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Trying to Become a Great Place To Work?
If your company isn’t putting employees in positions they are truly passionate about, having the occasional ‘fun’ event, won’t turn your company into a Great Place To Work. Spending time, money, and resources building a great corporate culture is so much more than happy hours, pie-your-manager days, and company outings.
Building a great culture is about having employees who are passionate about your customers, managers who care about your employees, and a company full of people who jump out of bed, run to work, and can’t wait to collaborate with others who, just like themselves, love what they do.
At Mailtrust, we focus on doing just that: putting people in roles they are passionate about. It begins with our Recruiting process. We seek out people who don’t just have the skills we need but who have the values, vision, and passion to succeed in the role we’ve created. It continues as we make decisions about re-adjusting, promoting, and changing roles in our organization. And at times, it means getting rid of a sour grape who is sucking the passion out of our passionate employees. Every move we make not only takes into account the strengths and career goals of the employees we currently have, but also ensures we’re clearing their path so they can achieve personal and professional greatness.
We foster that greatness with guidance. First, we ask what their career passions are and how we can fuel those passions here at Mailtrust. Second, we watch them. Paying attention to successes and struggles helps guide employees based on individual tolerance. Third, we offer direction with tools like Gallup’s Strengths Profile training to give employees a broader understanding of their talents. We also offer a wealth of learning resources through “Rackspace University”.
So, if you’re an organization that is trying to figure out how to truly become a Great Place To Work, forget about the ‘fun’ stuff for a second. First, make sure you’re clearing the way for your best employees to succeed. Find your most passionate employees and ask them what you can change to make their lives better. Their input might surprise you. Then you can add the ‘fun’ stuff.
Opening Doors for Open Source
Which of the following companies use open source software for vital business functions?
a) Mailtrust
b) Microsoft
c) Google
d) NYSE Euronext
e) All of the Above
Answer: E) All of the above. Are you surprised? More and more companies are harnessing the flexibility and possibilities of open source software development. Open source refers to software with a publicly accessible source code that programmers can modify to their purposes. Mailtrust uses open source – a lot. We believe in the idea and like the ability to modify software to suit our needs. We use Linux, MySQL, Dovecot, Postfix, Funambol, Hadoop, and Zookeeper for a variety of functions from mobile sync to search. We contribute back to the open source projects where we can by reporting bugs, enhancing the code, and by encouraging others to use this free software.
But we want to do more to support the growth of the open source community. What more you ask? Well, for starters, we hosted an Open Source Round Table to keep the conversation going locally in Blacksburg, VA. By creating a forum for those who are passionate about open source software, we’re contributing to the future growth of open source projects and creating a place for developers and other interested parties to share and learn from each other. The free pizza was an added bonus! We’ve also added open source pioneer, Timo Sirainen, creator and lead developer for Dovecot, the highest performing open-source IMAP server for Linux/Unix, to the Mailtrust team.
If you’ve never used open source software, now is the perfect time to start. Just search online for software that interests you, check out the project’s website, download the software and use it for free, and if you’re really brave you can download the source code and start hacking!
Launch: Noteworthy Webmail Beta 7.0
Mailtrust is pumped to announce that our Apps team (code name the ultimate killer coding ninjas) recently released a new version of Noteworthy Webmail to our beta site. This release is the culmination of six months of hard work and represents a major leap forward for the Noteworthy Webmail product. Just a few examples of new features are:
- Support for multiple personal calendars, including the ability to share and grant calendar editing access to other Noteworthy users
- Calendar sharing with anyone via unique urls for each calendar (iCal feeds)
- Access to Calendar, Event, Task and Email features through right mouse click
- Calendar Invite enhancements
- Outlook/Exchange compatible
- Option to include comments with responses
- Setting to allow automatic delete on response
- Custom Email Filters based on information found in the email header
- New Notes section added to allow users to record their ideas and information
We invite you to view the video below to see a few of these features for yourself. If you are a current Noteworthy Webmail user, please try out the beta site and give us your feedback via the “feedback” link at the top of the app. We’ll use it to improve the release during the beta period. Enjoy!
