For the last year and a half or so, we’ve been using Get Satisfaction to power the Slife Labs forum. If you go to our community page on the site, you will see that it has engaged hundreds of Slife users in very productive conversations with us. It does work, and is pretty cool.
However, from time to time we hear from some of you that the Get Satisfaction interface is not what you would like to use. So, with that in mind, we set out on a small journey to find out what others options are available out there in the community and forum software space.
As it turns out, there are some great options. The one we liked the most is called Tender and is designed by a very talented group of people up in Portland. We even created an account and started playing with it. It looks great and seems very simple, straightforward to use.
Now comes the question to you. We are considering leaving Get Satisfaction and using Tender from now on. The obvious downside is that we probably wouldn’t be able to move all the GS discussions over to Tender. But we would be moving to a great forum platform, that would be all about Slife Labs.
What do you think? Are you getting enough satisfaction in our forums or would like to see a change? Since this is about what the community prefers, your input is key. Let us know.
You might have noticed how quiet the Slife Labs blog was over the last few weeks. The reason for that is because we were working really hard on a whole new push for Slife and Slife Teams.
Today we are really excited to announce the release of the Slife 2.0 Platform. In addition to an update to the Slife Mac client, we are also releasing Slife for Windows and Slife Teams.
Let’s dive in a little deeper and look at each product one by one.
The Slife 2.0 client for MacOS X has been available for free for the past 4 months or so. It’s been really popular and we are very pleased that so many people have found it useful and incorporated it in their ‘digital’ lives. Today, we are releasing an update, v2.0.2, that addresses a few issues and makes it fully compatible with Slife Teams. This is a minor release, and we are planning a v2.1 update in a few weeks that will include new features and bring together some of the feedback we got from users over the last several months.
After a long period of beta testing, Slife v2.0 for Windows is also out of the gates today. It’s very similar to the Slife client for the Mac, and includes an almost identical feature set. You can create ‘Activities’ to aggregate your computer interactions, view your computer usage by application, documents and much more. Like the Mac version, it’s also completely free.
Slife Teams is a new team-based communication and activity analytics web service that we introduced a few months ago. It works alongside the Slife client and is a great way for workgroups to keep track of their collective activities. Until now, we’ve been testing it extensively with invite users and teams, and today we are opening the service to everyone. Teams is a subscription-based service, based on the number of users on your team – $10 user/month. But you can create your account and try it for free for 30 days. You can find out more details on the Slife Teams site.
On top of the software releases, you will also notice that we’ve updated the look of the web site a bit and also made available a few new help resources. We’ve just published three short user guides, one for Slife Mac, one for Slife Windows and one for Slife Teams. They are meant to serve as an introduction to these products, describing in more detail how to set up activities, interpret the visualizations, configure Slife Teams, etc. We will be improving the guides as we move forward.
As always, we would love to know what you think about our new products and initiatives. Your feedback has been instrumental in the development of Slife until now and we can’t wait to make the Slife Platform 2.0 even better and more relevant to your needs.
One question we’ve been asked a few times since we officially released Slife 2.0 yesterday is, ‘What if I bought a Slife license recently? Can I get a refund, since Slife is now free?’.
And our answer is, ‘Absolutely!’
So, If you’ve bought a license within the last 30 days, get in touch with us and we will be happy to give you a refund. We can either refund your credit card or get you an iTunes gift card.
A New Year is almost here, so it’s time for some Slife Labs housekeeping!
We’ve been making small changes throughout the site in preparation for some new goodies we will make available soon. But today, we made a more significant change, so I thought I would write a short post here.
Remember how I created a Slife Labs community on Satisfaction about 3 months? Well, starting today we are putting our now old forum to sleep and using Satisfaction as our new tech-support, suggestion, comment backyard.
So create your account and check it out. What’s nice is that when you sign up with Satisfaction, you get an account that works with lots of other cool communities, such as this and this and this.
Last but not least, don’t forget that our chat line is open Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in the morning. Set up your alarm clock one of these days and come chat with us. But not during the holidays. We will take it easy.
The other day we found out about Satisfaction and it seems like it’s a great service for people to come together and discuss ideas, problems and offer suggestions around companies and products.
You create an account and participate in as many conversations as you want. We added Slife Labs to their system, so go check it out and get the conversation going.