Posts in: Inside OpenSRS

A Movember that would make Magnum P.I. proud

November is Movember month, an annual fundraising event where participants grow moustaches to raise awareness and funds that will help to eventually bring an end to prostate cancer, the #1 cancer affecting men around the globe.

For the youngsters not familiar with Magnum P.I., the actor known as Tom Selleck has played a more recent role as Dr. Richard Burke aka Monica’s boyfriend on the TV show, Friends.

Before Movember provided the necessary cover, Tom Selleck was often to blame whenever a man fooled himself into believing he’d look good with a moustache… a credit formerly given to Burt Reynolds.

Dave Woroch, EVP Sales

This Movember, our very own Dave Woroch is putting his best whiskers forward for the cause and with some coaxing he even let us snap a few photos for this post. We think he bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Tom Skerritt aka “Viper”, in the 1986 hit, Top Gun. But don’t tell him that.

If you have no plans to grow an upper lip follicle forest of your own, why not take a moment and support Viper in his efforts? Visit his Movember fundraising page and make a pledge and learn more: http://mobro.co/ViperDave

Are you participating in Movember?

We want to know! Just leave a comment below with a link to your Movember profile, or send us a tweet to @OpenSRS. As the end of November approaches, we’ll pledge $50 to a few of our favourite ‘staches.

From the Movember website:

Since its humble beginnings in Melbourne Australia, Movember has grown to become a truly global movement inspiring more than 1.1 Million Mo Bros and Mo Sistas to participate, with formal campaigns in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, the UK, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa and Ireland. In addition, Movember is aware of Mo Bros and Mo Sistas supporting the campaign and men’s health cause across the globe, from Russia to Dubai, Hong Kong to Antarctica, Rio de Janeiro to Mumbai, and everywhere in between.

No matter the country or city, Movember will continue to work to change established habits and attitudes men have about their health, to educate men about the health risks they face, getting them to act on that knowledge thereby increasing the chances of early detection, diagnosis and effective treatment.

In 2010, nearly 119,000 Canadian Mo Bros and Mo Sistas got on board, raising $22.3 million CAD.

Via the moustache, Movember aims to fulfill its vision of having an everlasting impact on the face of men’s health by continuing to spark conversation and spread awareness of men’s health each year.

Tucows’ Employee Lucas Cochran and His Discovery Channel Debut

If you’re a fan of the Discovery Channel, you may have seen our very own Lucas Cochran during Daily Planet’s, “Future Tech” a new segment that covers Tech, Gaming and Social Media.

Lucas is no stranger to the camera. In 2009, he had his own show called “Pimp My PC” on Butterscotch TV, where he helped viewers creatively customize, personalize and trick out their boring beige box PCs.

During business hours at Tucows, Lucas is our go-to guy for all things related to IT and can be counted on to handle everything from the deployment of an authentication cluster, to troubleshooting audio/video issues on Skype.

But labeling Lucas the Tucows IT guy and leaving it at that just wouldn’t be fair…

This man has the geek cred of ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ lead character Lewis Skolnick, combined with the stage presence and comedic timing of Jerry Lewis, and the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of Ron Popeil. When George Clooney needs help with the ladies AND programming his VCR, Lucas is #1 in his speed dial. At least, he will be as soon as George sees this episode of FutureTech.

A word of caution however: never (ever) agree to play Star Wars trivia with this man (you will lose), and never, ever bet Lucas that he’ll be unable to get an old Logitech webcam working on a MacBook Pro (I lost $5 bucks to him this way just last week).

But seriously, Lucas is a great example of the super talented people we get to spend out days with at Tucows/OpenSRS. His intrinsic desire to teach himself new things, combined with his super friendly nature and ability to teach others will undoubtedly make him a great addition to the Daily Planet team and we’re all extremely proud of him here at Tucows.

Congrats Lucas!

To see what Lucas has to say, check out the segment of FutureTech on this week’s episode of Daily Planet.

Further Strengthening Our Commitment to Europe

OpenSRS has been focusing heavily on Europe for the past few years. We’re quite confident that we’re the best choice for European companies looking for a partner they can count on that understands their business, culture and specific needs.

