Beta is like high school – it’s the first step to becoming adult you, you learn a lot about who you are, and, hopefully, it ends. Today, we’re proud to announce Frontline’s graduation from beta.
We’re releasing brand new versions of FrontlineCloud, FrontlineSMS, and FrontlineSync. If there’s anything that we’ve learned, it’s that good mobile technologies make engagement easier to build, automate, and measure. Today’s release updates the look and feel of the applications to be cleaner, more intuitive, and easier to set-up. Our new activities are smarter and faster. We’ve also rebuilt the foundations of the tool, starting with more powerful search, tags, and filters – ensuring that the information you’re looking for is always at your fingertips. And, of course, we’ve squashed a lot of bugs along the way.
We have a lot of users to thank for helping – we’ve been inspired by the United Methodists’ Ebola work, challenged by the Center for Disease Control anti-smoking campaigns, and excited to begin integrating with the some of the best civic technology platforms in the world.
Today’s release is one of the biggest in Frontline’s history – and it’s just the first step. We have an exciting set of releases planned, starting in late January with Frontline’s first developer release. From January, we’ll work with friends and Frontline Heroes to build content, and then in early spring, we’ll release something even better. At Frontline, open source isn’t enough – it makes sure that users aren’t dependent on a company, but it means that users are dependent on developers for tools tailored to them. While we love developers (we do, our developers are amazing), Frontline is working on tools that everyone can use to build digital messaging campaigns, services, and systems.
FrontlineSMS will stay free and open source, but we’re finishing off (a much more powerful set of) APIs, which you won’t see until early 2015. FrontlineCloud has an updated price, a new trial plan, and will get APIs in January. FrontlineSync is even more consistent than before and will update automatically.
That said, do you remember being 18? You’re not out of the woods yet. There’s more to learn, more to prove, and the occasional growth spurt. Starting now, if you download or sign up for Frontline, you’ll have the latest and greatest. If you’re an existing user, we’ll give you a bit more time to get used to the new Frontline – feel free to check things out, and we’ll ensure you have feature complete, seamless migration in January. It’s not all elbows and awkwardness, Frontline will start adding simple sophistication starting in January.
Today is the beginning of a new Frontline - one that’s quickly growing into distributed, open, connected world of civic enterprise messaging. Still, you never forget your friends or where you started – so no matter whether you’ve known Frontline for years or hearing about it for the first time, give the new tools a try. We’re looking forward to what we can build together.
You must watch this video: