Whether you will use Business Manager?

[Sergey L]

single Business Manager can handle any number of Plesks

You can use one Business Manager instance for 10 Plesk servers as well. No need to run 10 instances of CBM.

Regards

 

[GBeach]

Needs some work

I voted yes because I want to use Business Manager but there are a number of things that need to be improved.

Domain Registration:
1) The TLDs available to be sold for a given registrar (in my case OpenSRS) do not include all the TLDs offered by the registrar.
2) The customer interface for purchasing domains needs to be overhauled. For businesses that want to offer a large selection of TLDs it is painfully slow. Perhaps allow the customer select the TLDs to search before they click "Check Domain" or search a small number of common TLDs (configurable in the store) and have a "Check More TLDs" link the the search results that then searches the remaining TLDs.

Store Templates:
1) It would be extremely useful if you could select the colours of the components in the template to make it easier to integrate. Currently taking one of the existing templates and making even a simple colour change requires significant CSS and image editing. Perhaps have a few template styles (squared corners, rounded corners, compact, etc) where you can change 2 or 3 colours. Or, since you're using jQuery, why not allow uploading of a jQuery theme (http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/).

General:
1) It would be good to have a shopping cart widget that can be placed on non-store pages so customers can see they have something in their shopping cart as they navigate the site.

 

[EugeneL]

Hello, GBeach

Great thanks for your valuable feedback.

1) The TLDs available to be sold for a given registrar (in my case OpenSRS) do not include all the TLDs offered by the registrar.

I'll check the list of supported TLDs in OpenSRS module.
The module code is opened and SDK is published. So you can change the list of supported TLDs on your own.

2) The customer interface for purchasing domains needs to be overhauled. For businesses that want to offer a large selection of TLDs it is painfully slow. Perhaps allow the customer select the TLDs to search before they click "Check Domain" or search a small number of common TLDs (configurable in the store) and have a "Check More TLDs" link the the search results that then searches the remaining TLDs.

Improvements for this area are already planned and you'll definitely see them in the near future.

It would be extremely useful if you could select the colours of the components in the template to make it easier to integrate. Currently taking one of the existing templates and making even a simple colour change requires significant CSS and image editing. Perhaps have a few template styles (squared corners, rounded corners, compact, etc) where you can change 2 or 3 colours. Or, since you're using jQuery, why not allow uploading of a jQuery theme (http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/).

I'll research this theme.

It would be good to have a shopping cart widget that can be placed on non-store pages so customers can see they have something in their shopping cart as they navigate the site.

New website widgets are already planned and you'll definitely see them in the near future. Thanks for the idea - your case will be covered.

If you have more comments about CBM:
1. Areas for usability improvements
2. Areas for integration with external systems
3. Missed functionality or business scenarios
I'll really appreciate your posts here.

Regards

 

[hardlink]

Had a very BAD experience today

Hi, thought I would voice my experience with Customer & Business Manager.

I bought a Virtual Server from Fasthosts last night which was Linux Centos 5.5 with plesk 9 pre installed.
Naturally I went ahead with upgrading to lastest version of Plesk 10 without any major hicups.
I got CBM working after having to change the plesk admin password, and was massively impressed with the idea... oh, there it is, the *idea* was nice, but the reality ended with a nightmare waste of time.
I spent ages configuring the plans and making an online store and was really happy, until I tested it!

I put through a couple of test orders on the store with my own legitimate details and was immediately disappointed that having ticked a box to do so in Notifications tab for the Bronze plan, I didn't receive any email to tell me an invoice had been generated; I only received the customer's email sent to the email address I entered as a customer. I have set my admin email address in the administrators area on CBM and set the correct group (root?) for the recipent for the notification on the plan.

So that aside I logged back into the CBM back end and saw my order was on the home page. I chose to "cancel" the order and tried to delete all traces of it to run a clean test through again. The next order showed up in the CBM, but no notification email. I was doing "Pay by Check" manual payments (should be Cheque for UK!)?.
Again I thought I had cleared the order down by choosing cancel an delete.