200 TLDs by the End of the Year

Alexander Schwertner, Managing Director, ePAG

The recent acquisition of ePAG by OpenSRS further illustrates this commitment to Europe. With ePAG, we’ll be able to dramatically extend our ccTLD coverage to include most, if not all, of Europe. We expect to be able to offer the ability to register 200 different TLDs by the end of the year.

Welcome ePAG to the OpenSRS Team

Joining the OpenSRS team as part of the ePAG acquisition is Alexander Schwertner, who is the Managing Director for ePAG. Alex has extensive experience working with European resellers at ePAG. He’ll continue to work at ePAG, with a specific focus on ccTLDs.

In addition to Alex, Jan Leendertse and Evelina Joschko will also be joining the OpenSRS European Team, continuing in their roles in sales and account management.

Welcome to Alessandro Baruffi

I’m also very happy to introduce yet another new member to our European team – Alessandro Baruffi. He is responsible for account management and business development throughout Europe and is based out of our office in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Alessandro Baruffi, Account Manager

Alessandro speaks English, Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese. I’m happy to say that we’re almost at the point where you’ll be able to talk to OpenSRS in whatever language you are most comfortable with.

Come Meet Us in Person at WHD.local

If you would like to learn more about OpenSRS and meet Alessandro, Alex or myself, various members of our team will be touring Europe in the coming weeks for the WHD.local events.

The first stop is Cologne, Germany, on September 14th and from there it’s a nearly two month trip around Europe including stops in Poland, Turkey, Netherlands, Russia, Romania, UK, France, Spain and finally Switzerland.

Get more information on WHD.local, including free registration codes (value €199) by clicking here. We look forward to meeting you at an event in your city!

OpenSRS Reseller Advisory Council. We’re Listening.

How often have you spoken with somebody and you can just tell that they’re not paying attention to what you’re saying? Their eyes look away for only a second, but that’s all it takes for you to know they’re just waiting for you to stop talking so they can blurt out whatever it is they want to say.

It can be frustrating for those with something to say because conversations are as much about listening as they are about talking.

Listening is silent. It doesn’t surprise and it will never shock. Perhaps that’s why talking has been so popular; It’s easy to keep a person’s attention while we’re making noise, isn’t it?

By listening, we can hear all about the challenges, the pains, frustrations, joys and successes of those we care about. We can empathize by listening and show that we care about all the little (and big) things going on with the people in our lives and the customers we talk to.

Recognizing that we wanted to become better listeners at OpenSRS, a few months ago, we launched a plan that would see the formation of the OpenSRS Reseller Advisory Council. It’s an initiative that begins tomorrow and it’s aimed at getting some of our smartest, creative, engaged Resellers to talk, while we listen.

What is the goal of the Council?

We created the Advisory Council with a specific purpose; to equip an underserved segment of our Reseller base with a voice that we can listen to. We plan to solicit their thoughts and benefit from their experience. We think we all have a lot to gain by doing this.

We’re going to listen to what the founding members have to say and do our best to tie what we hear to real business outcomes. The current plan is a conference call each quarter, with access to a private forum to continue the conversation after the calls. We may, depending on the needs of the group, create smaller committees to discuss, debate and come to the larger group with recommendations.

In the end, we’re going to move forward. It might be an inch forward, and not a mile to start with, but it will be a step forward.

The topics for the agenda were created from comments and answers given in the Advisory Council application form and we’re also crowd-sourcing additional topics and voting on the ones most important to the members. You can see the most popular agenda items at the right.

We don’t get to choose what to talk about, the members do.

How were the Council members chosen?

It started with an email to a couple thousand already engaged Resellers, inviting them to complete the application form. We had over 100 Resellers apply.

From there, we identified a group of 40 individuals, the majority of them senior executives, or company founders working at companies that have 100 to 1,000 domain names under management with OpenSRS.

If you completed an application form and did not hear from us, we’re sorry about that… you will soon. It’s not that we haven’t approved you, it’s just that we’re taking things a bit slow as we get started and another Reseller may have been a better fit this time around.

If you’re a reseller outside of North America, we’re running a separate Council (at least in the beginning), so we’ll be touching base with you to get the ball rolling. We’ll also be sharing what we learned from the first Council meeting.

Do you want to get involved?

Super! Let us know in the comments and we’ll follow-up as we run additional recruitment efforts. Be warned though, membership in the Council is not a free ride. There’s work involved and we’ll have high expectations of you if you’re accepted.

