Jive SBS Syndication Feed

How You Deliver The Message Matters

community@xmatters.com — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:13:42 GMT

I was watching Aziz Ansari's comedy special, Dangerously Delicious last night and one of his bits was about communication and dating. He had this gem that he threw out to start it off:

It made me think about all the different ways that we can be reached, and what the choice of communication channel says about the importance of the message itself. Most of us now own a smartphone which means that there are more ways than ever to connect with someone: a phone call, email, text message (SMS), multimedia message (MMS), iMessage (Apple), BBM (RIM), instant message apps, social media apps (Facebook, Twitter, Google+), enterprise 2.0 apps (Yammer, Chatter), or any other application that can send you push notifications. And let's add in home and office phones for good measure, some of which support multiple communication channels themselves.

If you're in IT, how would you want to be contacted for different types of issues that required your attention? For companies that use an xMatters relevance engine as part of their IT Management process, here's a sample of what I typically recommend:

Automated phone calls when assembling teams of fix agents to resolve major incidents. Your phone rings, you get a brief update, if your'e available to help you hit a button and you're connected into a conference call with the rest of the team.
Text messages for SEV2 type issues, or when something has been waiting for your response for a while, like a ticket in your assignment queue, or a change requst that needs your approval.
Emails for regular communications like status updates, lower severity issues, or non-critical change requests.

The right choice of how you deliver the message tells you something about the situation instantly. If my phone rings and I see that it's xMatters calling, I know it must be something serious. If my phone vibrates and I see that it's a text from xMatters, I know that it's something I need to address pretty quickly. If I scan down my email and see a number of messages from xMatters, I know that there is activity around my area of responsiblity or interest that I should review.

The wrong choices can have painful consequences. Too many automated phone calls will at the least annoy people, and worse can create a culture where people just ignore the calls and send them to voicemail, wasting the urgency effect. Using email along means that you will lose any sense of differentiation to your communications. We've all had the experience of seeing a bunch of emails in our inbox and thinking "Ugh, I'll deal with these as a batch later" without opening a single one. If there was anything that needed your immediate action, that opportunity has been lost.

If you have a communication channel best practice you'd like to share, jump into the fray in the comments!

Oh, and if you want to catch Ansari's rant on texting, you can catch the short preview, or buy one hour special. Totally worth $5.

Abbas Haider Ali.

An Early Easter Present

community@xmatters.com — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:21:52 GMT

Easter is here a little early this year: we were able to wrap up our Windows release of 5.0 for new customers running against Oracle 11G. You can find the details here: Not authorized to view the specified document 3146. The release also marks our first patch for 5.0 and with that we have a few important notes for you:

Our naming convention now includes patches as the last digit in the version. So "5.0 Patch 1" is called "5.0.1".
Our installer will be upgraded with every patch so that new installs will not need to install the software and then apply patches. (Hooray)
The same installer is used for new installs, and to apply patches. So to upgrade 5.0 to 5.0.1 you run the 5.0.1 installer against your nodes and it will detect you are performing an upgrade and behave differently.
The installer supports automated replay of an upgrade, so you can capture the upgrade of one node and then replay that install against other nodes.

We are working on our SQL Server new install release tentatively slated for May 31st and our 5.0 upgrader (to allow existing Clients to upgrade their system) which is set to release towards the end of Summer. However we don't want existing Clients to feel left out, so we rounded up a set of patches for both 4.0 and 4.1 Clients (Not authorized to view the specified document 3144).

Update: One other platform support item I forgot to mention on the original posting: for those of you who love Community Enterprise Operating Systems we now officially support CentOS as well as Red Hat!

Happy Easter!

Impact Based Warning

community@xmatters.com — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 01:01:29 GMT

The good folks at the National Weather Service are conducting an experiment at 5 of their mid-west offices to see how their use of language can better influence people in the decisions they make (see articles: CNN and Reuters). We have heard many of our Clients are experimenting with similar types of aggressive messaging to drive their scenarios to higher success rates. It has me thinking how our amazing new relevance engine building technology can support forms to allow business continuity professionals to optionally select an impact message. Take the following example I was able to kick out from scratch in 5 minutes in our drag'n'drop UI and message designer which provides selectable impact language that I pulled from the CNN and Reuters articles:

Just another example of how a xMatters can provide better emergency notifications using our relevance engine technology! Ask other vendors to build you a form like this that matches your unique communication needs in 5 minutes or less:)

xMatters 5.0 Update - Chew On This

community@xmatters.com — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:08:15 GMT

First of all, I want to thank all of our friends at DRJ for coming out and playing with us - it was a blast! I hope to see as many of you as possible in San Diego.

