Batchbook Service Issues
- Posted November 3rd, 2011
- Filed under: Technology
As you may know, we’ve experienced system slowness and occasional downtimes recently. We’re truly sorry for the disruption to your business. It’s unacceptable and we are working on a solution as fast as possible.
Why is this happening?
Well, there are a lot of people using Batchbook. While the system was certainly designed to scale, it has not kept up at a pace we find acceptable. We started to build the product over 5 years ago and in that time there have been significant upgrades to the programming language, hosting environment and back-end architecture. We realized that to truly take advantage of the strengths of our SaaS environment, we can’t just plug in some bigger, faster servers. We need to take a look at every line of code, every call to the database, every bit of data stored in memory and every process needed to hook them all together. So that’s what’s happening.
What are you doing about it?
We’re rebuilding the entire Batchbook product. It’s an extremely expensive undertaking, but we know that to continue to grow and serve our customers in the absolute fastest and most reliable way possible, we must go through this
short-term pain. There are a few blog posts about the new system and more coming very soon.
In the mean time, we’re also putting our best resources, and calling on outside best resources, to minimize the slowness and periodic outages. Our Systems Administrator is monitoring the system 24/7 and responds instantly when there are any issues. We tweet and update our status page when we do have an outage, and we usually have it resolved within minutes. But even this is unacceptable, so we’re now increasing the manual supervision of the servers and continuing to update processes on the existing Batchbook servers to improve speed and reliability.
What next?
We can’t promise that there won’t be any other problems, but we can promise that the entire Batchbook team and a number of other developers and partners are working as fast and hard as possible to build the new system, and keep your downtime to a minimum. We can also promise that the new Batchbook is well worth the wait and then some; you’re gonna love it.
The new Batchbook is set to launch early in 2012. We’re committed to keeping the existing system running smoothly until all existing Batchbook accounts are transferred successfully onto the new application. We truly value the relationships we’ve built with our customers both old and new and are doing everything we can to insure that your business can run smoothly now and far on into the future.
Hi Pamela,
Thank you for the update. I am till frustrated though. I can not find anywhere a suggestion of when BB2 will be ready.
Are you any closer to being able to give us a launch date?
Regards,
Duncan
No new on this in a month is a little scary. Could you guys please put more info on the next version progress on the blog? We just spent the summer getting all our data set up and now it is deathly slow. Please update!
Batchbook I think many subscribers are looking at 2012 and trying to evaluate if they are going to stick it out with your platform or move on to something else.
Patience is a virtue but I think I can safely say on behalf of others as well as myself, we would like to make a decision sooner rather than later. If you can’t show us what you have then how about a conference call to update your customers.
Thank you!
We are hard at work on the new version of Batchbook, and will have some updates on the blog soon. We have also been working on improving the back end functionality of the current version of Batchbook, fixing bugs, and making sure things continue to run smoothly.
One of our primary goals is to make sure current customers will be able to use the current Batchbook and eventually the new version of Batchbook, without any interruption. We are taking our time to make sure we get it right!
To Bradford regarding your January 13th post… will you please work a little harder and quit giving us excuses? You produst has been slow for months and months and all I read on these blogs is we are doing this and we are doing that, blah, blah…. I figure my day is 30-45 minutes longer each day because BB is so damn slow. Seriously, can you please do soemthing about it without another blog post saying, “we are rebuilding the platform and the this and the that…” I do not even know what that means and I really do not care! Just fix it! My clients do want excusses from me and I won’t except excusses from you! Mybee you can put in a few extra hours and get it right?
Mark – I’m sorry you have had problems with the slowness and rest assured we are working as fast as possible (and overtime) to get it fixed. We have seen speed improvements this last month, and continue to monitor it constantly to keep speed maximized until we move to the new system.
All – thanks for the messages and patience as get ready to launch the new version.
How about answering this question or at least letting us know if it was even considered. Have you addressed tighter integration for the Google Apps Business users?
Also, maybe you could give us some milestone updates. Certainly our Project Managers have defined various milestones. Those would make for a perfect blog topic and allow us to share in the progress (and the process) of migrating a legacy system onto a new platform.
In the absence of information their is chatter of the mind, which sometimes becomes chatter of the mouth. Help us keep our chatter to a minimum by communicating more frequently on this much anticipated release.
Respectfully
P. Correia
Any updates here? I’m sure I’m not the only one checking back to this post before deciding to move forward with Batchbook. I was referred to this post when I made mention of service issues during our trial.