BatchBook Blog
Archive for the “Technology” Category
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.
(more…)
Tags:
It’s finally here!
The new Batchbook Droid App is available for free in the Android Market. I’m personally a big fan of Android phones, and got to help out with some of the testing, which is good because I’m also one of the folks fielding customer support questions – so if you run into any problems or have questions about it you can email us at support@batchblue.com and we’ll help you out.
The app is similar to the iPhone app but does have one major difference. With the Droid app, you have the ability to sync records of a particular tag. You can find which contacts you would like to sync to the Droid, tag them, then sync with just that tag. The app has a limit of 3000 contacts which will sync to your phone, so if you do have a ton of records in your account it would be a good idea to tag the ones you need most when you are on the go. I’d suggest a “Record Last Updated” or “Record Communicated With” Advanced search to quickly grab the contacts you’ve been dealing with lately.
You have the ability to add/edit/delete new or existing Contacts, To-Dos, and Deals. The Communications aren’t on the app, but if you press the blue Batchbook icon from the View Contact screen displayed here you can quickly see all of your Communications on the full version of the site. Then just press the back arrow button on your phone, and you’ll go back to the app for that icon.
Here are a few tips that will hopefully help get you organizing your mobile contacts: (more…)
Tags:
There have been a few changes to the BatchBlue team recently, namely Sean Ransom and Michelle Riggen-Ransom are no longer with the company. Sean and Michelle were founding employees, have made a huge contribution to the success of this company and will always be a part of our history.
Change is hard, especially in a small and close knit group such as ours. I know this will be a change for you, our users, as well because we’ve developed the type of company where you can feel connected to individual members of our team. We would not have it any other way. But, as often happens in the business world, things do change and we know that Sean and Michelle will be extremely successful in their new adventures. We appreciate all that they have done for BatchBlue and for the world of small business.
That said, we want to reassure the members of our community that the BatchBlue team is here as always to provide you with the best solution to manage your contacts and build relationships with your network. As you know, we are in the middle of the rewrite of Batchbook and have a great team and the support of our great partners to do it. I’m excited to share more about the changes that are coming. Stay tuned for more information.
Tags:
A few months ago Constant Contact announced the acquisition of social CRM product Bantam Live. As part of the technology transfer, the Bantam Live service will be unavailable to its customers for an extended period of time. Here at BatchBlue we started to hear from a number of those customers who were looking for a new home for their contacts.
Though deep in the middle of our Batchbook rewrite, we could not leave fellow small businesses (especially when they were asking so nicely) without a good option for managing their contacts. So we turned to trusted friends and Batchbook Experts Xioup.com to write a script that would import the XML files available as an export from Bantam Live directly into Batchbook.
Kurt Milam from Xioup wrote up a very nice description of how the import works and how to go about setting it up. This quick excerpt explains what data is available for transfer:
We’re happy to report that our importer brings in all contacts (companies and people, including all address information, tags, special dates, social networking profiles and rss feeds). It also brings in 100% of Bantam deal and project information, notes, tweets and internal messages (including creation date, author and recipients). Bantam statuses are brought in, as well, albeit without creation dates, since they’re not included in Bantam’s export archives.
(more…)
Tags:
We’re working on something pretty big here these days. It is a major rebuild of our flagship product Batchbook.
Batchbook is a bit of a paradox. It is simple, easy to get around, easy to update. And yet it is also powerfully complex. SuperTags, to-do templates and integrations allow for enormous flexibility in workflow customizations. The contradiction is by design, as we have learned that CRM success comes both from frequency of use (make it easy) and the deep dive (to work with a unique business process). With the help of tens of thousands of customers and our diligent support team we have been able to hone in on the useful aspects of the simple, while also expanding the power of the complex. And little by little, we have updated and iterated on Batchbook to maintain this careful balance.
The team has been working very hard over the past few months to take all of the knowledge we have gained over these past 5 years to rebuild, from the ground up, Batchbook. Much of the work is back-end streamlining and optimizing to make the infrastructure more powerful and scalable. We’ve also taken the opportunity to improve the interface and workflow to make it much faster and easier to use. And we’ve got some exciting new features built in, as well.
While we still have a ways to go, I wanted to start pulling the curtains back a little to let you all know about things to come. Over the next few months, as we continue to polish things up and test them out I will be sharing bits and pieces of the new and improved Batchbook here on our blog.
(more…)
Tags: batchbook, Product Updates
Older Entries
