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Showing posts from 2012

Auto expired properties–contacts problem corrected

We’ve corrected a problem on properties where the mandate auto-expired (when the mandate expiry date was reached). When you selected a previous mandate history the contacts didn’t load - it will now load correctly.

Virtual Tours–upload corrected

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We’ve corrected a bug in the virtual tour uploader that prevented the upload of new virtual tours into the OMS. The OMS virtual tours is a self-service virtual tour solution available to all OMS users. You can create your own unlimited number of virtual tours on all your property listings. For assistance click on the virtual tour help link under ‘Help’ in the OMS.

At least 20% of property searches done through mobile phones

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Did you know that at least 20% of property searches in South Africa are done through mobile phones? Recent figures from the UK reports 1/3 property searches are done through mobile. Our latest stats from MyProperty shows that property searches through mobile phones increase significantly after 5pm and peaks at 8pm. Interestingly enough is that almost 50% of these visitors are using Blackberry devices (South Africa has a very high Blackberry user base) followed by Android and iPhone (iOS) users. Question is - is your estate agency catering for these mobile users? If not, check out our mobile website solution that can be bolted on your existing website: http://www.entegral.net/content/p203_products-real-estate-website-mobile-website.aspx A great feature is that Users are automatically redirected to your mobile website when they enter your standard website address.

Over 5 million photos managed in the OMS cloud

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Here is an interesting statistic for you. Estate Agents using the OMS (Office Management System) are currently managing over 5 million photos (5,256,632 to be precise) of over 100,000 property listing mandates they’ve captured.  (These are for active South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique clients only and excludes our USA operations where nearly 1,000,000 MLS properties are imported and updated daily). These photos can be accessed in a snap in the OMS and agents can add as many photos to listings as they want, not uncommon to see 50 photos on more upmarket properties.  Listings are added and removed every day. In the last 24 hours over 12,000 new photos were added to the OMS by over 1,000 users. These listings and photos are then exported seamlessly to thousands of property sale and rental websites including partner property portals. More mind blowing is that these 5 million photos are backed up daily and we can retrieve an exact copy of photos up to 6 months back. All made p

Eskom’s power drive is sputtering - all the more reason to host on Entegral's cloud infrastructure

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Business Day reports that South African national electricity provider Eskom’s power drive is sputtering . “Not one of Eskom’s three major new build projects — coal-fired stations Kusile and Medupi and the pumped-water storage scheme Ingula — will be completed within initial deadlines or budgets” This is all the more reason to host on Entegral’s Amazon AWS powered cloud infrastructure and ensure your business is kept online and will not be affected by long electricity outages. Our clients are also not affected by the current & future increases in electricity rates, ensuring you get the best hosting prices, all the time. And along the way, your business will support a more environmental friendly approach to hosting, as cloud computing uses less electricity compared to traditional hosting. Either way, you win with us.  

New OLX interface is live!

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Great news is that the OMS interface to the www.olx.co.za classifieds website is live. We automatically interface all your latest property listings where the mandate is 1-2 months old free of charge. Property listings are currently being loaded and should be completed by early next week. Property search results: Detailed property listing: We’ve recently launched a re-developed Property24 listing interface, and added Bid-Or-Buy to our list of portals after completion of the Junkmail and Property Junction interfaces. Watch this space for more interfaces we are working on. Entegral currently provides the most cost effective and easiest way for estate agents to advertise on multiple portals, with a low fixed support fee of only R50/month to support all your interfaces.

Revolutionizing property search

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Why do all property search portals work more or less the same? Isn't there an easier way to search for property? Why is there a single minded approach in finding property? Is the way search currently work best for both the consumer and agent in maximizing the selection criteria in finding a property? We are constantly asking this question. And every now and then we are addressing it and introducing innovative new ways to find property.  We introduce it on our main property portal MyProperty.co.za , and the functionality then finds its way to our client websites after thorough testing & tweaking. INNOVATION MyProperty was first with its radius searches ,  we introduced POI searches and a world first comparative driving time search. This year we celebrated 1 year in the cloud and back in June 2010 was first to launch with Google Streetview for a property portal in Africa . Soon after we launched another first, integrated driving directions to properties . Along the way

Never delete email again, 25GB PremiumMail email accounts

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Our PremiumMail email accounts already boasted an industry best 10GB/mailbox size. Due to economies of scale we have now increased the space to a whopping 25GB per mailbox (that is 25,000MB if you want to compare it to competitor products). There is no increase in cost and PremiumMail clients will have their mailboxes increased next week to the new 25GB sizes. With a 25GB email account you are unlikely to ever have to delete email again. Simply access your email through the user friendly web interface or setup your account as an IMAP account in your email client (eg Outlook). This will always keep a copy of your email on the server (which comes in handy if your laptop or pc is ever stolen or crashed). Our PremiumMail accounts also offers industry best spam and virus protection, and achieved 100% uptime through its advanced cloud infrastructure setup. More info here: Cloud Email Services We are also reviewing our ValueMail solution for possible upgrades.  

