In this month’s newsletter

1) Webmail Interface Improvements
2) CIXReader
3) ICUK News

Since our last newsletter, there have been further developments on the CIX platform, including improvements to the webmail interface and the new CIXReader desktop client.

CIX Webmail

On the webmail interface, we are currently testing a new spam filtering delivery system where customers can configure additional rules and the trigger point-score level the system considers an email to be spam.

This was temporarily removed on a per customer basis when we switched the CIX spam filtering service away from JunkScreen back in 2011 to the ICUK hosted platform.

Customers are invited to test this at cix:cix.beta/webmail

CIXReader

Further developments are afoot with the new CIXReader desktop client, with a release pending. Currently in beta 2, with beta 3 being worked on, we’re concentrating to removing important bugs and making the program as easy to use as possible.

The program improves upon Ameol by removing the need to ‘blink’ to download and upload messages, as users now have the option of instant interaction with CIX and read/unread flags are held on the CIX system. This obviously helps with customers that are away from their main computer and can use the web interface or another copy of CIXReader on a laptop and have message read flags and statues in-sync with each machine.

Plans to port to Mac and Linux are also in the pipeline.

If customers wish to try CIXReader, details can be found in cix:cix.beta/cixreader

ICUK News

CIX’s parent company ICUK has joined Superconnected Cities – a voucher scheme run by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to encourage businesses to take up leased lines for superfast internet access. Full information can be found on the website at www.icuk.net/superconnectedcities.

We’re also up for another award! This time the Comms Business Reader Vote award for ISP of the Year. We’d be very grateful for any and every vote we receive:  www.commsbusinessawards.co.uk.

Finally, we’ll be exhibiting at the Convergence Summit North in Manchester in March, on the 11th and 12th. It’s free to attend, so sign up and come and meet the team! We’d love to see you there. http://goo.gl/NbErGm

As some of you may know, CIX is a reseller of the popular Windows email client The Bat!

Full details at http://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/features.php

It’s a highly advanced mail client offering multiple account support, IMAP, TLS, full threading, and is a natural progression for anyone familiar with Ameol2, but wish to upgrade to a more powerful program. The software is available on a 30 day trial period.

RitLabs has recently released 6.1 of the The Bat!, and CIX is able to offer the following prices :-

Professional £37.00
Pro Upgrade £26.00

Home £16.00
Home Upgrade £11.00

To purchase this product, please email solutions@cix.co.uk and we’ll proceed from there.

Prices exclude VAT.

In this month’s newsletter

1) CoSy moves to new hardware
2) Development Corner
3) Newsfeed Articles
4) ICUK turns 12

CoSy moves to new hardware

In October, we were pleased to complete the upgrade of the core CoSy Conferencing system to new CIX hardware. The new CIX hardware now runs Linux Ubuntu, ending 14 years of old Sun hardware. Previously, the old CIX sun box operated on a 5U server, with a manual backup process in place for fail-over.

The new CIX hardware is considerably faster, more reliable and is now part of an automatic real-time fail over cluster; so should one server fail, another can take over the load without the end customer noticing any downtime. Not to mention smaller and more energy efficient ;-).

Customers should notice speed improvements when connecting via an off-line reader, such as Ameol2, and the CIX Forums web interface and API applications.

As part of this upgrade, moderators will be pleased to hear they will be able to ban users from forums they control via CoSy as well as the web interface at http://forums.cix.co.uk/. A new edition of Ameol2 will be has been made available where moderators will be able to implement ‘Ban’ and ‘Unban’ directly.

This now means that none of the original hardware (which came to about four racks worth) acquired in the ICUK takeover in November 2011 is now in use today.

Development Corner

Work is progressing well on a new client-reader for CIX. We are planning on releasing this for beta testing, with alpha-testing already taking place behind the scenes. The idea of the new client will be to interact with the CIX API and CIX Forum systems, with a brand new easy to follow layout, especially aimed at new users who might not be familiar with the Ameol2 ‘offline’ mechanism. Our main development goals are speed, accessibility and keeping the design clutter free and many thanks to Steve Palmer for his continued work on the project.

As part of this development work, we have been looking at the CIX API and making some processes much faster and easier for potential developers to use in order to widen the features CIX can bring to other platforms, and we look forward to more releases and updates over the coming months.

