This morning's intermittent downtime

This morning we saw some downtime that affected many of our customers. All scheduler functions were intermittently available/non available for a few minutes at a time. The downtime was unusual in that way as it was unavailable for 30 minutes total but over the course of about 2 hours before it was fully resolved.

This is the time it took to reliably diagnose the cause of the issue and then find a temporary, then longer term fix, and then implement it. The bad news is this issue could not be avoided or anticipated but the good news is, should the same issue happen again, we will be able to resolve it right away with almost unnoticeable downtime. There are also some steps we will be taking soon to even further reduce the likelihood of this particular problem happening.

As a result of work we did in late January we have experienced about 56 minutes of downtime in 151 days (including today) with about half of it happening on various nights (in the US) and the other half this morning. This is rather low downtime (or an uptime of 99.97% if you will) and well below some major multi hour outages that affected some huge companies's paid online services recently.

Unfortunately, downtime can and will happen in the future, sometimes at inconvenient times. Just like the power can fail, the internet connection may go down or your computer may die on you unexpectedly. When things do go wrong, we always diligently get to work to try to bring the site back up as quickly as possible. We usually can't tell how long it's going to last or can't help out with most customer inquiries. This is a very stressful moment for us as we understand this is a crucial service that needs to be up at all times ideally.

In order to mitigate the impact on your business we suggest you take the following steps:

• subscribe to your calendar feed in a desktop calendar application such as Outlook 2007+, Windows Vista Calendar, the free Sunbird, Apple's iCal or even from your iPhone or a different web application such as Google Calendar. This will ensure that you have offline access to your upcoming appointments (including client contact details) as they will be automatically updated by your calendar software from our site. This is even useful if the site is still up but you have an internet outage. Go to "my settings" > "links" to find out more about the calendar feeds we offer.
• download our standard CSV files which are Excel compatible and will also provide offline access to the appointments in addition to your own backups for your local records. This needs to be manually downloaded by clicking a link and saving the resulting file to your computer. Go to "my settings" > "links" to find out more about the CSV files we offer.

This way, should the scheduler be unavailable at the time you can still at least get to your appointment list until we bring it back up or your internet access is restored.

SMS feature live

The new SMS (text message) is live for everyone to enable.. or not. It's off by default of course but you can enable it under "my account" > "company details".

Note: only admins can access this screen and turn it on/off.

As a reminder, here's how the feature works:

• a text message will be sent to client profiles with a valid north american number
• the number used to satisfy the above criteria is the one in the "cell phone" field
• a reminder will be sent on the previous evening or late afternoon for appointments the next day in the morning
• a reminder will be sent in the morning for appointments in the afternoon / evening on the same day
• the text of the reminder is as follows: "Appointment reminder: BUSINESSNAME DATEANDTIME local time. See email for details. No reply."

We may still tweak this feature further but at this point we're confident enough to make it available to all that want to enable it.

Volunteers needed!

We have a new feature brewing that we need beta testers for... since our next round of updates will be focused on reducing no shows, we are looking to add SMS (phone text message) reminders for clients as a first step.

We need some volunteers for our public beta test so we have decided to open it to those who can show that they are avid, faithful blog readers :) All you need to do is contact us by sending a support request from your account requesting participation in the beta test and we'll enable the SMS feature for you if we still need testers.
You need to have a valid, non expired account obviously :) (trial users welcome too) and will need to have clients primarily in the US and Canada.
We'll update your account as soon as you are accepted into the beta test or we'll let you know if it's too late.

Here's a description of the feature as it works today:

• text message will be sent to client profiles with a valid north american number
• the number used to satisfy the above criteria is the one in the "cell phone" field
• a reminder will be sent on the previous evening or late afternoon for appointments the next day in the morning
• a reminder will be sent in the morning for appointments in the afternoon / evening on the same day
• the text of the reminder is as follows: "Reminder for your appointment with BUSINESSNAME DATEANDTIME local time. Check your email for more info. Please do not reply."

Of course, for those of you who don't make the beta, you can still send us your feedback based on the above description.

Thanks and Happy Scheduling!

Some limitations lifted

Told you the next post would be about visible changes :)

Thanks to the move to our new and improved infrastructure we are pleased to announce that we have removed some limitations of the calendar feeds:

• it now includes the schedule name when using the global feed
• all feeds now go up to 6 months out as opposed to one

Also, the client list Excel download now includes the profile notes which was the only field previously excluded.

There is nothing you need to change on your end!

We have also been working on several, bigger, things and will be announcing them separately (they deserve their own posts) as they become available... actually starting today with our beta text message feature!

Major upgrade completed

As some of you may have noticed, we had to take most of the website offline this past sunday. Calendar feeds and the read only appointment list (pages that require a PIN) where all available but you could not sign in to the main portal.

We can normally perform most maintenance work while keeping everything accessible but last weekend's maintenance was different. We performed a major infrastructure upgrade which will help us overcome some of the problems we've been having for the past couple of weeks due to higher than anticipated growth. We had issues with some email notifications and reminders being randomly skipped and some pages not reliably loading, or doing so at a snail's pace.
The infrastructure that powers the site did not allow us to react to load changes quickly enough and the site was simply overloading at times. In order to remedy the situation we had to make the decision to switch to a new, more flexible infrastructure and make this coincide with some of the behind the scenes enhancements we had been working on for some time to speed things up.

