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:
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.
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.