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tylertetzloff: @RackApps what rackspace mail skin is that in the resend email photo? looks nice! hope we get it. :-) 11 hours, 10 minutes
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RackApps: RT @jacobpuck: #gmailsxsw "Re-Send Email" @rackapps webmail has it http://bit.ly/cZgTVP (Probably more of a business feature) 12 hours, 33 minutes
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lapaterson: RT @jacobpuck: #gmailsxsw "Re-Send Email" @rackapps webmail has it http://brizzly.com/pic/1Q5N (Probably more of a business feature) 12 hours, 34 minutes
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jacobpuck: #gmailsxsw "Re-Send Email" @rackapps webmail has it http://brizzly.com/pic/1Q5N (Probably more of a business feature) 12 hours, 35 minutes
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TheSMESpace: iSMEStorage lets you view files offline for #RackSpace #CloudFiles & #S3, Sync files to #iPhone + share files over email, Twitter & TinyURL 18 hours, 27 minutes
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Our 15 Minutes of Fame (Well almost)
We don’t usually highlight when we get media coverage on our company through this blog, but we had to share this one. It’s too good to pass up. A few weeks ago on the evening of July 15, 2009 Rackspace Email got its 15 minutes of fame. Well actually it was more like half a second, but who’s really counting anyways?
That night if you were watching the Colbert Report on Comedy Central you might have caught a quick glimpse of an email that the host, Stephen Colbert, was showing to the audience. If you looked closely you would have seen that the email was actually being viewed in our Rackspace Email web-based client. Check out the screenshot below.
Don’t believe it’s true? You can check it out yourself on the Colbert Report‘s site. Scan to about 1:54 seconds in the video and you’ll see.
Needless to say we are pretty proud of our few milli-seconds of fame.
Hadoop Discussion at OSCON Today
Mike Olson, the CEO of Cloudera, is giving a presentation on Hadoop at OSCON 2009 today at 4:30 pm PT. Check it out – and watch for the slides on how Rackspace uses Hadoop!
“Using Hadoop for Big Data Analysis”
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/7378
Ordering Delivery Was Never Easier
I am really good at forgetting things. Mostly, I forget my lunch—which really is a shame considering I put in time each night to carefully craft the next day’s meal. Peanut butter sandwich with no crust, 22 seedless grapes, and 3 cookies. Sometimes, if I am feeling really daring, I will pack some chips. It’s all for nothing, though, as I inevitably leave it on the counter each morning (much to my dog’s delight).
Luckily, two days a week, I am saved through our employee lunch program here at work. As a group, we are given a different restaurant choice each time—Chinese, Japanese, sandwiches, BBQ, etc. All we have to do is place our individual orders on the signup sheet. Then Rackspace pays the delivery and tip, and the remainder is taken out of our check monthly.
Whether you are too lazy to make your lunch, too forgetful to actually bring your lunch, or are just in the mood to order in, Rackspace helps out in a big way. More importantly, we don’t have to wander around the office looking to make change or trying to see who is going to tip the driver. Easy + convenient + great food = win.
[Email Tip] Save Time by Sending Email Blind
BCC, blind carbon copy, is a tool to send an email to someone and share it with a third person without the primary contact knowing it.
Have you ever been copied on an email, the contents of which were sent to you just as an FYI? Then before you know it, you’ve received 5 or 10 more emails that are follow up questions or debates that don’t affect you? With BCC, when the recipient hits reply, it only goes back to the original sender saving everyone time.
If you send an email to a list, just address the email to yourself and put the recipient’s email in the BCC field. This prevents the swarm of emails that may arise if the recipient clicks “reply all”.
This practice also protects the recipient’s email addresses in case one of them forwards the email beyond.
Impact of the Month Award for May
As we do every month, we came together at the June company lunch to celebrate another month of successes, birthdays, competition winners, and the “Impact of the Month” award. It’s always a struggle to choose the one person that we feel made the biggest impact. This month was no exception. After all, we went through a massive rebranding and there were dozens and dozens of people throughout the organization that made our rebranding an amazing success.
However, one person stood out. Steve Piercy is the lead developer of the website team here at Rackspace Email & Apps, and had the single largest responsibility during the rebranding process. Steve and his team had to rewrite the website from scratch. The entire website had to be completely overhauled, from the look and feel of the site, all the way down to the backend code base, in order to fit seamlessly with the Rackspace website. Steve, backed by a dedicated team of developers, designers, illustrators, project managers, and QA testers worked extremely long hours to meet tight deadlines without compromising an iota of quality. You’re looking at the result – our most successful rebranding effort to date (yes, we’ve had a few).
Microsoft WPC09 in New Orleans
Kirk Averett and I are headed to New Orleans next week for the Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference. We are excited to be participating in this year’s conference and to meet with other partners and Microsoft executives. We will be there throughout the four day event and are interested in meeting others who have interests in Microsoft Exchange and software-as-as-service. We’re actively hiring too, so if you’ve got experience with Exchange and would like to chat, drop us a line and we’ll set something up.
