AnthonyLondon:

Adam,

Thank you for your quick answer. As I said I really like the product and the customer service (based on your responsiveness) seems to be good but you should really spend time on the documentation. If this helps, this is what I did which lead to a lot of frustration (I easily spent 4 hours on this this weekend) and was about to give up.

 
My goal was to use the chatroom directly from my website. I downloaded the 'Cute Chat and Web Messenger standalone' zip file. I realise now that this was a mistake as I should have downloaded the 'Cute Chat and Web Messenger integration package' zip file but to be fair it's not very clear on the 'download' page which file should be downloaded as the description is not readable:

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I tried to follow the instructions of this page (General Installation Instructions):

http://cutesoft.net/ASP.NET+Chat/Developer-Guide/deploymentintegration.htm

 

It says I should run SQLScripts\cutechat3.sql

 

As I had downloaded the 'standalone' app., I didn't find the sql file in the zip file which was a bit frustrating. I checked the 'Integration with an existing user membership database (VB)' page:

http://cutesoft.net/ASP.NET+Chat/Developer-Guide/integration_vb.htm

 

I found some explanation but no cutechat3.sq file mentioned there.

 

In the end, I found a link at the bottom of this page:

http://cutesoft.net/ASP.NET+Chat/Developer-Guide/integration_overview.htm

 

It says: “if you haven't downloaded the integration package, please download the package from    http://cutesoft.net/download/CuteChat3IntegrationPackage.zip”.

 

 

 

In the end, I managed to get everything working but even using the configuration page wasn’t straightforward. For example, I set ‘Show room list’ to false (expecting the drop down list on each chat room to disappear) but it didn’t. Generally speaking there are plenty of parameters which can be set on the Admin page but for some of them it’s not obvious what they do (and as there is no help files…). You know your product so you know what those parameters do but for someone you look at your product for the first time it’s a different matter.

 

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I wouldn’t be surprised if some of your potential customers just give up when they evaluate your product and they don’t bother letting you know. You have a great product so you should make sure it’s easy for your cutomers to install it. I suspect you are a technical person and you probably appreciate proper documentation when you use a product too. For example the way you explain how to modify the global.asax is amazing: you just give some examples (an example is not a substitute for documentation). You don’t explain for example which functions have to be implemented in the global.asax, which ones are optional and when they will be called etc.

 
Regards,

 
Anthony.