Following our announcement at the beginning of this year of the slow launch of our new platform #gandiv5, it’s time again for another update, like we did a few weeks ago, on how things are coming along. And it’s all the more important to give another update as we continue to approach the point where we can move all of our customers over to the new platform.
Because we have been slowly launching #gandiv5, not all functionalities have been available from the beginning of the launch of #gandiv5 in Beta. Certain features have since been added and others are set to be added in the coming weeks. The front interface is also subject to regular optimizations.
In any case, no need to panic: any functions not yet available on the new platform will remain available on the old one until they are fully integrated into #gandiv5.
Here are the principal functions that have been added recently, or will be added to #gandiv5 in the coming weeks:
Through July:
- Mailbox management and the launch of our the new Gandi Mail service
- Advanced dashboard, alert and notification management, and multi-organization display
August
- SSL/TLS certificate management
September:
- Purchase and simplified Cloud server management interface
From October to December :
- Launch of the reseller and large-portfolio management platform
- Zone file management
- Complete Cloud server management
- Gandi Site and Gandi Blog management
We decided on this slow launch approach because of one significant advantage: our customers can opt-in to the new site by migrating their account(s) before the final switchover, depending on their needs. As such, if you only management a small number of domains, we suggest migrating today and trying the new site as soon as possible: that way you’ll have all the time you need to get used to #gandiv5 before you can no longer access the old interface.
Otherwise, we expect that when the final cut-off date does arrive, our Customer care team will be busier than normal. Migrating ahead of time gives you the chance to get help from our team before the rush.
Tagged in GandiV5
I just went through the migration from v4 and ran into several issues.
I had 2FA enabled. It required me to log into my account, so it asked for ID & password (on the new login form), then rather than asking for just the second factor (as v4 does), it asks for the password *and* the second factor. This is enough to completely fool my password manager, 1Password. There is no need to ask for the password a second time. V4’s login works perfectly.
Next up it required me to create a whole new login for V5, which is fair enough, however, this new login uses the old account’s second factor!! Again, this completely breaks my password manager, and means my new login uses the second factor from my old account, and I can’t see any way of changing it – all I’m offered in settings is the ability to turn it off, but it’s not clear if this might affect my old login. Really not good, this is a mess.
Next I had trouble finding my domains – my dashboard contained a note saying “Looking for your domains?” and telling me to select my account from the menu in top right, which I did – only to have it display the same thing again, and not my domains. This advice is actually wrong – the domains are shown when you select the domains tab from the left sidebar. If you have to post a new item pointing out where it is, it suggests it should be more obvious, or shown by default. Why isn’t the “show all my products” the default? It’s what I want to see!
Next I looked at my email settings, which I had already set up with several forwards but no mailboxes. All my forwards have apparently disappeared.
Next I imported the DNS records for one of my domains domains. This seems to work, but the UI is ridiculously huge – I’m running on a big 2560×1440 screen (non-retina) and it only displays a measly 12 records. I’m on a desktop machine – I’m not interested in using buttons I could use my fist to press…
The records are displayed in apparently random order – creation order perhaps? v4 orders by type, then name, which I find more logical – it should be a settings option, or done via column headings. It might make sense to list CNAMEs first to emphasise that they take priority over other record types.
In “domain contacts” it shows “type” as “company, but it’s not editable. My organisation name is set as “Surname Firstname”, which is common in France, but not elsewhere, and it’s not editable (I probably set this when I created the account originally) as it used to be a requirement along with my SIREN number – but that was only needed for a .fr domain which I no longer have.
On the same page there are switches controlling email and data hiding. There is very little colour difference between the on/off states. I have good sight, but I can imagine them looking identical to many. Make these more obvious – regular checkboxes would work just fine. There are similar problems with the Yes/No buttons used in various places – though they don’t have a contrast problem, it’s not clear which is the active state – dark or light – I had to click the control to figure out whether it was on or off – again regular checkboxes would work much better; colour should not be the only differentiator – this is basic UI design.
When saving changes on that page, there is no feedback that it has saved successfully or not – a couple of the fields flicker, but that looks like a glitch, not any intentional confirmation. I noticed that another page popped up a notification at the top – much better.
When I went to look at my account settings, I seemed to be moved into an entirely different interface in admin.beta.gandi.net. The colours and layout are slightly different, but similar enough to make me wonder where the other things had disappeared to. the security settings pages are quite different, switching to a centred layout instead of the left-aligned layout used everywhere else. When I tried to get back to my account, I ended up on the beta.gandi.net marketing site.
