The result?
Within 7 days they had half filled the event (50 people), and after 2 weeks the event was fully booked (100 people) with a waiting list.

They had intentionally only promoted the event this way as an experiment, testing some of what I had said to them in the past.  For an event like this they would normally have used traditional letters and or newsletters sent via Royal Mail. This would have taken longer and cost much more than the “Free” it cost to promote the event online.

Their news page is syndicated to a news aggregator for their target audience, so they new just posting it there would give it a wide audience. The aggregator also sends updates to Twitter,  so they knew the information would end up there too. Facebook provided easy access to people who were already self-identified as “fans” and/or members of a group around their organisation.

The syndication and free dispersal of their news is important here, it allowed their message to get passed further than they had the ability to do themselves. The news was syndicated by the aggregator and that in turn “tweeted” the news. This was “re-tweeted” by people. Re-tweeting is important as it is pure “word of mouth”. When people retweet a message it means they are basically endorsing the message.

So if someone influential decides to re-tweet your message, your message gains from their status amongst their followers. Which may well be substantially higher than your own. Syndicating your news (via RSS for example) so other sites can use it has the same effect.

What the story tells you should be this:
The easier you make it for people to use your information and to use it in their own way, the more your information will spread and promote your event, product, cause or services.

If you run a Sports club, take a look at http://envirtua.com/products-page/web-services/community-sports-club-web-site./ and drop us an email to sales@enVirtua.com and lets get started talking about getting your club a website that will be Google friendly and serve as a tool to bring in new members and to communicate with your existing members.

enVirtua is already involved in developing, maintain, hosting and writing content for a variety of websites. Lance Wicks (managing director), has been coaching sport since the early 1990’s, which was about the same time he wrote his first website. He is now well known within his own sport (Judo) as a source of information on how technology can be used by sports coaches. This has included lecturing on the subject of “Coaching Digital Natives” at the University of Bath, The British Judo Performance Centre, and online in webinar format.

Every sports club in the UK should have a website, it is as essential as having members. Your website allows potential participants to find you via Google and learn about your sport and your club. It is the easiest way of ensuring that people know where you are, when you operate and what to expect (and bring).

Sports Club website also provide a broadcast medium to the existing members of the club, you are able to share all the results online, tell people about changes in the training schedules etc. You club website can also serve as a Social networking site for the members of your site. This can be a forum so they can leave messages for one another, or a more sophisticated system where they can build links with other participants in the club or outside the club.

Your website can also be a location to book coaching time, or court time. You can potentially take membership fees, entry fees, sell merchandise and equipment, etc.

Contact us to talk about what you might be able to do with your website.

If you have an existing site, don’t let that prevent you contacting us, we can transfer websites from existing providers or simply work with you on the existing website.

We welcome informal chats, so please call us on 020 7193 8987, ask for Lance.

The coding work we have been doing recently is revising a perl based application to meet changes in the way people want to use it. As with many applications in businesses, the application started as something entirely different and in this case it started life in a different programming language and was migrated by someone (not by us) and eventually became a piece of software being used by users. It has expanded beyond being a “quick hack”, to being used in production.

When we looked at the project of revising the code earlier this year we made it clear that step one would be to implement some coding style conventions and start moving to a test driven development model. This did mean that initially we were spending chargeable time simply tidying the existing codebase and not making changes or adding the changes the client required. We were fortunate that we conveyed the importance of doing this to the client and they agreed to paying for the work.

So what did we do and why is it worth doing?

Obviously, we can’t give too much away, but what we can share is below.

We decided that we would automate as much of the stylistic testing as possible and also that we would start by writing tests to confirm operation of the application (and the code). We also wanted to test the known bugs. What this meant is we took some time writing code that would test not only that things worked correctly but also that tested for known bugs and in effect proved that parts of the code failed.

