Weekly Release: Incremental File Retrieval

Well it was a nice Christmas with family and friends, and there was a bit of work getting done as well. I’ve come to realize that starting a company is pretty demanding. This week’s release was a big one, we’ve been saving up all of the features that required database changes for a larger release, and that was this one! Although things didn’t go as smoothly as hoped with the data migration, we got things cleaned up and we’re back in business. With this release we’ll be opening up our beta to a wider audience to give it a try. Here’s a quick run down of the changes we pushed out today:

In the Web Application:

• We’ve begun integrating in the plans and pricing into the overall application. You’ll now need to choose a plan that you want to use for your Basecamp data and file retrieval.
• There are quite a few UI changes that went into this release. It tightens up the overall UI and hopefully makes it more clear as to what is happening.
• By request from some of our beta participants, we added in a detailed status log view. You can access this from the main console page by clicking on the icon to the right of the most recent status message for each job. This will give you all status messages grouped by Job run.
• There is a new status message available in the logs as well that shows a count of the number of files retrieved as well as the total size in bytes of all files retrieved. It was an internal monitor we had that we decided to expose through the status messages. It may be a bit cryptic right now, but we’ll clean it up. It currently reads something like “FileCount=49:TotalSize=208823384”.
• One consistent feedback message we got from our beta users was that there was no way to complete a job if it got partially done and then they had to go get some coffee or something. We knew that going in to the initial release, but chose to cut that feature in favor of releasing. Well, we’ve now added it in. If you have a job that is partially configured it will show a Configure icon next to the status message on the main console. Clicking on this will take you to the next step in the wizard that needs to be configured.
• We added in a number of small security related assertions to better ensure that our applications remains secure.
• Finally, we added in a page that gives details about how your job will be scheduled and when you can expect your first retrieval to happen.

In the Core Engine:

• Of course the big feature that we released today is the ability to do incremental file retrievals from Basecamp. This is a feature we’ve been working on for some time. Now all jobs will run a full retrieval on a limited schedule and an incremental retrieval on the runs in between.

There’s still more coming as we ramp up to our initial public release in the beginning of the new year.

Amazon EC2 Downtime reminds us of the need for managing IT even for online applications

A lot of startups and even medium sized businesses that run online, subscription applications would not have been viable just 10 years ago. This is because the cost of computer hardware and network hardware and infrastructure personnel to run a large online business was cost prohibitive even a few years ago. Cloud computing has changed much of that and Amazon has really led the way in implementing the vision (After Sun came up with the idea). Now it's possible for a company to build a highly complex application and deploy it to Amazon's cloud infrastructure and pay a minimal amount to start off, but have virtually unlimited resources to scale up as they grow. Having a company like Amazon or Google, or Microsoft run the data center should be comforting for customers of these online applications. It means that there are specialized security experts figuring out how to secure things, specialized storage experts figuring out how to back thins up and keep data online, specialized performance experts worrying about how to keep things fast, and specialized operations people keeping things running and available. This is something that most online companies would not be able to do anywhere close to as well as these bigger, specialized companies could do. Amazon has lots of experience running a huge data center for their own applications and they are able to use that expertise to run other company's applications as well.

But, that doesn't mean that even the big boys are immune from downtime, data loss or security issues. Just this week, in the prime Christmas shopping season, Amazon's Ec2 cloud went down for a short time. This mainly probably impacted a number of online applications of startups that were trying to make things happen at this prime time of year. Even though users can get some relief from knowing that applications they use online are being managed by a large, specialized company, there are still concerns that need to be thought through. Core IT principles still need to be followed. It's not enough to trust your service provider to keep your data secure, or back it up consistently. You need to make sure that you are caring for the IT assets that run your business.

Windows 7 Giveaway Winner

We recently ran a giveaway in an attempt to do a little bit of market research about how people are using online project management software. You can still fill out the survey here. We chose one of the survey participants randomly as the winner of our giveaway. Our winner is Kim Vigsbo of Vigsbo Solutions. We sent off a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Professional to her the other day. Kim uses Basecamp to manage her design projects with her clients. Thanks to all who participated in our short survey.