OMS - office logo setup updated

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There was a problem with uploading office logos in the OMS. We’ve corrected this and also introduced the cropping features that we’ve recently introduced in the improved user profile pages . This allows you to cut out your logo from the supplied file and upload it on the OMS. Your logo is used on websites and brochures.

[fixed!] Current issue: Agent details not exported to portals/websites

the following reported issue has been resolved at 1:10pm 31 Aug 2012 We are currently addressing a problem where agent details that are updated are not exported to all websites, we should have it resolved shortly.

OMS Mandate history enhancements

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As you know the OMS can track property mandate changes and keeps a record of every mandate change. The mandate history dropdown have been enhanced to provide more valuable feedback as follows: - The date shown will now reflect the date the status was changed - It will show the number of days the mandate was in that particular status In the example below you will for example see that the mandate was 1st created on 21 January and remained in for sale status for 57 days before being changed to a pending sale on the 19 March: The example above also shows (via the pie chart) that there are 124 days left on this mandate to sell this property, roughly 50% of the mandate time passed.

WIN 3 months’ Free subscription on Bid or Buy.

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Estate agents using Entegral’s OMS will be glad to know that the interface between Entegral and Bid or Buy has now been completed!     We have 3 free accounts for this feed that we’d like to give away to any of Entegral’s current clients.  Three lucky estate agencies will have the opportunity to advertise 25 or 200 of their latest listings on this high traffic portal free of charge for a period of 3 months.  Simply go to our Facebook page (click here) – you have to “like” our page as well as the post done on this new partnership.  All agencies who liked the post will be considered for this prize.   T’s & C’s Only Entegral clients may enter. There are 2 packages for 25 listings and 1 package for 200 listings available – any agency entering this competition will stand a chance to win either of the various packages. Not redeemable for money or credit on current account with Entegral. Only agents/agencies whom “liked” our Facebook page as well as our Bid or Buy post wil

OMS Login update

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This is an existing feature that has been re-developed as it did not work correctly on all PC's and browsers When logging onto the OMS, you can check the 'keep me logged in on this computer' checkbox. This will save your login details on the particular computer so that you don't have to log in every time. Do not use this setting if you are using a computer that is shared with other people. The settings are removed if you either: 1) use the 'sign out' link in the OMS 2) you clear your temporary internet files including cookies 3) you change your password in the OMS We have also renamed 'username' to 'email'.

OMS login and search updates

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x2 Small updates have been done: IP ADDRESS On the login screen your public IP address is now displayed to assist with any support queries: The system will also now log this IP address in your Audit Trail (available under reports) for all users as indicated below: SEARCH Small performance and interface tweaks have been made for the OMS universal search. It now provides better visual feedback when a search is performed while search times have also been slightly improved:     The OMS search is universal , so you can search property reference numbers, street names, complex names as well as contact info like first name, last name, email address and telephone numbers. The results are fetched from the database and displayed to you very quickly and is sorted in the most recent listings or contacts first. The search also allows for partial searches , so you can enter the first 3 letters of your query and hit search. E.g. if you have listings in a complex called ‘boatlak

OMS Mandate commission update

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The property mandate screen has been updated to reflect the commission nett and gross amounts in a simple table format (and still with the auto-calculation features).  We have also updated the days on market/days to expiry indicator to a little pie chart, the green slice showing the % of days left you have available on this mandate: Various upgrades will be done in the OMS for the remainder of the year to integrate & upgrade sales tracking & reporting functionality. If you have any suggestions, please capture them here online .

OMS enhanced new user edit pages

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New user profile pages is now available in the OMS. (1) There are 3 tabs now: public info, administrative info and the user account details. The size of the about section (2) has been increased and the profile photo uploader (3) has been improved. You can now also crop photos in the system: The user account section has also been tweaked and will for instance indicate the password strength as you type it (from very weak up to very strong): One of the features suggested by a lot of users is to individually configure whether a user can send SMS messages. This can now be configured (but only by the office administrator). Users who don’t have this featured enabled by Monday 27 August will be restricted from sending bulk SMS messages through the system: We have also centralised and moved 2 functions to the account section: ‘delete user’ and ‘move user to another office’. Note the ‘move user to another office’ is only available at group level to move agents between offi

New Bid-or-Buy interface ready to go live

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As announced today on our Facebook page , we are almost ready to go live with the new Bid-or-Buy interface. This will seamlessly interface your property listings from the Office Management System (OMS) to the www.bidorbuy.co.za website. Pricing will be announced early next week. We have structured x2 packages and will also launch a competition, so watch this spot! Bid-or-buy receives over 1.2M unique visitors per month through their website and can therefore provide you with more exposure to your property mandates. The new Bid-or-Buy interface follows on an improved Property24 interface just launched. An upgraded Private Property interface is also underway while an interface to OLX is currently being developed. More exposure for your listings through the OMS.