What we did was start from the outside and work our way in, as opposed to “unit testing” first. We worked this way because we wanted to quickly establish a starting point with ‘x‘ tests that passed and ‘y‘ tests that failed BEFORE we touched the code in any way! We then worte tests for specific modules within the code and added them to a metrics. Again, this was before we touched the original source code provided to us at all! This was important to us and the client to establish that we were not making the code worse.

Once we had some basic testing in place that confirmed things worked as we understood them and showed up the known bugs; we moved into touching the original source code for the first time and started reformatting it. We started by running the code through Perl::Tidy each and everytime we ran the test suite. Perl::Tidy is a great tool and helps ensure we all follow a style (in our case we chose to follow the http://www.perl.com/doc/manual/html/pod/perlstyle.html guidelines ). By using Perl:Tidy as part of the test suite, we help ensure that the team don’t get lazy and start leaving messy code about.

At this stage we also started documenting the code both in external documents and also within the code itself.

Next we added Perl::Critic to our test suite. Perl::Critic is another useful tool as it programmatically allowed us to test that the code followed some “Perl Best Practices” specifically those from Damian Conway’s seminal book on best practices for Perl coding. Now, all developers have opinions on what is and is not good practice, and we can disagree and alter the policies. But as a general rule we like to use the policies as they come “out of the box” as the standards are well documented and it is a starting point that all levels of developer can use as a base.

Running Perl::Critic was when the first batch of real alterations to the code started. We started changing the code till we reached compliance of the first 3 levels of Perl::Critic errors quite quickly and then we stopped for a moment. At this stage we had a codebase that looked substantially different but performed exactly the same in terms of functionality and bugs.

So next we looked at the bugs and altered the code to resolve the bugs, by which we meant that we considered that a bug was fixed when the test we had written initially had passed, that no other tests had started failing, and that Perl::Critic had no new errors. We also added quite a few tests at this point to test specifics of the code we were adding (approximately doubling the number of tests in the suite). At this stage we were happy that we had made some improvements to stability of the code and this was when we rolled up a version number and passed the code back to the client for approval.

Why do all that work at the start?

You may be sitting there thinking “why did they waste all that time and not just fix the bugs right away?“. Other than professional pride, we went through the extra steps because it is making our job easier day on day. So as we reach a point in the process where we want to add more complex and sophisticated changes to the software, we have a test suite that proves that we have not broken the software with any new changes. The standards help ensure that as people move around the codebase it has a consistent look, feel and way of doing things.

This is particularly helpful for us as we are sending iterations of the code back to the client, it can take weeks to get the approval that they like the code and that they want us to start on the next change to the software. These breaks have the effect that we may not look at the code for a couple of weeks, having good tests and standards means that we are already comfortable with the layout and styles in the code when we return to it. We know right away if we have broken something inadvertantly as well. This means that each time we start a new alteration we spend less time on it than we would if we had not established the stylistic standards and tests.

This in turn means that we spend less time on making changes and that doing them is easier/safer from our perspective, so we don’t need to charge our clients as much for the work. It also has the advantage that the work can efficiently and effective be done in small bundles, which make sit easier to manage for both us and for the clients. Small monthly bills as opposed to large bills at the end of some months of work.

What it means to you? (or why are you posting this online?)

The reason we are sharing this online is so that someone trying to decide between us and another company has a reason to choose us. We genuinely believe that by using standards and tests we produce better work and produce it faster. This means that when we quote for work, we can be both the better quality AND lower cost option.

For “you”, it means that be it a web site, a web application or some other work, you now have an understanding of some of our philosophies in regard to using coding standards. It means that we think it means a better service for you and that we want to share it with you as we feel strongly that it is an important factor you will want to consider when comparing vendors.

“Nasty Bug” image by Nils Pickert on Flickr.

What is Blogging?

You probably know this already, but lets cover it again, just to make sure we all have the same starting point. A “Blog” is a type of website where updates are listed chronologically. So a news page is often like a Blog. Blogs come from the term Weblog and are often like an online diary for individuals. They are shared online as web pages and as a RSS feed that can be syndicated.

