A few weeks ago, I asked a number of folks to offer some early feedback on my alpha version of Missive. I’ve collected some great feedback, including how end-users perceive the security risk of trusting third party tools, and I’ve been sent some various notes on UX and usability.

One of the important considerations for building Missive is its security, so for the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a data validation system, which examines every piece of data entered into the web application, and rejects any data that does not look right. That is now deployed.

The blog and documentation site has been revamped to make it easier to follow.

One of my alpha users has suggested that some users may be wary of supplying their web server credentials to a third-party service they don’t know, so I have been giving some consideration to that issue. My current thinking is to allow users to upload an installer package to their server manually, which would circumvent the need to supply any credentials at all.

This might look something like this tabbed interface, offering the new mechanism by default:

Package deployment

This will use an existing remote-control system (of limited capability) to carry out new deployment actions (e.g. installing a new config file).

The existing password-based system would still be available, in a secondary tab:

Credential deployment