This blog has moved to http://www.reallysimplesystems.com/blog

This blog moved to http://www.reallysimplesystems.com/blog as from July 2011 – make sure up update your reader!

We have a new web site!

We’ve just upgraded our web site, www.reallysimplesystems.com, to a new look and feel. More importantly, the new site will allow us to publish more information about Really Simple Systems Cloud CRM, particularly more help documentation and videos.

The new site is build on using WordPress, the blogging platform that is increasingly being used to build whole applications, such as our new site.

Let us know what you think about the new site, and what additional information you’d like to see on it.

Login problem today – the autopsy

We’ve worked out what happened today. At 13:55 (all times UK time) one of our developers inadvertently deleted the table in the system that has the names of each customer’s system, which is referenced by the login process. People who were logged on were unaffected, but new users trying to log on got an error message. The table is held on multiple servers but as they all replicate in real time, the table was instantly deleted off all the servers.

Once we had identified the cause of the problem we could reload the deleted table on one server,  check the system for data integrity, switch all the new logins to that one server and test.

At 14:32 this process was complete and all users could start logging in again.

At 15:40 the other servers were synchronised and we started spreading the logins across the multiple boxes.

During this time we had about 20 calls and emails from users who could not log in, although of course more could have been affected.

We are going to change the permissions on the database to stop developers dropping tables, and the developer involved has been sentenced to cleaning the toilets for a week!

Our apologies again to all the users who were affected.

Login problems

We’ve had a problem with some people logging in today, which is fixed now.

Looks like it started 13:40 UK time, it was fixed 15:00.

Customers that were already logged in were unaffected.

Autopsy soon, but all should be ok now.

Free Edition CRM Hits 10,000 Users

We’ve just hit the 10,000 user mark for our Free Edition CRM system. That’s just over 1,000 users a month since we launched in October 2010, and well ahead of the target that we set ourselves of 10,000 users in the first year.

About 200 users have now upgraded to Premium Edition so they can have more users, storage or features.

Looks like people like the idea of a free CRM system that is easy to use but has all the functionality you need to manage your customers, prospects and sales pipeline!

Really Simple Systems shortlisted for the Software Satisfaction Awards

Really Simple Systems has been shortlisted for the 2011 Software Satisfaction Awards in the best small business CRM and Customer Management Software category.

We won the award in 2008, came second in 2009, and won it back again in 2010. Will we keep our crown in 2011? We’ll know on 18th October at the award ceremony.

Thanks again to all our customers who voted for us.

Really Simple Systems wins at EuroCloud

Really Simple Systems has won EuroCloud‘s Best Customer Case Study award for its work with RSM Tenon (formerly Bentley Jennison).

“Cloud computing is more than just a passing trend or a buzz phrase – it is a new way of delivering business advantage,” said John Paterson, CEO of Really Simple Systems. “Using our cloud solutions, our customers have been able to avoid expensive and cumbersome hardware and software that would never have been able to keep up with their changing needs. They have the ability to scale the resources we use, as we need them, without having to factor in costly overheads, making them more agile and flexible as a result.”

EuroCloud is a European network gathering SaaS and cloud computing communities from 27 European countries, including vendors and industry experts.

How to make money from Cloud CRM

We’ve just released our Affiliate Partner scheme.

Simply by having a link on your web site you can earn a substantial commission.

The Really Simple Systems Affiliate Programme allows you to earn commision on the visitors you refer to our web site when they sign up for a CRM subscription.

• You get 10% commission on all customers you refer to us, just by adding a simple link from your site.
• You can track the number of clicks and sign-ups though our Affiliate system.
• We provide you with all the linking code and images.
• We handle all the pre and post sales support and delivery of the CRM system.
• You’ll be offering your visitors a world beating CRM system.

More details and sign up on the Affiliate Login page.

Apologies for the server glitches today

We had a couple of 5 minutes blips on one of our servers today that meant we had to log people off that server and onto another one. This was caused by the server in question getting overloaded and failing faster than we could monitor. So we had to close it down and move everybody who was logged onto that server to another one, which meant those people had to log in again.

The good news is that our failover /replication worked perfectly, so no data was lost and users could just log in again and continue working.

This evening we’ve turned on some more servers and smartened up the load balancing so things should run smoothly again tomorrow.

It is a strange fact that servers never seem to degrade slowly: one minute they are fine, the next minute they slip into a death spiral with no warning. We’ve been signing up a lot of new users in the last few months, we had new servers racked and standing by ready to go but the suddeness of the extra load took us by suprise.

So our apologies to those users that were inconvenienced, we are working hard here to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

8,000 users sign up for Really Simple Systems

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just hit 8,000 users who have signed up for Really Simple Systems Cloud CRM.

This is mainly driven by our Free Edition that we launched back in October last year – we’re getting about 1,000 users a month signing up for this entry level CRM system.

Free Edition is a two user Sales system for up to 100 Accounts, perfect for startups and small companies new to CRM.

Maybe you know somebody who would benefit from this great offer?