Launch: Noteworthy Search 2.0 Release: Speed, Quality and Scalability
If you use e-mail to do business, you probably receive an exorbitant amount of emails every day, each of which is important to the work you do. Keeping track of all that data in your head is near impossible, so, you try to filter and segregate incoming messages to better organize your mailbox. But folders fill up fast, and messages get pushed out of sight and out of mind in an instant.
So, what happens when you need to find the email that someone in HR sent three or four months ago? Was it in the ‘work’ folder, or the ‘HR’ folder?
The classic answer to this question is to run a quick search. After all, search has become a standard feature of email clients, with Noteworthy Search being added in 2006; efficient search has come to be expected from any mailbox. Unfortunately, as mailboxes grow to tens of gigabytes, it has also come to be expected that sifting through all that mail can take a while. Noteworthy’s own search feature has historically had a few issues with certain queries taking too long or, in rare cases, occasionally omitting results due to communication errors.
That’s why we’re very proud to announce the release of Search 2.0 for all Noteworthy users using our Webmail interface. We’ve focused on improving the speed and quality of searches while ensuring that we lay down a scalable foundation to maintain performance as we grow. In our beta testing period, we reduced average query times down to half a second and prevented communication gaps between mailboxes and our indexing servers. With this solid base, we’re prepared to bring you more exciting new search features in future releases. So stay tuned!
If you have a Noteworthy mailbox, go ahead and try it out now.
Note: If it’s your first time using the search feature, give it up to 30 minutes to populate the indexes for your mailbox
Building43: Robert Scoble joins Rackspace
The news is true — Robert Scoble and Rocky Barbanica have officially joined us here at Rackspace. We are all super excited to have them join the team here and look forward to what the future holds.
Read more over on the Rackspace blog to learn more about why this is all happening.
We are headed to SXSW – Are you?
A couple of us here at Mailtrust are getting ready to pack our bags and head out to the 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. We’ll be joining others from Rackspace and Mosso to talk about our vision for cloud computing and join in the conversation that ensues. We’re planning on attending a ton of events out there, and really want a chance to interact with others who are interested in learning more about the cloud.
Going to SXSW and interested in learning more about the cloud?
Let us know. Bill, Matt, and I will be out there. If you are interested in meeting up, leave a note on this blog or Twitter us (@mailtrust), or just keep an eye out for us…
New Prioritization Strategy – KANO Analysis
In our never ending quest to give you exactly what you want, Mailtrust is employing new strategies to identify and prioritize our product roadmap. Developed in the 1980’s by Dr Noriaki Kano, KANO Analysis is gaining momentum among IT companies using Agile development methods. In the world of development, there are unlimited product possibilities and unlimited opinions on which products are the most important. Using KANO analysis, Product Managers have the ammo to say, “We need this feature now or we’re going to lose customers.” Mailtrust just finished our first round of KANO Analysis, asking customers two key questions:
(1) How would you feel if Mailtrust offered this new product?
(2) How would you feel if Mailtrust DID NOT offer this new product?
These answers tell us how “mandatory” future enhancements are to our current and potential customers. A typical survey might ask, “Would you like to have Active Directory synchronization?” Plenty of users would say “yes.” But KANO gives us the tools to separate those who said yes into those who must have the feature and those who wouldn’t mind having the feature. Customers that must have the feature might look to other companies if we don’t provide it. While customers that wouldn’t mind a feature are fine without it or okay with putting it on the backburner.
So far, we’ve gotten some powerful input from our users. What do our customers want? Email archiving, Active Directory synchronization, and SharePoint. Now that we know what’s most important, we can give customers the things they must have, as well as, some neat bells and whistles they wouldn’t mind having.
Want to know more about KANO? Check out a great explanation of the process or take a look at my favorite video on the subject.