Blogging is a way of sharing information with clients, customers, suppliers, etc.

Things to think about?

A blog is a public thing, you are sharing information about what you are doing with anyone and everyone. So your clients, your compeditors, etc. As such what ever you share you need to understand can and will be read by people you don’t expect. As such it is important that you have policies in place about what you will blog about and the way in which you and your organisation blog.

A blog allows you to share the inner working of your organisation with the outside world. This can be very powerful and very risky too. If you talk about a terrible day you have a customer might interpret that as you being annoyed with them for example. You may talk about a great meeting with a client, and have a competitor work out who the client is and swoop in and try and steal the business.

Organisation or Individual?

There are two main types of blog out there, the individual sharing and the organisation sharing. This blog, that you are reading now, is a organisational style blog. The work of multiple authors and to be honest with you; we share little about the inner workings of enVirtua via the site. We use it as a way of expressing our ideas and opinions on a range of areas we work in. The staff of enVirtua also write for their individual blogs, but keep work and personal separate.

This is not always the case. Sun for example promote blogging by staff and host a large number of blogs for staff who blog on the Sun domain as individuals.

What this raises is the issue of managing blogging in your organisation. And much of it comes down to the level of transparency you are happy to have with the outside world. It is something different in all organisations and something you need to discuss and decide upon before you start. You probably want to talk with staff about it today, you may find staff running blogs already. Now is the time to discuss how what they blog relates to their position in the organization.

For example, you may decide to setup some corporate blogs and ask all staff to keep work stuff on the corporate site and ask them not to blog about work on their personal blogs. You will have some policies in place about what is and is not acceptable to talk about on the blogs. For example, you will want to make it clear that there are some things they can talk about. Product features, benefits, etc for example. But you will probably say you don’t want people blogging about the company financial status.

You may or may not want people to blog about new products or features? The plus side is that your new features/products will get known earlier and clients might get excited to buy your new product. Alternatively, it may be giving away too many secrets.

How to start Blogging?

Getting started is easy. Depending on the decisions you make, you can install something like WordPress on your website and create accounts for people to use to login and type up entries. Alternatively, you could use some of the free services available such as Blogger.com.

Once you have the technical elements in place, you will want to sit down and plan out what you are going to write about and how often you will write. Once a week is a good target. If you put down on paper in advance what you want to write about that will help you start.

Important first steps are also to read other peoples blogs in your industry. See what they do and follow their lead, write responses to other peoples blogs. If you agree with them, or not, write about it.

Summary

Blogging is a fantastic way of opening up to your clients and partners. You can share and engage with your clients and customers. You need to be careful about how you approach blogging and make sure you have made decisions about what you will and won’t allow to be written about. You will have a plan and you will blog just like any other task in your business… with dedications, consistency and enthusiasm.

Social Media and Social Networking is terrific! Lance Wicks our managing director loves it so much he has given keynote lectures at University of Bath on the importance it plays in the future of sport and coaching of sport.

The photo to the left is from a social media website (www.flickr.com) and this site is a “blog” and is part of the mass of social media on the internet. We use Flickr, Twitter, FaceBok, YouTube and many more. We are also helping develop social networks in the sporting world and http://martialconversations.com is the latest project we have worked on in the area of social media and social networking. The benefits to your business or organisation are potentially huge!

But should your business use social media or social networking?

It really depends on your business is the truth of the matter. There are a myriad of social media and a myriad of use cases and benefits. There are also a myriad of pitfalls and hidden costs.

So how do you decide if your business should use social media?

Our first question when people discuss this with us is this: “Do you use social media/social networking yourselves?“ If the answer to this question is not “YES“, then using it for your business is in our opinion a risky decision. As with any “social” situation or environment, social media has conventions and etiquette and risks.

The second question we normally ask is “What social media/social networking sites do your customers use now?“ if the answer is none, or you don’t know the answer, we would again suggest that social media is not for you.

