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Social Media and Social Networking are all the rage. There are social media experts on the radio, on TV and calling you on the phone daily now.But what does it all mean and should your business be using FaceBook, Twitter, Blogs, Wikis and all the rest? In This post we’ll give a quick introduction to the area as we are talking to lots of people about it at the moment and we worry that people are being “taken for a ride”.

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.

[Update: 19 June 2009] Reports are coming out that Oracle is terminating Virtual Iron as a product, which changes things somewhat. How this affects the potential changes to the virtualisation market (especially for large enterprises) time will tell.

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.

As we speak to more and more people about our Online Backup to the cloud software solution and service, we are finding answers to the more common questions about what we provide, you will have noticed that by the content of the site recently. We are posting it online to make it easier to understand the benefits of what we offer and where be differ from a tape based central backup solution like Symantec BackupExec for example.

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.

A common question we receive is what are the differences between using an external USB drive and backing up to a cloud service online like ours. So we thought it merited a blog post.

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.)

You are in Thomson Local, you are in the Yellow Pages, but the phone does not ring? Why?

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.

Photo by Oscar Yasser Noriega on Flickr

One of the features that has proven popular with our Cloud Backup software is the shared network drive. This allows you to share a virtual network drive with your colleagues, even when you are in different physical locations.

For example, your sales team might have a virtual network drive that holds all your templates, spreadsheets, brochures, etc.

A local cache is stored on the local machine, so access to the files is quick even when you are using a mobile phone to connect to the internet.

Another benefit that people are often not aware of immediately is that you can at anytime restore a prior version of a file. So if you accidentally overwrote a letter to a client; you can restore that letter not just from the last version, but from the version last Wednesday at 9:00am. If that is not the version you need you can restore the version from Tuesday, 3:07pm.

One client of our has been using the network drive to share the agenda for their distributed team meetings. They video or audio conference one another andall have access to the agenda. As it is a single file, shared between everyone, no matter where they are; all the latest ammednments to the agenda are there. There are no issues with emailed version not matching local people have. Everyone sure they are on the same agenda. Once the minutes are typed up, they are being saved into the same location, so again everyone has access.

We really like the network drive feature and would like more people to be able to take advantage of it. We can do it simple for you by setting up a shared drive for your team, department or even your entire organisation.

Below is a video about the network shared drive:

As you’ll be aware, Envirtua is run by a Judo coach and as such we host several websites already for Judo Clubs.

After discussing websites with a number of Judo coaches and realising that many clubs want a simple solutions to their website ideas. Specifically, they want an easy to maintain, easy to implement, low cost website that is built for Judo, not for a business. Judo Clubs are (on the whole) happy to choose from a selection of templates as long as there is some simple customisation done. Things like adding their club logo is often all they really want in terms of aesthetics; assuming the templates look okay to them.

Most clubs want similar pages too, a history of the club (maybe of Judo itself), a list of coaches and classes, address and maps, news. Thats often about all that they want… or need.

So enVirtua will soon be releasing some low cost hosting bundles specifically built for Judo clubs. There will be a selection of designs and standard pages, with a small amount of customisation (adding the logo). We shall bundle together everytyhing to go from start to finish, domain registration, hosting, design, email hosting, setup and even maintenance. The bundles will vary depending on what stage your site is at, so if you have an existing site and domain, we’ll help transfer to us all that good stuff.

We are looking for a few clubs to try this out on, to test the concept, so if you are a Judo club and you want a really low cost website please email Lance (lancew@envirtua.com) and we will test out our bundles and so forth with you, you will be our test clients, so we’ll compensate you for helping us test this by keeping the costs down for you.

Websites, web servers and spare rooms have one thing in common, they collect junk.

Recently we have been doing quite a bit of work moving websites and/or taking over maintaining sites. What we are finding more times than not is that the website and the webserver itself are often full of junk.
[One (nameless) website that springs to mind had pages and pages of products that no longer are valid, some in fact no longer exist. They were just there taking up space and making what the company does blurrier. Do you have pages like that on your website?
Another example is finding old_index.html files and other old_someother page.html files littering the webserver folders. A classic example is finding BACKUP folders on the webserver from a prior upgrade/change to the site. Not to forget the backup2, backup3 and onwards folders. Do you have space wasting away on your webserver?

Last and by no means least, is junk in your databases. Have you changed the structure of your website and altered the database tables to reflect it? Did you do the old, rename the table trick? So the pages table became xPages, so you could quickly switch back if you had to? Is the old table still there?

So here is our suggestion, take a look at your web pages and check for ones that are redundant, then delete them. If they are redundant, talking about services or products you don’t deal with anymore then get rid of them. The temptation is to leave them there, you never know someone might call you about that oneday… but don’t it looks bad if they do call and you get caught out having an out of date website. It also creates useless traffic, pages of stuff that does not have potential revenue attached. It also watses your visitors time, and the more time they spend on dead pages the less time they have for your real pages. So bin them!

Second, maybe today is the day you take a look at the files and folders on your webserver and look for junk that has accumulated. Clear it out. If you are not sure what is valid, why not make a local copy and delete everything that looks like junk and see if everything else works still? Better yet, start from an empty folder and copy only the stuff that works across, copy files as you notice problems. Now may also be a good time to document the structure and quirks of the website so the next person to come along knows whats what.

Third, take a close look at your database(s) and see if you can clean them up too.

Of course, if all that sounds like hard work, give us a call and we can do it for you.

Photo by Chris Smart on Flickr

We received the following email from one of our clients that use the Cloud Backup software on their laptop. We were so pleased with it we wanted to share it with others.

“…I arrived at the client site ready to present when I realise that my laptop battery is dead, and I left the power cord in the office. Luckily though they had a PC connected to the projector that had a connection to the internet. So I logged into the web interface to laptops backups and pulled the presentation down to the desktop and ran it on the PC there in the meeting room…”

Photo by César Astudillo

We like this story as it highlights that Cloud Backup is not just about recovering lost data when a drive fails or it gets corrupted. Cloud backup allows you to access your files from anywhere with a web connection. So be it a client site or you are at home, you can get access to that file you need.

Of course the system also ticks all the other boxes you need for backup. It provides automatic offsite backups and the ability to restore files via a simple graphical user interface.

We are planning to add to the Cloud Backup offerings in the near future, we would like to provide a fuller service offering, where enVirtua will manage all your backups and make sure that all your users machines are being backed up. If not, we shall contact you (them) and determine why backups are not being done, and solve the issue. We are also looking at a flat rate service for those of you with many users who need a fee that is stable across a budgetary period.
These are new services, the existing pay as you go model will continue of course. If you are interested in these sorts of services or have other requirements please contact us.