Weekly Release: Beta feedback enhancements

Still slaving away here on the product this week, getting ready for the holidays at home as well with lots of cookies and parties going on. We've been getting some great feedback from our beta program and we're rolling out some quick fixes of things that we're hearing about a lot. There are a couple bigger features about done that should be rolling out shortly as well. Stay Tuned! Here's the bag of changes we added today:

In the Web Application:

• Added the ability for users to give their own names to tasks so that they can be differentiated in the Management Console.
• We made the overall application larger, it was sort of constrained before to a pretty small window so we grew it a lot, this makes it easier to see stuff and will allow us to add in some more features without over crowding the console.
• We've added some more help topics as well as additional help related information into error messages that better help users understand how to correct data input that may be incorrect.
• We also built out some additional monitoring capabilities into the overall application so that we can have a better handle on the application as it is plugging away day after day!

In the Core Engine:

• A new feature we added in the FTP Storage logic is to name the project directories after the name that you give the project in Basecamp instead of using the project ID we get from Basecamp.
• We added in a retry mechanism to the Basecamp file retrieval logic. We were seeing occasional requests to Basecamp's Amazon Storage for a file were timing out or getting some other error back that was network related. So now if we get that back we'll wait for a bit and then try the file again. This has decreased the missed files that we were seeing. There is lots of error handling required when dealing with such a network dependent application.
• Along those lines, we also added in some additional error handling on the FTP storage logic. There are tons of FTP servers and they all have little nuances that we have to handle. We're getting a lot more robust in handling them as well as the related network issues that come with securely transporting GB's of files and data across the Internet.
• We fixed a bug we discovered around the handling of Basecamp Projects that are archived state.

We have a lot more features coming down the pipe soon. Have a blessed Christmas and a great holiday season. Thanks to all of our beta program participants and a special thanks to those that have actively been providing feedback.

Rackspace Outage impacts SaaS companies

Rackspace is one of the largest hosted data centers and many leading SaaS business applications are hosted in their datacenters. On Friday their datacenters had an outage that caused all hosted sites that they manage to be unavailable.

Read the full story from PC Magazine - http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357366,00.asp

The Data Liberation Front

Looking to retrieve your data out of Google's tools and applications? They have a great site that gives detailed directions on how to get all of your data out of many of their most popular applications. The idea they are touting is that this is your data so you should be able to get at it, they want to provide services so good that you won't want to leave with your data, but if you do want to then you can. The interesting aspect to this is that this gives you a way to keep your own copy of your data. If you are a business then you want to have data backup and archival policies in place, that is getting difficult as you move to SaaS basec applications. But if you are using Google's tools, you are one step closer to making that a reality.

Check it out at http://www.dataliberation.org/

Data Backups with SaaS Applications

When evaluating SaaS applications for use within your business, one of the questions that you should be concerned with is backup and availability of data. There are two sides to this when you look at SaaS applications: On one hand you want to know, does the SaaS vendor backup your data and have a disaster recovery plan? And on the other hand you need to know if you have access to that backup data or the ability to export all of your data?

Since these applications are hosted in data-centers that are managed by someone other than you, and that company is focused on running a great hosted application it is pretty much a given that they are backing up their data centers and including your data. They most certainly also have a decent disaster recovery plan where they can be back up and running in short time. It is pretty likely that many SaaS vendors can do a much better job of backing up and restoring data and applications as well as recovering from a disaster than most small and medium sized businesses could do themselves. It is something that SaaS vendors live and breathe and their business models are dependent on doing it well. When looking into this in more detail you will find backup policies listed in the FAQ's or Service Contracts for these applications, for example a quick search on Salesforce.com reveals the following backup policy:

3 global data centers & disaster recovery

Salesforce.com’s three state-of-the-art data centers feature carrier-class bandwidth and the latest infrastructure already configured to serve 1.5+ million subscribers. The facilities are linked through a dedicated OC-48 backbone, providing real-time failover and point-to-multipoint replication as well as disk-to-disk-to-tape backups. They include biometric scanning, "lights out"/opaque cages, video and infrared surveillance, intrusion-detection scanning and security audits.