Next thing I know, I'm clicking on the Customers link to view my customers and it's thrown up an error about there not being a countries_id=0? (Sorry cannot report exact message now as I have re-deployed my server to start again).
I was clicking about trying some other things and then I got a "Fatal error: Cannot use string offset as an array" error from php and that was it for me. I couldn't find a way to fix it/clean up the mess other than reload my entire server and start over.

Any suggestions about how not to break this not-quite-idiot-proof but otherwise lovely system?

I would rather it worked when I tested it next time as I am very keen on using it's features!

Chris

 

[64bithost.com]

CBM for Plesk 10.x and Linux

Dear everyone,

I read the manual and was happy with my installation except that SRSPlus.com does not have a registrar plugin yet...Bummer...so am I going to have to write the code for it?

Chris

 

[IgorG]

Dear everyone,

I read the manual and was happy with my installation except that SRSPlus.com does not have a registrar plugin yet...Bummer...so am I going to have to write the code for it?

Chris

You can try to write your own SRSPlus plugin with CBM SDK - http://download1.parallels.com/Plesk/PP10/10.3.1/sdk/plesk-business-manager-sdk.zip

 

[hardlink]

Hi, thought I would voice my experience with Customer & Business Manager.

I bought a Virtual Server from Fasthosts last night which was Linux Centos 5.5 with plesk 9 pre installed.
Naturally I went ahead with upgrading to lastest version of Plesk 10 without any major hicups.
I got CBM working after having to change the plesk admin password, and was massively impressed with the idea... oh, there it is, the *idea* was nice, but the reality ended with a nightmare waste of time.
I spent ages configuring the plans and making an online store and was really happy, until I tested it!

I put through a couple of test orders on the store with my own legitimate details and was immediately disappointed that having ticked a box to do so in Notifications tab for the Bronze plan, I didn't receive any email to tell me an invoice had been generated; I only received the customer's email sent to the email address I entered as a customer. I have set my admin email address in the administrators area on CBM and set the correct group (root?) for the recipent for the notification on the plan.

So that aside I logged back into the CBM back end and saw my order was on the home page. I chose to "cancel" the order and tried to delete all traces of it to run a clean test through again. The next order showed up in the CBM, but no notification email. I was doing "Pay by Check" manual payments (should be Cheque for UK!)?.
Again I thought I had cleared the order down by choosing cancel an delete.

Next thing I know, I'm clicking on the Customers link to view my customers and it's thrown up an error about there not being a countries_id=0? (Sorry cannot report exact message now as I have re-deployed my server to start again).
I was clicking about trying some other things and then I got a "Fatal error: Cannot use string offset as an array" error from php and that was it for me. I couldn't find a way to fix it/clean up the mess other than reload my entire server and start over.

Any suggestions about how not to break this not-quite-idiot-proof but otherwise lovely system?

I would rather it worked when I tested it next time as I am very keen on using it's features!

Chris

Report back from the idiot above:
I put my hands up, after rebuilding my new server back to default OS image and updating to Plesk 10.3.1 again I gave CBM another chance. Having failed before, I read the manual first this time!

After reading through some installation concepts, I came to my LICENSE page. The license says...

Customer & Business Manager version 10.3.0
License Customer & Business Manager 10.3.0 Bundled with the Panel
Number of accounts 0 / (Used 0)

SO I DON'T HAVE A LICENSE! Which was why it all went wrong for me as I managed to not even realise that it was a bug which enabled me to create a customer from the STORE processing.

When I updated Plesk to 10.3.1 today and last night, it DID NOT SAY anything about requiring a Lisence.
I have Plesk License with Unlimited Users and Unlimited Domains, but obviously that isn't good enough for Parallels!

Much disappointment still.

 

[Sergey L]

You probably own a "Parallels® Plesk Panel 10 – Standalone Product – Unlimited Domains", but for CBM you need "Parallels® Plesk Panel 10 – Hosting Suite – Unlimited Domains". As you can see from description only the latter one has CBM included at no additional charge though they cost the same:

Parallels® Plesk Panel 10 – Hosting Suite – Unlimited Domains
Includes Parallels Plesk Panel 10 (Unlimited Domains), Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder (100 Sites) and Parallels Plesk Billing (1,000 Clients) at no additional charge!

You probably can ask you sales represntative for conversion.

Regards