Unique Features of EnThinnai
Apr 9th, 2020 by Aswath
EnThinnai is a 1:1 messaging system focused on security, privacy, data ownership and data portability. Lots of care and thought has gone in to the design. This post lists some of them.
Hosted in a dedicated VPS host
Each customer or a practice is hosted in a dedicated, managed server instance. This ensures that customer data is isolated from those of others. Also this setup allows easy migration if it is desired. You are not locked in. We have to earn your business every month with our service and features.
Bring your own domain and ID
Your friends and clients can reach you by clicking on a URL you had previously shared. This URL depends on the domain name of the server and your ID. This the case in many other applications. For example, your email id changes if you change the provider. Historically this has been a deterrent for people to move. To counter that, we allow you to bring your own id as long as it follows a structure. Additionally, if you own a domain name (or a subdomain), we can set up the instance to use that instead of one of our own. There is no additional charge for this, though the industry standard is to charge a premium. We have to include this in the base package since we truly believe that you must be free to move at any time you want and nothing in our design should be an impediment.
Free Guest access to your friends and clients
Most of the systems allow free access to your friends and clients so they can all you. But they do not authenticate the callers. The whole system is built on the premise that few people will know the URL your caller will be using to call you. And then subsequently, these system depends on the assumption that you will be able to identify and validate the person once the session starts. In contrast to this, our system will allow the caller to authenticate themselves by sending a one-time password to their email. We also recognize that there are occasions when you would want any second party to reach out to you as when a prospective customer wants to reach out to you. This flexibility is unique to our system.
Data ownership
In the course of operation, the system stores information related to registered users. For example, the system will store a list of friends who are allowed to initiate a session with the user. Users can save their contact information and share them with their friends. The system stores session information for later review. All these are collected and stored just for the benefit of the individual users. Also, the users can port their data out of the system and use it in a different server.
Privacy and security designed-in
The system is designed with privacy and security built-in. Even though the main purpose of the app is to share information with others and to allow others to call the users, it uses what is generally known as “Default Deny” philosophy. The app allows the users to share their Availability status and profile/contact information. But, the user has to specify who can access which information. And you can change the permission setting at any time. This granular control to access is unique. The same goes for who can initiate a session with you; even then which mode – text, voice, video – is up to you.
No additional programming required
This app is designed so it can be used by consumers directly. So there is no SDK to master or any need for further programming. Still, the app offers great flexibility and can be used in different scenarios and configurations. For example, one of the use cases is its use in customer support. For this use case, the app will display to your callers their position in the queue. Instead of otherwise engaging the caller while they are waiting (or being held), callers are free to attend to other things; the agent will buzz the caller when it is their turn. All this is pre-programmed. Other use cases already designed are Pet monitor (caller can hear/see audio/video of the pet and not the other way around), Baby monitor (both the caller and the baby can hear/see other’s audio/video) and Door monitor (you can see hear/see the audio/video from the door, but the visitor can only hear your audio). All this you select simply from your dashboard and will be encoded as part of the URL you will share with the prospective caller.
Multiple concurrent sessions
Nominally, all sessions begin when the caller sends a text message to you and the session takes place in an independent browser window. At any time after that both the parties agree to escalate the session to an audio or video session. The system allows you to have multiple active sessions. Either party can close the media portion without closing the session.
Given this structure, you can have multiple active sessions; presumably you are using audio/video in only one session even though the system does not force it.