If you are selling to a group of customers that don’t use FaceBook, then FaceBook is not a tool you should use. If they are all on Bebo, then maybe you should be there. If they are on Twitter, you should perhaps be on Twitter. Maybe your videos should be on YouTube (our demonstration videos are hosted via social media sites like Vimeo, Blip.tv and YouTube for example).

We know a sports coach that is promoting his services via Facebook and promoting his classes to close on 30,000 people and having great success. We also know of sporting national governing bodies who have attempted to use social media and failed. There is also the sadly increasingly common situation where businesses are making social blunders with their use of social networking and social media websites. Twitter seems to be a place where mistakes are being made quite a bit at the moment.

Mars, for example tried something interesting and had mixed results. They turned the home page for their M&M product into a page that showed every mention of M&Ms on Twitter. Which was pretty cool to start with, but then people started to mention M&Ms in a bad and often obscene ways and Mars page started to look bad for the brand. It was quickly altered.

The mistake here was to forget that they have no control over social media. They could not filter the content and they (somehow) didn’t consider the possibility that people would find it amusing to put swear words on a major brands website without breaking any laws; simply via a tweet message.

The opposite would be organisations like Zappos, who use Twitter in a different way. They have real people within the business use twitter, watching for mentions of the company and interacting with the public. An example is a UK based person tweeted “do Zappos deliver to the UK?” and a Zappos representative replied back (to the soon to be customer’s suprise) “yes we do… visit www.zappos.com, when you order you’ll be able to put a UK address no problem”.

If you are going to use social media the lesson is that you need to see it as an opportunity to interact with your customers, not to sell to them or be clever. You need to use the medium and understand how and why people use it. Facebook are stuggling with this as are many businesses on many sites.

How to get started with social media?

We would recommend that you should start by creating accounts and “lurking” as a start. For example signup to twitter and start following people in your industry, don’t start posting twitter messages right away. Just listen in and learn how people communicate on twitter. You might also want to try searching for your company name or product names and see if people are talking about you. If they are, join in… carefully.

Of course we would also recommend speaking with someone like ourselves and getting some advice on how to proceed.

So here we are half way through 2009, virtualisation (virtualization) and cloud computing are hot, there are new services, new blogs, new companies popping up everyday and the hype is intolerable! So we thought we’d take a look at the state of play and summarise where we see automation, Virtualisation and Cloud.

Virtualisation:

There are two big names, and some close seconds. VMware continues to be the big name in virtualisation, despite the competition breathing down it’s back and big changes internally within management etc. Xen is the other big name to consider. Now part of Citrix Xen has been putting pressure on VMware for sometime and the battle is working out pretty good for the users really. You can now get a free hypervisor from either party and get started right away. Hardware assisted virtualisation and general advances are lessening the performance issues, so virtualisation becomes a more and more sensible business decision for any size business.

The number twos are a quite large group. Virtual Iron, VirtualBox, KVM and the fabled Hyper-V from Microsoft are all broadening the offerings to consider. Virtual Iron is now part of Oracle, VirtualBox is Sun… now Oracle. So expect more pressure from Oracle in the future. Especially if they can bring the virtualisation strands together (which they will/are). As a BIG name in enterprise computing anything Oracle offer should be considered pretty carefully.

For a smaller organisation Xen perhaps is still the first port of call, followed by VMware as you grow. That said, ESXi makes the case for VMware from the start quite compelling. What Oracle will bring to the table will be interesting and of course Microsoft’s Hyper-V as always threatens to change the landscape completely through pure ubiquity of Microsoft products in IT. VirtualBox (now in Oracle’s portfolio) is a bit of a dark horse, especially in terms of Competing with VMware’s Workstation product.

Automation:

There is one king here, Puppet. It is probably the most common automation tool in use in the Linux world. On the Windows side, life is more complicated and diverse.