For the past two weeks, we had been setting up and testing this new infrastructure and decided on pulling the switch on sunday. Most everything had been switched over by saturday night with no downtime for our users, and because we had rehearsed things several times we were quite confident the whole process would only result in about an hour of downtime during the night from saturday to sunday. Unfortunately, shortly after we had begun the process of migrating the live data to the new infrastructure, our main ISP suffered some severe bandwidth issues which did affect the process drastically, making it roughly 8 times slower then normal. To top it off, some things could not be fully tested without switching to the new system and we experienced some configuration issues early on when we brought everything back online. All in all, it took the better part of sunday to make the site almost fully operational but some issues remained until late afternoon on monday.

We are now confident everything has been fully resolved and is operating normally.

But what have you gained in all this?

• well, things will be consistently faster for one. We have much more power available and more room and flexibility to grow too.
• we can now focus on adding new features and tweaking things.
• some features that would have exacerbated our capacity problems can now be considered and included, such as automatic reminder calls.

Feel free to contact us at support at instant-scheduling dot com to share your comments and let us know if you've noticed anything... good or bad.

The next post will be about a feature enhancement.. we swear :)

Priority maintenance

We are going to perform some priority maintenance on our infrastructure today in order to pave the way for a couple new features.
We expect only a short downtime and unfortunately this is the kind of downtime we cannot gracefully handle (like with a nice "Come back later" message).

It should be relatively short but unfortunately we cannot precisely know when this is going to happen as it is not entirely dependent on us (it has to do with re-generating security certificates).

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

Customer support 2.0

Just a quick note to let the world know that we've updated our support system to include (at last!) direct email communications both ways. So from now on you can start a support request via any of our contact forms or by using our support email (support at instant-scheduling dot com).

Rules you need to respect (or else):

• for new issues, questions or suggestions send a new email (with whatever subject) or use the contact forms
• for things related to a previous inquiry, just reply to our email (don't use the contact forms and don't change the subject of the email)

Customer support

Because people sometimes wonder why we do not offer phone support as an option, we thought we could post an answer here as opposed to our usual one liner.

The reasons for this choice are not immediately obvious so let's explore a bit:

• email support allows us to provide a complete audit trail of every support interaction (both incoming and outgoing) so we can refer to previous inquiries easily
• quicker turnaround as some questions can be answered in no time using predefined responses (commonly asked questions or common setup issues). This translates to lower costs (that benefit everyone) and quicker responses for you
• since everything is in writing you can easily refer to our instructions and do it at your own pace (or re-read should you later on come across the same issue)
• no need to schedule an appropriate time to call you back or hold you on the phone when we need to research something or perform additional troubleshooting
• sometimes we need to include web links or even, god forbid, raw HTML code. Clearly, doing this over the phone is shall we say, not very convenient
• we can automatically tie into our support system to pull your account information and a summary of your settings.. this is definitely a huge plus

We still have a few things to improve with our support process however, such as allowing you to directly email us and reply to support tickets.

The client passwords dilema

We strongly feel like this should have been done earlier.. but since it's better late than never, we would like to explain the rationale behind removing client passwords and why we believe it's going to make your scheduler harder, better, faster, stronger!

First let's preface this by saying that every client scheduling tool out there and their mothers have client authentication built in. So do we. That's the current state of the art... and we think it's wrong.

Note: we will still be keeping STAFF email/passwords. We also still want to retain a similar level of SECURITY and PRIVACY for your customers.

Our emphasis has always been on EASE of use but there is room for improvement. One thing we do want is for your clients to spend as little time scheduling as possible.. otherwise they're back to calling you for simple booking issues (and nobody wants that, even they don't, which is why they went online in the first place). Here's more details:

The welcome email

We send it out the first time people are added to the system in order to give them their system generated password (if you booked on their behalf) or simply let them know how to review their upcoming appointments all in one place. The thing about this email is some say that:

• it looks spammy
• it is sent separately from the appointment notification
• people are likely to delete it or not pay attention to it

While some of these points could be addressed to some extent we think it's simply best to do away with the beast. Some hate it, some don't mind it but nobody likes it.

If we remove client passwords, we have no need for this email and we can add a link to the client's upcoming appointments in every appointment notification instead.

It slows the scheduling process down

It's one more field to fill out (if you included the email address on your appointment form) and in addition to that we have a split login here / fill out the form there view. Removing the login section will remove an extra step for your clients and have everyone focus on your intake form right from the start. This much less thinking and this much time saved. Some people also don't realize that they can simply ignore it when booking a new appointment, which leads us to...

Login issues

Because people delete the welcome email, change/set the password and forget it, or forget that it's case sensitive.. they sometimes can't login and have to reset the password. Worse, they sometimes just give up and feel the urge to call you.

So every login required section could be a one extra step or even a 4 extra steps affair, and god forbid, could even mean some extra unneeded work for you. They deserve to get to the thing right away without a fuss, and so do you!

Rescheduling/Canceling

Because of the issues mentioned above, rescheduling/canceling from an appointment notification is less straightforward and less enjoyable than it could. We want to change that and allow for one click access. Again, easier for clients, less work for you and possibly fewer no shows as well (people that couldn't cancel/reschedule easily enough and didn't bother to call).

Security considerations

Some of you need to be HIPAA compliant and some don't but still care about security. We do care and removing the need for client passwords does not necessarily mean we're abandoning that focus.

We can't disclose too much about it at this point but we think we have found a way to conciliate everything into one easy to use and secure system.

If you made it all the way to this point, kudos! Your reward is that you can now vote in the poll to help us decide for good what to do next in regard to this issue :)

Cast your vote!

Survey results

First things first: THANK YOU for the great response rate to the survey. We've already collected quite a bit of useful feedback and most of you have taken the time to not only select things but share their thoughts as well.

This was more or less a test as well (as our first survey) and only included a few of our paid customers and only the first administrator user for each. We will be opening up these surveys in the future to gather more feedback quicker.. where will we find the time to read all that? :)