January Update

Dear John Doe

I hope this email finds you well, and that you had a Great Holiday Season and Happy New Year! This email includes some updates on a couple of key areas, including:

1. Summary of recent Bistro updates
2. Overview of upcoming development roadmap
3. Update on Lewis Media's business transition

Recent Bistro Updates

The January 16th update included a couple of key new features including the launch of a Troubleshooting Package feature and the inclusion of a sorting framework for content that will be added to various modules over the next few months. Although our blog entry goes into more detail about these updates, the Troubleshooting Package is an important new feature that hooks into the help desk. When someone sends in a new help request, they now have the option to include a Troubleshooting Package: a summary of their website's health and stability, recent errors and alarms, software versions and other diagnostic information. This information helps our helpdesk staff troubleshoot more quickly, making the help desk more efficient.

This update is setting the tone for the next few months of updates, which will focus on self-serve features. These features include more documentation and tutorials, improved helpdesk features, and more tools to allow end-users to configure their sites. These changes will not only give your clients more control, but will reduce their dependence on you for making changes.

Related to this, we have a number of new tutorials and documents that will be of interest to you and your customers. The links marked with a * are for distributors-only, and require a valid username and password to access.

• Linking Thumbnail Images to Larger Images
• Uploading Documents to Your Site
• Uploading Large Files via FTP
• Working with Menus *
• Search Engine Friendliness for IIS *

As we add more tutorials and materials, I'll let you know in future email updates, as well as linking to them via our Blog.

Finally, another Bistro update that we have made live in its "Beta" stage is additional website monitoring. To check it out just

• log into the distributor's area of our website at www.lewismedia.com/distributors
• click the green "Manage" button for one of your sites
• find the section at the bottom of the page called "Stability & Performance"

This new area will show you charts of the last 30 days performance of the selected site. Please note, this feature is still in-development, and we're currently working out all the kinks. In the meantime, feel free to take a look at the performance of the websites you manage.

Spring 2009 Feature Roadmap

As I mentioned above, the next few months will be seeing a number of key updates. While I will be elaborating on the updates in our blog, below is a quick list. If you have any questions about a specific update, please feel free to post a comment on our blog (to make the question/answer public) or to email me directly at joseph@lewismedia.com

• Additional software support contract options
• Automatic Lightbox support for images in the Catalog, Online Store, Real Estate Listing Manager, Profile Manager
• Category and product sorting in the Online Store
• New Module: Social Bookmarking
• New Module: Twitter Integration
• Additional Sub Menu AutoStuff Tags
• Improved IIS Support
• Minor Bugfixes in the Installer and Help Requests
• Monthly emailed Monitoring Report for Resellers, summarizing the Bistro sites they have and their respective health
• URL Manager will be upgraded to become the SEO Manager with additional features
• Improved stats filtering (to weed out bots) and visualization

Several of these will be taken care of in the February update, which is currently scheduled for Wednesday, February 18th.

Lewis Media Business Update

As mentioned in my previous update email, as we complete the sale transaction, we will be closing down the full-time Kitchener office - and now we have a date for that closure: March 31, 2009. During the next couple of months we'll be moving a number of the core functions of Lewis Media to some of our partner locations, as well as on to contract-remote staff. During this transition, we ask for your support and patience. Rest assured that we are working diligently to ensure the transition is a smooth one.

Related to this transition, I am also thrilled to announce that we have partnered with ZFactor to provide ongoing design and consultancy services to Lewis Media's legacy web design clients and to several of our resellers. ZFactor Communications is an internet marketing agency with a long history of providing great website solutions in Waterloo Region, and we're happy to have them taking care of our design clients going forward. As part of this, several Lewis Media staff and contractors will be working with ZFactor on an ongoing basis.

If you are looking for assistance with your design work for your Bistro clients, please feel welcome to contact ZFactor or any of the contractors I mentioned in my previous email.

It has been an exciting January so far, and I'm sure 2009 will be bringing more news and adventures!

Cheers,

Joseph

P.S. I will continue to send out these email updates on roughly a monthly basis, and I will be personally maintaining our blog at www.lewismedia.com/blog.