In terms of automating server infrastructure, the landscape is quite barren. Cassatt are… well they have been acquired by CA, will this be them saved or euthanized time will tell. OpenQRM is progressing very well as an open source project after the commercial business that spawned it passed away. And of course Puppet is here also.

VMware are making inroads into this area and we watch with interest to see when/if they move beyond managing VMware to take on physical machines and other hypervisors in earnest. It could be a compelling move on their part. There partnership with Cassatt seemed to spur developments in this area, but now Cassatt is… well, the question is does VMware see a business in managing physical machines and other hypervisors?

Cloud

Cloud computing has grown on the hype level exponentially, and actual use and services grow also, though not at the same rate as the excitement surrounding the subject. Amazon are the clear leaders here, offering storage, computing, database, queues, map reduce and a content delivery network. It is arguably the most mature platform and probably the largest.

But the competition is growing and finding niches and unique features that allow them to compete with Amazon. Google’s AppEngine continues to attract Python developers, and the rumours continue about support for other languages and new features. Also more people are making their services applicable in a cloud environment or building their entire business on other peoples hardware/services.

We for example provide our cloudbackup product using more than one storage provider. Which also raises the subject of localisation. You are now able to base your cloud infrastructure in a region of your own choosing rather than just the USA. People like Rackspace and Amazon have expanded their services to allow you to keep your infrastructure in Europe for example. But there are also local providers who fill a niche by being (in our case) in the UK, so any ambiguity about moving data outside the UK and the DPA is lessened, though the issue of hosting your data on another companies hardware still remains.

Summary:

All in all, the hype exceeds the practical substantially, which is a shame.

Virtualisation, Automation and the cloud are useful tools that any size business can and should in our opinion be considering. Everytime your business encounters a physical restriction it is time to consider one of these methods. If your servers disk drive is getting full, can you use a cloud based storage service (like our cloud backup software) to create a new drive with unlimited capacity?  Need a new server, then consider creating a virtual server. Have an application that is straining a server? Consider cloud based processing power perhaps?

What we are seeing is that the hype in many ways is scaring off the “normal” businesses.

The “sexy” tech startups are leaping onboard and we have the poster children like Animoto basing everything on cloud services, but the more traditional companies are moving more slowly. This is in part their cautious nature perhaps, but also the hype is confusing the issue. Virtualisation, Automation and Cloud make good business sense but if over hyped start to look like “snake oil”.

To sum it all up, everything is basically a little further along than it was a year ago, the landscape is suprisingly stable with Amazon, Google, VMware and Xen and the other big names still being dominant and competing more with one another. Bringing new offerings to a public which is “almost” ready to come onboard.

There are basically two ways to backup data files, centrally or at the edge on users machines. There are mixed solutions, but they are less common.

Centralised Backup

The standard deployment of a centralised backup is to have a tape drive (or more commonly now days a tape library/tape robot system) connected to one or more servers (or direct to the SAN). Backups are then run at regular intervals, traditionally overnight. The tape(s) are then taken away to be stored offsite. This is so that should the building be demolished, the tapes you backed all your data onto are not destroyed also.

Centralised backup is an excellent solution for many environments. There is a good reason it is the standard configuration for backup. However, it has limitations and risks that are worth considering. To start with, the data needs to be accessible to the backup software/server/tape drive. So typically a centralized backup solution will backup data stored on servers and not on users machines. Which works well in the traditional office environment and when staff are well trained to avoid putting data on their local machine.

The other big limitation of centralised backup is that it is time consuming to and can create a heavy load on the network and servers. You are often copying every single file on your network to one location and trying to write it to a magnetic tape as fast as the tape drive can handle it. Common issues surrounding this are backups slowing down the servers. Also the backup can take a very long time, many hours even, and start occuring during office hours and affecting staff performance.

Also the traditional model leaves huge (24 hour) windows of risk where data is on disk but not backed up. So if John down in accounting corrupts the excel spreadsheet he worked on all day, you have to restore from last night. If he corrupts the file in the afternoon all his work from the morning is lost. Again, there are solutions out there that can do multiple backups through out the day, but they are both expensive and complicated.