The salesforce.com backup policy

· All networking components, SSL accelerators, load balancers, Web servers, and application servers are configured in a redundant configuration.

· All customer data is stored on a primary database server that is clustered with a backup database server for redundancy.

· All customer data is stored on disk storage that is mirrored across different storage cabinets and controllers.

· All customer data, up to the last committed transaction, is automatically backed up to a primary tape library on a nightly basis.

· Backup tapes are immediately cloned to a second tape library to verify their integrity, and the clones are moved to secure, fire-resistant, off-site storage on a regular basis.

· Disaster recovery plans are in place.

- http://www.salesforce.com/platform/cloud-infrastructure/recovery.jsp

This gives you a good feeling that Salesforce is taking good care of your data and not too much is going to happen to it. If something goes down you're probably not even going to notice. 37Signals has something similar for their well known products Basecamp and Highrise. They want you to feel comfortable with their backups as well as the security of your data:

We protect your data

All data is written to multiple disks instantly, backed up daily, and stored in multiple locations. Files that our customers upload are stored on servers that use modern techniques to remove bottlenecks and points of failure.

Sophisticated physical security

Our state-of-the-art servers are protected by biometric locks and round-the-clock interior and exterior surveillance monitoring. Only authorized personnel have access to the data center. 24/7/365 onsite staff provides additional protection against unauthorized entry and security breaches.

Full redundancy for all major systems

Our servers — from power supplies to the internet connection to the air purifying systems — operate at full redundancy. Our systems are engineered to stay up even if multiple servers fail.\

- 37 Signals Website

You'll find these same types of descriptions on almost all SaaS vendor sites for their products, touting how well they manage your data and security for you and how well they have planned for disasters of their data centers.

The thing that is consistently missing from all of the SaaS vendors sites is information on how you as a customer can access these backups in the event that you need to. Things as simple as accidentally deleting files or data from their site, or just the need for a bulk data download so that you can access data and files offline while you're on the plane. If you are needing to do integration between these online applications and other internal IT infrastructure, can you get at that data or do you have to write custom integrations for everything? And what do you do if you just want to clear out some older, stale data and files that are taking up space in your account, you can't just delete them as you may need them for future reference or in case of an audit. This is not the core business of these SaaS vendors and it is not something that is in any standard contract that will be offered, so if you need this type of service it is something you need to negotiate with the vendor (and pay handsomely for), or you will need to do a custom integration yourself to get at the data and files you want. Or investigate 3rd party tools that can provide these data extraction integrations for you.

Weekly Release: Account Management features and Core Engine tweaks

There's been a ton of work going on here, we released our beta to a wider audience last week after a full test cycle with Utest. Over the weekend we worked through a number of the suggestions we've been given and also a few other small features that we had on the backlog. Here's the bag of changes we added today:

In the Web Application:

• Added a forgot password page for our accounts
• Added a change password page for accounts
• Added in a new account management screen so that you can access all of the account manangement features in one place.
• We fixed a UI bug with our logon validation messages and included better messaging on logon failure

In the Core Engine:

• Fixed a bug with files containing international character sets that caused those files to not be transferred correctly
• Implemented changes to the Basecamp logon flow based on their new login policies that they are putting into place this week.

Lots more coming soon! Thanks to all participating in our beta for the great feedback.

Beta Release Updates

We pushed out another build yesterday after completing a test pass with UTest testers. This build allowed us to pull in additional Beta testers so we have sent out a round of beta invitations to new customers allowing them to try out our product.

We decided to go down the path of using invitations for the beta as a means to control the scaling of our application. This allows us to slowly grow the user base while keeping a close eye on the service and how it handles the large amounts of data transfer that it does as the number of users grows. We want to get an idea of how many users and data retrieval jobs one of our servers can handle so that we can project our needs as we grow.

