Wright PC Consulting, LLC

Today web developers are pulling more tricks out of thier sleeves to attract and keep visitors to thier customer’s site; Wright services included.

The latest eye popping trick for us is PicLens. PicLens gives visitors the option to view a wall of images & video.  Rather than try to paint a word picture, I’ll just show you:

Many popular sites like YouTube, Yahoo!, Google, Amazon  and others are already capitalizing on this feature rich tool.

PicLens. How will you use it?

While most all web hosting providers, including mine, have a provision in their AUP or TOS that says that you, the consumer, are responsibility for backing up your data, I believe that as a service provider I owe it to my customers to do all that I can to protect their data. Backing up customer data both internally and off site is really the only way to fully mitigate potential disaster as the unfortunate folks that run their business out of The Planet’s H1 data center in Houston, Texas discovered when there was a large explosion in the electrical room that took the center off line for more than a week. While The Planet staff from the top down worked 24/7 to get the center back online, the update page tells the story of how difficult a task they had before them. During the downtime I followed the frustration of many whose data was held in powerless servers with no off site backup, were without a web presence, email and other services that make any hosting service’s world turn.

So, what do does Wright PC Consulting, LLC do to protect consumer data? Here is our current backup formula. While not perfect, it provides a pretty reasonable level of safety.

1. At approx. 3AM the cPanel backup script, cpbackup, runs an incremental backup of all customers’ home directories and cPanel configuration files and saves them to a dedicated backup drive where they are archived and rotated monthly.
2. When cpbackup has completed its backup, it starts a second script that “mirrors” the backup drive and sends it to a data center in another state through a secure encrypted tunnel using the rsync protocol.
3. Monthly customer data is burned to DVD and stored in a third, secure location.
4. For added security and by special arrangement, we will also mirror a customer’s email off site every hour.

These steps have proven to not only ease customer anxiety, but make they make restoring data, from a single file to any entire account easy.

Editor’s note: The following story is directly from the source and was not altered.

DALLAS, TEXAS (June 13, 2008) – MPower – which provides the most open, flexible, and powerful software for nonprofit constituent relationship management (CRM) and fundraising – today announced that its solution has been accepted by SourceForge.net, the world’s largest online repository of open source code and applications, with more than 100,000 projects and 1,000,000-plus registered users.

“This is a milestone not just for MPower but also in the continuing evolution of CRM and fundraising software for nonprofits,” said Randy McCabe, Founder and CEO, MPower. “As excited as we were when we released our software as an open source offering in March, we are even more excited now because acceptance by SourceForge officially launches the real work, innovation and MPower community.”
Freedom for Nonprofits to Use, Innovate and Share

With MPower now fully available on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpower, nonprofits and their partners have easy access to the software’s source code so they can develop additional features and functionality to optimize constituent relationships and drive giving – in ways that work best for their individual organizations. MPower’s presence on SourceForge also creates a community of users who can easily collaborate and share their innovations.

To support developers, MPower plans to create forums (monitored and moderated by the company’s product development and management teams) covering such topics as adding new feature functionality and sharing innovations. Developers also will be able to track the incorporation of their innovations into the product. Additionally, MPower will provide Wikis on development best practices and coding as well as extensive product documentation.

“At NTEN, we believe that the more open software is, the better — the ability to customize, modify, and share data is key to really make software work for nonprofits and their unique business processes,” said Holly Ross, Executive Director, Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN). “We are very excited to see so many vendors in our space embrace openness as a value and to learn that there is now one more choice available to the nonprofit community for additional development and innovation on SourceForge.”
MPower Available Under General Public License

Consistent with the dual licensing approach used by many of the world’s leading open source solutions (e.g., MySQL, Asterisk and Alfresco), MPower is available on SourceForge and through MPower directly under two licenses. Nonprofits may use and innovate with the software under the latest version of the GNU General Public License, or GPLv3, which is the most widely used licensing agreement for open source software. Under this license, nonprofits have the freedom to use and modify the software for any purpose to suit their organizations’ needs, and also share their modifications – all without fees.

“By adopting a well-regarded license, joining the SourceForge platform, and launching its community, MPower is making great strides in creating an open source community around its application,” said Michelle Murrain, Principal, MetaCentric Technology Advising, and Coordinator, Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI). “I look forward to the growth of this community, and the ongoing development of the MPower solution as an open source alternative CRM for nonprofit organizations.”

Commercial users — such as other software vendors serving the nonprofit community — can use and develop MPower under another licensing agreement that does not require release of their modifications under an open source model.

MPower already was full feature, mature software used by hundreds of nonprofits, including some of the world’s most savvy direct marketers, when it became available as an open source offering in early March. Since then, more than 400 organizations have downloaded the solution from www.mpoweropen.com and the company expects that number to increase significantly now that the product is available for collaborative development on SourceForge.
About MPower

Dallas-based MPower provides the most open, flexible, and powerful suite of software and services for fundraising and constituent relationship management for today’s nonprofits. MPower enables organizations to manage important daily operations (including donation processing, fulfillment, event and volunteer management, call center activity tracking and major donors relations) and also capture and leverage key constituent data from all channels for building strong, lifetime relationships. MPower serves hundreds of nonprofits of all sizes with diverse missions and constituencies, including some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated direct marketers. For more information, please visit www.mpoweropen.com.