Hi folks, it’s time for another update on apnscp esprit and everything going on with Apis. As you may know, I have been busy rewriting and automating the account setup process after roughly three years of sidelining it in favor of other tasks, like writing apnscp esprit. esprit has matured into a well-featured product, so it’s back to the basics and hopefully this will, in the long run, free up more time for me to go back to what I do best— server engineering.
Be on the lookout for a voluntary survey within a week or two asking for your opinions on Apis and your views of esprit’s product positioning. I have conducted a few focus group sessions with users in the metro Atlanta area to get a better understanding of what needs to be done with esprit. Every time the major shortcoming appears to be common tasks tend to be more difficult while more difficult tasks tend to be easier. I’ll be exploring this criticism in-depth within the coming weeks and I would like to ask everyone to please be sure to think about what can be done to improve esprit over the next few weeks. Just jot it down on a piece of paper or in Notepad if you stumble across something that comes across as cumbersome.
Having said that, esprit will be in a feature freeze until the usability aspects are properly addressed. Following the UI tweaks, I’ll be working on adding reseller support to the control panel and bring everything together, such as seamless user/account switching. I would expect these changes to carry into at least October, with the first leg, the survey, coming in late July.
– Matt