You’ll soon be greeted by a different looking login page. Don’t panic, nothing catastrophic has happened. Here’s what it will look like:
You may also notice that when you login you are directed to a different URL (address) than before. Something like “east1.merchantos.com” instead of the normal “shop.merchantos.com”. We’re making this change so we can better handle our growing customer base and give you better reliability.
We’ve found that the biggest reliability issue is your internet connection. Sometimes your provider will lose connectivity to a portion of the internet, and sometimes this includes the data center where our system runs. We’ve designed the new login page to help work around these problems. After we phase in the new look/feel of the login page we’ll be turning on this new feature.
Use Your Email Address As A Login
We’re switching to email addresses as the primary way to login in to MerchantOS. For now this is optional and you can keep your normal login name. But we are going to encourage you to go to Admin->Employee Setup and change your employee logins over to their email addresses.
Why? We are adding the ability to reset your password via email. The easiest and most straight forward way to do this is to have your login name be your email address. This is also becoming a fairly standard practice across the internet so this should be comfortable to most users.
We are also implementing a Users email list that you will have the option to subscribe to. We’ll email you about once every 3 months to let you know about changes to the system and other important news. We won’t spam you every day or week with it. Promise! You can unsubscribe at any time.
For The Geeks
The login page uses some clever javascript to detect which of our data centers you have connectivity to. It will then direct you to our preferred datacenter if you can connect, but if you don’t have connectivity there it will use a proxy in our secondary data center to get you there. This means that if you can connect to at least one of our data centers you’ll be good to go.
At first we are just turning on the new look/feel of the login page but keeping it hosted at our primary data center. Meaning this new whiz-bang functionality won’t get you much benefit. But over the course of the next month or so we’ll be moving the login page to a more high availability setup that you should be able to access even if you have limited internet connectivity.