It’s been almost a year since we first introduced the first changes in “Your Account” section. The rapid expansion of Telerik’s product portfolio required new product management tools and logic. That led to a “Your Account” section consisting of four separate areas for the four product divisions. It was not easy to use and maintain.

Now we are happy to introduce to you the new and improved “Your Account” section with better navigation and logic. Thanks to your valuable feedback, excessive research and hard work we managed to put all your registered products in one place so you can easily manage your licenses and projects.

Your Account Main Page

Although it doesn’t look very different from the previous version the page now has new navigation logic. You can now go to “Your Products” page and have all your products listed for managing, or if you want to do something specific you can choose from the “task oriented” links on the right. Either way you will easily get to the page or product you wish to interact with.

 

Your Products Page

Get a 360* view of all your purchased, trial or free Telerik products. With this new design you will have complete overview and control over all available product options and services. Everything is just a click away.

 

 

Manage Licensed Developers Page

Managing your licensed users has never been easier. Have multiple products? No problem. You can assign a user to more than one product with just a couple of clicks.

Boost your team productivity by allowing each member to share tickets and decide which of them are transparent to the team. Simply choose the permissions level you’d like for each of team member. You can also allow team leaders to distribute license within their team by giving them permission to manage licensed users.

 

Product File Downloads*

We have made it easy to find what you are looking for by separating files into categories and providing detailed information on what is included in downloadable packages. Useful additional information is also within easy reach to the right of the file list.

* This page will be available if you have purchased any of Telerik products.

Renewals and Upgrades

You will now find information on the exact list of licensed users assigned to a particular purchase, the dates of expiration of your support and major updates subscription. You will also be able to read a detailed explanation of what each renewal or upgrade option will give you and make an informed decision.

 

Telerik Testing Tools and TeamPulse License Keys Management Page*

A refreshed look and quick access to all license keys by product. Links to those pages will be shown on “Your Account” main page if you have one of the products.

* These pages will be available if you have purchased any edition of Telerik WebUI Test Studio, or Telerik TeamPulse.

Sitefinity License Management*

Your Sitefinity licenses, regardless which product version, are now listed in one place by domain. If a license has no domain registered it is listed on top of the page for ease of reference. If you would like to review all details about your license, assign developers, or renew your subscription, you can easily do so, by following the Manage link.

* This page will be available if you have purchased Sitefinity WebCMS.

Few days after our blog post about the autocomplete feature, we are now ready to unveil the mystery about two other features we asked you to guess.

The first feature presents the new sorting functionality that we have added. Feel free to sort your search results by both Relevance and Date to get a better match of what you need to find on our website.

The second feature we implemented shows a box at the bottom of every results page on our sites, where we have provided you with related searches. The suggestions are optimized so that the topmost is the most relevant and frequently met against the results. This way, you can narrow your search much easier and quite faster.

We hope you enjoy the new features – your feedback is kindly appreciated. Stay tuned for our next search improvement announcement.

Within the next few weeks, we intend to publish a series of posts that will introduce you to the new Search Enhancements that we have been working on intensively during the past month.

Being part of our overall Site Search Improvements program we would first like to present to you the Autocomplete functionality.

 

The new feature is already turned on for all the search fields on our website and we hope it really helps you get the needed search results faster and much more accurate.

This is a small but yet very helpful step leading to the general improvement of the search experience on our website.

The next step to be taken would again present a new feature implementation which will be announced with our next article. 

Check the screenshot below to get a hint of what is coming up next week.

Guess what the question marks stand for and you will find out what the titles of our next blog posts would be.

We wish you luck … and happy searching through our website!

We are proud to announce the launch of Telerik's interactive issue tracking system! Now you can suggest features or report bugs for all Telerik products and then track the progress of your feature or download the latest build with your fix. The voting functionality allows you to raise the priority of issues and thus expedite their solutions.

The shiny application is built entirely from scratch and uses the stylish RadControls for Silverlight for displaying data. Although the first version is with a Beta tag you can explore almost the entire functionality of PITS and see how Telerik Silverlight controls handle real data in real time.

Now, go ahead and play with PITS! (Silverlight plug-in v3 or above is required)

You can view screenshots and read more about the tracking system on What's PITS page.

Yesterday we launched a new, significantly updated version of our 'Purchases and Downloads' pages. We listened to your feedback and we made a lot of improvements.

