Syncplicity

News from Syncplicity Support

At the end of June, I joined the support team as a Support Guru. This role is a unique challenge for me - no existing dedicated support team, low ticket volume, but technological needs that are detailed and complex. This blog series will follow me as I build the support team and services at Syncplicity to match the needs of our users. What are your first steps? One of the questions asked in my interview was "What will you change here in your first 30 days?" My answer? "Nothing." I plan on spending my first 30 days with Syncplicity learning about our users, investigating the product, and learning about support patterns and current support tools. After that 30 days, I will be able to start moving support in a direction that is in line with the Syncplicity user base and company direction - but I know the learning doesn't stop at 30 days. It is critical to have a constant presence with the support queue and user base to make sure that we continue to grow with our user base and their needs. What is your hypothesis for how support will grow?

• Support Ticket Tracking Support ticketing volume is fairly low at Syncplicity - about 20 tickets a day. However, we do have an active forum and Twitter account. Because the nature of our support interactions require more one-on-one communication, it's time to move support into a standard tracking system rather than a public forum. To do this, we will use a highly customized version of Salesforce to handle support interactions. We will also have a dedicated support Twitter account to help troubleshoot and announce status updates to our user base.
• Support  Business Hours The support team should remain relatively stable for the next few months and 8x5 support should cover our bases. However, after assessing the user base, we may want to offer first 8x7 support (covering international users and east coast users), and then finally offer 24x7 support as our product becomes mission critical in an organization.
• Professional Services Syncplicity's current user base is very much an early adopter group - which means they like figuring things out themselves, or turning to a community-based support model for assistance. As we acquire more customers, we may offer training, customization, and engagement services to serve the entire breadth of technological knowledge and ability of our users.
• Documentation One of my first tasks at Syncplicity will be to centralize our FAQs and documentation into one user manual that is easy to search, update, and collaborate on with the Syncplicity team.

So, stay tuned as I start my new role at Syncplicity. Watch the company grow along with the support and services team!

Blog E-mail Subscription

We recently added the ability to get updates the Syncplicity blog via e-mail. You can now get the latest Syncplicity news through your web browser, your favorite RSS reader, or delivered straight to your e-mail inbox. It's your choice. You can use the links under Subscribe to enable the subscription of your choice. Enjoy! Leonard

A quick word from your products guy

Hi everyone, Our blog was a long time coming and I’m excited to finally see it up here ready for postings! What do I do at Syncplicity? During the day, I figure out what you – our users – want from Syncplicity. I take all your feedback and use it to decide what our product needs next and what shape our new features need to take. I’m the guy who loves to get emails, forum replies, and blog comments from you because they make my job so much for fun, not to mention so much easier! The rest of my time is spent making sure Syncplicity fulfills its promise of bridging your desktop and the web. We envision a future where it won’t matter where you store and work with your files – we want that to be something you don’t even have to think about. After all, why shouldn’t you be free to use the best tool for the job in the best environment possible? Whether that tool is a desktop application or an online Web 2.0 site, or whether that environment is your desktop or your browser, Syncplicity will make sure your data is everywhere it needs to be. We have a lot in store for the future and I can’t wait to start sharing that with you, discussing your ideas and suggestions, and hearing from you about what works and what doesn’t. Looking forward to catching up with you on our forums! Ondrej

Lots of data!

Allow me to introduce myself: I'm Isaac.  Today, the database, a few back-end systems, and the website are my focus.  Let me tell you a little about what makes this pretty darn interesting from a DBA perspective: The Syncplicity database is pretty incredible.  Most website databases perform a lot of read operations and a few writes, mainly to maintain a little state information about the user.  I think 10 - 100 KB is more than enough state information per user for almost any web database.  However, the Syncplicity database is nothing like that.  Our databases have quickly grown to triple digit GBs in size as we synchronize your files across all your computers.  That's a lot of state and a lot of writing.  Pretty incredible!  And, we're scaling very well to handle the load.  So, keep it coming! Feel free to contact me thru the comments, forums, or Contact page if there's something you'd like to know.  We've got some exciting information in the works... stay tuned! Cheers, Isaac - VP of Technology

Welcome!

On behalf of the Syncplicity team, welcome to the Syncplicity blog! We will be posting the latest and greatest news, useful tips and tricks, and some of our thoughts so you can see some of our thinking as Syncplicity grows and moves out of beta. Along with myself, Syncplicity's other co-founders, Ondrej and Isaac, will be posting on here as well. They'll be introducing themselves shortly. We have some topics lined up over the next few weeks, but if you have any questions or topics you're interested in, post up a message in the Syncplicity Forums. We'll be taking interesting questions and hot topics from the forums and covering them in more detail here. I'm very excited about this new blog. It's my hope that you'll find this informative and have as much fun reading it as we have writing it! Leonard Chung - CEO