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Ordering Delivery Was Never Easier

Jul 22nd, 2009 in Culture by Melissa Mancuso

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.

Is your Browser Ready for Retirement?

Jun 16th, 2009 in Tips & Advice by Melissa Mancuso

When you reach out for support regarding something on your computer, one of the first troubleshooting steps is confirming you have the latest browser version. You’re asked this because there are countless symptoms and effects on your computer from using an outdated browser.

Here are just a few reasons to keep up with the curve:

Internet Use: Believe it or not, most websites are built and maintained based on the latest internet standards and latest version of browsers. The symptoms could be as benign as a logo not showing up or as aggressive as the site not functioning at all.

Backwards compatibility: Not all tech companies pride themselves on taking the time to make sure their product is backwards compatible with other browsers. At Rackspace, our developers spend hours making sure customers can use our product to its full capacity in a variety of browsers. Imagine all the cool features developers could be working on if everyone kept their browsers up to date.

Are you convinced yet? If so, here are links to the latest browser versions for the most popular browsers. Or, you can download them from the “Help” tab in your browser and periodically check for updates.

Firefox: 3.0.11

Internet Explorer: 8

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Transparency Matters

May 19th, 2009 in Fanatical Support by Melissa Mancuso

We know that communication is extremely important to all of our customers. We appreciate this fact so much that we developed an internal tool to further facilitate communicating with our customers.

The second version of this tool, internally named Broadcast, was just launched. This is an internal tool that allows us to update our system status page, control panel page and internal pages to alert employees and customers of outages, planned maintenance or other important information. The beauty of the tool does not stop there. We can also alert specific customers by email or text messages sent directly from the tool to the account administrator.

If you are currently a customer, this is a great time to update your contact information in the control panel to make sure you receive updates from the new Broadcast tool.

We pride ourselves as a company on transparency. We admit that we are not above having issues. The important part is that we want to be upfront and timely in letting our customers know what they can expect at any given time. This tool facilitates that transparency.

Open Source Data Synchronization between Servers

Apr 23rd, 2009 in Product Enhancements by Melissa Mancuso

Google, Apple and Microsoft take pride in offering ways to synchronize your data to the mobile device of your choice; however, the consumer, smitten by the power of incredible services and devices dwells at the center of a smorgasbord of phones, PDAs, computers, email accounts, and social networking services. At this point consumers spend a better part of their web time trying to unify their personal and shared data across platforms and devices rather than letting it happen automatically.
Enter Mailtrust. Up until this point we have offered a way to sync your contacts, calendars, tasks and notes for our Noteworthy product to your BlackBerry, Outlook, Windows Mobile or iPhone seamlessly. Over the past few months, however, we have developed a piece of software called Source-To-Source Sync, built on top of the open source innovator Funambol, that allows one to sync data directly from one source to another across different platforms just as easily as one can sync data to their devices. We’re leveraging Source-to-Source Sync with our new Migrations project, currently in development, to allow users to migrate their data from external Exchange accounts, but the possibilities are endless.
For me this could mean keeping my Google contacts and calendars constantly synchronized with my Noteworthy contacts and calendars. Adding a contact on Noteworthy replicates the contact on Google within minutes and vice versa. Additionally, my Blackberry would be kept up-to-date through Sync for Blackberry.
Putting this all together we come to the real life scenario. I happen upon a long lost friend in a coffee shop where I take down his contact information on my Blackberry only to find that I have misplaced my phone at lunchtime. Since I promised to call him I open my laptop and browse to my Gmail account to get his info only to find that the servers are down. Finally — and thankfully — I browse to my Noteworthy account, and by the virtue of Source-To-Source Sync, I find the contact and make the call!
And, its open source! We just launched the Source-to-Source Sync home page on Funambol Forge. Go there to download the code, submit feature requests and track development of new features. This is perfect for developers interested in getting a platform supported or building a new feature for the project. We welcome all contributions big or small.

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