The functionality in this release includes the following:

• Complete Retrieval of all your Basecamp Data and Files.
• Control over scheduling of automated data retrieval.
• FTP Push of your data to your server.
• Storage of data and files in a non-proprietary format that you can access at anytime with the tools you already use.

We're pushing ahead on our feature list and will be doing incremental releases as we get a batch of features completed and though our test cycle.

Windows 7 Professional Giveaway

We're doing a little market research for some of our product planning. We'd love to get your feedback about online project management software. Here's a short survey that we put together. We'll be giving away a copy of Windows 7 Professional to one respondent. All you need to do is fill out the survey and then follow us on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/aanhou

Don't worry, we'll have some other giveaways for you Mac users soon.

Did SaaS kill the IT department?

One of the fastest growing segments in the software industry is Software as a Service (SaaS). Think of Salesforce, Google Apps, Microsoft Dynamics Online, Netsuite, Zoho, Outright, Shoebox, 37 Signals products, or a myriad of others. These applications run on servers managed by someone other than the customer and the customers access their data over the web. The customer's data is stored on the managed servers and is typically only accessible through the application's user interface or an applications programming interface. As more companies begin to migrate much of their critical data into these applications basic IT principles are becoming a requirement.

The top concerns of customers evaluating SaaS applications revolve around data privacy, security and access. Customers are asking key questions about data ownership, backup, archiving and migration. When a customer's data is stored on the servers of an application provider, the customer still owns that data and a key requirement must be accessing it in a neutral way.

Many SaaS vendors offer complex and expensive options to allow customers access to the applications and data should the vendor cease operation. Few offer options for customers to access data offline during periods of downtime or other issues. Few offer the ability for the customer to restore data in the event of a data loss. And even fewer provide options or even clear instructions that would allow a customer to migrate to a competing service should the customer find a better fit for their business needs or just become dissatisfied with the vendor. In the world of IT these are basic requirements for any software application that a company integrates into their business. And these requirements do not go away because there is a "paradigm shift" with new buzzwords. Businesses must (and they will) demand the basic set of IT requirements for SaaS based applications.

When any business deploys and manages an application within their own data centers they expect that they will integrate that application into their existing set of operations tools. These are tools such as monitoring, virtualization, backups, deployment and so on. Many of the largest systems companies like Microsoft, IBM and HP provide extensive tool sets for managing the data center. The expectation is not that each new application that a company deploys will provide all of this basic IT functionality, rather the expectation is that the application will be capable of being managed by the existing tool set that a company uses. If your company is using Microsoft System Center for deploying applications, monitoring them in production, and backing up their data, you will not require, let alone utilize, that functionality from an application vendor that provides a new software package you are buying. Instead you will require that application vendor to allow their application to be fully managed by System Center.

In much the same way there is an emerging tools market for SaaS and online based applications that will provide much of the basic IT infrastructure that businesses have come to expect in their own data centers. Many of these tools such as online monitoring tool vendor Pingdom are already well established. There are many more companies that are being founded even now that will fill in across the remaining IT service gaps.

About Us:

Centripetal Software products, Aanhou Retrieve™, Aanhou Archive™ and Aanhou Migrate™, provide the ability for a customer of a SaaS application to retrieve full and incremental snapshots of their data so that they can access it at anytime, archive it in ways of their choosing, or migrate to competing services with zero downtime. Sign up today to join our beta program or to be alerted as new products are made available.

Website & Beta Release!

The website for Centripetal Software is now live. I'll still be tweeking it here and there and putting up new content, but the overall site is up and ready. There are a couple of cool things that I figured I'd call out here.

First, the rotating images on the front page were done by a local design company named Movement Designs, they do great work and do it quickly. Sean Naus is the owner of that company and is a pleasure to work with (and fun to surf with as well).

Next, I pulled together a How it Works screencast video that is a product overview and gives a short explanation of what it is our products do. It's not super flashy or anything, but gets the point across. I used a cool video screen capture product called Jing Project to record the video and audio. I'll write up more on that another time, but check it out as it makes screen casting super simple.