User Experience Design In ‘The Cloud’…Literally
There we stood with a giant white wall, markers, and notes in-hand ready to begin our sprint planning meeting. This time we weren’t in front of a whiteboard. We were surrounded by clouds. Our User Experience Design team decided to take their sprint planning meeting outdoors.
For those of you not familiar with a sprint planning meeting, it’s a component of an agile development process we use in our R&D department called Scrum. During sprint planning, a team spends several hours together planning/estimating tasks and setting goals for a time-boxed development iteration.
After spending a day together the previous week white water rafting, the team wanted to keep the outdoor adventure theme going. So, we set our eyes on a 7.5 mile hike (round-trip) known as McAfee’s Knob on the Appalachian Trial. Our goal was to hold a sprint planning meeting atop the mountain at 3,197 feet above sea level. What we didn’t anticipate when planning the trek was a last minute forecast calling for rain. A little rain wouldn’t deter us from our team outing. We forged on with our plans and packed a few tarps and some rope for a shelter. As we walked through the office to leave for the hike with rain pouring outside, we received quite a few “you’re crazy” looks from fellow Rackers. Honestly, as I drove to the trail head and the rain continued to pour, it crossed my mind a few times that we may be crazy for going through with the outing.
As we made our way up the trail, the rain continued to come down in buckets. When we reached our conference room (aka McAfee’s Knob) the rain had stopped, however, we were met with a white wall of nothing. Instead of looking out over a beautiful landscape of valleys and mountains, the User Experience Design team was literally in the clouds. Visibility was down to less than 30 feet. Perfect weather for a meeting!
We broke out notes, product backlogs, and post-its and began our planning meeting. With our agenda in hand, the team worked with their product owner to discuss items on the backlog, define requirements/tasks, and set priorities and goals for the coming iteration. While taking pictures of the team working together, I saw a change in the team dynamic outside of what I normally see in a conference room. There was an energy I hadn’t experience before; the team was engaged, having fun, and plowing through the meeting agenda.
A through-hiker tackling 300 miles of the trail came into our “conference room” to take a few pictures of the view. He asked, “What are all of you doing up here?”
We simply answered, “Having a company meeting.”
I can’t repeat his exact words, but he thought it was awesome that our company allowed us to get out of the office and venture into the woods for a meeting. His next question was, “Are you hiring?”
As he asked this question, I realized that what we have at Rackspace is unique.
Rackspace Email & Apps Incident – July 7, 2009
Some of our customers were unable to log into their email accounts between 12:00 pm ET and 12:30pm ET today. We experienced a connectivity issue affecting around 60% of Rackspace Email and 100% of Microsoft Exchange customers. Due to a power interruption at our Dallas (DFW) data center, upstream networking devices lost power. This prevented impacted customers from accessing our server environment.
At NO point was customer data at risk. All incoming and outgoing email was queued and delivered shortly after the issue was resolved. Affected customers may have experienced delays receiving or sending email during this incident. At this time, all Rackspace Email and Microsoft Exchange services have no known issues.
We understand how important email is to your business and apologize to any customers who have been affected by this incident. As a Rackspace customer, you can be confident that the fanatical approach we take to customer support is being poured into diagnosing, fixing, and taking measures to prevent future issues.
For further updates about this incident, visit the main Rackspace blog here.
Scrum @ Rackspace – Sprint Planning
This is where it all begins. Sprint planning is where the team gathers to plan the next sprint’s worth of work. What is a sprint? A sprint is a fixed time period to complete defined tasks. The sprint planning meeting is where a team selects and commits to work for the next sprint.
What does sprint planning look like at Rackspace? It depends on the team and how the team plans. Guidelines exist on how sprint planning meetings should flow; however, there is room for teams to adapt the process to their workflow.
Of the scrum meetings, sprint planning is arguably the most important. This is where the stakeholders gather to discuss the importance of upcoming features and changes within a product line. We discuss the overall plan and dive into individual features, discussing both business and technical details. As you can imagine, this looks very different for our technical writing team than it does for the team that brings you Rackspace Email, and even more different for teams charged with ensuring spam and viruses stay out of your inbox.
Each team has its own set of tools. Some teams use spreadsheets, we’ve tried enterprise software, open source tools, and some teams even use index cards taped to the wall. Depending on team size and topic, these meetings last from a few to eight hours. In the last meeting, the team walked in to the sounds of John Mellencamp’s “Jack & Diane,” doughnuts, and juice. After settling in, we spent over three hours hashing out what the team would be working on for the next 20 days.
After lunch, we reconvened and finished discussing each feature and the team decided what it wanted to work on. Team ownership is encouraged within scrum and sprint planning. Finally, the team discusses any external dependencies, the meeting ends, and I am off to make sure this plan is documented and communicated to interested parties. Tomorrow, the sprint begins.