The Blog

We here at Big Dog HQ have a couple of switchers on staff. The two fortunate ones (or smart ones, take your pick), that have made the rather pleasant jump to MAC from PC are loving every minute of it for sure. But as server infrastructure goes we are still running some MS Windows based servers and we need to be able to administer those systems remotely.

At first we tried out Microsoft’s version of Remote Desktop for MAC, but a couple of things were quickly apparent:

1. The application is not really set up for someone that needs to operate concurrent sessions. So if you need to troubleshoot a cluster issue, well tough luck for the most part. You can create a rather sorry work around by creating duplicate instances of the application and launching them as separate instances, but like I said, not very slick.
2. The second issue that we found before we said that there must be a better way, is the fact that when you disconnect a session, the application shuts down, so forget the fact that you can’t run concurrent sessions, cool, maybe could tough that out, but now you gotta relaunch the application just to get to the next session. Too much gotta go.

Aye-chee-wah-wah! What has happened to the art of customer service? How many times have you phoned a company that you are doing business with because you needed help with something, only to be greeted with the dreaded auto-attendant? How many times have you just started shouting into the phone, “speak to a representative, speak to a representative”? Or started hammering the “0″ key in an effort to get a live person? I think that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said it most eloquently “We are not in the coffee business serving people, we are in the people business serving coffee”. The reason that people make Starbucks a regular, even ritualistic part of their daily routine, is in large part for the total personal experience that they have when in the Starbucks environment, not just the coffee. Good customer service makes everyone feel as though they are not just wallet with a human attached! Read more »

So we thought for Earth Day we would post a little bit about our little part here at Otis Technologies. As a spiritual person I personally feel that we have been given this earth by God and that we as humans have a responsibility to take care of it in the highest of ways.

In June of ‘07 our parent company, The Chandler Group, made a decision to leave the nice plush corporate offices, the 2 WONDERFUL $5000 leather couches and the 16 person table in the conference room, The floor to ceiling windows, The $40k Cisco IP phone system, and the amazing 3rd floor view overlooking Cool Springs area in Franklin, behind us. We made the conscience decision to have everyone go mobile. The logistics were somewhat of a nightmare and it took us 2 months and 2 phone systems, and countless VPN’s to figure that part out but it all ironed itself out. We now use Gtalk and Packet8 as our virtual office and we couldn’t be happier. We rent out meeting space at a local shared facilities office whenever we need it and utilize Panera for any side face-to-face meetings we need. We found that at first we did weekly face-to-face meetings… then that moved to every 2 weeks… now it is once a month with a phone call every other week to regroup.

It has made working for this company a dream. I have 3 kids and the ability to leave work and be home in 2.5 seconds is great! I can’t remember the last time I put gas in my car and I can’t tell you how much I have saved on lunches and dress clothes! My work attire is Shorts and a nice shirt (and yes I do shower every day unlike the stereotype).

The environmental impact for our small company may not be large but just getting our guys off the road on a daily basis makes them more productive and happier. It also allows them freedom to work and feel invested in the company instead of just a slop who is just doing a J O B.

The next thing we have done is to make sure that our production server environment is in a clean energy facility. Our co-location facility is based in a a TVA city that generates most of its power from hydroelectric and nuclear energy. They have energy efficient cooling systems and we use low powered servers to reduce the overall power consumption. It is in a modern building in a downtown area that allows for less energy and keeps the cooling to a minimum.

All this to say that, like the theme from this years Nashville Earth Day Festival, It all starts with me!. We may not be saving the world in total but it takes us all to be self-aware about what I am doing and how that little part can make a difference.

Happy Earth Day!

Wow what a crazy few months it has been. Some of you may know but SpotOn! is brought to you by Otis Technologies, a company that has been creating enterprise level applications for big box retailers for about 7 years now. We created SpotOn! to be a tool that allowed smaller businesses to be able to harness what we have done in the enterprise sector for a much more affordable price.

Because we do work with larger businesses sometimes our development time is moved away from what we love (SpotOn!). SpotOn! was released last fall to little fanfare but has caught a great grassroots following in the project management field. We were mentioned on Web Worker Daily and it gave a nice boost to signups and the buzz around it.

Well we noticed in our Google Analytics stats that we all the sudden had a surge of vistors with a lot of them being direct hits… meaning people just typing in the domain… which in Internet marketing speak means that you were featured somewhere in print.

