5 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With Box Panel

Probably my favorite thing about my life at Blue Box is getting to work alongside a team that’s really dedicated to improving the quality of the services we provide. Scarcely a day goes by where we don’t have some kind of update to our systems that makes life a little easier for both our customers and our technicians. That said, one of the tools that’s changed the most since I started working here has been the Box Panel.

Our long term goal is to make the Box Panel your one-stop resource for everything related to account management, and it’s become that in more ways than I could have initially imagined. The only problem is, with things progressing at such a fast pace, it’s easy to overlook new features as they are added. With that in mind, I’ve decided to put together a little list of useful tools you might not have even known you had.

1. E-Mail Administration

Since adding e-mail management tools to Box Panel, we’ve really expanded the scope of just how much you can do with just a few clicks. While initially customers could just add, remove, and reset passwords on their accounts, we’ve since added a number of features, including:

• Vacation Messages – Once turned on you can set an automated response to be sent to your contacts when you’re unavailable, and you can set a date to have your message automatically disable itself.
• Automatic CC – If you want your e-mail to also go to another address, simply define it here, and you’re good to go
• Simple Spam Filter – If you have spam problems, but don’t want to pay extra for postini, the simple spam filter may be your next best bet. It uses a filtering tool called SpamAssassin to automatically move spam messages to a “Junk Mail” folder. It’s not as robust or flexible as postini, but it has the upshot of being a more than adequate free alternative.

2. Bandwidth Data/New Relic

As your site grows, it’s going to become more and more important to have good data on how it’s performing. Under the “Monitoring and Reporting” group (all the way on the bottom of your Box Panel page) are bandwidth data and graphs, which will tell you how much data your servers push to and receive from the internet, and New Relic RPM which is an invaluable tool for easily finding bottlenecks in your applications.

We announced our partnership with New Relic a few months back and have had a great response from developers who’ve used these tools to help tune their applications. The best part is, not only can you associate your New Relic account with Box Panel (whether it’s pre-existing or newly created) but you can also get a free month trial of their gold membership plan for hosting with Blue Box. Be sure and let us know if you’re interested!

3. Registering Domains

In the domain names section of Box Panel, you can Update your DNS and renew your domains at the click of the button. It’s also easier than ever to register domains! While you could always check domain name availability and add domains from the Box Panel, until recently if you wanted to add more than one domain at a time, you’d have to order each individually. With that in mind we’ve implemented a cart system—when you search for a domain and want to purchase it, it will add it to an online shopping cart and will allow you to continue adding domains until you’re ready to check out.

4. Online Chat

One of our most exciting new Box Panel features is the live support chat. Since our initial announcement we’ve seen a lot of positive feedback from customers who have appreciated having another way to get in touch with us, and the chat interface is fantastic for quickly copying and pasting quick links to customers’ sites or error messages they might need help troubleshooting. Keep in mind that the service is still in beta, and we’re still ironing out the bugs, but so far it’s been working like a charm. What are you waiting for—check it out!

5. Quick help links

Probably the best kept secret of the Box Panel is the handy online support button in the upper right-hand corner. Take a look up there the next time you login—you should see something like this:

Our contact number, of course, needs no explanation, but what you might not know about that support link is that it’s context specific to each page of the Box Panel. If you see any features that you’re not entirely sure how to use, click that button and you’ll be taken to our public knowledge base article for that specific service. For example, if you were to navigate to the DNS administration page, but aren’t entirely sure how to add entries for your domain, when you click that button, you’ll be instantly taken here! It can really be a life saver when you just have a quick question, and don’t want to search through the knowledge base to find an answer.

The Box Panel is constantly being updated and improved, so hopefully this has been a helpful quick list of features, but as ever if you find anything you have questions about, and you can’t seem to find the answers online, feel free to let us know and maybe it’ll be about time for us to throw together the top 10 things you didn’t know you could do with Box Panel!

-Nick Rycar
Blue Box Group Systems Administrator