The ambiguously named 'Purchases and Downloads' section is gone. Now we have just a 'Downloads' page, as well as a 'Billing History' page, both accessible straight from the main 'Your Account' section.

What was wrong with the old version?

1. The page consisted of a list of expandable panels for each product. The panels were slow to expand.
2. Each panel used to have 4 tabs. The first tab didn't contain a lot of useful information, since most people visit the page to download mainly, and downloading was not available until you clicked on the second tab. So, you had to wait even more...

The old 'Purchases and Downloads' page (left). The old 'Downloads' tab (right)

3. Licenses for developers had to be managed separately for each product. Once again - expanding panels, changing tabs, and waiting...
4. You couldn't preview the whole billing history at once. Instead you had to expand each product's panel and change the tab. Even more waiting.
5. The 'Download' tab used to intimidate you with a long list of files, which you had to review carefully, but in 80% of the cases you just wanted to download the Automatic Installation.
6. A drop-down list was used for changing the version, but drop-downs are supposed to be used in forms, not for navigation.

What we did

1. We got rid of the expandable panels.
2. The link for the Automatic Installation is the largest on the page. There is nothing expandable that is wasting your time

The new 'Downloads' page

3. The main page provides links to all other related files from the same product version, as well as links to Latest Internal Builds and older versions of the same product.
4. The link 'Source Code, Manual Installation, Examples' loads a new page, where you can find all the files for the current versions.

The new 'Downloads' page: detail

All files of a version in a separate page

5. Your whole billing history is now on a single, separate page.
6. Licensed Developers for all products are on a separate page which is linked from the main page of Your Account, as well as in the bottom part of all pages in the same section.

The main 'Your Account' page. All pages from the section are listed there.

The page where you manage the licensed developers for all products.

Even though the content is spread among more pages compared to the previous version, now it takes objectively less time to complete your tasks.

So, what was your initial impression when you encountered the modified section for the first time?

Did you know you can search all the Telerik resources without actually visiting the pages?

To add telerik.com to your browser search box...

1. go to telerik.com,
2. expand the search box,
3. choose "Add Search Providers" and select the search options you would like to use.

As telerik.com grows bigger, you may start finding it time-consuming to navigate to the deeper pages in the site hierarchy. The increasing number of clicks is getting irritating, especially for regular visitors of the site. 

We tried to tackle this problem by introducing a supplemental navigation tool (you need to be logged in to see it).

The "Your Links" menu is straight-forward to use: bookmark, rearrange and delete your favorite telerik.com pages.

1. Go to the page you want to bookmark and expand the menu. 

2. Bookmark the currently opened page by pressing the "Add Current Page" button.

3. Type in the name of the link, or just leave it with its default name and click "Done".

 

The link is immediately added to the menu. 
The bullet point indicates the page is currently opened. 

Hovering the links reveals options for rearranging and deleting.

 

We'd like to hear your feedback. Do you find the "Your Links" menu useful?

For the past several months, we've been rebuilding & redesigning the Telerik.com web site.  Our existing web site had served us very well, but it was beginning to show some age.  We were anxious to utilize some of the newer techniques & technologies available to us and, in the end, hopefully offer a better experience to our customers.

Telerik.com is a big a web site and rebuilding it wasn't a trivial task.  Not only does Telerik.com get a lot of traffic, but it also contains a TON of content (product information, demos, support articles, forum posts, etc.).  To support this task we needed a platform and content management system (CMS) that was flexible enough to merge with our existing systems and support the traffic load.

[Wait a second, I feel a sales pitch coming...]

Of course we chose Telerik's own Sitefinity CMS for this task.  The entire project was done in 10 minutes and we were so far under budget that we turned a profit.  Next week we're all traveling to Hawaii to celebrate.

I'm just joking.  In fact, rebuilding Telerik.com on the Sitefinity CMS taught us a lot.  Many of the performance improvements found in the Sitefinity 3.5 release were a direct result of this project.  In the coming months we'll see many more Sitefinity improvements that were also a result of the new Telerik.com.  We have now become one of our own biggest customers. 

For now, please take a look at the new web site.  We sincerely hope you enjoy it!  As always, your feedback is greatly desired & appreciated.

P.S.  Huge congrats to the team.