Appli­ca­tions and Sys­tems

Our pub­lic rela­tions team spent the last months plan­ning and work­ing on the con­cept for our new cor­po­rate SHORELESS web­site. As of the upcom­ing busi­ness year 2018/19, our old web­site shall be replaced entirely with this new site. Fea­tur­ing improved usabil­ity, our cor­po­rate iden­tity and more infor­ma­tive con­tents for our clients and vis­i­tors.

We're happy to announce, that the first steps are done. "We're on" at https://shore­less.lim­ited. You can now fol­low our progress online, while we're still migrat­ing con­tents from our old site and inter­nal data­bases, adding trans­la­tions and doing some fin­ish.

Stay tuned for how-to's and insights to IT related top­ics from selected arti­cles of our inter­nal knowl­edge base, our IT glos­sary, the new sup­port cen­ter and soft­ware licens­ing plat­form, and - of course - your well-known pro­ject dash­boards.

Within the next weeks, they all will find their new home at https://shore­less.lim­ited.

SHORELESS is using sev­eral dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions and sys­tems to pro­vide our ser­vices and sup­port our work­flows. Hav­ing to main­tain a unique and secure pass­word and keep­ing user pro­file infor­ma­tion up-to-date on each of them often caused headaches to both, our clients and our staff.

As of Novem­ber 2017, we there­fore intro­duce the "SHORELESS Account" for our clients and team mem­bers. One sin­gle user account to main­tain for access­ing all SHORELESS prod­uct and ser­vices related sys­tems. Whether for using this web­site, your Man­aged Host­ing con­trol panel, the SHORELESS Web­mailer, SHORELESS TIM and SHORELESS Team, or any of our other sys­tems, you now only have to remem­ber one pass­word. An addi­tional layer of secu­rity is added by an optional two-fac­tor authen­tifi­ca­tion.

You can also link your SHORELESS Account with your favorite social accounts on LinkedIn, GitHub, Face­book, Twit­ter or Stack­Over­flow to get access to your SHORELESS ser­vices.

What does this mean for You as User of a SHORELESS System?

All exist­ing users of any SHORELESS Sys­tem auto­mat­i­cally get a SHORELESS Account cre­ated using their pri­mary email address. You should get an email with instruc­tions on how to set a SHORELESS Account pass­word for your account. If you did not receive this email, you can always use the pass­word reset func­tion with your email address, or reach out to us at accounts@shore­less.lim­ited.

Some SHORELESS Sys­tems will still show the reg­u­lar user name/pass­word login AND an addi­tional "Login with SHORELESS Account" but­ton. Please note, that the user name/pass­word authen­ti­ca­tion of these sys­tems still use your old user name and pass­word, while the but­ton allows you to login using your new SHORELESS Account. We keep the old login options of these sys­tems for your con­ve­nience dur­ing the tran­si­tion period. They will dis­ap­pear by Jan­u­ary 2018.

Other SHORELESS Sys­tems will auto­mat­i­cally redi­rect you to sign in with your SHORELESS Account once you open them (sign-in only appli­ca­tions ) or hit the login pages (hybrid appli­ca­tions ) and did not sign in to your SHORELESS Account before. Oth­er­wise you will be authen­ti­cated auto­mat­i­cally.

Our sup­port team will always answer any ques­tions regard­ing your SHORELESS Account at accounts@shore­less.lim­ited or by using our con­tact form.

For a long time, Skype, QQ and WeChat have been con­ve­nient tools to exchange instant mes­sages with clients and between our dis­trib­uted devel­op­ment teams. Things just got a lit­tle messy, when we had to deal with dif­fer­ent pro­jects and clients at the same time. But not only long and mixed up mes­sage his­to­ries in dif­fer­ent mes­sag­ing plat­forms, but also grow­ing secu­rity con­cerns led SHORELESS to look for alter­na­tive ways of instant mes­sag­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tion.

While Slack is a viable option in many ways, our change man­age­ment board did not embrace the idea of exchang­ing the depen­dence on exter­nal 3rd party ser­vices with another exter­nal 3rd party ser­vice.

That's why SHORELESS decided to go for a self-hosted col­lab­o­ra­tion plat­form based on the open-source Mat­ter­most mes­sag­ing sys­tem. SHORELESS Team was born in Jan­u­ary 2017. After an inter­nal three-months pilot phase com­bined with Sig­nal for secure point-to-point voice calls, we now encour­age all our clients to join our con­ver­sa­tions at SHORELESS Team.

Ded­i­cated pro­ject-related chan­nels, a search­able chat his­tory, as well as desk­top and mobile apps for the most impor­tant oper­at­ing sys­tems are only some of the ben­e­fits of our new mes­sag­ing strat­egy.

With imme­di­ate effect SHORELESS switches to GIT as ver­sion con­trol sys­tem of choice for its soft­ware devel­op­ment pro­jects. Sub­ver­sion (SVN) has been around and used suc­cess­fully for more than a decade within IOc3 GmbH and Mario Steinitz Con­sult­ing respec­tively. On our way to excel­lence, SHORELESS as their new soft­ware devel­op­ment ser­vice provider is always striv­ing for bet­ter work­flows, eas­ier, safer and faster meth­ods, as well as opti­mal resource usage.

Using GIT allows for eas­ier advanced work­flows like when merg­ing source code, fea­ture branch­ing, forks and pull requests. Locally enforced val­i­da­tion and work­flow rules improve the source code qual­ity, and our glob­ally oper­at­ing devel­op­ment teams do not rely on our cen­tral SVN repos­i­to­ries any­more.

Exist­ing soft­ware devel­op­ment pro­jects still using SVN will move to our new cen­tral SHORELESS GIT repos­i­to­ries within the upcom­ing weeks.

What does this mean for You as our Software Development Project Client?

Besides get­ting faster results of higher qual­ity, the only change you will rec­og­nize is that our source code repos­i­tory browser is now SHORELESS GIT. When­ever you'd like to fol­low the progress of your soft­ware devel­op­ment pro­ject with SHORELESS by its source code and ver­sion­ing his­tory, you now have to nav­i­gate to https://git.shore­less.lim­ited, our new GIT repos­i­tory browser.