Here we go!

We’re really exciting about this initiative and it is our hope that the founding members of the Advisory Council will play a critically important role in helping us become better listeners as we continue our efforts to build the world’s most reseller friendly, super-focused provider of Domain Names, SSL and Email services!

The Untold History of the RWI

A few weeks back we rolled out the long-awaited OpenSRS Control Panel in a preview for all Resellers. This was the first chance for most of you to dig in and see what the Control Panel could do, and the response has been overwhelming positive. Thanks for that – we really do listen and you’ve already come back with some great ideas.

With the preview underway, we wanted to tell the story of how the Control Panel came to be. It turns out that it owes a lot to the Reseller Web Interface and its history.

I sat down with a couple of the key people behind the Control Panel to chat about it. This first post will delve into some on the thinking and philosophy behind the Control Panel – Ken Schafer, our EVP Products is responsible for a lot of that.

Those looking for a tech slant should stay tuned – in a couple of weeks, we’ll focus on the dev side with Paul Tichonczuk, Senior Web Application Developer. He’s the perfect person to fill in all the geeky details about some of the neat stuff that’s hiding under that fancy new interface.

Back to the Beginning

One of the key objectives in developing the Control Panel was to provide a simple-to-use interface that was still able to handle the complex tasks associated with registering domain names and other services with consistent metaphors and a unified look and feel.

In talking about how the Control Panel ended up this way, it only seemed natural to start by talking about how the Reseller Web Interface came to be.

It turns out that the idea of a web-based control panel wasn’t thought of as core to OpenSRS back in the early days. Ken explained that when OpenSRS was first launched, it was primarily an API, offering a way for resellers to connect to us, and in turn, to connect to the various registries we had an accreditation with.

“When we started out back in 1999, if you wanted to sell domains, you would have to go to a Registry and they would give you an API to integrate with as an accredited registrar.

“But OpenSRS came along and invented the wholesale model where rather than having you go out and become a registrar at a whole bunch of different registries, and do separate API into all of them, we said, ‘why don’t we do that work for you?’

“We would have one API and one agreement and that would give you access to all those Registries.

Just to be clear: it’s not that the RWI was an after thought. Rather, as Ken explained, it was merely thought that a reseller would integrate with the API and make their own interfaces (both customer-facing, and also for their own internal support staff and processes). In Ken’s words:

“In the early days we pretty much said, ‘Here’s the API…away you go.’ Except early resellers quickly started saying things like ‘Do I really have to build my own control panel for my own support staff? That seems like overkill’”

Our assumptions about what our Resellers wanted and needed turned out to be a bit off the mark and the RWI was born.

Restoring Simplicity

Over the years, OpenSRS grew in complexity, and the RWI came along for the ride, often kicking and screaming. We added bunches of gTLDs and ccTLDs, products like SSL Certificates, DNS, blogging tools, a site builder and more. The RWI started to look like a house with a bunch of additions bolted on rather than a single cohesive control panel. Ken explained:

“The RWI that we’ve lived with for the past ten years has grown organically from ‘you don’t need one’, to ‘there’s a few things you might want to do’, to ‘you might want to be able to do quite a bit.’

“In the early days it was a few domains. But we added SSL, and expanded into Trust, we added email, and publishing tools. The service evolved to let you sell multiple things. And a lot of those services ended up having their own control panels and ended up presented to the world as separate services.

“In short, we made it too complicated. And over the years, it became harder and harder for new resellers to come into it. We found a whole class of resellers like IT consultants, web developers, web designers who didn’t need an API integration at all. What they really needed and wanted was a good control panel to manage domains and other services for their customers.”

Where the RWI often made things complicated – like registering ccTLDs with specific residency requirements – the Control Panel should make it simple. Even though it’s a complex task with sophisticated logic and rules, the Reseller shouldn’t have to care and the Control Panel should handle it all behind the scenes.

Next up: The Techie Stuff

A lot of thinking went into the Control Panel in an effort to take what are very complex tasks and requirements and make them seem simple. We’ll dig deeper into some of the advanced web technology that’s at the heart of the Control Panel in the next post in this series. Stay tuned!

Control Panel: In-Depth Webinar

For those wanting even more information on the Control Panel, including some power tips and an advance look at some of the web technology, we’ll hosting a webinar on Thursday, May 19, 2011.