We’re about to have our first-ever user group meeting, and I’m really excited, but also terrified.  Since we’ve never done this before, it’s extra stressful… but hopefully there will be lots of value for everyone there.

It’s ironic that we make scheduling software, but I’m totally daunted by this kind of planning.  Here’s what I’ve done so far – if it’s a success, this will be the roadmap for what we do in the future.  If it’s a failure, it’ll be the “what not to do” list.

1. Who – About a month before our planned date, we sent out two blanket emails.  One was fairly impersonal and went out to lots of folks, the other was a personal email from me to a much smaller list.  We also posted the invites on some industry forums.
2. What – There are two questions we want to help answer.  “How do I use your software better?” and “How do other people user Moraware JobTracker?”  I think everyone sharing their knowledge will be great.  To do this, we’ll have 3 speakers that are actual users of our software presenting what they do well.
3. Where – we’ve scheduled our meeting in conjunction with the ICE trade show on 2/8/2010, so lots of our customers will be right there.  This gives us a conference room that’s really convenient.
4. When – I’m a bit worried about the time.  5:30pm after a full day of trade-show might be tiring.  But, hopefully food, beer, and caffeine are the solution to keeping everyone engaged and awake. 
5. How – I’ve had multiple conversations with the speakers, hotel, and show organizers double-checking the room, food, audio/visual, internet, tables, chairs.  None of it is hard, but there are lots of decisions to make – “Are chicken fingers worth $5/person?” “Do we want seating classroom-style or auditorium style?”…and I’m sure things will go wrong.

Still on my to-do list:   Get nametags. Make a feedback card. Practice introductions for the people who’ll be speaking.  Triple-check that the room and services are correct.  Figure out how to keep everything on time.  Videotape the meeting so more people can benefit.

Less than two weeks to go!  Hope to see you all there.

The phone started ringing today with about 10 people who suddenly couldn’t connect to JobTracker. That was strange because the servers were fine and everyone else was connecting just fine. What was special about these few?

Luckily there was a work-around: they could get to the servers by IP address, but just not by the moraware.net domain name. That’s strange because the DNS servers are hosted on the same set of servers as JobTracker, so if you can get to one, you can get to the other.

Then we found a clue: none of us could resolve the DNS for www.moraware.com This was a different story — the DNS for moraware.com has always been hosted on a 3rd party service, zoneedit.com, and apparently both the servers that were hosting the DNS went down at once. We’ve been using this service for 7 years, since we first set up our website, with no problems. But it’s a free service, so there’s noone to yell at when it goes down.

So I quickly rebuilt the DNS entries on our own servers and pointed the domain there, and had it fixed in about 15 minutes.

So why did the moraware.com DNS being down stop just a handful of people from accessing moraware.net addresses? It turns out the moraware.net domain was using name servers named like ns10.moraware.com. Now that doesn’t usually matter because the DNS servers can get the ip addresses for the name servers directly by using what’s called “glue” without having to do a separate DNS lookup. But apparently these 10 customers were connecting to some DNS servers that didn’t use the glue, but instead tried to lookup the addresses on moraware.com, which was failing.

So now moraware.net and moraware.com both use the same cluster of 4 DNS servers so this kind of problem won’t happen again.

Please join us for the inaugural Moraware User Group meeting, being
held in conjunction with the International Countertop Expo.

Location: Tradewinds conference room at Mandalay Bay convention center, Las Vegas, NV.

Date: February 8, 2010

Time: 5:30pm-7:30pm

Agenda to follow. Topics will include tips, tricks, real-life examples, new features, and more.

Space is limited, RSVP to Harry Hollander via email:
harry@moraware.com or phone: 866-312-9273 x802