Payment Information Updating

We’ve been working on a ton of new features and have released some of them, but the blog has been getting neglected. So I thought I’d throw up a tidbit of what we’re working on. We’ve been building out the admin section of the application to allow users to better manage the information about them and their account. The most recent bit we’re about to push out is a mechanism to update payment information. One of the downfalls of a recurring service that is automatically billed is that payment information gets out of date. It’s difficult to get people to update it, especially if there is no way to update it, so we’re working on making that a little bit easier.

 

Carbonite Review

Carbonite (found at carbonite.com) is a back up program for your computer’s files, music, videos, and more. It boasts of unlimited backup capacity, completely automatic retrieval, secure and encrypted file storage, and easy file recovery. The cost is $54.95/year with a free, no credit card required, trial.

According to their website, “The current version of Carbonite is designed for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Carbonite supports both the standard 32-bit and 64-bit versions of each. Carbonite will not support older versions of Windows (Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows ME) or Linux operating systems. Carbonite is also available for all Intel-based Macs running OS 10.4 (Tiger), 10.5 (Leopard), and 10.6 (Snow Leopard).”


Carbonite works by installing a small application on your computer that works in the background. There are no limits on the backup storage capacity, but Carbonite does warn that because of DSL speeds, a larger file file back up will take considerably longer to upload to their server.

I signed up for the free trial and have started the process as I write this review. I am running it on an Intel-based MacBook version 10.6.4. The installation process was simple and straightforward, however I was not pleased to read, after I started the program, that the initial back up could take several days.

Because I’m running this on a laptop, my computer will not stay on continuously for that amount of time. I’m not sure how this will affect the usefulness of this program. It may be better suited for a desktop computer that can stay connected to the Internet continuously in awake or sleep mode.

Once you install Carbonite, you can just let it run its course. It works in the background when your computer is idle, backing up new and changed files. All files are encrypted twice, using the same security measures banks do, and the information stays secure, only accessible for you to retrieve it if need be.

The retrieval process seems simple as well. A few clicks and your important files are brought back to your computer. You have the option of selecting which files to backup, and it’s important to check the preferences of the program to customize the default files Carbonite updates.

As a backup system, I believe Carbonite is worth looking into and considering. However, it is subject to being connected continuously to the Internet and DSL speeds. I think it would be a great option for desktop computers and their Carbonite Pro packages for multiple computers, is worth looking into for small businesses.

*It’s been one hour since I installed Carbonite on my Macbook and my initial backup is still initializing, no files have been uploaded to the Carbonite system yet... time will tell if I will continue with Carbonite as my backup solution. I will post an update to this post when (or if) my backup completes.

Kjaere Friestad
- guest blogger :: San Francisco, CA :: for Centripetal Software

1% for the Planet

We recently became a member company of 1% for the Planet. We did this because we care deeply about our planet and for all that God created, and want to ensure that our business does everything possible to help to better the place that we live. 1% for the Planet exists to build and support an alliance of businesses financially committed to creating a healthy planet. What Centripetal Software is committing to is giving 1% of sales to one of the environmental organizations listed on the 1% for the Planet web site. We will donate directly to a nonprofits—not through 1% FTP. We do everything we can to ensure that the way we run our business causes a minimal impact on our planet and we are committed to helping organizations that are working to make this a better place to live.

A moment of panic....

We recently had a Basecamp user call us with a hint of panic in their voice. They had been working with a consulting company that used Basecamp as the means for most of the communication with this person's company and as the mechanism to exchange all files that were deliverables as part of the consulting engagement. Well, as sometimes happens, the relationship wasn't quite working out and the man on the other end of the phone was desperate to get all of the data and files out of the Basecamp account before the consulting company was able to remove his access to the data. With Basecamp a company can grant access to a project to another company in order to collaborate on a project, this is typical for consulting companies to do with their clients. This man was looking to get a copy of all of his data and files for the work he had paid for over the past 2 years in order to have a copy of it all, as well as to have a record of communications in case the worst case should find the parties in court.

He was able to use Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp to export all of the todo's, messages, comments, files, & writeboards from Basecamp and have a local copy delivered to his desktop via Dropbox syncing. He was so excited to have this done so quickly and seemed relieved to know that he had a copy of everything that had become so important to his business. They had been using Basecamp so extensively with this consulting company that they didn't even realize how important the data had become to them and he didn't want to risk not being able to access it should the relationship further sour.

Customer Feature Request Product Release

We recently released a number of features and bug fixes to our core engine which were primarily based on customer feedback for both feature requests and bug reports. We’re pretty excited to be hearing so much from our customers and we’re always excited to be able to release software that is directly driven by what our customers want. This latest release includes the following:

• A fix to the way that we name files and directories and syncing that up with the way that we link them in the html exports. The issue was that we had some casing problems where we linked to a lower case directory name when the directory was actually camel cased. This only caused problems for our customers who are on Unix based systems where directory linking is case sensitive. Having come from Sun Microsystems and working exclusively on Unix systems for years, I feel bad that this one was missed, but working on Windows these days made this one slip by us unnoticed.
• We had a number of customers request that we add author information to the html exports for messages. We had limited what we put into the html exports with an aim of getting them released earlier. We’re open to any other enhancements that customers want to see there.
• We discovered a bug on exporting Basecamp messages from projects that are in an archived state. This was causing us to not receive the message body and so we printed out an empty message body in the html exports. We poked around and figured out how to extract this information from Basecamp.
• A recent (unannounced & undocumented) change by the Basecamp team was causing us to hit a rate limiting threshold on the API access we make to backup user data. We put in some workarounds and fixes so that we won’t hit that any more. This was simply causing our service to continually have to wait for a 20 second timeout period until we could make additional requests. With these new fixes we are now able to complete backup jobs much more quickly.

Please let us know if you have any additional feature requests. We love hearing from our customers.

 

We’re working on some new account management features now as well as an integration with Highrise for backing up all of that data.

Automated Invoice Emailing

We've been working on lots of new features and have completed a piece of our billing system updates. This latest feature enables automated emailing of monthly receipts to the email on file for the billing contact. We've opted all of our existing customers in to this new feature which will begin on the next billing cycle for each customer.

Centripetal deploys update for unannounced Basecamp API changes

Today 37Signals made modifications to their Basecamp API which modified the way in which they limit the number if calls that can be made to their APIs. Our application has always been in compliance with their requirements and it was because of our strong logging and monitoring that we noticed the issue right away. Basecamp doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to announcing changes to their applications that impact other people that are dependent on it, so we put some extra effort into some mechanisms that would alert us of those changes. When they made these changes today we saw the issues in our logs and began investigating as quickly as possible. Once understood the change we implemented a work around that works with new rules, tested it and deployed it to our servers. Our system is back up and running and all Basecamp backup jobs that hit this error will be picked back up by our scheduler and rerun within 24 hours. We also alerted other Basecamp API users of the issue so that they could know about it as well.