Second, a quick update for those of you watching our progress for platform support: we are tracking for our April release of xMatters 5.0 running on a Windows/Oracle stack for new installations. I'll post a notice here when we get all of the pieces available for download on the Community.

The Magic Kingdom?

community@xmatters.com — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 20:33:42 GMT

Ok, a little silliness, but I am headed to Spring DRJ in Orlando and I have Disney on the mind!

So what am I talking about? The Magic Quadrant for EMNS recently released by our friends at Gartner.

The release of the MQ naturally creates buzz in the space and folks have asked me “why isn’t xMatters in the MQ?”. Great question! It’s simple really, we chose not to participate! Why would you do that, you are asking?

Here’s the thing, Gartner’s MQ for EMNS is a valuable survey for understanding the baseline requirements that any mass notification solution should possess. You should be able to send a lot messages, really fast, we get that. You should have multiple datacenters, with high levels of encryption, we get that too. And any vendor in the MQ can do that, as well as most of the other 45+ that weren’t evaluated in the MQ! But what really differentiates the leaders identified in the MQ? Can you evaluate Notification vendors purely on their throughput, number of datacenters, number of acronyms? You bet those are important and cannot be overlooked, but is that enough???

· How effectively are they communicating those messages?

· Are they delivering the right content?

· Are they ensuring that content gets to the right person?

· Are there controls in place to ensure the wrong information is not sent out creating more panic/chaos?

· Can messaging be tightly aligned with the business process?

The focus of the survey is geared towards the standalone Notification solutions and the criterion is all around a message being sent fast.

We believe that technology should guide the user to send the right information.

We believe that the information sent should be relevant to that person, at that moment.

We believe that each client is unique.

We believe that each message is unique.

We do not believe that “just sending word now” is the right approach.

It has to be the right word, to the right person when they need it so they can act. We know we’re rebellious but it’s only because we believe passionately in servicing our clients’ needs. For us participating in the MQ was a distraction, the time and resources involved to respond the survey would have pulled us away from creating the exciting new offerings we will be showcasing at Spring DRJ in Orlando. But you know, maybe we’ll have extra time next go round.

So let me step down from the soapbox now and check into getting those Disneyworld tickets!

Lance Stange

What xMatters means to the people that keep IT humming

community@xmatters.com — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:37:58 GMT

One of the most interesting hats I wear at xMatters involves visiting our clients and learning about what our products and services have done for their companies. We have a very diverse group of companies in our 1000+ client community so I hear lots of anecdotes like:

"We got our customer facing web services back online faster than ever before"

"It used to take us 30min to assemble our major incident management SWAT team, we've been doing it in <5 with our IT relevance engine"

"We support more workloads with less people because of self service options built right into our job abend notifications"

"It keeps our airport operations running smoothly"

"We've shaved off 100s of hours [annually] of our outage durations across all the incidents that we track. That's real money."

etc.

You can always catch these great stories live or in recorded form in our client webinars.

What's always great to hear about is how xMatters impacts the lives of the actual people in IT. As IT organizations continue to become more agile, they demand ever more of their people. Be on call all the time, communicate relentlessly to keep everyone aware of what's going on, resolve business impacting issues more quickly, jump onto the myriad of calls that we need you on, get projects done more efficiently, here's some new tech – make it work, and so on. And all this while making sure that you follow process, keep things documented, and juggle flaming torches while standing on one leg.

Sounds about as easy as doing this:

So what role can can xMatters play in makings things a little easier for IT personnel? A fair bit as it turns out. Without the right tools to foster effective communications between people, tools, and process you will engage the wrong resources at the wrong time (or all the time). Each alert sent to the wrong person at best disrupts them from completing the task they were involved in, and at worst causes problems to last much longer. Here are some of the best quotes that I've heard in the last few weeks from IT people who had relevance engines in their lives for a while:

"I got to sleep through the night without pages that turned out to be false alarms! Felt as good as when our kids stopped waking us in the middle of the night."

