useful? Is there some simple code to be removed to fix these issues? Is it that simple?
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@scottalanmiller said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
Login persistence between sessions (the F5 annoying thing) is simply incomplete. So you can classify it as a bug for now, and will be fixed in version 1.2.
But what about the same user on multiple machines, since the system is designed 1:1, that's a show stopping oversight.
It feels like artificial limitations being put in that block user functionality, why not leave it open to being useful? Is there some simple code to be removed to fix these issues? Is it that simple?
You can review the source code on Bitbucket
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But what about the same user on multiple machines, since the system is designed 1:1, that's a show stopping oversight.
It feels like artificial limitations being put in that block user functionality, why not leave it open to being useful? Is there some simple code to be removed to fix these issues? Is it that simple?
The single login per computer is probably pretty easy to change, and I can add that to the change request. That would allow for both multiple logins on different computers, and would allow for something like "[email protected]" for the main company number.
Both of these limitations are related to security concerns our developers had. We've seen people transmit information via SMS that they really shouldn't (credit card numbers, SSNs, etc), and so they went a little heavy on the security.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
Both of these limitations are related to security concerns our developers had.
You don't design from developers. You design from business need / use case.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
We've seen people transmit information via SMS that they really shouldn't (credit card numbers, SSNs, etc), and so they went a little heavy on the security.
You do not fix stupid by making a solid technical solution useless.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
The single login per computer is probably pretty easy to change, and I can add that to the change request. That would allow for both multiple logins on different computers, and would allow for something like "[email protected]" for the main company number.
That would be huge. Make a massive difference to every day use. Both us internally, and every customer we have that uses texts need this to be able to use it beyond just seeing if the code works.
It's not exactly how we'd want it if we were designing it, but it makes it nearly always useful.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
Both of these limitations are related to security concerns our developers had. We've seen people transmit information via SMS that they really shouldn't (credit card numbers, SSNs, etc), and so they went a little heavy on the security.
If everyone did that, we'd never be able to use phones or emails. It's great to think about security, but it has to remain useful
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@JaredBusch said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
We've seen people transmit information via SMS that they really shouldn't (credit card numbers, SSNs, etc), and so they went a little heavy on the security.
You do not fix stupid by making a solid technical solution useless.
Yeah, this didn't stop people from sharing the info, it only made us unable to track or control who got access. It specifically made it less secure and forced us to expose the exact data they thought they were protecting because now we HAVE to share a password instead of controlling accounts.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
Both of these limitations are related to security concerns our developers had. We've seen people transmit information via SMS that they really shouldn't
As @scottalanmiller would say, that's an HR issue, not a technical issue.
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@scottalanmiller said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
@JaredBusch said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
We've seen people transmit information via SMS that they really shouldn't (credit card numbers, SSNs, etc), and so they went a little heavy on the security.
You do not fix stupid by making a solid technical solution useless.
Yeah, this didn't stop people from sharing the info, it only made us unable to track or control who got access. It specifically made it less secure and forced us to expose the exact data they thought they were protecting because now we HAVE to share a password instead of controlling accounts.
Frankly - if the SMS number itself is going to be shared, I would assume everyone who has access needs access to any and all messages received so everyone is on the same page. So sure, it's less secure because sharing single username/password, but the data itself it's any more or less secure, because all the same people would likely still have access to it.
That said - I see both sides of this. non IT/security people just don't seem to give two shits about security and are just as likely to post their SSN on the side of their car as they are to protect it.
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@Dashrender said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
That said - I see both sides of this. non IT/security people just don't seem to give two shits about security and are just as likely to post their SSN on the side of their car as they are to protect it.
There is no "both sides of this" at all. This is a business tool. Business tools that are unable to be used in an intelligent fashion are useless.
@Skyetel Postcards was waste of hours of my time.
I have customers that absolutely would love a simple solution like this to send and receive text messages from their main number. But a crippled solution as Postcards is now is useless to them.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:
The single login per computer is probably pretty easy to change, and I can add that to the change request.
Seems like this died on the vine
I would love to make use of this if the issues raised above were resolved.