When we originally were settling on an architecture for Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp, these changes were one of the considerations that we took into account. We chose a hosted application model so that we could control the push of fixes as quickly as possible. Had we chosen a desktop application model that our users download and install on their system, our ability to fix issues would be drastically limited and impossible in most cases. The cloud based application model is one that has a lot of benefits for software vendors as well as customers alike.

Box.net Review

I recently signed up for the free "Lite" version of Box. I was given 1 GB of web-storage and a 25 MB file upload size limit. You can check out Box at Box.net. Box offers tools for securely uploading files to private and public folders that are then accessible for other contributors or embedded into your website for public access. You can also send to social media networks among a variety of other options.

The paid accounts at Box start at $9.95/month for individual users with 10 GB of storage and 1 GB file size limit, $15/user/month for business users (3+ users) with 15 GB of storage and 2 GB file size, and a variable pricing plan for larger companies, referred to as their Enterprise plan, with Unlimited storage and a 2 GB file size limit. Each paid plans offers a 14 day free trial. 

Wanting to just test the system out, I settled for the "Lite" version to dive into what Box has to offer me. After confirming my email address, Box directed me right away to starting the process of their product by creating a folder to be used to store my documents. 

I had the option of creating a private folder or inviting others to upload information to the folder I create. This would be very helpful if I needed people to submit documents to one central location that was easily accessible world wide. For now, I have decided to keep my folder private, but if I change my mind, it is fairly simple to invite collaborators to securely share files inside this folder. 

I created a folder called: Newsletters. When I'm not working for Centripetal Software, I work at a Preschool in the Bay Area. Part of my job is to create our monthly Newsletter. A program like Box would be very helpful for me even at the basic free version. Now I can upload my Newsletters here, invite the school director, board members, or other teachers to view my document, and/or send in contributions to be considered for publication.

As you can see from the screen shot below, I have different and easily understood options to explore after uploading my April Newsletter:

If I don't want to invite collaborators to directly view this folder, Box offers a great option of creating a specific email address for every folder I create. I can then share that email address with anyone, and all they have to do is send an email to contribute information to my folder. Box also creates both an embeddable link to the folder for your website, or a direct link, depending on how you want to share your information.

If I were to upgrade to a different level of Box, I'd have more options on file storage size, file controls, faster uploads, security options, etc. 

Box works with a variety of operating systems, including a Box app for the iPad. I viewed and tested Box in Safari on a Mac OS X operating system. It works on FireFox as well, however, I was unable to find other information on the site about what other Web browsers and systems it works in.

You can link your Box account with a variety of resources. For example, link your account to FedEx office, and send your documents directly from Box to be printed and shipped, or link your account to Twitter, and have updates to your Twitter account when you create a folder for the public eye. The list of applications to integrate to your Box account is impressive and provides tools for many different social and business networking options. 

I was very impressed with Box and think it's a great tool for individuals and business to look into to manage their important documents and files. It's easy to set up and use and I think a worthwhile tool for companies and individuals to look into.

Written by: Kjaere Friestad

Centripetal Software

Community Manager

Fun Product Overview Video

We've been working with Splainers for awhile now on the completion of an animated product overview video for our Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp product. It's finally done and up on our website, but I thought I'd throw it on the blog as well.

Protecting my critical business data in Basecamp

Centripetal Software specializes in building products to backup business data from online applications. One thing that we have been finding is that many of our customers are moving to online, cloud based, business tools like Basecamp and Highrise partially to get away from managing the infrastructure and all of the IT type of services that go along with running a data center. These customers picked Basecamp and Highrise because they were great tools that also had a stellar track record with availability, reliability and data protection. Many of them came to Centripetal Software to backup their files, Writeboards and data from Basecamp as an added layer of security because they are trusting Basecamp with some of their most critical business data. It's just makes sense for them to keep redundant copies of that data on their own computers.

One Centripetal customer recently said something that is typical of what a lot of customers have been saying:

"I’m looking to back up our Basecamp data because, even though I think 37signals and Amazon/S3 are two extremely solid companies and I fully trust them, I still need to protect our critical business data that exists solely on Basecamp.  I need redundant copies duplicated to our local servers somehow.  The other angle is Basecamp project archiving, we need to remove large projects from Basecamp to clear room for new ones. We mostly use the Files tab, in fact. Having everything automatically pushed to our Dropbox account is a huge help."

Centripetal customers are saying that they fully trust Basecamp, 37Signals, and Amazon S3 with their data, they are not backing up their data because they are afraid of 37Signals or Amazon screwing up. Instead this is an extra layer of security for people who want to stay in complete control of their data.

We recently completed a customer testimonial video with one of their customers that talks about this added layer of backup that people are looking for.

An extra layer of security for people who want to stay in complete control of their data

Here is a quote I got from a customer that is really typical of what I've heard a lot of customers tell me:

"I’m looking to back up our Basecamp data because, even though I think 37signals and Amazon/S3 are two extremely solid companies, I still need to protect our critical business data that exists solely on Basecamp.  I need redundant copies duplicated to our local servers somehow.  The other angle is Basecamp project archiving – it’s a real pain to pull a large project OFF of Basecamp (to clear room for new ones) since they don’t (yet) offer any sort of mass Files export.  We mostly use the Files tab, in fact.  Having everything automatically pushed to our Dropbox account is a huge help."

Our customers are telling us that they fully trust Basecamp, 37Signals, and Amazon S3, they are not backing up their data because they are afraid of them screwing up. Instead this is an extra layer of security for people who want to stay in complete control of their data.

Announcing New, Lower Pricing for Recurring Basecamp Backups

We heard it loud and clear from many of our customers that we hadn’t gotten our pricing quite right yet. We talked in detail to some industry experts, a number of current customers as well as lots of people who tried out our products but didn’t sign up for a paid plan and we think we have a set of prices for our monthly recurring plans that are in line with the service that is being offered. All new customers will be given these new prices, and all of our existing customers will also get the new pricing on all upcoming bills. Check it out and let us know what you think:

Automate Basecamp XML and HTML Exports for Free

We have recently been testing our new HTML export functionality for Basecamp data with our higher level plans. It was met with a lot of enthusiasm from our customers that were on those plans. We’ve now completed rolling that out to all of the plans including our free trial and our always free plan. What this means is that anyone can automate the export of all Basecamp data from your account and get it in both XML and HTML formats and have it delivered directly to you. Are you sick of going in to your Basecamp account when you think about doing a backup of your data? Are you afraid you might forget to do a backup that you might need? Do you wish you could request a data export in both html and xml and not have to choose one or the other? Would you rather just have your data delivered to your computer and not have to go and download something after it has run? Well our automated data export functionality does all of that for you. We even have plans that will get all of your Files and Writeboards at the same time.