"Since our notifications got more targeted, I've finally started to get over my 'phantom vibration' syndrome"

"Making our service desk available on mobile devices finally gave me the business case to get the boss to buy the field techs iPads. And yes, we do use them to get actual work done all the time!"

Great IT people = Great IT services. Are you doing everything that you can to attract and retain the best people?

Share your quotes and thoughts in the comments! I'll update the post with the best ones.

Abbas Haider Ali.

Proper Timing and Message Mode Are Important

community@xmatters.com — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:24:27 GMT

I ran across this little reminder that both timing and message mode are very important things to consider when you design and use your relevance engines for business continuity: Western officials should only send text notifications during timely emergencies.

I encourage you to read the article by the editorial board at Western Washington University, the third largest university in the state of Washington. In it they talk about how SMS is still regarded as a special messaging format in contrast to email which people receive all the time. They make their case to the administrators of their emergency notication system very clearly:

We ask Western administrators to take caution when choosing what information needs to be sent to students’ phones.

Sending too many texts that do not include time-sensitive information can dilute student perception of the importance of receiving a text from Western.

Administrators, save text notifications for only the most time-sensitive events to ensure students will continue to take them seriously.

Clearly a plea that isn't unique to universities and educational facilities - it is a lesson to be learned by all of us business continuity professionals.

5.0 - It's Not Just For Breakfast Anymore!

community@xmatters.com — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:11:39 GMT

Last week I had hinted at some news on the 5.0 front... and here it is: we are accelerating our development against Windows and SQL Server for new installations. The previous projections had Windows and SQL Server support in July. The new delivery dates are:

April 30th for new installation on Windows 2k8R2 against an Oracle database
May 31st for new installations on SQL Server

Those deliverables will be for new installations and if we can deliver earlier, we will.

If you haven't seen all the great features in 5.0, check this out: Not authorized to view the specified document 3040.

One other note: if you have noticed that some of our cross document links always scroll to the bottom of the document it is a known issue with our content management system. We are upgrading the system this evening (2/10/12) and the latest upgrade should fix the links so that they link to the top of the page.

Summer Olympics: No Internet = Business Continuity Challenge

community@xmatters.com — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:28:15 GMT

At this point, I think I've read enough scary warnings about possible infrastructure problems during the London Olympics that I'd like to make business continuity headaches a whole new event at the games. The latest one comes from the Cabinet Office via the Guardian warning British businesses that they might see disruptions in their internet connections during key points at the games. Everything from full on outages to bandwidth caps are on the table.

The good news is that the warnings are being put as well as good general guidelines on how to prepare your business for the Olympic games. The possibility of internet disruptions is a good exercise to run through for business continuity professionals. Let's consider the impact and explore alternatives from a few different perspectives.

If you are a business continuity professional tasked with managing communications for incidents, how would an internet outage impact you?

With no internet access, you could only initiate communications from a mobile device, or by using calling your notification vendor's call center
To get updates on how many people had received the messages, what their responses were, or any other report, you would again have to rely on mobile access, or contact the vendor's call center

To actually get messages such as "work from home today" or just provide updates during the games to employees, you must have diversity in your communication channels:

Internet disruptions mean email becomes less reliable, both on the sending and receiving side. If an employee loses internet access at home, they're certainly not going to get your messages. If you (or your email provider) lose internet access, that's even worse for getting information out.
SMS is a great way to get short messages to people, but it's also not guaranteed to work as communication infrastructure gets overloaded. You could see everything from delayed delivery, to messages not making it to their recipients at all.
Phone calls, with options for both land lines and mobile phones, are another good alternative to disseminate information
Call centers where employees can call in to retrieve information can provide another "pull" mechanism
Get the message out using social media, where appropriate

When communication systems become unreliable giving people the ability to respond becomes even more important. You can't rely on service provider updates that confirm receipt to the system, but not the actual individual. That's true of email, and SMS in some cases. Even simple responses such as "I got the message" will make reporting far more reliable.