The other big thing I noticed is that it’s all very slow, and almost every operation incurs a whole page load via a white screen. There is some CSS animation – but having that happen after a complete page load just looks silly. A little more immediacy via the myriad javascript options available would be appropriate. There’s a lot here, and it would look pretty enough if we could lose the gigantic Fisher-Price controls, but at present it doesn’t come across as a nicely integrated system – it’s a collection of parts. A long way to go, I suspect.
First, thanks for the detailed feedback. I’ll pass this along to the team.
Next, I’d like to address some of your points one-by-one:
I had 2FA enabled. It required me to log into my account, so it asked for ID & password (on the new login form), then rather than asking for just the second factor (as v4 does), it asks for the password *and* the second factor. This is enough to completely fool my password manager, 1Password. There is no need to ask for the password a second time. V4’s login works perfectly.
Good point. This is actually a known issue and we are working on fixing this.
my new login uses the second factor from my old account, and I can’t see any way of changing it – all I’m offered in settings is the ability to turn it off, but it’s not clear if this might affect my old login. Really not good, this is a mess.
We are revisiting how two-factor works with the migration. Of course, we don’t intend to keep v4 running in parallel forever so eventually the question of the impact turning off two-factor would have on the v4 login will be moot, as the old login will no longer be available. As for how to get a new seed, turning it off and back on has this effect. This seems intuitive enough. Having a single button for turning off 2FA or getting a new seed makes sense.
Next I had trouble finding my domains – my dashboard contained a note saying “Looking for your domains?” and telling me to select my account from the menu in top right, which I did – only to have it display the same thing again, and not my domains.
The “Looking for your domains?” item dates to before the search bar and the “show all products” option were added and the instructions were perhaps more apt before we added these dashboard features, which we meant precisely to provide more direct access to domains. As for defaulting to display all products upon login, it wouldn’t really be desirable for those with many different domains and other products managed across multiple organizations.
Next I imported the DNS records for one of my domains domains. This seems to work, but the UI is ridiculously huge – I’m running on a big 2560×1440 screen (non-retina) and it only displays a measly 12 records. I’m on a desktop machine – I’m not interested in using buttons I could use my fist to press…
Tried it on my display (same resolution, also non-retina) and I can see a few more records than 12 but point taken. Above all, at this size, the interface could use some improvement.
The records are displayed in apparently random order – creation order perhaps? v4 orders by type, then name, which I find more logical – it should be a settings option, or done via column headings. It might make sense to list CNAMEs first to emphasise that they take priority over other record types.
I think maybe you imported your records from v4 but haven’t activated LiveDNS yet. LiveDNS does sort by type, then name. However, I noticed when I tried the import on my own domain that the API still imports the records from v4 by name only, which granted is not immediately evident in the DNS interface due to the primacy given to the type, but I suspect that if you look, you’ll see this is the case. Good suggestion for prioritizing CNAMEs, though. We may ultimately end up implementing some kind of “sort by” feature, but that’s not for sure yet.
In “domain contacts” it shows “type” as “company, but it’s not editable.
This is the same as in v4, actually, and is due to the same restraints. You can change this by changing the owner, rather than editing.
There is very little colour difference between the on/off states.
Indeed. This could be differentiated better.
it’s not clear which is the active state – dark or light – I had to click the control to figure out whether it was on or off – again regular checkboxes would work much better
A checkbox seems reasonable and legibile to signal a binary on/off choice. I’ll suggest that.
When saving changes on that page, there is no feedback that it has saved successfully or not – a couple of the fields flicker, but that looks like a glitch, not any intentional confirmation. I noticed that another page popped up a notification at the top – much better.
You’re right. There should be the same kind of notification, as is the case elsewhere on the site.
the security settings pages are quite different, switching to a centred layout instead of the left-aligned layout used everywhere else.
That’s fair. There is an intentional differentiation between this area of the site and the dashboard, but the switch between the two could perhaps be improved.
When I tried to get back to my account, I ended up on the beta.gandi.net marketing site.
I see what you did: you clicked the gandi.net logo whereas you would have had to have clicked “Dashboard” (on the right) to get back to the dashboard. Again, the transitions between the “account” area and the “dashboard” area could be smoother.
The other big thing I noticed is that it’s all very slow, and almost every operation incurs a whole page load via a white screen. There is some CSS animation – but having that happen after a complete page load just looks silly. A little more immediacy via the myriad javascript options available would be appropriate.