Launch Party

It wasn't quite the ship party like I was used to in my days at Microsoft or Sun Microsystems, but we were determined to celebrate the launch of Centripetal Retrieve. We headed to the local Foster's Freeze and had hot fudge sundaes!

HTML Export

As a Basecamp users you are able to export all of your data in either XML or HTML formats. These don’t include files or Writeboards and there is no way to automate the scheduling of the exports. With Centripetal Software you are able to automate the backups as well as get copies of all files and Writeboards. We also give you all of your data in XML format, but until today we did not offer the HTML export capability. We now have that functionality we’ll be rolling it out to most of the plans shortly. The HTML files are similar to the export you can get from Basecamp, but also include html pages for files and Writeboards on a per project basis.

Weekly Release

This weeks release adds in some long overdue user preference settings. Previously we sent email messages for everything that happens to a user’s account, but with this release we’ve added in capabilities for the user to control whether or not they should receive different notification messages. In order to update your email preferences simply log in to the application and click on “Account” link on the top of the screen. This will take you to our Account Settings screen which allows you to see and update certain information.

More Dropbox Benefits

Our integration with Dropbox has proven to be a very popular feature. More than 90% of our customers use Dropbox to have their Basecamp files, writeboards and data delivered to them. There are plenty of reasons for this from a customer perspective: Dropbox is drop dead simple to use and it makes getting your Basecamp backup just as simple. They provide syncing between all of your devices as well as online backup of them all so you will have multiple copies of all your Basecamp information. All of your data and files stored online in Dropbox are encrypted which addresses many of the potential security threats. With our latest release Basecamp backups are also versioned using Dropbox’s versioning system, so if the backup engine pulls the same file multiple times from your Basecamp account across different backups that file will be versioned in Dropbox.

There’s one other cool feature that Dropbox provides that many FTP servers do not: Internationalization. For many of our customers, English isn’t their first language, nor is it the language that they work in with their customers. This means that they are naming files and data in different languages and, many what that does is forces applications like Centripetal Retrieve to use UTF8 character sets to handle those file names. The problem comes when we try to store those file names to FTP servers that do not support UTF8 (which surprisingly many don’t). What you end up with is a bunch of gibberish for the file name, and it is unreadable in any language. Dropbox fully supports all of the international character sets that we test with and so our customers that use Dropbox to receive their Basecamp backups are ensured to have their file names stored correctly. For FTP there are no issues with the content of the files, only with the file names because the FTP server never attempts to do any conversion on the file contents only on the name of the file.

Top threats to cloud computing? - Data Loss

The Cloud Security Alliance, a group that focuses on security in cloud computing, released a paper recently titled "Top threats to Cloud Computing". Of the 7 threats that they discussed, #5 was most interesting to us and is titled "Data Loss or Leakage". This is something particularly close to our minds as it is what we are working on helping to alleviate. In their report they state:

There are many ways to compromise data. Deletion or alteration of records without a backup of the original content is an obvious example. Unlinking a record from a larger context may render it unrecoverable, as can storage on unreliable media. Loss of an encoding key may result in effective destruction. Finally, unauthorized parties must be prevented
from gaining access to sensitive data.

The threat of data compromise increases in the cloud, due to the number of and interactions between risks and challenges which are either unique to cloud, or more dangerous because of the architectural or operational characteristics of the cloud environment.

It is extremely important for businesses that are beginning to adopt or already have adopted Cloud applications into their core business to ensure that they are taking the threat of data loss seriously. Businesses need to be sure that they maintain local copies of their critical business data that is stored in these cloud applications.

Read the full Cloud Security Alliance paper.

3 Recommendations when using Cloud Applications

Are you part of an IT department that has been told to manage the online accounts of cloud applications? Here’s a few recommendations that we’ve been giving to our customers in this boat.

I met with a customer this morning who runs the IT department at a large retail company (you would know who they are). He was recently told to start managing all the IT for the marketing and sales departments in his company which had, until now, been off doing their own thing. One of the things he discovered was that they use a product called Basecamp from 37Signals extensively. The different groups within his company have over 10 separate paid accounts, and they are storing GB’s of files and data in their accounts and sharing that data with partners and customers. The manager came to us for a solution to back up all of this data in one place but asked me if I had any other thoughts of things that needed to be done since I had quite a bit of experience with Basecamp. My thoughts immediately went to the more general concerns that businesses have in adopting cloud based applications and so I think that these thoughts are applicable to all applications.

There are typically 3 main concerns when a business looks into adopting a hosted application (aka Cloud or SaaS): 1) Security; 2) data ownership; and 3) vendor lock in. We have some recommendations for each of these.

Cloud Security

When an IT shop thinks about security there are lots of things to address. One thing that businesses have been working on for a long time is centralized access control so that there is on place to revoke an employee’s access. With cloud applications that has all been thrown back out the window. Now if an employee leaves or is fired their access needs to be revoked in numerous places. We recommend to our customers that they (as the IT department) need to have a master account in Basecamp that has access to all of their Basecamp accounts as an administrator. This way they at least have the ability to go in and revoke access to individuals as well as partner companies if needed. This is possible now that 37Signals rolled out the 37Signals ID which allows one user to have access to multiple accounts. Having administrator access in each of these accounts is key for an IT department as it allows them to control access as well as have a complete picture of what is happening within the Basecamp account.

Recommendation: You must have an administrator level account in all online applications your company uses.

Data Ownership

This is a pretty hot topic lately. Businesses want to be sure that they maintain control of their data that is stored in online applications. Sometimes this is out of fear of a catastrophe, other times it is peace of mind, sometimes it is the need to have a local copy of data, but it is always just good practice. If a company has an in house application running on an Oracle database, they are for sure backing up that database to ensure that their data is safe. The same applies to online applications, although the company running the application is probably doing their own backups, your business needs to know that that critical business data will always be available no matter what and in a timely manner. Many of these online application offer solutions to backup all or most of your data, and there are starting to be some 3rd party tools available to automate these types of tasks. However you do it, it is imperative that you are backing up this data. For Basecamp this means that you need to be backing up your data, files and Writeboards on a consistent basis.

Recommendation: Create a scheduled backup of your data stored in online applications that delivers your data to you so you have a local copy of it.

