Most of us use cloud-based applications, whether we realize it or not. If you use Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, for business or pleasure, you use a cloud-based application. And this doesn’t even take into account Salesforce.com, WebEx, Google Apps, GMail and a hundred other services. Most people would say that their email or CRM system is mission critical. But how about Twitter or Facebook?
If you use Twitter, you may have noticed they have had a tough time keeping the system up at times. According to their blog, a lot of this is increase in traffic from the World Cup. Twitter has had its worst month of uptime since last year. I always thought the Fail Whale was cute when Twitter is inaccessible, but I don’t want to see it very often. To alleviate the strain, Twitter announced an API rate limit cut. They cut it from their default limit of 350 to 175. What this means in plain English is that if you have an application that works with Twitter, you can read only half the number of tweets you could before. For occasional users, this isn’t a big deal. For heavy users it is. This also affects websites and blogs that have Twitter rolls as part of their site.
Read the rest of this entry »
Did you ever open your email and see an attachment called winmail.dat or win.dat? Did you ever try to open it and read what’s inside? Were you successful? Probably not.
So what are these strange files and where do they come from? The culprit is Microsoft Outlook.
Lots of people use Microsoft Outlook as an email client. I use it myself. The problem is that it doesn’t always play nicely with other email clients, like AOL, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird and lots of web-based email systems; although Thunderbird has a plug-in to make this work. You would expect that in 2010 this would be fixed, but alas, it’s not. If you send email with Outlook, you don’t have the problem. The person who receives your email has the problem.
The issue lies with the different formats you can use in Outlook. You have 3 options: Plain text , Rich Text or HTML. In Outlook 2007 and 2010, Rich Text is the culprit. In earlier versions, HTML also caused problems.
A few minutes ago concluded the longest and perhaps greatest tennis match in history. John Isner from the United States and Nicolas Mahut from France just finished an 11 hour marathon at Wimbledon. This match was played over 3 days. The final set was won by Isner 70 – 68. For those not familiar with tennis, that’s 70 games to 68 games. The match broke every record imaginable.
What stands out more than anything for me is the mental and physical commitment and perseverance of these 2 men. Either of them could have given up at anytime, but they were playing to win. I think all of us can take lessons from this in our business lives.
When you are involved in a small business, startup or any venture, things frequently look dire. Will I make the next payroll? Can I afford to subscribe to that mailing service? Will any customers buy what I’m selling? Will a competitor put me out of business? Is this really a good idea for marketing? All of us have these questions, but we need to stay the course and move ahead. If you have a good idea for a business, product or marketing campaign, stick to it and execute. That makes all the difference in the world.
Read the rest of this entry »
Did you ever wonder if your customer lists and other confidential data is walking out the door when people leave the organization? Here is something that I came across when working with a client.
This organization uses multiple FTP and other file sharing sites to share documents internally and with partners and customers. Some of these are sanctioned by the organization, but many aren’t. The reason there are so many is because IT is very busy and hasn’t gotten around to creating an easy-to-use collaboration site for everyone. They also make it very difficult to implement anything as basic as a secure collaboration site without having to get vice presidential justification and jumping through hoops. There are Windows file servers for some internal projects and Microsoft SharePoint sites for others. People use email, free sites, like drop.io and YouSendIt, and FTP sites to exchange documents with outside people. Employees have resorted to “roll your own” because of the IT can’t meet the need in a timely way.
Read the rest of this entry »
Part of any organization’s security and governance plan needs to be what to do when you have a data breach. Notice I said When and not If. With everyone from a kid with a laptop to sophisticated criminal hackers attacking systems, you are bound to be on the list. Even if you are lucky not to be a victim, as British Petroleum can tell you, it’s better to be prepared.
If I am your customer, the first thing I want to know is what happened. Next is what are you doing to fix it and any problems that it caused me, and will it happen again. Part of that should be an apology and some transparency. If not, I may not trust you and will take my business elsewhere.
Here is a great example of what not to do. Recently AT&T exposed personal information from 114,000 Apple iPad users. The carrier has enough trouble with everyone constantly piling on about how bad their service is for iPhones, so they didn’t need more problems. The NY Times got a copy of the email sent to iPad users explaining the problem. The email is very long and after a minute or so my eyes glazed over.
Read the rest of this entry »
Most of us use cloud-based applications, whether we realize it or not. If you use Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, for business or pleasure, you use a cloud-based application. And this doesn’t even take into account Salesforce.com, WebEx, Google Apps, GMail and a hundred other services. Most people would say that their email or CRM system is mission critical. But how about Twitter or Facebook?
