MioWorks.com Blog

MioWorks.com Feature Updates!

Today we rolled out two highly anticipated features: the import and the export.   The import is a multi-function feature allowing you to directly pull your contacts from a Gmail account, upload a vCard file (.vcf) OR upload a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file from one of several popular applications.  In this first release we automatically recognize and upload the export file from Yahoo!, Gmail, InfoUSA, Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Vista Address Book.   We also have a standard template that allows you to build a CSV file into a format we can recognize.

Import directly from Gmail

You can directly import your Gmail contacts with just a few clicks. Log into your {name}.MioWorks.com site and visit the “Contacts” tab.  You will see new options in the right panel for import.  The first step in importing directly from Gmail is to give us permission to access your account.  Just click on the link we provide.  Google will authenticate you and ask is you want to give permission to MioWorks.com to access your contacts.  Accept this and you’ll return to the MioWorks.com screen.  Finally fill out the short form and click import.  In a matter of seconds you will see all of your Gmail contacts inside of MioWorks.   You can do this import as often as you like to keep the two synchronized.  We recognize duplicates and don’t import them.

Import from CSV file

Most applications that have contacts will have a CSV export option.  You will need to download this file (or create it) from the application itself.  Once you have the CSV file, you can then fill out the short form in {name}.MioWorks.com and we will import all of those contacts directly into your site. If the file is larger than 100 names, the process occurs in the background and you’ll get a message once it’s been completed.

Import from vCard

If you have your contacts in vCard format, then just click on the tab for vCard and fill out the form. It’s that simple. This is an easy way to import your contacts from services such as LinkedIn.  Just choose the option to export your contacts to vCard format (.vcf)

Create a CSV file from any application

If you have your data inside of an application that we don’t support just yet, you can put on your geek hat and export the data so that it conforms to our template.  (Link to the template found on the CSV export page) You more than likely will need someone familiar with exporting data and manipulating it into a CSV file.  We can also help, so if you are stuck on this – drop us an email at gethelp at mioworks dot com and we’ll try our best to help you out.

Export your data

Because we don’t hold your data hostage, you can download all of your information at any time.  The main request that we received from testers was for backup purposes.  It gives users an added level of confidence that they can download a full snapshot of their customer data and store it on their local machines.  This feature can now be found on the Administration page (click the link next to your name when you are logged on).  The data download is in an industry standard XML format.

Our philosophy here at Mio Partnerz is to do the best job that we can for our customers in every thing we do.   To us that entails being proactive with our customer service.  This includes the management of our servers, making sure that backups are doubled and tripled and work properly.  It includes answering emails and phone calls as quickly as possible and it means keeping our users informed.  As part of our standard procedures for system problems, we have decided to be ulta-transparent using both this blog and our @mioworks twitter account. It seems that this decision may have back-fired on us this past week…..

Last week we experienced a small issue that caused us to take action.  Only a fraction of our customer sites were impacted but we wanted to provide information on what was going on so there was no worry and no question that our team was solving the problems.  As soon as we were alerted of the problem we sprang to action.  Our system administrator dove into the cloud feet first while the back office started disseminating information with blog posts and twitter messages.  The impact to the system was minimal and everything was recovered in 10 minutes.  We all felt good about our ability to respond and completely reroute production servers to our our standby environment in less then 10 minutes.

I heard a few things later in the week that made me wonder if transparency is good or bad?  Several people came up to me at Lunch 2.0 and questioned the stability of the platform, sighting that they saw on twitter that the system was experiencing an issue.  I received emails from people who decided not to sign up for the beta because we proactively announced what was going on.  If we kept quiet and let clients flap in the wind….the new clients would never have seen a thing…well unless someone else started a twitter-fest.  So there is my question to those of you who read this blog.  What do you think about transparency?  Is it good or bad?   Can this hurt a small young company like ours, even though we feel it showcases our ability to respond and provide superior service?

…..David

Today we lost a server in our production environment at approximately 5:52pm.  We executed our recovery & verification procedures immediately following the server crash.  The system was fully operational and all data was restored & verified by 6:01pm.  Here is a summary of the event and the recovery procedure:

5:52pm – External monitoring alertered that one of the production servers was not responding

5:53pm – MioWorks team began diagnostics – offending server was unresponsive

5:55pm – MioWorks team disconnected server from the production environment

5:57pm – MioWorks swapped in a hot standby machine, updating configurations, DNS setting and security protocols

5:59pm – Verification tests executed, data snapshots compared.  No data loss occurred

6:01pm – All systems available

We apologize if you were impacted by the outage. Our engineers are now diagnosing the server failure to prevent similar occurences in the future.

…The MioWorks.com Team

We are currently experiencing a system outage.  Our engineers are investigating the matter and will have services restored shortly.  We will advise via the blog when service has been fully restored.

We are going to start doing weekly updates via the blog to keep our beta testers and customers in the loop.  Here is what is new and exciting this week:

Importing your existing contacts into MioWorks.com is very important to most of our customers.  This is our highest priority right now and we have made terrific progress this week.  So far we have completed the features to import from both vCards as well as directly from your Gmail account.  Both of these technologies are on our internal testing servers and we plan to roll them out to you in the coming week. We are also working to extend the import to include Microsoft Outlook as well as Excel style spreadsheets and comma separated files (CSV).

In addition we have also completed the data download feature.  This feature allows you to download a copy of all your information.  This is a great way to have yet another level of assurance when it comes to data backups & data ownership.  You can quickly dump a copy of your records to your local computer where you can archive it for safekeeping.    The data download is also in the testing phase as we make sure it works consistently.

Keep an eye on our blog or on the @mioworks twitter account and we will let you know when both of these features will be available.