This week we released our most recent customer case study that highlights how SendSafely customer EZOPS launched a software distribution portal by integrating Zendesk Guide & SendSafely Workspaces. EZOPS develops artificial intelligence-driven solutions to enhance productivity for middle and back office teams in the financial services industry, and frequently needs to distribute new software versions and product updates to customers. The SendSafely team met with Jim Zucker, the CTO of EZOPS to get a first hand account of the benefits his team has realized by setting up the integration and get a walkthrough of the portal.
The new EZOPS software distribution portal allows customers to authenticate through Zendesk and then browse the latest release and help desk documentation articles in Zendesk Guide. The User Segments feature of Zendesk Guide allows EZOPS to apply permissions to each article so that users can only see product articles for software they have purchased and are licensed to use. Within each Guide Article there is a link to a SendSafely Workspace where the customer can securely download product related installers and updates.
Prior to deploying the SendSafely integration, EZOPS has been searching for two years to find a good software distribution solution. “There was no good out of the box solution, surprisingly, for software companies to provide a download site to distribute their software. I looked for two years and didn’t find anything on the market.”
The initial search for a distribution portal platform had three main requirements. First, the solution had to integrate with Zendesk Guide as EZOPS had already been a Zendesk customer for two years. Secondly the solution had to alleviate the need for EZOPS to host and maintain their own portal infrastructure. One of the main drivers for finding a new platform was to allow the EZOPS development team to focus on developing the company’s core software products without distraction. “Maintaining our previous system took a lot of time away from the core product. Every time I wanted an enhancement, we had to steal engineers away from delivery.” explains Zucker. “We like to leverage the Platform as a Service model wherever possible, so that I don’t have to hire people to manage services and servers”.
Lastly, the solution had to provide an audit trail and log every software download in order to comply with contractual requirements. With SendSafely, all customer access and download activity is logged and can be reviewed and audited by EZOPS administrators. “Everything is logged so we have a good record, even when a customer downloads product documentation. The big advantage of that is better traceability, and for a software company that’s valuable as we have a requirement for tracking downloads of our software. It’s important to be able to show when someone downloads the software. [SendSafely] gives us a record so we can always account for who has had access to the product.”
An added money-saving bonus for EZOPS was the fact that the company was already using SendSafely to address the strict file size restrictions that Zendesk imposes on ticket attachments. With SendSafely’s native Zendesk App, attachments larger than 20MB can be added to support tickets by both agents and external customers. “After talking with SendSafely, we found we could also solve our software distribution problem as well. It was particularly pleasing to be able to develop the integration using our existing Zendesk and SendSafely licenses without any additional or double licensing”.
You can read more about the EZOPS integration by reading the entire case study. For further information on how to integrate SendSafely Workspaces and Zendesk Guide, please consult the following resources:
- Full Case Study: EZOPS Case Study: Integrating Zendesk Guide with SendSafely Workspaces
- Blog: Using Zendesk Guide & SendSafely for Authenticated Software Distribution
- How-To: Using a SendSafely Workspace for Authenticated File Distribution with Zendesk Guide
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