Newsfeed

Don’t forget a few months ago, CIX added the ‘newsfeed’ feature to allow moderators to add external content feeds into forums. Examples of where this has been done successfully can be seen in cix:wendyg.public, cix:tech_news and, as a personal blog writer, at cix:wur. CIX’s own parent company, ICUK, has copies of its own blog posts replicated in cix:icuknet/newsfeed for customers to discuss and highlight articles posted by us.

It is a useful way for moderators to add additional traffic in their forums from external sources.

ICUK turns 12 

On November 8th, CIX’s parent company, ICUK, will turn 12. ICUK in 2013 launched many new products, especially aimed at its growing reseller platform. These include brand new leased line products at extremely competitive pricing, a brand new responsive-design control panel for cross-platform mobile support, a new invoicing and billing platform, a new range of powerful dedicated servers, and hardware upgrades across its broadband network.

In ICUK’s 13th year, we’re planning on more improvements for CIX, more hardware upgrades on the ICUK hosting platform with many more exciting development projects on the horizon.

As always, if you have any feedback for CIX, please post in the cix:cix.customer forum accordingly.

The CIX Team

In our October 2013 CIX Newsletter.

1) Updated API for CIX Forums
2) ICUK Announced as Comms National Awards Finalist
3) Free Membership for Broadband Customers

Updated API for CIX forums

In the last month, Steve Palmer has been working to improve the usability of the API for CIX Forums. We’re currently looking for developers and programmers who would be interested in getting involved with this – a great example being iXolr, the offline reader for iPad and iPhone which is available through the App Store. Working on the API is a great way to get started, and if you’re interested, please drop an email to support@cix.co.uk to be added to the right forums.

ICUK announced as Comms National Awards Finalist!

ICUK are very excited to announce that they are finalists in the ‘Best Channel Software Solution’ category at the 2013 Comms National Awards which will be hosted by Comms Dealer in October at Park Lane Hilton. We are up against 14 other companies so it’s a tough category, but we’re hoping for the best!

Convergence Summit South

We’re also exhibiting at the Convergence Summit South at Sandown Park this week – there’s still time to register if you want to come along too! Just do so here: http://goo.gl/pHg1TT; or on the day.

There’s a new set of blogs coming soon based around our time at Social Media Week in London this year. If you’re interested (as users of the original social network!) then please head to blog.icuk.net to have a read.

Free CIX Membership for Broadband Customers

As we mentioned last month, we are offering full access CIX accounts free to existing users who switch their broadband to ICUK.net. The  sign-up process is simple and the link can be found here: https://www.icuk.net/broadband/internet_signup.aspx?ref=cix.

We will need your CIX login details in order to authenticate your account to qualify for this offer.

ICUK broadband offers great speeds with packages starting at £10, and excellent UK coverage. Our phone lines are open 9am – 5.30pm, Monday to Friday and we answer emails within minutes.

Our full range of packages can be viewed here: http://www.icuk.net/broadband/home_adsl.asp and don’t forget to ask
about Fibre too.

The CIX Team

CIX is pleased to announce an update to the official CIX API which allows third parties to develop solutions based around the CIX Forum services. The update introduces a number of new API methods to make interacting with CIX easier, as well as improvements to existing methods and the introduction of a basic authentication scheme to accompany the existing OAuth authentication mechanism.

Documentation of the API and samples are available at the web site:

http://developer.cixonline.com

Further updates are planned over the coming months. Aspiring developers and other interested parties should join the closed cix.developer forum. E-mail solutions@cix.co.uk if you would like to be admitted.

From 2nd September 2013, all ADSL/FTTC broadband, leased line, dedicated server and reseller customers of CIX’s parent company, ICUK, will be entitled to a FREE CIX Account with full conferencing/forums access and email facilities worth £6.25 per month or £69 per annum.

Frequently Asked Questions

I am not an ICUK Broadband customer
If you do not have broadband ADSL/FTTC with ICUK and you’re paying for your CIX subscription, by switching your broadband to ICUK, you will qualify for a free full CIX account with @cix.co.uk POP3/IMAP email and conferencing/forums access.

