We hope you have a safe and fun holiday season!

We would like to sincerely apologize to all our customers for an email error that occurred while notifying you about our system’s availability. Due to a human error, one of the notification emails inadvertently included the email addresses of other customers in the cc: field. The error was limited to a small subset of our users. We have investigated the issue, reviewed all our security and privacy policies and have taken measures to ensure this or any other security and privacy lapses do not happen again in the future. My contact information is at the bottom of this post and please reach out to me if you have concerns, questions or comments.

We want to reiterate that we take security and privacy extremely seriously and you can be confident that this will not happen again. Every aspect of our service is designed with security and privacy in mind. Our privacy policies have been reviewed and certified by Truste; McAfee runs tests daily to test the security of our systems; and our systems are hosted on Amazon Data centers to ensure the security and availability of your data and documents.  We welcome you to visit our Privacy and Security page at www.pixily.com/security to learn more about our security and privacy procedures.

What happened?

This morning an email notification was sent to users to inform them about an outage earlier in the day. This email was sent in multiple waves to different sets of OfficeDrop users. In one such email notification, customer emails were in the cc: list, there by revealing their email addresses to other customers.

Why did this happen?

Simply put, this was due to a human error and it should not have happened. We sincerely apologize to our customers for the mistake. We assure you that this is not the same set of processes that we use for notifications as part of our ongoing operations. This was a one-time email correspondence, for which we didn’t use our usual email notification systems (such as those that we use for our newsletters or other notifications), and it was sent to all users regardless of their notification preferences. Hence the scope for human error and will not happen again. We also wish to reiterate that no customer documents were impacted due to this email nor were any of the secure servers where we encrypt and store customer documents were affected.

What has OfficeDrop done to ensure it does not happen again?

The OfficeDrop team has investigated this issue in detail and has put together processes in place to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. Specifically, the following will be done:

1. An automated system that uses our existing proven notification mechanisms, will be implemented by July 20th. Like other systems in OfficeDrop, access will be restricted to authorized individuals. This system will eliminate human error such as the one that happened today.
2. We will review our employee training and improve our customer communication practices.
3. All Email broadcasts and customer communication will be reviewed in our monthly Security and Privacy audit meetings.

Some Parting thoughts:

I would like to thank all the customers who have offered their words of support for us. We take pride in the way we serve our customers. Please rest assured that we will continue to do everything we can to retain the high level of trust that you have placed in us.

As a token of our apology, we are offering one free Scanvelope to all customers who inadvertently had their email addresses exposed by us. We sincerely apologize and hope that we can make it up to you by impressing you with our reinforced security and privacy policies and procedures.

If you have concerns or questions, please feel free to reach out to me at prasad {@} pixily {dot} com or at 888-674-6493. I am at extension 703.

Sincerely,

Prasad Thammineni
CEO, OfficeDrop

How did your bracket do this March? Good, bad or Mad? Either way, you have the chance to keep it forever. Just remember to add your bracket to your Scanvelope. You can also send your entire office pool’s bracket. And ofcourse, depending on how well you did, you may choose to brag about it to the world by Embeding an URL of the bracket to your blog, or can have us securely shred it. Your call.

I wanted to leave you with a feel-good thought for this weekend. To quote the Teach Paperless blog, “It’s not paper I’m against. I’m against the static idea of knowledge that paper so often represents.”

Paper seems like such a necessary evil. It is really convenient, and honestly, it is the only “format” that has been around for centuries. And yet, paper is static, it can only belong in one folder at a time, and its contents cannot be searched (or found) easily. It takes up space, eats up trees and I can go on and on.

Wouldn’t we all love to be in a world where paper is used for it is really meant for. To quote the blog again, “…..  to do good stuff with paper. Like making airplanes. And footballs. All kinds of creative things..”

A quick update regarding the critical outage that impacted many websites, including pixily.com.

Enom, the world’s second largest domain name registrar was down for approximately 4 hours until about 6:15 pm EST. This means that browsers were not able to send requests to our servers using the www.pixily.com domain name. Our servers were and are all healthy and running, and your documents, as always, are secure. My apologies if you were impacted because of this, but this was a situation beyond our control.

It is worth pointing out that this outage was not specific to pixily.com and impacted approximately 10 million web sites around the world. To reiterate, your documents and your information are, as always, secure.

Our technology team is already implementing a failover strategy so that we minimize downtime even during such extreme circumstances. So you may rest assured that we continue to work hard to provide secure anytime, anywhere access to your information.

Amazon is bringing the Amazon Web Services (AWS) startup tour for the second year in a row to Boston and OfficeDrop is invited to present at the conference. It will be held on September 22nd at the Hotel Marlowe in Cambridge.

If you are thinking of cloud computing or Amazon Web Services, you should attend this event. We attended this event same time last year and it helped us craft our infrastructure strategy. We learnt a lot from it and a year later we run 95% of infrastructure on Amazon Web Services.

Here is the agenda for the conference:

Event Schedule:

 2:00-2:20    Opening Statements – Andy Jassy, Sr. Vice President, Amazon Web Services

2:20-3:00    AWS Presentation – Jinesh Varia, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

3:00-3:15    Break

3:15-3:55    Customer Presentations:

Prasad Thammineni, CEO, OfficeDrop

Ryan Angilly, Founder, MessageSling.com

Greg Arnette, Founder & CTO, Sonian Networks

3:55-4:25    Customer Q&A

4:25-4:45    Presentation – Mike Hirshland, Partner, Polaris Ventures

4:45-5:00    Closing Statements – Andy Jassy, Sr. Vice President, Amazon Web Services

5:00-7:00    Cocktail/Networking Reception sponsored by Polaris Ventures

 

I got a near surreal reminder of the power of usability yesterday. I was showing some recent pictures to my 3-year old son on my new iPhone 3G and he instinctively started advancing to the next picture using his fingers. This is really what user interface and human computer interaction ought to be about. A 3-year old with no other defined mental model should be able to just use it.

On the other hand, I wonder if the iPhone would pass the so-called Grandma Test, which we employ quite frequently at OfficeDrop. The Grandma may have some mental models to unlearn before she can use the iPhone (or she may choose to just stick to her jitterbug). Around here, the user interaction related conversations evoke the most discussion, since we all care a lot about it. Our product’s usability reflects it loud and clear.

The snippet view is a stellar example of our extreme usability. The thumbnail (to the left) gives a telescopic/big-picture view of the page, and the snippet (to the right) anchors our vision to familiar logos, and patterns (such as Billing Date and Account number) mimicking what we do when we flip through stacks of paper. The labels and other metadata (below) provide the necessary context. All in all, they are discrete nuggets of information in perfect harmony. Our users love it.

So, what tests do you employ as you design your user interaction? Where do you draw the line between the toddler test and the grandma test?