Not sure whether or not javascript is the solution here, but you’re right about the problem. This is a question I’ll leave to our design and development team.
Thanks again for your input. Keep it coming! If you’d like a more direct line, feel free to email feedback@gandi.net.
Will we finally be able to use Gandi support and hosting without requiring transfer of sensitive data through unencrypted e-mails?
That’s already the case. You can send a GPG-encrypted to secure-gpg@support.gandi.net as described here: https://wiki.gandi.net/en/gandi/documents (other options for sending encrypted documents are suggested on this page as well).
Thanks for pointing this wiki page out, I didn’t know this option existed. You should mention it on the “Contact support” pages.
It would be nice to have an option to opt-out from automated e-mails too such as “your site is installed”.
Is one-click DNSSEC still on track for gandi v5? Any ETA? Thanks.
Hi Boris! Yes, it is. I have no ETA yet but definitively one of the very next feature to be added to V5.
Is this a joke ? How can you force migration to a platform that isn’t fully developed yet ?
Cloud administration isn’t developed but my account got migrated to the new V5 and V4 access has been disabled. I used to connect to IAAS cloud management, and now I can’t do any action at all !
I can’t neither administrate my wallet.
That’s unprofessional and unacceptable from a cloud provider.
Hi Silvio,
The migration is not mandatory. While you are arriving on our new platform when using gandi.net URL, you are not forced to use it, and can still use http://v4.gandi.net to access your product.
Product which are not integrated yet in #gandiV5 can be managed via our legacy platform and this will remain until the new platform is fully functional.
If you face difficulties, can you please log in to our livechat (http://www.gandi.net/support/livechat) so a customer care agent can help you?
Hi Sophie,
I can’t login anymore to V4 so I though it was disabled.
I’ll go to the livechat, thanks for the link.
Regards
You need to be logged in to see the live chat :/ In case your Gandi handle does not work anymore, please send an email to feedback@gandi.net, I’ll have a customer care agent get back to you right away.
Livechat to which I have to be connected to use it …
V5 works for me but not V4 anymore for no reason.
I filled a support ticket, let’s see
Thanks Sophie, I’m writing a mail to the address you provided.
Regards
Damn guys, if you think this is “Ready for takeoff” I am Ready for takeoff from Gandi… Something really went wrong here.
You know, the “beta” should be the version where you think it is production ready and you only have unexpected edge-case-scenario problems.
I haven’t migrated to the v5 yet, but judging from the outside and the comments in the news posts about v5, you should still call this project “alpha”.
For example here are some very basic design/usability mistakes:
Your most important contents have #999 grey and #fb0 yellow fonts on #f3f3f3 background.
Are you even operating legally in the EU? Shouldn’t you display a “sponsored by *** HDR display manufactorer” disclaimer somewhere? 🙂
https://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html#fg=999999,bg=F3F3F3
https://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html#fg=FFBB00,bg=F3F3F3
Using hamburger menu at all is not enough, but you use it badly: doubleclicking to the same place does not open-close menu, the menu pushes the whole page, the menu has different elements depending on the page and screen size, and last but not least, it is still a hamburger menu on every resolution/viewport/platform.
These cross-subdomain redirections are really-really bad. Feels like I’m on a Microsoft page…
Thanks for the feedback. We’re aware of the text/background contrast issues on some of our marketing pages (and some other places), and have had a few other commenters express distaste with our hamburger menu. Yours are perhaps more to-the-point about our particular implementation of this design feature, though, than criticisms focused on whether we should be using hamburger menus at all.
As for the cross-subdomain redirections issue you raise, I see what you’re referring to, but I’m afraid that, maybe due to not being a designer myself, I’m not sure what the complaint is. For the sake of clarity, would you mind specifying what the issue is? That will facilitate passing your feedback on to our design and development team.
Otherwise, I should clarify that when we talk about v5, we’re referring to (at least) two things: one is a new site, the design of which you brought up a few criticisms (colors, hamburger menus, etc.). The other is new and upgraded products/features: dashboard, more granular rights management, LiveDNS, a new Mail service, new webmail, and so on. In this post, we’re talking about the features much more than the site design itself.
DNS requests are still unencrypted and considered to be public information by many ISPs.
Separate DNS requests for each action means that you are leaking the exact times of logins, the times when we use the admin panel and the shopping times.
Glad you’re security-minded. There are some steps you could take on your side to mitigate threats posed by DNS lookup monitoring, as we are certainly not the only site to use this kind of structure. That said, we’ll look into what if any subdomains could be merged without serious impact. Thanks for pointing this out.
