Archive for November, 2009

Who's Managing your Online Store ?

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

A couple of weeks ago I got a call from an old school ad man that sends me some web work because he couldn’t see a client website. I gave it a look and lo and behold it was gone. I could have been surprised but I have been online long enough to realise these things happen.

I did the usual checks and all the ducks seemed to be lined up – the website just wouldn’t display.

Being a straight forward kind of fellow, I picked up the telephone and rang the hosting company to see if something was amiss. 10 minutes on hold and the hosting company told me that it was a planned event and that they had sent numerous emails to prepare us for this outage. They gave me the information I needed (and that they had emailed the client originally) and I sent it to them on an email address I knew they would check.

Now I am not telling you this story to get you to check your email. That would be too simple.

I am telling you this because I checked the website this morning and it was still down. I made a few phone calls while I was having my morning coffee and I find out that the website was down for two weeks before my ad man mate noticed it – which means that as of this morning this website has been down for over a month.

Now we get to the reason for this story. This company had carefully sectioned off all of there IT and internet services so that an outage of one would not affect the other. One paper it was a sensible plan – in reality they had no website for over a month and 3 companies sending emails trying to work out who’s problem it was to fix.

Don’t misunderstand me there is good wisdom in spreading out your service provider’s, but at the end of the day if you can’t find someone that can give a straight answer as to the cause and time it will take to fix any problems, your life online will be miserable. Maybe even more importantly you need someone that knows about a problem as soon as possible – not two weeks later when an outsider happens to notice.

To that end let me offer few gems that have saved my bacon on more than one occasion.

  1. Make sure all your important accounts are setup with email addresses that will ALWAYS be checked (even years into the future)
  2. Use a service like Pingdom to be notified as soon as your website (or email) have a problem

Do you have anymore tips to help people keep sane online ? Drop us a comment or an email

Posted in Rest of the Internet | No Comments »

Microsoft Office Accounting No More.

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

If you would like to get your hands on Microsoft’s small business accounting package (like the four other people) you need to get in fast. In a not so surprising email announcement Microsoft said the will no longer be distributing it after the 16th November 2009.

They will continue to support it through until 2014 as a mainstream product, and extended thanks for coming support until 2019. Ebay users are hit hardest because online sales through eBay, credit profile through Equifax, download of tax mappings for tax preparation software and setting up online banking (all available as add-ons) will be terminated on the 15th December 2009

This isn’t a huge shock, Microsoft did very little to improve the product or customer base, it was only available in the USA and I think briefly in the UK. The real shame is that it was quite a good piece of software. It was very easy to use and understand, it had a very familiar interface – unlike some accounting packages, and it allowed for extending through add-ons (like other office products).

We pushed for a long time to get it into Australia because of the eBay integration and the customization.

Did you ever use Microsoft Accounting ? Would you have tried it if you knew it was available ? Let us know

Posted in Naval Gazing | No Comments »