29th Oct 2014 | General Information
Cloud Genius is proud to be providing the technology behind the Bounce Back team at the Pembrokeshire Jobs Fair (29 October 2014).
Bounce Back are helping recently redundant people back into work. They are doing this through:
- Facilitating access to Government grants
- Helping people look for employment
- Helping people, who want to, change career.
Using Salesforce and tablet computers this information is being collected straight into the database. There it will be processed efficiently, using the new Process Builder that is part of the Winter ’15 edition of Salesforce (yes, that is this year’s version). This will enable Bounce Back to work efficiently with various government agencies.
Go team Bounce Back!
If you missed the Job Fair, but could do with some help, contact the Bounce Back team: info@reallypro.co.uk
30th Sep 2014 | cPanel, Email, General Information, Web Hosting, Websites, WordPress
Here at Cloud Genius we are always trying to make things easier for our customers, clients, friends, selves to buy domain names.
A number of our folk were having difficulty remembering where to buy domain names (and other web stuff) at the best price, so we have purchased a new domain to make things easier.
Old location: webhost.cloud-genius.com
New location: cloudgenius.domains
It’s easier, shorter and there is only one dot.
Tell us what you think? Better? No change? Worse? or constructive comments. We want to know 🙂
Forgot to say, we have now changed the default currency to pounds sterling (GBP). You may have to change the currency (top right) one last time. You should also be billed in GBP now, too.
19th Sep 2014 | Event Bridge, Eventbrite, Salesforce
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
John Wanamaker
Imagine if you were not wasting that money. Imagine your marketing is as tight and effective as possible.
Lots of marketing is done through events, meetings, presentations and so on. Events where it would be great to know who was in attendance, whether you had ‘touched’ them before and how you converted them to buy your product (and then evangelise it).
Eventbrite is fantastic for this – if you offer your events for free, then Eventbrite takes no money… but advertises your event, promotes it, handles ticketing and attendance. It is amazing!
Eventbrite has tools for analysing individual events, but you are serious about your marketing. You want to analyse ALL your data.
Event Bridge brings all of your data from Eventbrite into Salesforce CRM (the leading CRM package in the world).
You can then analyse it all. Find out which event converted whom, which events gave biggest ‘bang for the buck’. You can tune your marketing sinews to Olympic standards.
The graphic that tells the story. Click here for more information.
8th Sep 2014 | General Information
Most computer users know that updates are important. Security updates make sure that you are safe on the web.
They tend not to think about their websites. Their websites are run by software, just like their computers. Security flaws are found in that software, just like on their computers.
Here is the big difference:
A website is connected to the internet 24×7.
To save you time and effort, Cloud Genius can update all the software on your WordPress site AND back it up daily.
Contact us at info@cloud-genius.com and one of our friendly engineers will make sure that your website is Safe and Secure. (The unfriendly ones are all on holiday.)
… or you could do it yourself!
4th Sep 2014 | Consultancy, Salesforce
First – respect to Salesforce for their #AppAcademy training. I attended a 2 hour #ISVpartner session this week – absolutely brilliant. Their motto: Your success is our success.
I was talking with a prospective client this week and they came to me wanting to use Salesforce to manage their contacts. They then had a spidery diagram connecting to several different other services: Dropbox, a project manager and several others.
This was a true consultancy moment – you don’t need Dropbox – your storage needs are under 10GB – use Salesforce Files. This fabulous new service works like Dropbox (so, you can sync files between your computers) but it loads them up to your Salesforce Org, where you can link them to Accounts, Contacts or any other Salesforce object.
After a client signs up, I need them to do this then this… 35 steps, so I need a project manager app. So, I pointed them in the direction of Workflows in Salesforce. Their procedures did not change much – having everything in Salesforce saved them time and money.
I also need calendars… Salesforce has calendars… if necessary, you can use the Appirio Cloud Sync (at little money) to sync between Google calendars and Salesforce calendars. It is so good that I use it myself 🙂
Finally, they needed to collect information about their clients in a form and they wanted to do it online. Well they could have used Survey Monkey and dragged the information in… but they don’t change the forms much, so they will get a new Forms object (custom), which they will be able to fill in using Salesforce1… giving them a wonderful, slick interface.
… Oh, and they wanted Salesforce to drag information out of Xero, their accounts package. There is a lovely AppExchange product called #Breadwinner for that. Whereas other products get your information from Salesforce into Xero, this flows against the tide and gets it from Xero to Salesforce. Awesome!
They thought they needed 4 cloud apps, but Salesforce covered all their needs.
21st Aug 2014 | General Information
Moving your information from one Salesforce Org to another is not a common event, but when it is needed, it is vital to the working of your company.
It is a bit like moving home and just as terrifying. (You cannot fully understand this until you have had your removal company playing ‘catch’ with your valuable items.)