I only use Gandi for a domain and email. Everyone else here seems to be more technically able than me. I don’t know whether any others just use email like me, but I’ve found this conversion quite complicated and daunting. There’s no central instructions for what to do or what to expect, just this news item and the previous one.
I set up a new handle and test email so I could do the conversion without harming my proper email. It all went very straightforwardly except for the email migration – after clicking the button for this it comes up with “Info You need to switch to Gandi’s LiveDNS in order for this feature to work”. I assume it means you have to do it for email to work? I’m still on the email tab. So I did it anyway. But being an amateur I don’t know what LiveDNS is. I don’t know if it’s just something the professionals take for granted? Or they already switched to it on v4?
Apart from that it was all very easy.
Thanks Roy for your useful feedback. Not all features have been implemented yet, and yes, some are maybe more advanced for your need. We’re still working on getting the platform the most adapted possible to each customer needs, so you can have a dashboard view corresponding with what matters for you.
Hey,
I’ve been a fan of Gandi for a long time, and I still like your company.
But this v5 rollout is a mess. The new UI is many times worse than the previous v4 (missing functionality, bad navigation, looks bad, etc).
Sorry to say, but you shouldn’t have rolled out something half-baked.
Regards,
Alexander
Hey Alexander. Thanks for taking the time to give us some input. And glad you’re a fan! I know this is not the way most places do rollouts of new sites, but the reason we did it this way is probably the same reason you’re a fan and like us. We want to maximize the feedback we get from customers such as yourself. As such, we’ve been slowly rolling it out in new geographic areas since the beginning of the year, really, not everywhere all at once, and we’ve been adapting to customer input all along the way. It’s part of our commitment to transparency.
Anyway, maybe you can help us in that respect. I’d like to ask if you could give a bit more detail about some of your comments. First, what functionalities are missing, besides the ones listed in this article? Or, more to the point, what are you trying to do that you can no longer do? A lot of the old ways of doing things in V4 are no longer necessary in V5 so there might be an easier way to do what you want. Or maybe there’s legitimately something we’re missing in V5 that you’d like to bring to our attention?
Next, do you have any examples of “bad navigation”? Maybe you could help by describing a specific use case, what you’re trying to do and why.
Finally, while “looks bad” is an aesthetic judgement, we’d like to dig into this question a bit further. What exactly looks bad, and in what circumstances? V5 includes our first responsive site design, so factors like screen size and resolution are important.
Anyway, the point is, yes we rolled out V5 a little differently than most would. It’s a little awkward, sure, but we did that because we wanted to maximize the input of our actual customers on the final outcome. All that is to say, if you’d like to help us, we’d be happy to hear the details of why you’re so turned off by V5. Otherwise, if you really can’t stand it, you can still log in to v4.gandi.net until we’ve perfected v5.
Thanks
According to the top of this page, you wrote this article on 08.04.2017, or 8th April 2017. However, the comments are all from August and September.
I suspect you’ve fallen foul of the rather silly American date format, which starts in the middle of the date, but only for the main post. All the comments are in the much more common DD.MM.YYYY format.
As Gandi is French, I’d expect you to get this right!
I agree with Matthew. Either use the ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD as in the WHOIS records) or write out the month with letters. Any different date writing has no place on a site which deals with domain registration.
Hi, thanks for these inputs, you’re absolutely right: the post date is in US format, while the comments are in European date format. I’ll check with our team in charge of the News website so we can correct.
Will v5 have an .onion address?
Hi, not planned for now.
Which site has the correct domain prices? The v4 or v5?
For example the .eu domain for 10 years is $99.00 on the v4 but $154.30 on v5.
The new design (at least the part which is visible without login) is terrible tbh.
Not only the domain prices which are inconsistent. The same menu items with the same look at the same place on news.gandi.net and beta.gandi.net (Domain Names, Simple Hosting, Cloud) point to different locations.
By the way the hamburger menu can not be closed without scrolling back to the top.
Hi,
Thanks for your feedback. We actually identified some of these points and are working on them already. Don’t hesitate to send an email to feedback@gandi.net if you have some other specific topics in mind.
About the pricing, you actually spotted a bug. We’re checking with tech team to understand what’s happening here.
Hi again,
About this very specific issue, there’s indeed a bug on our legacy interface. The promo displayed in #gandiv5 are the right ones.
Comments are closed.