Stationary for Estate Agents

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Some may think that we only develop software and build websites from 8-5 behind the doors of Entegral, truth is we really are a Jack of All Trades!  Have a look at this beautiful and very much professional set of stationary designed for Eminent Homes.     Let’s face it – something designed in Word or drawn in Paint just isn’t worth it – it looks unprofessional and I bet the outcome of something done by someone other than a professional just wasn’t what you had in mind.  We do a quick brief with the client, do a few examples and supply all artwork print ready and ready for use.   An affordable and well thought out branding exercise done in a heart beat!    If you’d like a set of stationary – that will stay professional and look new for years to come – send us a mail at support@entegral.net and we’ll contact you to get that distinct look out there for your real estate company.

Automated & integrated valuation reports coming soon to the OMS

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We’ve been hard at work lately extending the features of the OMS to provide a more comprehensive service. Launching soon is a range of automated and integrated property reports in partnership with Lightstone. You will be able to conveniently draw PDF property valuation reports in the OMS (Office Management System) branded with your company logo. Best of all is that you will be able to save these reports in the OMS cloud. Pricing will be announced closer to launch but you are looking at less than R50 for the property report than includes an automated valuation and less than R35 for the property report without the valuation. Other reports including suburb analysis, deeds name and property reports plus transfers reports will also be released.

OMS: mandate listing date correction for rental listings

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A couple of days earlier we’ve made this change that prevents the listing date to be changed to a future date. Unfortunately this update also crept into the rental listing mandates – we’ve now removed it and you can set the ‘available from’ and ‘available to’ dates correctly.

Performance upgrades OMS & Websites

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At Entegral , we are obsessed about providing highly optimised systems and websites. Today we’ve made more adjustments to make your online OMS experience and visitors searching on your real estate website even faster! This includes the implementation of ground-breaking new cloud technology that allows for much faster access to your data, whether you are uploading or viewing your properties, viewing your contacts or searching on your website. Everything is off course based on our industry first and leading real estate cloud platform. It uses less energy and we only consume the immediate computing resources we require. Green IT for your real estate business. “Technical jargon to follow” warning! Based on IOPS performance measurements , it results in up to x10 faster read/writes to the Microsoft SQL Server databases hosting your data, when compared to the dedicated servers. This is especially useful at peak times ensuring consistent performance 24/7!

[FIXED] Oops! temporary photo uploading error

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WE’VE NAILED THIS SMALL BUG POSTED THIS MORNING – EVERYTHING BACK TO NORMAL We’ve made some performance upgrades last night but it looks like a small bug crept it. When you upload photos this message will appear after uploading: But don’t worry – your photos actually uploaded! Just go back to the property listing and refresh the photos pages, you will notice the photos are there. We will have this bug squashed in no time! Sorry for the inconvenience!

New interface to OLX coming soon!

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We are busy working on a new property syndication interface to www.olx.co.za , watch this space for the launch date. OLX is a popular classifieds website and does regular ad spots on tv to promote their website.   We are also working on an improved user configuration which will launch in the next few days:   If you haven’t yet tried it out, you can now send faxes straight into the OMS! Click here for more details on the fax-to-document library service.  It is free and you can try it out immediately. The space provided in the document library has also been doubled, so you can securely save all your faxes online.

OMS: mandate listing date & contacts changes

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We’ve made a couple of small enhancements/changes to the OMS: You are no longer allowed to change the listing date on an existing listing to a future date (you will not be able to select future dates): On the property mandate contact details we’ve removed the link to open/edit the listing/letting agent and also inserted extra checks to ensure that the agent cannot be removed from the listing:

Now send your faxes straight to the OMS

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A new industry first innovation has just been launched by Entegral. It allows you to send your faxes straight into the OMS document library and start managing your faxes better! The ground-breaking functionality allows you to assign a unique fax number to your office or personal document libraries (so you can assign a fax number for your office and every agent). Just open the document library and follow the steps to instantly get a unique fax number for your office or personal use that you can start using immediately. The number is yours for life as long as you receive at least 1 fax every 2 months - and is completely free. So put it in your email signature, business cards or any other marketing material. Faxes are automatically converted and imported into PDF format in a “fax” folder. You can rename faxes, drag and drop it to other folders or create subfolders to better organize them: We’ve recently doubled the available document library space for all clients , so you can eas