Vendor Lock In

A final area of concern is vendor lock in. This is nothing new, we had the same problem with in house systems, but many of the more mature tools offered migration utilities between their top competitors and there were a number of 3rd party tools that did this as well. As we look at online applications like Basecamp we seem to be back to square one. So many of these online applications are so new that there is little in the way of standardization, and API’s are lacking in many areas so writing your own migration tool is often next to impossible. We’re starting to see a few competitors to Basecamp offer partial migration tools to their offering, but the mappings are not complete. They don’t import files for example. There isn’t a lot that you can do to limit vendor lock in, but having complete exports of your data is a start. This removes one portion of the hurdle. For Basecamp you’ll want to do scheduled exports of your data. If you do find that you need to move on to another tool, whether hosted or in house, make sure that the new tool will map your projects and the data that you use often to a like mechanism within the tool so that you don’t lose so much of what you have been building up in these applications.

Recommendation: Ensure you have full exports of all data on hand and evaluate new products for potential gaps in data mapping.

 

I’d be interested in hearing what other recommendations people have…

What customers are doing with their Basecamp Backups – Part 2

This is a continuation of the posts on what customers are using our product for. Many of them are using them beyond the original idea that we had for the product which has been really interesting to us. We’ve been working hard to make things work better for these alternate uses in order to make them be main stream uses. The usage scenario I’ll talk about here is that of a user who is migrating away from Basecamp to another tool. For whatever reason, this is actually pretty common. Some people are unhappy with Basecamp, some have outgrown it and are in need of a project management tool that has more process associated with it, and some others have been mandated to use another tool by their corporate structures. Many of these customers have come to us to export all of their data, files and Writeboards from Basecamp so that they can migrate them to other tools. These customers are looking for a one time snapshot of their Basecamp accounts before they close the account.

We knew that some people would want to do this, but it didn’t really hit us that we needed to support it immediately until we were chatting with a customer about why he was cancelling our service, this customer told us, “the real problem I was trying to solve was archiving the Writeboards because we are moving off of Basecamp”. We did actually support, in a round about way. Essentially customers could sign up and use our product to get their snapshot and then cancel their account as this customer was doing. But they were all telling us that our service was such a time saver to them that they wanted to pay us for it. Another customer told us “it (Centripetal Retrieve) was the only solution I could find for backing up files and Writeboards in Basecamp. I was setup and scheduled for backup in five minutes. Once I confirmed a successful backup, I was no longer worried about losing my content because I'm finally guaranteed a local copy. It is a simple product that does what it says well and I appreciate that. I just need a way to pay you for it now!” The payment for a one time export is the part we didn’t support! We’ve now fixed this by providing 2 separate one time export plans that allow a customer to get a complete snapshot of all their data, files and Writeboards delivered to their Dropbox of FTP accounts and be done with it.

We now also provide a free trial plan that will give you a test trial to make sure that our product will do what you are looking for. This plan will backup all the data, files and Writeboards from one Basecamp project and deliver it to your Dropbox or FTP. We’re also in the testing phase of a DVD service that will allow you to get that export delivered to you on DVD. We’re super excited about that one!

Updated Plans, Pricing & Trial

We’ve been working on changing around the way our plans and pricing works for backup jobs of your Basecamp data, files an Writeboards. We released that tonight and we think that it will work even better for many of our customers. What we have been seeing is that about 15% of our customers were looking to do one time exports of their data. For some of them they are leaving Basecamp and just want to take their data with them. Others use Basecamp somewhat sporadically and just want to back it up when they feel that they need it. What these customers told us was essentially that they love our service, but only needed to use it on a limited basis, not the monthly recurring basis we were currently offering and they genuinely felt bad for signing up for a one time export only to cancel before paying anything. Thanks to those that were open about this and were willing to pay for our service because of the value that it provided to them.

We knew before we released that there was a group of people that would want the one time export functionality, but we chose to roll out our initial release with only the recurring plans in order to get the product into the wild as quickly as possible. As of tonight, we have now updated our plans to allow for more flexibility in what our customers are looking for. We’ve now broken our plans into two groups:

1. Recurring Backup Plans
2. One Time Export Plans

Recurring Backup Plans

Recurring Backup Plans are the same plans that we had previously, we clarified a few things in the plans like the number of Writeboards backed up for each plan. We’ve also removed the 30 day free trial that was associated with all plans, this was just giving away too much. We created a new Trial plan that allows users to try out our service on a limited functionality basis. The free trial allows a user to select a single (1) Basecamp project to backup files and Writeboards from and will run the backup one time and store the files and Writeboards to the user’s Dropbox or FTP account. The regular recurring plans still offer ongoing backups of data, files and Writeboards on plans ranging from $15/month to $75/month depending on the amount of files and Writeboards to be retrieved and the frequency of the backups.

We also still offer the Always Free Plan which backs up Basecamp data (but no files or Writeboards) on an ongoing, scheduled basis so that you don’t need to remember to go in and do a Basecamp export manually.

 

One Time Export Plans

The new plans we have added are the One Time Export Plans. These plans give a user the ability to do a one time, full export of all of their Basecamp data, files and Writeboards and have it stored to their Dropbox or FTP account. These plans run as soon as the setup is complete (and our scheduler can fit them in for processing time) and then do not run again unless the user wants to go in and run it again. We currently offer two (2) plans for the One Time Export service, the Medium Export plan ($30) for up to 15GB of files and 500 Writeboards, as well the Jumbo Export plan ($60) for up to 75GB of files and unlimited Writeboards.

We believe that these new sets of plans will meet the needs of our customers. We’ve been getting lots of other great feedback and are working hard on additional features that we’ll be rolling out soon.

Weekly Release

Things keep moving around here. We’ve been busy working on some pretty cool new features and we released one of them today.

Dropbox File Versioning

The new feature takes full advantage of Dropbox functionality and thus we’re going to start pushing Dropbox as our preferred storage solution for your Basecamp backups. Dropbox has a sophisticated versioning system for file versioning that we were not utilizing. With this release all files stored to Dropbox will begin to use the versioning capability within Dropbox. This means that if you update a file within Basecamp, you’ll begin to see version history information on your files just like you see in this screenshot:

From within Dropbox you will be able to see the history of all file changes that happen to that file from your Basecamp account. The version history will be updated every time and incremental backup runs and the file has been updated or modified in Basecamp or when a Full backup runs.

Besides the real benefit of having a true versioning system backing your files this feature also saves you space on your Dropbox account. Dropbox only counts space for the most recent version of a file, but you have the ability to access any of the versions of a file at anytime. Centripetal Retrieve no longer creates a separate date stamped folder for every full and incremental backup, which would create duplicate files and use up more of your space.