How do I sign up for this offer if I’m not an ICUK broadband Customer?
If you’re switching your broadband service, you will need to ask your current broadband provider for a MAC Key. Once this has been obtained, you should choose a package from our site that best suits your requirements at https://www.icuk.net/broadband/broadband_home.asp

Once you have chosen a package, you must use the ICUK/CIX sign up page at https://www.icuk.net/broadband/internet_signup.aspx?ref=cix

This will prompt you for your CIX account details in a secure page and verify you are the CIX account holder, so we can match up the details once the order comes through.

I already have broadband/reseller account with ICUK
If you have a broadband ADSL, dedicated server, or Reseller Hosting/Telecoms account with ICUK, you can qualify for this offer.

As part of this offer, all current ICUK broadband, dedicated server and reseller customers will be offered free CIX accounts in order to bring more users onto the CIX platform.

To associate your CIX account with your ICUK service, please drop an email to solutions@cix.co.uk and we’ll do the rest from there.

I am a shared hosting customer of ICUK, do I qualify?
Customers that just have shared web and email hosting packages, or just have line rental packages with ICUK do not currently qualify for this offer.

Do I need to move my line rental to qualify, as well as broadband?
No, you can just switch your broadband to ICUK and qualify for this service. However, ICUK also offers competitive line rental packages and our team would be keen to quote.

What if I do not switch my services to ICUK?
You will continued to be billed by CIX Online Limited in the same way you currently are.

Will ICUK Customers be able to join CIX for free?
Yes, this offer will be made available to them via the ICUK Control Panel in due time.

More information?
If you wish to know more regarding this offer, or if you’re a current ICUK customer and wish to convert your account, please email solutions@cix.co.uk to discuss this further, or cix:cix.customer/11feedback.

We are pleased to announce that Steve Palmer (spalmer@cix) will be joining the ICUK and CIX development team.

Many of you will be familiar with Steve as the original author who wrote Ameol 1 and 2, and has recently been involved with updating the software with some bug fixes and cosmetic changes.

Steve will be working full time for the company and will be concentrating on a brand new cross platform Client Reader, modernising the CIX API, web services, and maintaining the existing Ameol2 off-line reader in terms of bug fixes and new O/S releases.

We are very excited about this announcement and we look forward to developing enhancing new features and applications for the CIX platform.

If you’d like to know more, please raise a thread in cix:cix.customer/11feedback

Leslie Costar
Director
CIX Online Ltd

We have now introduced an Auto-Responder to the list of features available through http://webmail.cix.co.uk in the Settings | CIX section. There are more details about this on the page.

Here you will also find the ability to edit your CIX mailing list settings.

One other useful feature not previously mentioned is your Email rules log which shows you what we did with each email that comes into your Mailbox.

If you have any queries, please contact us via email to solutions@cix.co.uk or post in cix:cix.support, for support, or cix:cix.customer for feedback.

ICUK would like to invite our customers, their friends and family to our CIX Barbecue 2013 to celebrate 26 years of the CIX Conferencing system.

The event will take place on Saturday July 20th, 2013 at Wyke Down, Andover (web site at http://www.wykedown.co.uk/). We are announcing this now to provide you with plenty of notice for the event.

A free hog roast and first drink will be provided, with alternative catering options for those with a specific dietary requirements available.

There is a camp site on the premises with limited spaces.

Note :-

Customers will need to contact the venue in order to book their own pitch for the night.

Alternatively, there are a number of local bed and breakfasts within walking distance of the venue for those that do not fancy the outdoor sleep over. If you contact the site for camping, please mention you are part of the CIX barbie event for their own records.

Details of local B&Bs can be found at

www.cherrytreesbandb.co.uk
www.picketpiecehouse.com
www.forest-edge.co.uk
www.bournevalleyinn.com
www.accommodationinandover.co.uk

Andover is connected via the A303, which is easily accessible from the A34/M3.

We are hoping to have several non CIX users attend from the ICUK side in order to promote the community aspect of the CIX service.

Please email cixbarbie@cix.co.uk if you wish to attend.

Discussion of this event is welcome in the cix:cixbarbie conference or cix:cix.customer/10feedback

We look forward to seeing you there.

The CIX and ICUK Team

We’re pleased to see that CIX is in the news this week.

You can find one article at

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/01/something_for_the_weekend_keyboard_woes/

And another at

http://thecroydoncitizen.com/croydon-tech-city/croydon-techcity-home-to-europes-first-online-social-network/