CompleteFTP as a customer portal
CompleteFTP - An Internal Success Story
Enterprise Distributed Technologies doesn't just sell CompleteFTP as a product, we use it too!
Over the last 15 years, we've gathered many thousands of customers who've purchased our Java and .NET file transfer libraries, and of course CompleteFTP, our flagship product.
With so many customers comes the problem of managing their data, allowing for timely renewal of support as well as product download and activation. Over time, this has become more complicated as data has spread across various databases and files. We needed to simplify things for us and for our customers.
We looked around at various options, and realized that CompleteFTP offered a potential solution via its JSS webapps technology. JSS webapps are server-side applications written in Javascript, and they can do almost anything - including building a customer portal.
It took some time to migrate all existing customer data and to develop the site, but our customer portal went live in December, 2015. Customers can login, inspect their licenses, download and activate products, purchase additional licenses and renew support agreements.
The flexibility of Javascript has meant it is easy to modify and enhance the portal as required. For example, we recently added payment links on invoices for purchase orders.
The portal is hosted on Amazon's EC2 cloud platform, which is a great host environment for CompleteFTP. We now use Braintree for accepting credit card payments, in common with companies such as Uber and Airbnb.
A Significant Benefit for our Customers
There certainly is benefit for customers in a software vendor using its own products. Using CompleteFTP for the portal has given us insight into being a user, and numerous ideas of how the product can be improved. For example, we've made various enhancements to JSS to support portal development, and we continue to do so as the portal is developed further.