FTP Performance Optimizations

We had been noticing that storing customers data to their FTP servers was an order of magnitude slower than storing data to Dropbox. This is partly due to the high availability and fat pipe that Dropbox and Amazon S3 have making it really fast to ship files there, but there was also some optimization that we were able to do within our own code. We added in some cacheing at certain points of our FTP storage code and have greatly improved our storage times for those jobs.

As usual, stay tuned for lots more goodness coming soon. As the number of subscribers to our product increases, so does the amount of feedback we receive and that is helping us to prioritize our todo list as well as to find new features that people are wanting.

Article: Archiving from the Cloud

A recent article over at ITBusinessEdge titled "Archiving to the Cloud" is worth a read. It brings a trend to light about the growing use of online storage for backups and archivals of data for businesses. This has been a trend now for a while that I've been seeing as more and more people become comfortable with cloud based computing they are starting to see the real benefits of it in different ways. Especially for archiving and backups. The writer notes, "It is important to understand the type of data that is being stored in the cloud. Almost all industry experts believe that cloud storage is an ideal medium for maintaining online, long-term, unstructured content. This sentiment has been echoed by the end user and early cloud adopters." This type of data that people are storing in the cloud is just the type of data that many tools are starting to pop up to support. You may have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of providers of these services. I've been working on a review of them, it started out as "10 Online Backup Solutions" but has since grown to 25+, and that is just the good ones.

One other trend that I've been noticing just starting to creep in recently takes this one step further. As people are moving more and more of their business computing to cloud based apps like Salesforce, Basecamp, whatever else, they are raising the concern about data ownership and are asking for backup solutions of their data that is stored in these applications so that they can maintain control of their critical business data. They want to have access to their own data at anytime just like they would with a typical backup, even if that data is stored in a managed, hosted application. You could call this trend "Archiving From the Cloud"

At Centripetal Software, we've recently released a product that is our first crack at addressing this space. Our product can backup all of your data, files and writeboards from 37Signals Basecamp and deliver it to you via Dropbox (for online archiving and versioning) or FTP if you want it to come directly to your own server.

Read the full article at ITBusinessEdge

New Community Manager Joins our Team

I want to welcome a new member to the Centripetal Software team. Kjaere Friestad (KJ) will be joining us as a part time Community manager. She’ll be responsible for many of our community building activities as well as a warm, smiling face to our customers. KJ recently moved to San Francisco, CA after spending almost 9 years in the Santa Barbara area. She’ll be our Silicon Valley representative. She has a certificate in journalism and a love of many different media platforms. She is an expert and avid user of various social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, etc. Her current full time job is as an assistant Preschool teacher at a private school off Haight street in San Francisco. Prior to that she was on a paid internship at QAD Inc, a Santa Barbara based Software company, as a Research and Development Operations Analyst.

 

She loves to travel and hopes to do more in the near future. She’s spent time in Siberia, Thailand, and Northern Ireland. She told us, “one thing I love about San Francisco, is the nations are here - that and good coffee... I'd be at Blue Bottle Coffee Company in SF everyday if possible.”

We are stoked to have KJ helping us out. She’ll be a great addition to our team and I’m sure you’ll start to see some of her influence soon!

Interesting Articles

Here are a couple interesting articles I stumbled on today.

• Using the Cloud to Guard Against Vendor Lock-In – DataMation
• Google, Microsoft compete to be 'platform of the world' - CNet

What customers are doing with their Basecamp Backups

When we first set out to build a backup product for online applications we were thinking purely of our own needs. As an organization that was dependent on some of the online applications that we were using we wanted to be sure that we maintained control of our data (much of it critical to the running of our business). It wasn’t long before we discovered that other people were interested in the same types of tools. The way that we used our own product and how we envisioned other people using our product was to get continuous backups of our data in case of a disaster, like us accidentally deleting something or some wider accident in the data center of our online apps. What has most surprised me with our Basecamp backup product has been the different reasons why our customers are using our product and the end result of what they do with their backups.

I’ll highlight some of the more interesting usage scenarios over a few posts. The one scenario that has been most interesting to me is that of larger companies that are using Basecamp. These are medium size companies with a few thousand employees that have their own IT departments. The IT groups run decent size data centers and manage the operations of lots of internal applications. Their business groups have begun playing around with online applications and many of them have embraced Basecamp and are using it extensively. Whether or not the IT department likes this move, they realize that it is inevitable and have decided to figure out how to make it work while still keeping business moving forward. These IT groups already have existing backup procedures, policies and tools. But none of these things work with online applications like Basecamp, but Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp provides a mechanism for them to integrate Basecamp backups into existing processes.

Once a company signs up for automatic scheduled backups of their Basecamp files , Writeboards and data with Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp they begin receiving their data. Their data is all delivered to them by Dropbox or FTP which gets their data into their network and onto one of their computers. From there they use their existing backup tools (CA ArcServe Backup, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft Systems Center) and processes to create a managed archive of that data that is stored to tape or whatever backup mechanism they are using. In the event of an accidentally deleted file they have the opportunity to check the backups that Centripetal Retrieve delivers to them and if their data is still available on their host computer they can use that file. But since they clear those backups off from time to time they may need to access the data from one of their archives that is on tape or something else. They can utilize their existing restore processes to retrieve the needed data and files and restore it back to their host machine from which they are able to re-upload the file back into Basecamp. I haven’t heard of anyone needing to do a restore yet, but I’m sure the IT managers have a little more peace of mind knowing that they have the ability to do so if the need should arise.

Weekly Release

We’re back on our weekly release cadence after our launch. The changes this week are relatively small as we are spending a lot of time on marketing our product (something we know zilch about). Here is the list of changes:

In the Web Application:

• We added in the Jumbo Job. We’ve been testing this for awhile in the back end engine, but just now made it available. This job will retrieve up to 75 GB of data, Files and Writeboards from Basecamp and then do incremental backups of the changes on a daily basis. This maps to the Basecamp Premium Plan.

In the Core Engine:

The primary changes in the Core engine were bug fixes.

• We fixed a bug with downloading Writeboards. Sort of a weird one where the encoding got messed up logging into the Writeboard when the user who last updated the Writeboard was different than the user our application was configured to log in as.
• Another bug was discovered by one of our customers was around login to Dropbox. The encoding of passwords with a couple of characters, specifically HTTP URL reserved characters, was getting messed up and causing the login to fail.

Our product covered on the 37Signals Product Blog

The team at 37Signals was kind enough to write up a blog post about our product. The ability for a Basecamp customer to backup all of their files, data and Writeboards on a regular schedule has been a long time request of the Basecamp team. There have been numerous discussions about it, even people practically begging and threatening for it. This capability is exactly what Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp does, and we work hard to make it the most comprehensive backup solution for Basecamp. So we really feel like we have a product that is beneficial to 37Signals, and more importantly, to their customers.