Save (twice as many) files in the cloud with the OMS

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We’ve substantially increased the storage space in the OMS document library . Agents and Offices using the OMS now have access to twice as much storage space than before at no additional cost. In December 2011 we’ve launched an improved document library for the OMS. It offers a highly secure place to store all your important files online in our advanced cloud infrastructure . The file explorer interface allows you to easily upload or download files, create directories and drag and drop files between directories. Each agent (user) gets his own personal document library and each office has a general document library that is shared between the office users. This makes it perfect for sharing office documents and other files in the office (e.g. logos, sales contracts, document templates).   The restructured document library sizes are as follows: Solo Package User: 25MB to 50MB Office: 50MB to 100MB Core Package User: 50MB to 100MB Office: 250MB to 500MB Venture P

5 awesome facts you need to know about the OMS photo upload

1) Did you know, you can easily copyright your photos through the OMS. You have the option to watermark your logo or text: http://goo.gl/zowzu 2) The OMS also allows you to upload an unlimited number of photos and automatically resizes them for you during upload time, saving you time and bandwidth. 3) The OMS checks your photo quality to assist you in only uploading high quality photos: http://goo.gl/iVJjH 4) The OMS features a larger photo size compared to other property systems, ensuring better quality images for visitors to your website: http://goo.gl/nK5xr 5) You can easily re-order photos in the OMS, this allows you to select the best photo for your main image on your website

OMS Updated : Photo uploader & Document library

Photo uploader updated A new version of the photo uploader is now available and will download the next time you try to upload photos. The updated version fixes a few issues reported by some users and should also load faster. Document library fix We had isolated instances of users (where they’ve uploaded a large number of files to the document library) reporting errors. This has been fixed.

New AWS Cloud disaster recovery tool (AWS EC2 EBS automated snapshots)

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If you run a big cloud infrastructure like us on Amazon AWS that has to support thousands of clients, you better make sure that you have proper disaster recovery processes in place and that your server disks (AWS EBS volumes) are always backed up, working and have enough space. Through our own experience working with the Amazon AWS environment through the years, we have learned a great deal and can now confidently apply our knowledge into creating a unique AWS Cloud disaster recovery tool.  The aim of this tool is to help minimize against any downtime you may experience with potential AWS zone outages or EC2 failures, and get your systems up in running ASAP.  If you have hands-on experience with Amazon AWS, you will know that this can be a very time consuming task if you have lots of EC2 instances and EBS volumes that you have to recover. PHASE 1 launch Our phase 1 launch is in testing mode and already provides some excellent features to manage a backup set of your EBS volumes. 

Turning property search on its head - industry first: comparative driving time between landmarks and properties for sale and rent

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A while ago we’ve launched our innovative new POI (Point of Interest) search on our property portal MyProperty South Africa . This allows you to find property near popular South African landmarks. We are constantly adding new landmarks and it is starting to gain great usage traction from visitors. The POI search allows you to enter a landmark name in the search area, e.g. school name, shopping mall, police station, hospital or train station name and search for property for sale or rent around that point. Visitors can also drill down from points of interest on properties to find nearby properties. Properties geocoded by agents are used. World first – comparative driving time between properties and landmarks As an industry first (and as far as we can see world first) it also shows you the driving time between the specific landmark and properties. Visitors can even sort properties by nearest driving time. This is quite interesting, because depending on a property location, certain p

OMS – you can now add Half bedrooms

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You can now add half bedrooms under residential property features. This is ideal for indicating bachelor type apartments.

New Real Estate agency opens for Bloemfontein

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A brand new (and fresh!) real estate agency has opened it’s doors for the property seekers of Bloemfontein .  Protea Real Estate was born when local and well known estate agents in Bloemfontein decided to join hands and launch their very own estate agency and brand.   At first, when they approached us to be their service providers we thought, Protea…this would certainly be a brand with your typical green and redish colours.  To our surprise their supplied us with the most creative, thought out and professional CI manual that we got to use to create their new website.   Have a look at this awesome logo:   Definitely something fresh for the real estate market and boy do they stand out with these bold colours when driving down Dan Pienaar or Langenhoven Park – you cannot miss them amongst the sea of on show boards. Back to the drawing board we opted for simplicity when figuring out what to do with their website.  User friendly dropdown searches were used together with an area

Better cloud server infrastructure management through Entegral

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Gone are the days of worrying about the capacity of your servers and doing lengthy planning & budgeting for server resources & associated operating software and licenses. Entegral’s expert real world experience with Amazon AWS cloud services including EC2, EBS, ELB, S3, Route 53, SES, SNS, DynamoDB, Firewalls and various new services, ensures that your company’s IT infrastructure & systems are in safe hands. Whether you use one of our leading cloud based products like the OMS, Virtual Tours, Websites or have dedicated cloud servers we manage - all are centrally managed by an expert team that will ensure better uptime & scalability and lower cost compared to traditional dedicated server environments. This includes full disaster recovery and failover services. RealTime monitoring & management With our Cloud infrastructure we are for example immediately notified if any custom thresholds on servers or cloud services were exceeded, as indicated in the above scre