Spring Cleaning the Portal

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The PlusNet portal and Member Centre offer our customers a number of tools and applications that help customers manage their accounts (such as Manage My Mail or Move My ADSL), provide information (like View My Broadband usage or Webstats) or allow customers to switch on (or off) certain value added services (like CGI or MySQL). As part of a project to "clean up" the website and make it less confusing we have been reviewing each of the tools that are available to see how many people actually use them, and have used them in the last 12 months. We've also been looking at the functionality of each tool to see whether it is still a useful tool or if it has become outdated. Our intention is to concentrate on building tools to further help our customers to manage their accounts and to achieve things they can't do elsewhere. As such we have identified three specific items on the portal which we believe to be outdated and for which very few people actually use. There are also a number of specialist providers who offer the same tools but do a better job. The three we have identified are the Diary, Address Book and Favourites (note the Address Book is a separate tool to the Address Book in Webmail). It is therefore our intention to give 30 days notice (by email) to all active users of these tools of our intention to remove them. We of course don't want to leave anyone in the lurch so where feasible we will provide a copy of any stored data from these tools in an importable format (for example, a CSV file for import into Google Bookmarks or Addressbook). We would also like to receive feedback from our customers about the tools they currently use (specifically in this case Diary, Address Book and Favourites) so that when we send the notice email we can also include a list of alternatives that customers can switch to. I've started a forum thread here to collate suggestions. As the popularity of the different tools will change over time and different people will offer new and better applications we will continue to review the various tools and value added services at regular intervals. Should the need arise to withdraw anything else we will of course, where possibe, give an appropriate notice period and provide a copy of any stored data. Dave Tomlinson PlusNet Product Team