Check out the blog post at http://productblog.37signals.com

Comparison with our competition

A potential customer recently wrote to me to ask for a comparison between Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp and a competitor of ours. I thought it was good information so I am sharing my response with everyone here.

 

Thanks for checking us out. The differences that I have seen are as follows:

1) Our service works. I have had an account with our competitor for a few months now and am yet to receive any files or data from my Basecamp backup with them. They are very focused on growing their user base around twitter and gmail and seem to have let their Basecamp integration lapse. Basecamp's login process recently changed and it may be that this competitor has not updated their system yet, although it didn't work for me prior to that change either. I would love to hear if you are able to get it working. From our side, we are focused exclusively on being the best at backing up Basecamp. We support backing up all data, files and Writeboards. Because we are more narrowly focused in what we are doing we are able to more quickly react to changes from Basecamp and keep our service working. We have been in beta for about a month and a half in which we did consistent back ups for about 30 customers. Just yesterday we completed a backup for a customer in our full release, that had 42GB of files and delivered it to their Dropbox account. We will add services in the future, but we will always strive to be the absolute best and most comprehensive backup solution for each service we do and will not ever let our integrations lapse. We want to build a product that our customers can depend on.

2) While our competitor is free now, their model is to charge based on the amount of data you store with them, which with a significant amount of data, may cost more than our service. Our plans and pricing will always be transparent so that you know exactly how much you will be getting billed each month, it is not going to change based on an amount of data or anything else that may surprise your wallet. We will likely offer a managed storage solution as an option with a set rate not based on a per GB storage cost, but right now we give your data to you. This can be done via FTP or Dropbox.

3) Another difference is on the focus of each company in the options provided. Our competitor is focusing on giving their users lots of options on what services to backup, they support twitter, facebook, gmail, flikr, etc. We have chosen to focus in on Basecamp exclusively for the current time and provide the options on the storage side of the equation. We currently allow you to choose to have your files stored by Dropbox or FTP. We are working on a DVD mailing service as well as some other online storage options. We have heard from our customers that they want to integrate their data into existing backup solutions that they have and that they don't want to just copy their data to yet another cloud storage system, they want to have it on their computers. So this is where we have chosen to focus our efforts.

4) Building out lots of service integrations is probably the right thing for our competitor to do, they are focused more on the consumer side of things and consumers will likely want more of a breadth type of offering. We are focused on business users and this drives us to work very hard on reliability and correctness of the service. It is not ok to our customers for the service to work some of the time or most of the time, it has to work all of the time. As companies move more and more of their data into cloud based applications they want to know that those services are going to be available to run their businesses, so when they invest in a backup product for those services they also want to be sure that the backup is going to work all the time in the event that something happens that causes them to need that backup.

In the mean time, our competitor is free and we offer a 30 day free trial so you can certainly run your own comparison of the two services. If you do I would love to hear about what you find out.

Another giveaway

We have even more software to give away. This time we’re running another contest based on survey respondents. Fill out our 2 question survey about what online business applications you use at work and we’ll enter you into the drawing for a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Professional.

Fill out the survey

What happens if your SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS vendor closes shop?

 

In response to the following topic on a SaaS forum:

I haven't seen a lot of direct answers to this topic, so I'd like to hear from SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS providers on how they answer this question for their customers. What assurances to give them against this possibility? What contingencies are typically built into contracts?

I posted the following response:

Even though most people here say that their product allows for backups or exports of data the truth is that most SaaS applications don't have this capability at all, or have it in a limited fashion that would be extremely difficult to migrate elsewhere without a ton of work. These concerns about data ownership and disaster recovery (ie. going out of business) are some of the top concerns that our partners hear on a daily basis in their sales calls. For larger deployments many customers are demanding escrow type solutions for their data or other legal mechanisms for addressing their concerns.

Having a backup or export functionality as part of the solution that a customer is buying is often not actually a viable option. So many of these export capabilities in SaaS apps require an administrator to go in and make a request through a webpage and then go back and download it once the export has been completed and an email sent notifying them of it. For an organization that has backup solutions in place, adding a manual step is likely to get missed, error prone, and untenable. When IT wants to back up an application in their own data center they automate every step of it using highly sophisticated backup tools. This is one of the things that is hindering adoption of SaaS. There is a need for SaaS applications to be able to play nice with existing IT infrastructure and processes and they currently just don't do that.

This is what my company, Centripetal Software, is attempting to address. There is a need to extend IT out from within the organization to the SaaS applications that the Line Of Business wants to use. Bringing critical business data back into the organization is a key requirement for many, and this must be done reliably and in an automated fashion. Our product, Centripetal Retrieve, integrates with existing cloud based applications to provide full and incremental backups of data and files and integrate them into IT infrastructure within an organization. http://www.centripetalsoftware.com

Patient Education Systems Case Study

Patient Education Systems is a customer of Centripetal Software using our Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp product. We recently met up with Cordell Baanhofman, Vice President of Technology and Corporate Development at Patient Education Systems, to find out a little bit more about why they chose Centripetal Retrieve to backup their files, Writeboards and data from Basecamp. We wrote up our findings as a short case study.

 

The Customer
Patient Education System (PES) is focused on helping Physicians, their staff and vendors improve the patient experience at the point of care. Designed by physicians for physicians and their patients, their digital media platform seamlessly connects doctors, patients and vendors together in a private “one to one” channel of communication.

The Challenge
PES has two key vendors using Basecamp extensively. Both use Basecamp to manage projects and share deliverables, reports and invoices with PES. The Basecamp accounts are owned and managed by the vendors, PES has been granted access as a collaborating company within the vendor’s account.

The team at PES has 3 main challenges that they are dealing with in their collaboration with their vendors in Basecamp:

1. As a company that is entrusting their core intellectual property to 3rd party vendors, PES wants to ensure that they always have access to their data and files even in the unlikely case where there is break in the relationship that causes a loss of data and deliverables. They tried downloading everything manually as it changed, but the number of files and amount of data was too much to keep up with and it was an inefficient use of time.
2. As they are dealing with multiple vendors and multiple Basecamp accounts they struggle with the continuity of the data as it spans different locations that they need to access. This makes it difficult to locate specific files or data and to keep all deliverables synchronized.
3. Many of the deliverables that they receive from their vendors are large zip files that must be downloaded individually. Searching through the contents of these files across multiple accounts and numerous versions can also be difficult in addition to the need to download so many files one by one.

