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.
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.
10th Apr 2014 | Email, General Information, Transferring, Web Hosting, Websites
Many of you who have grown up with the internet will be aware of the DynDNS service.
This allowed you to host services from home and get to them with a website address that ended .dyndns.com (or one of a variety of other endings). Mine was jd10k.dyndns.com.
Very soon it will be no more. Dyn want you to subscribe to their ‘Pro’ service, at $25 per year! (There is a temporary, discount.)
There are other options. A similar free service is provided by no-ip for free!
But perhaps you were hosting your email and/or website from home (not the best idea), in that case you might want to check out our low-priced email and web services on WebHost. You may want to add a personal domain name to that, too. You can do all that and still save on the price of the Dyn offering (and a personal domain name will look far more professional).
Anyway, there are lots of better options that signing up for Dyn’s service. Good luck!
Time for a change.
28th Feb 2014 | General Information
As someone who runs a small business, I have to keep my eye on market trends.
I am currently in the midst of trying out various marketing software. Over the coming weeks I will let you know how I get on.
Over the past couple of weeks I have been putting Send Pepper (Pro) through its paces. I comes with a free two week trial, so I had high hopes. People do not normally offer free trials unless a product works well. I was particularly interested in the way it can automate certain processes… and how it could automatically track incoming and outgoing emails.
The interface was lovely and crisp. It lost a few points because it only really likes working in Firefox. (I thought the days of browser preference were behind us.) I liked the interface, very simple to understand and snappy.
It seemed to have the capability to track clients progress through my website with astonishing, almost creepy, abilities. I did not get a chance to fully test this, but others inform me that it really is amazing. I have no reason to doubt them.
A feature that I did get to test was Send Pepper’s ability to attach emails to client records. After a time a blank email would attach itself to my contacts and sometimes the full email would appear after a couple of hours. Other times not. Call in the techs. First level very helpful, then it went to second level and the devs. At this point the company became less communicative. To me attaching emails is core functionality and it did not work. But, I use a Mac perhaps that was doing something nasty. I have never had any issues with similar functionality in other products I have tried. On the other hand, I used to be in charge of a department that dealt with email filtering for the financial industry. We got used to knowing the vagaries of different systems and documenting the work-arounds. I could not see anything here that was unusual enough that they would not have come across it before.
“I was prepared for any suggestion of a solution, even if it meant that I needed to reconfigure something with my email service provider or on my Mac.
I will never know.”
I got to the end of my two week trial and it was still not working. I asked for an extension to the free period and made it clear that I would be leaving rather than paying for a faulty product. The tech took this to his manager who refused. I closed the account. The money would have been taken automatically from my account. I did not have the time to go chasing for a refund. I do have a business to run!
Send Pepper (Pro) is a single-user product that costs nearly $200 per month, cannot cope with currencies other than US dollars (well, there are “sort-of” work-arounds), and the iPhone app is only available on the US store. There is are upgrades in the pipeline, but looking at other reviews these seem to have been promised for more than a year.
At the end of the day, for me to trust my business to a product I need reliability. Full-stop. Send Pepper did not deliver on this crucial point.
