MioWorks.com Blog

If you are like me you have dozens of web sites where you interact with different people. Some sites are for business, some are for pleasure while others are people I have worked with in the past.  This combination of websites, contacts and information can be overwhelming.

I use MioWorks.com to bring everything together into one central location.  The import function allows me to directly connect to my Google account and pull in my contacts in just a few seconds.

The team at MioWorks built the import feature to be intelligent and not to over-write or duplicate records. This means that I can re-run the import as often as I want an only the new records will appear in my MioWorks contact list.

I also use the vCard import feature often.  Many of the social networking sites such as LinkedIn allow me to export vCards.  On a monthly basis I dump out my contacts from LinkedIn and then import them into MioWorks.  I do the same with several other systems and I use MioWorks as the consolidation point.  It only takes me a few minutes a month to bring it all together and I like the benefits of the end result.

At the end of the day it’s all about building relationships and knowing about my clients, customers and prospects.  By using MioWorks I am able to aggregate information into one place so that I can quickly act.  Gone are the days of trying to remember what network a particular person was on.  Today, I just go to MioWorks, search for the person and a full history of my relationship is displayed.  I can see what network the person was from because the import feature will tag the contacts.

You too can use MioWorks to consolidate your client information.  There is a free 30 day trial that will allow you to use the entire solution at no cost.

Today MioWorks.com exits the beta testing stage and is now a fully operational application.  Companies can now use MioWorks.com in confidence to help them keep their business in order and to better communicate with clients.   With today’s updates you will also notice a new simplified pricing scheme. If you participated in the beta test, you now have 30 days of complimentary service before you will be required to upgrade to a paid account.

Regarding the simplified pricing, based upon feedback during the beta period, customers asked us for a change.  We listened and have provided it.  Now you can subscribe to MioWorks.com for  only $25 per month for you small business.  If you have more than 25 users in your company, you can add users 5 at a time.  If you need more space for storing of files, you can add that 5GB at a time.  There is no limit on how many of these “packs” you can add to MioWorks.  This means you only pay for what you actually use/need.  And if you look at a per user pricing – we are now one of the lowest in the industry – at 25 users that only $1 per user per month.

We thank our beta testers for being extremely active and providing us valuable feedback.  We look forward to continuing our relationships and providing you a quality application that allows you to enhance your business, make more money & get back some time!

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.

Portland Based Mio Partnerz LLC Launches MioWorks.com

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