Wednesday, January 28, 2009

It’s release time!  Our team has been cranking away on an update to the Calliflower conference calling and document sharing service for the last few weeks.  We’ve made some subtle, but important changes that I’m excited to share with you.

First, we’ve done some things to improve the searchability of conference calls created with Calliflower.  This is the beginning of a wholesale change in how we think about and expose public content, including the conference calls, text chat, and any shared documents, to the web. Previously, all conference calls had been behind the Calliflower login “firewall”, which prevented Google from searching and indexing them. Now, upcoming public calls and past public calls can be accessed without having to have a Calliflower account or to be logged into a Calliflower call.  In fact, those calls are also viewable when in progress, although to participate or listen, users will still have to be logged into Calliflower for the time being.  The same is also true for access to the shared documents – for now, you’ll have to be logged into the call.  

Because Calliflower conference calls can now be indexed by search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo, they are discoverable by people looking for information on particular topics. To help speed up how quickly those calls are indexed, they will also become part of the sitemap of the Calliflower site. Our hope is that this new approach will provide substantial value to our users by helping potential participants  more easily discover conference calls of interest. Our goal is that if you’re holding a teleclass on weight loss, for example, searchers looking for this kind of content will be able to find it within 24 hours of your creating the call. 

Second, we’ve upgraded the document sharing features to include Office 2007 and Mac Office 2008 formats.  At our launch, if you were using those products, you had to down convert your files or save to PDF.  Now you won’t have to take those extra steps.

Thirdly, we’ve overhauled the sign-up process and our website in order to simplify the experience of becoming a Calliflower user.  It was simply too hard.  We watched, listened and responded.

There also numerous bug fixes, including adding Google Chrome as one of our supported browsers. More users are now using Chrome to access Calliflower than are using Safari.   We’ve also made some changes in the interests of usability, such as bumping up the size of fonts on the pages in order to make them more readable.

Let us know what you think!  And see if you can find the Easter egg hidden in the application… hint, it’s a certain vegetable. 

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