Recently, Cloud Genius had to move a lot of data, stored in various Salesforce Orgs and other places and amalgamate it into our own copy of Salesforce. Fortunately, JD has a lot of experience with ETL – Extract Transform Load. Within a day, all our data was correctly marshalled into the new Org. Contacts linked up with the corrects Accounts, with the correct Opportunities, with the correct Campaigns, etc.
From that point it was back to business as usual (but with better data).
So, we have all the framework set up. If you ever need this done, call us!
19th Aug 2014 | General Information
Salesforce Connect for Office is a brilliant utility that allows you to import information directly from your Salesforce Org into either Word (for mail merge) or Excel for data manipulation.
It has recently been updated to version 1.8.1.3
If you are using Office 2007, then the installation works faultlessly. However, if you are using Microsoft Office 2010 or later the requisite template files do not get installed. Just to give you a bit of help, I have zipped them up into a zip file
Just put the files into STARTUP (for the Word templates) and XLSTART (for the Excel templates) in your c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office 14 or c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office 14 folder. (The folder will be different for Office 2013. I have been unable to test it.)
When you run Word or Excel, you will get a security warning. Just click to allow and you will be able to import Salesforce data directly into the application. Enjoy!
(Due to the security model of Office, you will always get a warning when you run Word or Excel.)
13th Aug 2014 | General Information
Exactly a week ago, 6 August 2014, the WordPress update 3.9.2 was released. This was to fix a number of security vulnerabilities that affected WordPress, as well as other content management systems.
If you have earlier versions of WordPress on any of your websites, you should update immediately.
How about having someone look after the plug-in and WordPress updates for your website, without you having to worry?
If you are operating an e-commerce website, or other websites with frequent updates, it would make sense to have a daily back-up. (In case your site is accidentally/maliciously damaged or your website hosting fails.)
We can offer both of these services.
https://cloud-genius.com/safe-secure-websites/
If you apply for any of these services before the end of August 2014, we will give you £5 off your monthly bill.
8th Aug 2014 | Event Bridge, Eventbrite, Salesforce, Security and Safety
You could say that it has been a good week, but that would be a lie. It has been a fantastic week! Bear with me… I will get to that security flaw.
I have to start with Salesforce – Cloud Genius Ltd now has registered partner status. This will let us give you even better service and give you sneak peeks at new features. It will also enhance our ability to offer training environments.
As you may have read before, we have been developing an Eventbrite -> Salesforce connector. Why? when there are others? Well this one has features that are unavailable in the others (and unlikely to be, because of their nature) and ours does not have the usage/limit costs associated with the others. We have finally come up with a name for the product (Event Bridge) and are in the process of developing a website that will tell you all about its features, pricing and why you could really do with using it. We are also in the process of re-vamping the CG website. (Yes, I know it is looking ‘tired’, but if you go to an electrician’s home and turn on the light the kettle boils.)
In the process of developing Event Bridge we discovered a subtle security flaw in Eventbrite. Talk about rapid reaction – within hours they had deployed a fix. I always say that you can just a company not in the good times, but in the bad. On that score, Eventbrite has certainly come up trumps. Even better, Cloud Genius will now appear on their security Hall of Fame… so we managed to help make the internet a safer place. (I always like it when a small company in Wales helps out a multi-national.)
So, that’s it for this week. Just off to get my super-hero uniform re-tailored.
15th Apr 2014 | Defeating spam, General Information, Salesforce, Security and Safety, Web Hosting, Websites
Some of you may have heard about a massive flaw in the security of the internet.
This is really serious and everyone should be aware of the implications.
Heartbleed is the sort of flaw that gives systems admins huge nightmares.
On vulnerable websites there is a significant possibility that your passwords have been revealed to hackers making use of the bug. Worse than that, if a site has been compromised there is no evidence!
It would be good practice to change all the passwords you use on the internet. Now.
…unless you have evidence that the services you use are not part of the problem.
At Cloud Genius, we have performed a full review of the services we use.
- Services to back up websites/update plug-ins. For clients that subscribe to this services one was not vulnerable, the other service has been secured and we have taken steps necessary to prevent any problems. No action required on your part.
- Website hosting – our provider has informed us that they are vulnerable. Until they update all their systems you may wish to change the password on your account at https://webhost.cloud-genius.com. Once their patching process is complete you should change your password again on the account. We will endeavour to let you know when this is.
- Paypal – our understanding is that Paypal is not affected.
- Teamviewer – our remote control solution of choice is not affected.
- Salesforce – To the best of our knowledge is not affected.
- LastPass – our password management software of choice is not affected. (And helped a lot in fixing services that were affected.)
Here is a list of other networks that were affected – these include people like Google, Yahoo and many others.
https://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/
This is really serious. Make sure you are not caught out!
One positive – LastPass was able to scan all the services we use, list the affected services and make password changing a doodle! Highly recommended… and much more secure than any other system we have come across.
Cloud Genius is proud to be providing the technology behind the Bounce Back team at the Pembrokeshire Jobs Fair (29 October 2014).