The Solution
PES found Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp and was able to setup an ongoing backup job for each of the Basecamp accounts that held their data, files and Writeboards. They receive a complete backup once a month and incremental backups of all new and updated files 3 times each week. All of this is delivered to their internal FTP server and from there, they are able to keep archives of everything from all their Basecamp accounts in one place and easily search across everything from their desktop.

The Result
PES has greatly increased their level of comfort that they maintain control of their core intellectual property and know that they protected from a potential disaster. They have easier access to everything in one place which they can easily search and access at anytime.

Patient Education Systems – http://www.peshealth.com
Centripetal Software – http://www.centripetalsoftware.com

Announcing the release of Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp

After a month long beta we’re pleased to announce the general availability of our product Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp™. The most comprehensive backup tool for business users of 37Signals Basecamp™. Our product backs up all of your data, files and Writeboards and delivers it to you via Dropbox™ or FTP.

We started out by making a product we needed ourselves. We then worked hard to enhance it for our alpha and beta users. Now, we are opening it to everyone. Our users feedback is what shapes the product. We'll be continuing to engage our users and enhance Centripetal Retrieve based on your feedback.

General

• Centripetal Retrieve is a hosted application that runs in the cloud.

 

Features

• Complete Retrieval of all your Basecamp™ Data, Files & Writeboards.
• Control where your data is stored. Choose Dropbox™ or FTP.
• Secured using the latest encryption algorithms when transferring data.
• Stored in non-proprietary formats that you can access at anytime.
• Control when your data is retrieved through our automated scheduling.
• Peace of Mind that you are in control of your data.

 

Pricing

• Plans starting from FREE up to $55/month
• 30-day Free Trial on all Basecamp Backup Jobs

 

Overview Video

 

More Information

• Company Website: http://www.centripetalsoftware.com
• Company Blog: http://blog.centripetalsoftware.com/
• General Information: info@centripetalsoftware.com
• Press Inquiries: press@centripetalsoftware.com
• Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/centripetalhq
• Product Tour: http://www.centripetalsoftware.com/product_tour/index.html

The global nature of running a startup

One of the things that I love about running my own startup is the chance to interact directly with my customers and other people. In my many years working at Microsoft and Sun Microsystems before that I rarely got the opportunity to meet and talk with customers. There was always the customer support team, or the business development group, or some other group that “owned” the customer. And the last thing anyone wanted was for an engineer to talk to a customer <gasp> who knows what they might say…. So, needless to say it is refreshing to be able to work directly with customers and other people that are connected to my business. This might be helping a customer through a problem they are having and in the process understanding how to make it more intuitive for the next person, or walking a vendor through code explaining the reasoning for implementations (which helps me think it through also). The benefit of the direct interaction is huge for my company and I believe it has been beneficial for my customers as well.

This week has been particularly interesting as we are preparing to launch our product out of beta and into its full release. I found myself smiling at the global nature of a small startup and somewhat awed by the reach that the internet of today allows. So much of this wasn’t possible even 5 years ago, well maybe technically possible, but highly unlikely at least. This week alone I have been on Skype with customers in Colorado, Florida and Switzerland; exchanged multiple emails with customers in New York, UK and Australia; interacted through web tools with developers and writers in South Africa, Philippines, China and India; worked with my test team who are distributed in places like India, Canada, Chile and the USA. All of this from my tiny office in Carpinteria, CA. The world is getting smaller.

What's Your Problem?

I often go back and read Getting Real from the guys at 37Signals. It’s a great book (available online for free) about keeping things simple in the software world. Every once in awhile I start to freak out about my business and fell like I need to go get lots of venture capital so I can hire lots of people so I can build tons of features…. Well this is exactly what Getting Real addresses. I was just re-reading the essay titled “What’s Your Problem?” and thought I’d share a bit about how Centripetal Software got started. The premise of this article is that you should build software for yourself because then you’ll be more passionate about it and you are your own user so you can make more informed decisions more quickly.

I have a 4 year old son. When he was born we needed a way to share his life with our families around the world, so I started up a free blog on Blogspot. That turned into our family picture album, we have about 1500 posts over the 4 years including some 5000 pictures and 300 videos not to mention all the stories written down to go with each post. About a year ago I started to realize that this was more than just a blog, it was really our only family album and it had a lot of memories in it, and I realized I really didn’t want to lose it. I started looking around for a way to save it off, but there was nothing out there. So, as any good software developer would do, I started to build my own. At first I was looking to build something to allow us to print it, but that had its limits, so I moved onto more of a backup solution that would allow me to have a local copy of the blog. As I got deeper into the implementation of this I started seeing that it would work for other things that I did online, the first of which was my Basecamp account. I built out some rudimentary integrations with Basecamp to meet my needs. As I began using Basecamp more and more there were more and more things I needed to backup and eventually (after a couple complete re-writes of the code) I had a pretty stable piece of code.

It was one day as I was looking for something in the Basecamp forums that I realized that my little homegrown application might have a broader appeal as there were quite a few people in the forums asking for pretty much exactly what I had. That is when I decided to try to make a product out of my tool. After reworking the solution some so that it would allow other people to use it I threw it out there for some people to try. I was given lots of feedback and was able to iterate on it and improve it quite a bit. I was blown away with the response I got and people were really excited about having a solution like mine available. The time I was investing in this was beginning to be somewhat taxing, so about 3 months ago we took the plunge, I quit my job at Microsoft and went out on my own with the hopes of creating a real business out of this.

Fast forward to today and we have come through a successful beta period with the application and we are officially launching the product on Monday, Feb 1, 2010! We’ll continue to build out the things that we need for ourselves and work hard to keep a solid, stable, working product for our customers that is simply a joy to use.

Article: Why you need a SaaS Strategy

There is a great article over at Information Week about why companies need a SaaS strategy. Hosted business applications as a market in itself is still quite new and is something that many businesses are just starting to explore. It’s imperative that IT departments take a long term approach to their adoption of cloud applications.

While SaaS shifts software deployment and maintenance burdens to the service provider, freeing up resources for other projects, IT is at the mercy of the provider for availability, data security, regulatory compliance, and other key issues. Outages will halt business, and poor response times will hamper productivity. SaaS apps aren't just a nice-to-have. Three-fourths of companies using SaaS consider application services extremely or critically important to their organizations, according to our InformationWeek Analytics survey of 281 business technologists, including 131 who now use SaaS. About one-third describe their SaaS apps as mission critical.

When Cloud applications become mission critical to a business there is an imperative to extend core IT principles to those cloud applications. Clearly this is a concern for many who are investigating SaaS adoption:

Data ownership is also a big obstacle, with 31% citing it as a reason they're not using SaaS. In speaking with SaaS vendors, they say security, privacy, and portability are the three objections they hear most. Portability will likely be one of the biggest worries this year, as companies pour more data into these apps and, having gained some SaaS experience and seen the growing number of choices, start switching providers.

