90p Admin

Thought: This is a solution I'm going to add to our EverSafe branded cloud data offerings. Primarily as an entre to smaller clients and an additional recurring revenue stream for larger clients. www.anchorworks.com I'm betting I could get them to extend the attached offer past December. I want to test out the trial period myself to make sure it really works as well as the demo I saw in a gotomeeting. Essentially its Sugarsync/Dropbox/Carbonite/Yousendit all rolled into one with multi-level entity security and 442 bit blowfish encryption as well as remote wipe options (i.e a tablet or laptop is stolen or an employee is terminated). Far more business friendly and secure than those other options. I'm trying to round up users from our other offices, but if 90minds also subscribed, at 100+ users, the cost per user is $5.50/month which is about 1/3 to 1/4 the retail pricing of box.net, sugarsync or dropbox and with alot more functionality and just one app needing to be installed. The nice thing is we could set up 90minds folder shares where all these images are stored as well and it allows you to transfer files up to 25 gigs in size (vs. yousendit at 2 gigs) Each company would have their own account and controls/security and admin console. Most companies now have a situation in which individuals have their own service with no central management of the data or costs or security. If any of you have PCI-DSS or HIPPA clients, handling their data is getting more and more onerous relative to regulations and laws. Everything would be done at my cost with 0 markup and I would handle all setup & training (which is minimal and most is available via videos). I'm doing this so that if I can sell it to my clients, my cost basis would be alot lower initially than if I did it without the 90minds members. Thoughts?

I'm an active user of Dropbox for transferring files that are needed for upgrades. There are several primary issues with this which i don't think Dropbox has a solution for. a. If you are putting a Dropbox to every one of your upgrade customer's sites and that customer can write to the Dropbox -- or erase it -- then you have problems with other sites if that data replicates (which it does). Also if a virus were somehow introduced to the Dropbox files you could unknowingly spread it. b. Ideally I'd want my customer Dropbox sites to be read only so I could copy the files out of Dropbox but nothing would be written back. I do not think I have an easy way to do that with Dropbox but I think Google Drive will allow read only. c. When you add your own Dropbox account to the customer site -- you really can only have a Dropbox account which you share that's 100% non-confidential because it appears the individual site can right click the Dropbox icon and start syncing all of your folders -- even if you've initially set it up to sync just the upgrade files. So far I've worked around this by having one Dropbox -- $99/yr -- dedicated to nothing but upgrade file storage. Nothing confidential. So my biggest issue is if a customer mistakenly (or intentionally) adds or removes files.

This is primarily because you are using one dropbox across multiple clients. Technically each client should have their own account, but then you couldn't easily access it. With our solution, you could buy an account for each client (but charge them a reimbursement fee, and probably mark it up some). You would have the ability to make it read only. Also, the system stores unlimited versions, so if a customer did accidentally overwrite the file, you can restore a prior version. You would also know who overwrote it, when and at what date/time. Wayne, in your case, why not just not install dropbox at the client, and instead use the web client to pull down the files when you need them when you are there?

Technically pulling down the files as needed from DB is a possible solution - however the problem is that -- for large files you cannot predict ahead of time how long (speed quality) it may take to download. Each customer has their own peculiar speed issue with Internet. Some are lightning fast -- others could take days. Also it's much easier and faster to tell a customer that as step one you're going to install Dropbox. Let it sync up all the possible files you'll need (usually overnight and over several days). This in my experience greatly reduces the wait time for downloads, etc because now it's all machine time. In my ideal world I'd like to have a separate private DB for each customer that stores: a. Their upgrade files -- this is just boilerplate b. A ""quick and dirty backup"" -- this would be a drag and drop of \MAS90 and subfolders c. Maybe a backup space for critical files like forms, reports, etc I cannot do this securely without the customer purchasing their own Dropbox. Despite my hope that every customer would embrace this - I'm not sold the take rate would be huge. I could probably sell the spare backup option though security, IT, etc could derail that idea.

I also think that since customers no longer receive a CD in the mail that it's nice to tell the IT folks that ""hey I've left a complete copy of the source files that you'll need - including FRX, etc"". IT reacts pretty favorably to providing them with all the source disks.

I think a big question is where does this lie in the range of services and offerings that 90 Minds makes to its members to vendor members and promotions.

I'm getting the feeling our income is starting to well exceed our expenses. This seems like a service that would benefit all members, whether they are a sole consultant or larger firm. By doing 'bulk buying' a $5.50/month/user cost is a fraction of all these other services. If it works out well, it offers an additional tangible benefit of 90minds and doesn't cost a fortune per user vs. something like gotomeeting etc.