Finally, I'm also kicking off the Beta for the first product. Aanhou Retrieve™ for Basecamp is our first product to be released and I'll be sending out beta invitations as I get through them. You can request a beta invitation on our new site.

Business Cards

Well now that I have a new logo from 99Designs I needed to get business cards. I used Vista Print to do it all online. It was simple, I chose from their long list of templates, then plugged in my information, uploaded a few image files and tweaked things a bit, entered my credit card and they showed up on my door step a few days later. I'm quite pleased with the quality of these. My first attempt at it with my old logo and name did not turn out so good. It is important to use very high resolution images, even for something as small as a business card.

I'm not quite sure why, but I felt the need to have physical business cards. In all my years working at Sun Microsystems and Microsoft about the only use I found for the boxes of business cards I received with my name and fancy titles on them, was to drop them in the free lunch drawing at Chipotle or Starbucks. Rarely did I hand them out to people who would actually have some use for them. Now that I am running my own software company (Centripetal Software) will I have more use for physical cards? I'm not too sure. At some point I'll be doing a lot more marketing, but that seems like it will be mostly online. Maybe I'll be heading out to some conferences or meeting with clients where I'll feel the need to hand over a card. Until then I'll just post a digital copy here and then tuck the box of heavy card stock, 4 color, front and back printed business cards into the drawer of my desk.

99designs

My company, Centripetal Software, is a new software startup. I quit my job at Microsoft on Oct. 15, 2009 to work on it full time. One thing that I wanted to get done was to begin to have a more professional presence on the web and elsewhere. I figured this started with ditching the home made logo I had created myself and go get a professionally designed logo. I began looking around online and with people that I knew who did this sort of thing and quickly determined that I couldn't afford to have it done professionally. About this same time I was reading through Bob Walsh's book "The Web Startup Success Guide" and came across a company profile he has in the book for 99 Designs. This web startup was exactly what I needed. This is basically crowd sourcing your design work.

The process for getting a logo created starts out by creating a Design Contest. In order to do this I wrote up my Design Brief which included a brief introduction to my company, a bit about my target audience, and then described what I wanted in a logo including some pointers to other logos that I sort of liked and why I liked them. Once I submitted this information the important part for a boot strapped startup came next. I got to choose how much I was going to pay for the whole thing. I chose to give a $295 prize to the winner of the contest. This is basically a guaranteed payment to a designed who creates the logo that I select. 99 Designs charges a small fee on top of that so my entire bill came to $364, much less than the thousands I had been quoted elsewhere.

Within a couple days of the contest starting up, different desingers began to submit designs. I was able to comment on each and every design telling what I liked and didn't like and changes I would like to see in the designs. Most designers were quick to turn around new designs and post them for me to see. The contest lasted for 10 days and by the end of the contest I had received 141 entries, many of them were variations on the same design, but I'd estimate I received about 30 unique designs from 15 different designers. I ended up choosing the logo you see on this site and have posted it here as well. I was very happy with the entire process and what I received as well as the cost. In the end I received my winning design in a Photoshop file and the designer even included some icons using my logo that I had expressed interest in. My logo now graces my business cards, my website, and is all over the development version of my product (which will be released in the next couple weeks).

99 Designs does Logos, icons, web site layouts, twitter and blog themes and pretty much anything design related. I'll certainly use them again when I need some additional work done.

The Pros:

• The Cost! $364 complete


• The Options, with that many options I was sure to find something I liked.


• Easy Process, 99 Designs makes it easy to get design work done for someone who is not design savvy.

The Cons:

• Information Overload - I almost had too many designs to choose from and had a hard time picking in the end. It also took a significant chunk of time to comment on each design.

Centripetal Software

Welcome to Centripetal Software.

Centripetal Software is an early stage, angel funded, startup focused on delivering IT services for end users of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. We help people maintain control of their business data even as they move that data onto applications hosted over the internet by 3rd party vendors. Our products, provide simple setup and complete integration with many of the leading SaaS applications to provide data backup and archiving, vendor migration, and managed security services.