After some P.I work we were able to find a blog post on PCWorld.com that was sending us a few hits so we thought that maybe we were in the print version of PCworld. Alan was on his way to Publix so he picked up a copy and sure enough there we were!

If you want to read the article in electronic form you can go to:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/142807/simpler_projectmanaging_apps_get_the_job_done.html

This caught us off guard because we had yet to do anything as far as press releases or anything like that. This just goes to show that if you create software that helps people do things better that it will just take off. Tell your friends about us and what you experience. The best review we can get is from someone who has used the application and has told someone else who trusts their opinion, that is worth it’s weight in GOLD.

So welcome to all the PC World users and this is just the beginning. We have a lot going on around here and you will see lots of things happening soon!

What blog isn’t complete with out a cute baby picture. My wife put this on my son the other day and I felt it was necessary to show that even at home we “eat our own dog food” If I remember correctly this was a rejected design when we were doing the logo!

We are asked a lot of times what applications do we use in our everyday experience. We are a company that likes to solve our own problems first but there are times when another web application offering has just done it so well that using them is a no-brainer. We have decided to do an ongoing series called “What We Use” were we talk about the applications, both web and desktop, that we use in our everyday life.

In a previous post Alan talked about the beauty of RSS. I am here to talk about my favorite RSS reader called… simply enough… Google Reader

In the Web 2.0 world of collaboration, sharing and open-source, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has taken the world over. Keeping track of the hundreds of blogs I like to read on a daily basis would be a monumental task if I had to go to each individual blog and read them. In walks RSS. RSS allows you to basically have a “Inbox for the web”. You can subscribe to a “feed” and anytime it is updated you will get notified of the new post.

One of the best ways to manage all that is to use an RSS reader and one of my favorites is Google Reader. This is a web based application that allows you to quickly scan through your RSS feeds as if they were emails in your inbox. It is a great way to get information quickly and stay on top of that ever so important blog post.

It has come to our attention that some of our favorite customers are still not familiar with the concept of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), how to use it, what it does, how to subscribe, and the whole nine yards. I will attempt to help them out.

First of all, you already know that around the SpotOn! Dog House we are big fans of Firefox combined with the free Google Reader which allow you to subscribe to your favorite blogs and move through the articles quickly by using the J and K keys (forwards and backwards) so that you don’t spend your entire day scrolling. The problem for some of our bigger customers that work behind firewalls with heavy corporate policies, and for whatever reason an affinity for Microsoft Internet Explorer, it is not always so straight forward as “Hey go download Firefox” and all your browsing will be better. So for them, I explain how to do it the MSIE way. Read more »

I love Firefox. There are so many great ideas floating around out there to make the browsing experience easier, more productive, more fun and just plain ol’ better. One of the latest Add-Ons that we at SpotOn! find very useful and cool is “Morning Coffee” by Shane J. M. Liesegang. It is true that with the ability to organize your bookmarks in folders and nested folders and then open all tabs is a similar type of functionality… But hey, the coolness factor of a coffee cup icon next to my home icon. Wow now we’re talkin! All kidding aside, there are many additional features that Morning Coffee provides that you cannot get with simple folders. For example the feature that lets you organize your reading by the day of the week is fantastic, as certain tasks require certain reading on different days or work schedules, and the coolness factor… oops sorry said that already.

Scott H Young has a blog entry about the 7 Bad E-Mail Habits that Make People Want to Kill You. He goes in to tell you that there are some things that you can do that are simple that will make people appreciate you using email as a communication tool… not as a cop-out to picking up the phone.

I know we use email around here like it is going out of style and thanks to Google Apps for domains we get to harness the magic that is conversations, labels and filters. I used to subscribe to a bunch of high volume email discussion lists but it would seem that I would last maybe a week or 2 and then have to unsubscribe because of the deluge of emails I would get. With filters and labels I can easily have an email go straight to the label, skip my inbox and I can read it when I want to. Someone actually has deemed this type of email BACN… not spam, not direct email but BACN.

hmmm how did email start to get pork product pseudonyms?

How many times have you been in a meeting that simply did not yield any useful results? You left the meeting with no more useful information than when you got there. Maybe the meeting’s agenda was not followed, or worse the whole meeting was done ad-hoc, blasting off in fragmented directions that in fact should be topics for yet another meeting. Yikes! How about the late comers that want you to start all over as if they were some special case? I think a past Dilbert cartoon depicted it best Read more »