If you'd like to share your business continuity team's approach to dealing with communication disruption during the London Olympics, sound off in the comments!

Abbas.

When It Rains...

community@xmatters.com — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:50:25 GMT

We haven't received a whole lot of precipitation here in California, but we are raining updates this week. One last update I want to share with you folks is our newly consolidated pages for 4.0 and 4.1 resources. Our Documentation Team did a really nice job with 5.0 documentation pages (Not authorized to view the specified document 3063) and the new format is so cool we decided to go back and do the same for 4.0 (Not authorized to view the specified document 3074 ) and 4.1 (Not authorized to view the specified document 3075 ).

Have a great weekend!

xMatters N°5

community@xmatters.com — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:44:57 GMT

The wait is over... the first drop of xMatters 5.0 has hit the download pages on the Community. Our Engineering Elves have been busy for a long time and the fruit of there labor is the largest xMatters release EVER! Have fun scrolling through these meaty Not authorized to view the specified document 3040.

The 5.0 release is currently available for new installs on Linux and Oracle. We will bring Windows, SQL Server and upgrade releases out within the first half of this year. Stay tuned for some exciting news on that topic as we are trying to mix a little more magic we will announce soon.

One last hot tip... make sure you are setting yourself to get automatic email updates when new products launch by joining our Community and clicking the "Receive email notifications" setting in the areas you want to be updated on. I would recommend at least doing it like this:

4.1 Integration Agent Patch 5

community@xmatters.com — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:39:07 GMT

When it rains it pours... not only do we have a patch for the core product, but we also have a patch for the Integration Agent. The details are here: Not authorized to view the specified document 2981. And I think there might be one more new product tomorrow... but I forget what

4.1 Patch 11 & 4.0 Patch 19 Are Available

community@xmatters.com — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:36:37 GMT

Just a quick reminder for you folks that aren't subscribed to receive notifications from the patch download space... the latest patches are available and contain bug fixes AND some cool new functionality:

Escalation checks
Template company script packages
HTTP proxy for xMatters SMS

You can find some high level details and links to the nitty-gritty stuff here: Not authorized to view the specified document 3030

Bah bah bah baah baaah baaaaah! Bah bah bah bah baaaah!

community@xmatters.com — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:39:24 GMT

5.0 is nearly here (see xMatters Five Ohhhhhhh!), and with it comes some of the coolest conference bridging technologies known to man: our Find You Conferencing is built into our Advanced Messaging (aka Scenarios) and if you are licensed for it you can create and manage conference bridges. The feature harnesses all of the calling power of your system to contact multiple concurrent recipients who are then pulled into either the xMatters conferencing bridge, or into your existing conferencing solution. No more manual call-trees, and no worrying about trying to write down a phone number or bridge ID so that you can dial in. Simply answer the call and Find You Conferencing will pull you into the bridge.

Scenario initiators can monitor the conference from a purpose-built panel to mute, disconnect and invite more people. They also have an audit report to see who joined the bridge, when people joined, and when people left. Wouldn't this have been handy the last time you had a Sev 1?

Check out a live video here:

Find You Conference requires you to have a license enabling Advanced messaging and also requires message credits to power it.

0b101 (Alex, the question is, "What is 5 in binary?")

community@xmatters.com — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:40:07 GMT

The glyphs above (compliments of Wikipedia) represents the evolution of the number 5. If you haven't had a chance, check out this posting on what has evolved into xMatters 5.0: xMatters Five Ohhhhhhh!

We are still tracking 5.0 for a Jan 31st release for new installations on Linux and Oracle (see the presentation reference above for our timing on upgrades and other platforms), but things are going to be close. Life in the software world is an exciting one to say the least!

Here are a few new features of our re-written installer to keep you guys warm while we finish cooking the release...

We now support directly entering Oracle RAC settings. Previously you would have to jump through a few post-install hoops to get RAC up and running. Here are a few screenshots (as always, click to see more detail):

And one other really cool feature allows you to record your installation steps so you can silently replay them on other nodes (I know... I teased Tobias about this feature, but I must confess that it really is cool):

Until next time...