SMB Web and Email

By Peter Melerud, KEMP Technologies

In business, time is money. This is especially true for small businesses where each click on the website could mean a new lead or sale. So, what happens when your website goes down when a potential customer is ordering a product? Does she like your product and price enough to keep trying? Or does he get so frustrated that he takes his business elsewhere, even if it might cost a little more?

While this isn’t a scenario that any company wants to encounter, the frequency of a down website is all too common. Both Twitter and Intuit had outages in the last few months, which shows that no company is immune. There are several types of technology available to help businesses better manage website traffic, but many of them are quite costly. For example, a common practice is to throw more servers at an application or upgrade to a faster (and more expensive) Internet connection.  A better solution may include improving network monitoring and balancing traffic through load balancers or ADCs (application delivery controllers), which sit between the router and server farm.

Just like a busy highway backs up with cars, websites often encounter the same effect when dealing with large amounts of erratic traffic. Load balancing technology takes the traffic and reroutes it to less congested servers to keep the website up and running during the busiest times.  The load balancer inspects traffic and makes routing decisions based on various server and application performance metrics, and then may cache or compress traffic while determining to which server to deliver it.  Load balancers are integral to business continuity, site resiliency, and easing management of the server load with a lower cost and easier deployment than upgrading bandwidth capacity.

As more companies are expanding their e-commerce application infrastructure to grow their businesses, it becomes more critical that website and applications are available 24/7 and scalable in order to keep revenue opportunities open.

About the Author:

Peter Melerudis the cofounder and vice president of product development for KEMP Technologies.

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Going Green, Without Going Broke

by John Beagle

Recently, angry parents sued the Mason, Ohio School Board* for not providing emails sent and received by school authorities on school computers.

Bottom Line: Mason Schools may be a violation of the Ohio Sunshine Laws**.

This may be a wakeup call for all public entities in Ohio and other states from Florida to Hawaii, that have enacted similar sunshine laws.

I spoke with a 15 year computer network engineer and email expert, Josh VanCleave+ about email, Sunshine Laws and Ohio's Public Records Act and Ohio's Open Meetings Act.

Beagle: Describe what is required in terms of complying with legal email data requests from parents and other entities.

VanCleave: E-Mail or any electronic documents for any government agency are considered public record and therefore must be retained and made available to the public.  

There are very strict guidelines for the types of e-mail that are not considered public record and are allowed to be redacted from the public.  These are things like personal communications in no way relating to work, e-mail's detailing student academic records, medical information, adoption information, probation information, parole information, confidential law enforcement records, confidential civil rights records, criminal records, even e-mail's that give information such as home addresses or phone numbers.  

To comply with the public records act a government agency must adhere to strict standards, the public records act states "all public records shall be promptly prepared and made available for inspection to any person at all reasonable times during regular business hours … upon request, a public office or person responsible for public records shall make copies available at cost, within a reasonable period of time…"

a.    There are no limits on who may make a public records request, the act expressly states that "any person" may make a request.
b.    The request for public records does not have to be made in writing, officials may request the requestor complete a form, but they can not be required to do so.
c.    Public records must be provided to the requestor "at cost" which means the requestor is only allowed to be charged for the media, government agencies can not charge for the labor involved with duplicating the public records.
d.    There may be no limits set on the amount of public records requests a person is allowed to make, however a government agency may limit the number of requests sent by mail to 10 per month.
e.    Any person who claims a denial of the opportunity to inspect or receive a copy of a public record may file a mandamus action in state court to obtain a judgment ordering the public agency to make requested records available.

Beagle: What would you suggest for Ohio Governments and School Districts?
    
VanCleave: Ohio Governments and School Districts need a way of archiving all e-mails so that public records are not accidentally discarded by e-mail users.  There is a large misconception by non technical people that if they have a backup system for their e-mail server they are in compliance.  This could not be more wrong. 

"Backups are not sufficient to comply"
Backups alone are not sufficient to comply with e-mail archiving rules and regulations.  Backups are essentially a snapshot of your e-mail at one moment in time.  They do not record messages removed from the deleted items folder.  Also, any message that is sent and then removed from the sent items folder before a backup is run is never c

Have something to sell? Get an E-Store.

The growth of online shopping has been nothing but amazing since the inception of the internet. Though if you do your research you will see that the numbers are starting to level off there is still a definite advantage to having an online e-store for most SMB's who have a product to sell.

Adam Lewis from Xponex Media Services tells SMB Now that his firm has designed e-commerce sites for customers with both traditional products and non traditional services that are sold online.
 
Lewis went on to explain that simply by having an online E-Store your site, and it's visibility to search engines such as Google, is greatly improved.

Depending on the size of the store a typical SMB , according to Lewis, could expect to pay as little as five thousand for a custom written e-store. Custom written e-stores allow the SMB to more tailor the look, the content, and the navigation of the site to more closely match their vertical.

One such custom written e-store developed by Xponex is affiliated with the highly visible Nationwide Computer Service website ComputerServiceNow.com. The ComputerServiceNow.com e-store sits on a website of its own and goes by the name of the Tech-Army.org e-store. These multiple domains, as well as the e-store, are part of the overall Search Engine Optimization strategy recommended by Xponex that has moved their website onto the first page of Google search results for the highly competitive search term of "Computer Service".

One of the most popular e-store products available off the shelf is AapDotNetStorefront who's most simple offerings start in the three thousand dollar range. Be careful however as many such products have license and other restrictions that could lead to hidden costs to get what you need.

With proper integration a custom written E-Store can become a key part of your website. As with little effort individual products or categories of products can be listed right on your website.

An E-Store is also a great outlet for the portion of your customer base that might be inclined to keep late hours or be shopping from the other side of the country. Often an SMB on the east coast will not be able to justify the expense of keeping staff in the office until the close of business on the west coast, but an E-Store never sleeps