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LibraryH3lp is software used by libraries, educators, and non-profits for better customer service.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Welcome to our new trials! And a big 'thank you' to our existing customers.

Welcome to LibraryH3lp, Meebo users!  And thanks, so much, to our current users for the wonderful recommendations.  We sincerely appreciate your enthusiastic support!

We've had a huge influx of new trials since Meebo's announcement.  We're very excited to have the opportunity to show all our new users everything that LibraryH3lp has to offer!

It's a very busy time for everyone involved with virtual reference.  A few people have asked us if our system is capable of handling a big influx of users. The answer is a resounding, "Yes!"

LibraryH3lp has a history of fast growth, more than doubling in each of the last four years.  We are in great shape to handle increased load in a variety of different ways.  We've been building and scaling our system since we began. We currently provide the platform for the busy state-wide NCknows service.  And we're ready for a rapid period of growth.

So, what sorts of loads do you find on any virtual reference system?

Operator logins.  Our core Jabber/XMPP server is under light load currently.  We're confident enough in this that we continue to offer unlimited numbers of concurrent operator accounts to everyone.  You never have to pay extra for more operators.  Just create however many you need and build your service and staffing models the way you want to.

Presence.  This is a big one for any chat service that dynamically shows your online/offline state.  Presence load can be significant once users begin placing chat in high-traffic areas, such as inside every page of a catalog at a busy library.  We're in good shape here, too.  And, our widget shows real-time presence in most browsers. We also offer a Presence API that lets you do some very fancy things with chat on your website.

In the last 24 hours, we processed about 33 million presence requests from over 300,000 unique IP addresses; a presence request happens each time someone loads a web page with a LibraryH3lp widget or presence badge.  Since it's summer right now, it's a safe bet that presence load was higher than this a couple of months ago when the Spring academic term was in full swing.

Widget loads.  You can have as many widgets as you'd like across your website or websites. We use Amazon's CloudFront to distribute our widget and compressed JavaScript files; these components have been optimized over the years to get them as small and fast-loading as possible.

Chatting.  Chatting is nice and snappy, with accurate typing notification on both ends of the conversation.  We offer unlimited chats on servers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Singapore to give our international community of users the best possible performance.  In the month of April, there were 63,483 chats answered on the US server alone.  That's a lot of patrons getting help!

So come on in. The water is fine.  :)

P.S.: Don't miss the resources in our last blog post: our quick drop-in Meebo replacement guide and our overview video!

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