The year 2021 is over and so it’s time to look back at the biggest improvements we’ve made to your Gandi interface.
1. Broad-based changes to improve your experience
More complete and more practical tables
Besides the sorting options, filters, and exports that have been added across all product categories, we reviewed and corrected the conceptions of these components themselves in order to improve performances and make the content more flexible and adaptable to your needs, particularly across multiple devices.
A new chat tool
In the middle of working in your Gandi dashboard and need help? Not to worry! You can now chat with one of our experts directly from your Gandi interface in order to get the help you need.
Of course, the chat complies with all data privacy regulations (including GDPR), and is available from the contact page, and the status page, in addition to your dashboard.
2. New organization management features
An activity history for organizations
Monitor activity on your organization account more closely with the activity feed. You can use this tool to see everything that’s happened, operations that your employees and partners have done, but also view these modifications.
SAML
If you already use SAML elsewhere, you should be aware that you can also use it with your Gandi account. That way, you can authorize employees to connect to their Gandi accounts using SAML. You can automatically withdraw access rights to your Gandi account when a user is deleted from your system.
This new feature will enable you to expand your security and manage your users and your teams by restricting access to accounts that have SAML active.
This is now available for Gandi Corporate customers.
3. Domain name management updates
Configuration template optimization
We’ve improved the display of configuration templates to make using them easier to understand. You can more easily create, modify, and manage a configuration template and apply it to your domain name in just a few seconds.
Linked zones
“Linked zones” enable you to link several domain names to a single DNS zone configuration. That way you can manage DNS records for your domain names in just a few clicks, in a centralized way.
All you need to do is edit a Linked zone and deploy it for the DNS registrations of all the linked domain names to be updated.
You can also filter your domain name list by linked zone.
Advanced DNS
We now provide an Advanced DNS feature, available on LiveDNS, for business users.
Advanced DNS adds an extra layer of protection against down time in case of an incident or an attack, guaranteeing your professional internet services stay up.
Secure your key domain names with Advanced DNS
Improved email mailbox management
We have also made improvements to email account and email forwarding management.
Aside from real-time data usage information, additional security settings have been added, which will enable you to update the settings on email accounts across multiple domain names in just a few clicks.
We now support DKIM and we add DNS records corresponding to each new domain name using the LiveDNS zone by default.
To encourage users to activate this feature, we have added the option to activate it, using a simple activation button, which automatically adds the necessary registrations to the domain zone.
4. Email service updates
A handful of webmail updates
We made many updates to our webmail services, primarily in order to improve security. In particular, we’ll mention two-factor authentication implemented for SOGo and Roundcube, but also a redesigned account recovery process (email address and recovery codes), as well as a redesign of the password update process and access management (i.e. the ability to deactivate IMAP, POP, SMTP, and webmail access).
A tool for importing email
We also implemented a new mailbox migration tool.
You can now use this interface to copy your emails from an email account at another provider to your Gandi email account (via IMAP).
You’ll need your email login information from both platforms in order to launch the migration, which can take a few hours, depending on the amount of data to transfer.
5. GandiCloud VPS
A new VPS application
This is probably one of the biggest updates of 2021: virtual private servers are now part of our product offering.
We developed a new GandiCloud VPS application so that you can manage your resources completely autonomously.
Based on OpenStack technology, our new GandCloud VPS infrastructure is intended to be flexible, intuitive, and reactive.
We are continuously implementing more and more features in order to further enrich and advance the user experience of this new product.
Resource management (volumes, servers, IPs)
Several new GandiCloud VPS resources are now available at the point of creation: servers, volumes, and IP addresses.
You can also change your servers’ reverse DNS in just a few clicks.
Post-payment
With the arrival of this new product, we re-examined the invoicing system, closely analyzing use-cases for such a product.
We logically decided to provide a post-payment solution for our GandiCloud VPS service. This was a big decision that required a lot of work, particularly on the billing side, where we had to totally revise our billing models.
6. Billing updates
New prepaid account history
In 2021, we made several changes to our billing application.
With all these changes, our goal was to improve your experience with your Gandi products, whatever they may be, billing and invoicing being an integral step to the lifecycle of any product.
Prepaid account history was added and all operations are centralized under a single list, with the corresponding documents.
Improved invoice and order search and export
We added filters to better isolate invoices and orders in your searches. Now you can filter by product type, payment method, date, and status.
Once you’ve performed a search, you can export the documents relating to a particular period or to the entire search results list in CSV or Excel format.
As far as the invoices themselves go, you can now view all orders included in a single invoice and download the invoice in PDF format.
All these lists also have sort features and filters. They also adapt to the size of your screen. Test them out and see for yourself!
7. Improved checkout experience
The shopping cart is available everywhere, all the time
One update to our shop, though not just there since it impacts all Gandi interfaces, is the shopping cart preview.
You can now check the contents of your shopping cart at any time, on any device, with a simplified interface.
8. The Public API advances
An expanded documentation
Through the year 2021, we added new elements in order to regularly and consistently expand our API documentation.
Useful information or even new sections, all that we thought relevant to the improvement of the documentation has been added.
Out of beta
Another update, and not the least of them, was that we were pleased to announce at the end of November that the API is now out of Beta. This means that it is now stable and that you can take full advantage of it!
And what better way to try it out than in our new testing environment?
With our API Sandbox, you can safely test our public API routes, validate your scripts, or test complex workflows.
You should first create an account and add an API Sandbox key to be able to use this API.
There’s no link with your production Gandi account. The API Sandbox key will give you access to the API Sandbox and only the API Sandbox.
So go play!
9. A new look for the main page
Login
You will probably have noticed, since it’s an unavoidable part of using our website, we have updated the login page.
More easily find account and password recovery features, choose whether or not to display your password once you’ve entered it, and more quickly and intuitively follow multi-factor authentication steps — all changes that impact your first point of contact with our platform.
A new design for Gandi’s website
Another big change to note is the redesign of our www.gandi.net website, bringing a breath of fresh air and renewed vigor to the creation of new interfaces for new features to come.
Our news site, news.gandi.net has also been refreshed, in order to increase its level of accessibility and usability more globally.
There will obviously be impacts on the client application side in order to harmonize the design of all of Gandi’s interfaces.
What’s next?
We will, of course, continue to improve our client application interfaces along the same axes as before: improving user experience, making our products easier to use, addressing specific use-cases, and providing quality service.
The major projects for this new year have already been identified. In particular, we’ll be working on:
Domain name activity history: look up a log of actions on your domain names by you, your employees, and your contractors with a domain activity history. You can also see which operations have been performed on a domain name and access a detailed description of each of these.
A notification center: we’re working on a new system with greater flexibility
The ability to force two-factor authentication for all users in your organization
For this and more, stay tuned, we’ll keep you informed of any developments as soon as possible.
And before it’s too late, we wish you the best for 2022!
We’ll see you soon for new adventures, and in the meantime, take care.
Sincerely,
The Gandi team
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