The author goes on to discuss 9 key areas that need to be addressed when adopting SaaS applications for your business. A couple of them are items that I am consistently touting from my little soapbox in the world.

Have a detailed exit strategy. If you do cancel, can you get your data back, and in a form that you can use? This will become one of the biggest questions around SaaS in the coming year, as companies put increasingly vital information into these platforms, in increasingly large quantities. So make sure you have a plan to move data when you want to change providers, or bring the solution back in-house.

When you are putting your critical business data into someone else’s database and storing your important documents on someone else’s hard drive you need to be sure that you can get it out for any reason. That might be that you want to switch to another provider, you might want to integrate it into other applications, or it might just be that you want to have a full backup copy of it. Whatever the case you need to make sure that any cloud application you sign up for provides this capability or there is a third party tool that will allow you to extract that data for you.

Create a contingency plan. With SaaS, we haven't left the concept of five nines behind. While satisfaction levels are high for SaaS, IT must have a backup plan for apps that can't go down or data that can't be lost. It's critical to classify the type of data you need to back up.

Even though your SaaS provider will tell you that they are backing up your data for you any IT department worth their salaries will be skeptical of that. Until you have seen the backup data and know that you can access it when you need it you should keep looking for a backup solution. Fortunately there are beginning to be a number of third party services that can backup data for you from online applications and deliver that data directly to you.

 

Read the Full Article

Cloud Computing Trends

Cloud adoption is rapidly increasing. Companies are moving more and more towards adopting applications to run their business where the application is not run on their computers, but is run as a hosted service deployed in the cloud. Many organizations see the economic benefits of not having to maintain their own IT infrastructure specifically real time storage, availability, 24x7 support and backups. This is one of the touted benefits of Software as a Service, your company no longer needs to think about managing IT infrastructure. The IT department doesn’t need to be thinking tactically about how to keep the business going, instead they can begin to think strategically about where the business needs to go from a technology standpoint. However, even as companies move more and more of their computing to Cloud based applications, they are still wary of losing their critical business data and about controlling security across all of their applications. While cloud application adoption can free up IT departments to think more strategically then simply cannot ignore the day to day technology operations of their company.

One trend that I see emerging is the need to back up the data and files stored in these cloud based applications. Most "cloud backup" companies provide the functionality to back up a PC or a datacenter server and store the data in the cloud for you to access at anytime and from anywhere. I see that there is a need to go the opposite way, i.e.. take my data out of the cloud and let me keep my own copy of it, maybe even integrate it into my existing backup processes. It is true that most large cloud application providers like Salesforce can likely do a much better job of managing a datacenter than the average small or mid size business, but even the big guys can screw this up (Look at the TMobile/Microsoft Danger disaster). Not to mention that the majority of cloud applications out there are actually hosting their applications on cloud infrastructure that they do not own, thus essentially outsourcing all of their own IT. The cloud applications that you are using likely have many more layers involved and so getting data restored in the event of a disaster may not be as simple as calling up your vendor.

I’m not trying to be gloom and doom over here, but there are certainly things to think about as you move to adopting cloud based applications. The issues can all be overcome quite easily and the benefits to cloud applications do far outweigh traditional software in many situations. Be brave about adopting cloud applications, but be diligent to control the data that is important to your business.

Weekly Release

We’ve been working hard on the final push for our public release of Centripetal Retrieve so there isn’t a whole lot in our weekly release to the beta app. We’re shooting for launching out of beta by the end of next week, probably official announcement on the Feb 1, 2010. There were a couple little items that went into our release this week, here they are:

In the Web Application:

• We did a revamp of the Status logs. This allows you to view all the details of the history of a Basecamp Backup job. From the initial configuration of it through all that happens on each run of it. One thing we had in there for out beta was a pretty nasty looking field that would usually drop exception stack traces from the code on errors. That is really a debugging field for internal use, so we took that out of the view that the user gets and replaced it with a more informative message.

In the Core Engine:

• We continue to fix bugs as we find them. There seem to be an unlimited number of permutations of how FTP servers were implemented so as we run more and more jobs we with different FTP servers we uncover more issues with storing to them. This was the bulk of the bug fixes for this round in the engine.

Help Files:

• We added a new help topic on setting up Dropbox and figuring out if you have enough space to store your Basecamp files there. We’ve been trying to add a screencast vide to each help topic to make it a little easier to understand. Here is the video from that How-To:
  
  

 

Stay Tuned for more next week.

5 Steps to Protect Yourself from Computer Data Loss

Here’s a good blog post on protecting yourself from data loss on your computer. I would assert that companies need to take many of the same steps to protect their data and files even as they move those files onto online applications. Make sure that you are creating your own backup of your data and files in those online applications in order to protect them.

Excerpt:

The Apple bug illuminates the need for computer users to take necessary steps to protect their data. Anyone who uses a computer, even a great one, is at risk for data loss. An operating system crash is only one cause of data loss. Others include, theft, user error, and lost media. While data loss may be rare for each individual, it only takes one instance to wipe out months, perhaps even years of irreplaceable data.

- blog.engyte.com

Read the Article

40 Creative Uses For Dropbox

Interesting article over at MacStories.net on lots of great ways to use Dropbox besides just file syncing. I’ll add another to the list in that you can store backups of your online application files and data like Basecamp, Highrise, or any others.

Excerpt:

Dropbox is a great service: it allows users to keep everything (yes, everything) in sync between multiple devices. I daily use Dropbox in my workflow to backup my Yojimbo library and share stuff with my friends and co-workers, and I’m very satisfied. If you’re new to Dropbox, you can signup with this referral link and, besides testing the service, you’ll make me earn 250 extra MB. (and I will thank you in one way or another)

Anyway, there are many creative yet less known uses for Dropbox. In this roundup I’ve collected the best I found around the web

- MacStories.net

 

Read the Article

Article: 5 Basecamp iPhone Apps

As you undoubtedly know, Basecamp is a simple and effective online project management system. And a few fortune 500 companies are even using it. One of the things Basecamp did from the beginning – and did well – was open itself up through its API to developers, in order to develop outside products and services. Well, being small, open, and extensible, has its advantages and one of those advantages includes the quick and simple development of outside Basecamp iPhone Apps. But which one should you choose?

 

See the Article

Article: Best Remote Backup Services

Remote backup and storage is not just for big corporations anymore. You too can get your data backed up at a secure remote location at very minimal fee. If you just want to prevent data loss for your most important 2GB of files, you can even get a backup solutions free-of-charge.

See Article