The Diverse Solutions Blog

Wow have we been busy around here but that’s a good thing.  Over the past few months we’ve added several new MLS’s and helped hundreds of people with developing a new online presence with our AgentCast websites or improving what they already have with our dsSearchAgent mapping IDX solution.  Currently we’re putting together our new developments schedule to further improve dsSearchAgent and I’d like to get some feed back from the people who matter most, our customers.  We have quite the list as it is but I know there are some great ideas out there that we haven’t thought of.  If you’re in the trenches and are using dsSearchAgent we want to hear from you.  Examples:

• New types of reports for the clients or the agents
• New ways to search
• New types of modules/widgets
• Additional ways to view properties
• New options to customize the look of the solution
• Anything that would make it better for you or your clients

It is the time to speak up and be heard.  There are no bad ideas.  We want to hear them all from the big ones to small ones.

We are wrapping up our beta of dsControlPanel today and going ahead with a soft release of dsControlPanel. To recap, our dsControlPanel is a combination of our dsAgentChat, dsSearchAgent, and dsAgentReach individual administration areas. Not only can you find all your tools in one place now, but we’ve also added a bunch of new features, and even mashed some of our features up. You can read my run-down here.

So, to get to the new admin, simply navigate your browser to http://controlpanel.diversesolutions.com and you will login with the same username and password you already use in our other admins. Additionally we’ve also put a big yellow notice on the dashboard of each of the affected admins, announcing the change and providing a link to auto-login.

Now, being this is a soft-release we’re allowing you to continue to use the old administration areas just in case, but only for a week. So on April 10th if you attempt to go to your old admin area, you will be forwarded to the new dsControlPanel. And the “Old Admin” link will be removed from the dsControlPanel navigation.

I’m sure many of you are going to say “how the heck do I use this thing?!”, so instead of calling, emailing, or quitting, we’ve provided you with demo videos. From anywhere in the admin you can click on the icon to get a popup of all our help videos. Additionally, each section that has a video will also have a icon directly to the left of the icon. We’re hoping these videos answer most of your questions. Let us know if you can’t find help for something.

We’re really proud of dsControlPanel and we hope you enjoy the new functionality and usability. Thanks everyone, and please, tell us what you think.

Overview

We have been hard at work improving the backend for both our mapping mls idx-solution, dsSearchAgent, and our contact & lead-management solution, dsAgentReach, for some time, and today we wanted to introduce to you some of the overall changes & additions to these programs, as well as announce our beta program.

Before we get started, for those of you who just want the bottom line, here is the short-list of what you’re going to see with in our new control panel:

• Streamlined Interface
• Improved integration & consolidation between dsAgentReach & dsSearchAgent
• New applications (Form-Creator and Lead-Pipelines)
• Complete re-tooling of incoming lead integration

Our main goal for this release was to fully integrate dsSearchAgent with our dsAgentReach & Lead Management products. This alone was the number one request from many of our customers, and by far one of the most useful.

Our second goal was to streamline the user interface of all our dsAgentReach applications. We decided to start from square one and take the user interface in a completely different direction. We think this new system will really help you to better organize and utilize your Leads & Contacts.

Third, we decided to change how we handle incoming-email leads, in addition to providing more avenues for lead aggregation. We feel that our new method and avenues will help streamline the lead-distribution process.

Beta Information

We also wanted to let you guys know that we’re starting a limited-beta program to help work the kinks out and ready the new control panel for wide release. If you would like to participate, you must already have our dsSearchAgent product. To request to be included in the beta, email your Customer Support Representative, or our general support line: support@diversesolutions.com. For those of you we’ve contacted to be in the beta, remember that you can post your thoughts and bugs in our forum.

That’s it for our overview. Again I’ll be detailing all this information in individual posts, describing our changes, and how each feature will work.

Hey everyone, we’ve updated our dsAgentChat Desktop with the most recent changes to the Adobe AIR framework, and a couple minor tweaks to dsAgentChat itself. To get on board with the latest version head to: http://admin.dsagentchat.com/Desktop/ and click the [Install Now] button, then you should be all set. Please post comments, questions, and issues here or email your support representative.

Here are a few notes on this release

• Better cross-platform support (Including support for Windows Vista)
• Audio and task/dock-bar chat notifications
• Cleaner Buttons, and small usability tweaks
• MUCH faster initial load (In most cases)

Also, I wanted to thank all of our customers that have been sending in their feedback and bugs with this program, it has been extremely helpful in finding our cross-platform issues, keep up the good work!

Welcome to the NEW Diverse Solutions Corporate Blog. My name is Justin LaJoie, and I am the CEO and President of Diverse Solutions.

After months of procrastinating over starting a company blog, we are finally here. I didn’t just want to put a blog up and post on it once or twice a month. If we were going to do it, we wanted to do it right. The biggest hurdle we had with this project was determining who was going to write all the posts. I certainly didn’t have time to write numerous posts a week, so I did what all good CEO’s do - I delegated. I selected individuals from each department that I felt had a lot to share, and from today on, you’ll see them posting articles within their areas of expertise.

You’ll see me posting from time to time about company updates and product ideas that we’d like to get some feedback on. In addition, we plan on discussing everything from website marketing tips to our thoughts on recent real estate news. Finally, we’ll also share some ideas on how to get the most out of our products and services.

We hope that this blog will help us better connect with our customers and with the real estate industry in general. If you have any requests on what you would like to see us talk about, just let us know through a comment.