If you haven’t already heard the big news, today marks the launch of The Planet’s Orbit portal iPhone Web application. By working with customer focus groups and culling survey responses about our portal experience, we have put together an ambitious road map to revamp and improve the way our customers interact with us and our system. A surprisingly large portion of our customer base claim the iPhone as their device of choice, so we set off to work on a tool that could manage Orbit accounts on the Mobile Safari platform.

In our initial release, our focus was to provide customers’ most-used functions and features:

• Basic hardware management
• ­Ping status
• ­Power on/off
• ­Reboot requests
• ­OS reload
• ­Bandwidth utilization information
• ­Escalation procedures
• Ticket management
• Invoice summaries

Enough telling … How about some showing? If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch visit https://iPhone.orbit.theplanet.com, and check it out! If you don’t have access to an iPhone at the moment, we’ve posted a few screenshots on Flickr:

Given the constraints of a mobile app and the fact that the screen real estate is limited to 480×320, the application will be most useful to customers who have less than 25 servers with us. Every Orbit user with an iPhone will find this tool to be a valuable resource.

The iPhone app is merely the first of many new customer-facing systems improvements we have slated to launch this year. Later this spring, we will release a new RESTful API upon which you can build you own feature-rich interfaces. You can also keep an eye out for a new community site — accessible from Orbit — that will take you behind the scenes to grade, rank and comment on our new development ideas. Longer-term projects for 2010 include revamping a number of portal functions, adding more API methods, and updating the user interface based on your feedback.

If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod Touch, check out the app and let us know what you think. We want as much feedback as you can muster, so don’t bite your tongue if you see areas we can improve. Using this app as a test case, we will continue development on other popular mobile platforms like Android and Blackberry, and we’ll update you with that progress.

-Kyle