User Based Online Backup to the Cloud.

Our solution is different to the traditional model, we recommend for most users they backup every 5-15 minutes. Yes, as much as every 5 minutes. Here in the office we backup every 15 minutes. We can do this because each one of our backups only needs to send the changes to the data we have made in that 15 minutes period, which is normally pretty small. It means that should a file get corrupted or we just decide we hate what we have written in a document, we can roll back changes by restoring anyone of the backups we take every 15 minutes. I can restore the one from 15 minutes ago, from 30 minutes ago from 3:15 ago, which ever one suits me best.

Also, this restore process is something I do through an easy to use interface on my own machine. It happens immediately and IT do not need to be involved at all. So no need to call the IT guys/girls and ask for a file to be restored from tape, no more waiting for the tape to come in from the offiste storage site (the next day?) and then wait for someone to restore the file for me and eventually let me know its there, just to find it’s the wrong file or the wrong version.

The backups are automatically stored offsite, and so if my laptop or PC dies, the data has already been backed up offsite. So if a herd of elephants stampeds trhough the office destroying all the machines, I know my data is safe.

If a machine is left that can connect to the internet, I can access all my files right away. I can access the web interface from any machine and copy down the files I need and keep working. This might be a office pc, my personal laptop or a computer in an internet cafe or client site. This is all within my control as a user.

There are limitations to consider of course; our service is not good for making system state backups that include the operating system. So it is not good for people looking to be able to restore an entire machine in the event of a serious issue. For that you want to look at the more expensive and complicated solutions, and probably look at disk to disk replication. It is a approach fraught with problems, we find most people who actually have to do this regularly (large organisations) prefer to start from a standard build of all new machines and then install/restore applications and data unique to the user afterwards, it is easier and quicker on the whole.

Hardware vs. Software.

If you use a USB hard disk to backup you need to buy the hardware, you need to get a external drive which will cost you £50+ probably for one big enough to be useful. of course it depends on you backup strategy. If you use something like TiimeMachine on the Mac, then you’ll be wanting a drive at least as big as the drive on your computer you want to protect.

The big plus of a hard disk backup is that you can clone the entire disk and in the event your primary disk fails, you have everything including the Operating System backed up. So you should be able to either swap in the backup drive, or use it to boot from and maybe then resyore across.

With a online backup system like our CloudBackup service, we don’t backup the operating system just data that you want to protect. Most of our clients start by backing up a few directories of data, then expand it over time to include more and more directories of files. It is file based and does rely on the Internet as the transport mechanism for your backups.

The big plusses of software based online are that there is no external drive to spill coffee on, or knock onto the floor. In our case, the software based backup drive will never run out of space. With our solution, your data is stored encrypted in secure data centres, even the filenames are encrypted!

Local Speed Vs. Internet Speed

The disadvantage of cloud/online backup is that all your data has to be uploaded via the internet, at what ever upload speed you have available. Your backups go up to the data centre via an encrypted channel, but only as fast as your WAN connection can push it up. A USB drive of course is not limited this way, it’ll backup at whatever speed it can get through your USB port; which will be faster than an average web connection.

We address this of course, we push changes to files not full files, this saves bandwidth and of course the datacentres are well connected with speeds well in excess of the enduser connection speeds. If you are lucky enough to have a good upload speed, we adjust for that.

But USB does win on pure speed of backup, especially for that initial backup. What we find is that our clients often start by uploading 1 directory, then another and another and another. This way only relatively small amounts of data are pushed up in one hit at a time.

Cost up front vs. Pay for what you use.

If you use a USB drive, you need to buy that drive before you can use it. You need to buy one as big as you think you’ll need (you’ll guess wrong, you’ll need more). With cloud backup, you just use what you need, it does not run out of space. You don’t pay for the space you don’t use, just what you use. So if you only backup 100mb that is what you pay for, use 200mb you pay for that. As your data grows your bill does grow, but it is we find still normally less than what you would have paid for a nice big external disk.

