New authentication system, usability improvements and upcoming federated accounts

Yesterday we deployed a new release of SMEasure, which although largely a maintenance release to enable some upcoming features, has a number of improvements.

We've completely overhauled the authentication system which will make the signup process simpler once we transition from private to public beta. One significant aspect of this is that it's now possible to reset your password directly from the site, rather than having to contact support.

In anticipation of opening the site to larger numbers of users, we've also increased our server capacity which should make SMEasure more responsive. In addition, if you're using Internet Explorer on Windows, we've enabled the site to use Google Chrome Frame, a plugin from Google that enables you to use Chrome's speedy JavaScript engine in IE. We use JavaScript to generate SMEasure's graphs, for example. More information here: http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/

We've made a number of usability and design improvements and removed unused, confusing options such as the need to set a Business Type for your Business.

We've also set up a new guest account (sign in with username/password: guest/guest) which shows contains a typical year's worth of electricity and gas usage. We'll be using the guest account to demonstrate some of the upcoming new feedback over the coming weeks, including how to spot when something goes wrong.

The main focus of the changes in the release are to support some new functionality we call 'federated accounts'. This is on testing with a small number of users now, but we are inviting feedback from everyone on what we have planned.

See this discussion for information about federated accounts: http://help.smeasure.org.uk/discussions/new-features/1-federated-ac...