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