The good thing about a cloud based system is that if you stop using it, you stop paying for it. You can’t return that USB drive to the shops when you have finished with it can you. We will happily remove all your data and stop billing you, you stop using the service; you stop paying.

We have been getting quite a bit of interest in the service lately, we still don’t know quite why, but we are not complaining. Hopefully this post helps answer some of those questions people have been asking in advance of them calling us out of the blue. (but don’t stop calling, it is always nice to have people call us rather than the other way around.)

The big question is “Are you on Google?“.

Lately we have been speaking to quite a few folks who we are promoting our web services too, who do not have presence on Google. It is usually one of two things:

• They have no website at all.
• The website is not doing it’s job.

If we take our case as an example, if you Google “enVirtua” we are what you find, which is the goal. We don’t achieve this any shady search engine optimisation (SEO) “tricks”, just through having a site designed to promote our business. It is just application of appropriate design and so forth. What often suprises people is when we talk to them about how many hits we (and our clients) get from people Googling their company name, rather than their service or product.

It is the way people work now days, if you havn’t got the number for the company you want to call you Google them.

So what we suggest to poeple is this, first you need to have a website. It’s up there with having a telephone or a desk now days. If you don’t have a website, people will wonder about you as an organisation. Second, that website although not needing to be super fancy, with all the “bells and whistles” does need to look modern and look like it was done professionally. It is a bit like wearing a business suit to a meeting, you don’t want to wear a cheap suit or one that is too over the top (the bright blue suit, with even brighter lining I had in my early twenties springs to mind).

Your website also needs to have your company name in plain text on every page, along with your contact details. Here on our site we put our contact email and phone number over there on the right. We also have the company name and location in the “Metatags” and also in MicroFormats on each and every page. This helps search engines identify the company and where we are. That way the UK-centric versions are more likely to show us.

We like to think that if you wanted to call us and couldn’t remember the number all anyone needs to do is type the company name into a search engine and the first result “should” take you to us. From there you should see ight away the number to ring. Is that the same for your business? We hope so, if not then it might mean people can’t find you easily and maybe don’t ring.

You must remember also that people will Google you for a variety of reasons, and you want to make sure that whatever it is your company does is included on your website. So we encourage our clients to share as much about what they do on the website as they can. Create a blog perhaps and talk about services you are delivering or products you have launched.

Write pages about the way your products can be used. Not just the specifications or the features. Write about how it works in everyday use, we have started trying this ourselves in the recent posts about the shared network drive feature of our CloudBackup software. The feature is dry and dull, but how it can be used from anywhere via a web interface was/is really interesting. The more genuine content you can share online about what your business does the more “discoverable” your company becomes online and that should lead to the phone ringing more often.

So… search your company name on Google today, if you don’t show up or worse a site you don’t control comes up first give us a call on 020 7193 8987. We would love to help your business get found and get that phone ringing more.

Backup is a good idea! Photo by Martin Schmidt

One benefit of our CloudBackup for teams is the shared virtual network drive we talked about in our last p0st the other side of the coin is the less hand on experience of being able to bill uniquely to match how your organisation looks at expenses. We are able to bill individuals, teams, departments or entire businesses. However you group your staff, we can bill to match that.

Perhaps you want Cloud Backup or a Shared disk for a specific project? Yes, we can bill you by the project, or product, or client… you name it, we should be able to do it.

You can have a shared virtual network drive working on our CloudBackup and have one invoice per shared drive. The same configuration could be billed by individual too. We can bill flexibly and you can pay with flexibility… meaning cheques, BACS, paypal, credit card, etc.

We are also about to roll out added services for teams. We will monitor the backup status of your team and let you/them know if a backup has not been run for a while (or if there were issues) for example.We are just typing it all up and finalising the details, but we would love to hear from you if you have an idea that you would love to see offered as a service.