Spanning Backup Blog

Bay Cove Human Services Frees Up Help Desk with Spanning Backup

[Editor’s Note: This is the sixth post in a new Q&A series with Spanning customers. Keep an eye out for new posts to learn more about how our customers are using Google Apps, how they’re using Spanning for backup, and tips they have for other businesses looking to “Go Google”.]

Hilary Croach, CIO
Bay Cove Human Services

Why did you choose Spanning Backup for Google Apps?

Spanning Backup gave us the ability to protect against our most frequent restore issue: user mistakes. We now have individual user access to the restore process as well as administrators, freeing up our Help Desk for more complex issues.

Tell us a bit about your setup process with Spanning Backup? What is the good, bad and ugly of the setup?

Setup is as easy as turning it on. The bigger challenge is educating our users about how to setup their own backup.

Did you consider any other backup providers, and what do you think about the other options out there?

When we were looking a number of months ago – Spanning stood out particularly in their accessibility and willingness to talk about the specific needs of our agency.

What prompted you to back up your businesses Google Apps data initially?

As we move more of our unstructured, mission critical data to from a network-based Microsoft paradigm (Word, Excel & PowerPoint) to Google Apps, we have an obligation to protect user data at least as well as we did on our network.

What new features would be most useful to your business?

Granular Calendar and Contacts restore – point in time restore of the whole Calendar or Contacts databases is useful for disaster recovery, but not for the majority of our problems, which are accidentally deleting individual events or contacts.

An Activity Stream for Your Google Apps Dashboard

Like lots of companies that use Google Apps, we have multiple people with administrative access. What we don’t have is a one-click way to keep track of what other admins are doing, whether it’s resetting a user’s password, creating a new suborganization, or creating a new email alias (er, “group”). So we built something new and are giving it away for free.

True, you can dig into the Google Apps dashboard and find a list of the individual events in your audit log, but they’re not organized into higher-level activities, and frankly it’s just a little ugly.

The free Spanning Admin Audit Log Viewer is a handy way for you to, well, view your audit log. Activities like “User Settings Updated” or “Group Settings Updated” are listed and can be expanded to reveal their underlying events with a click.

You’ll find the Admin Audit Log Viewer in the new Free Tools section of spanning.com. Add it to your Google Apps domain, check it out, and let us know what you think!

Thanks,
Charlie

Announcing Spanning Backup v3.0

After months of development, we’re proud to announce the launch of Spanning Backup for Google Apps v3.0.

The most readily apparent change is a revamped user interface. We’ve studied users’ interactions with Spanning Backup and used our findings to create a simplified, streamlined experience that effectively reduces the distance between you and your data.

We’ve also listened carefully to feedback from Google Apps admin power users, many of whom told us they need to be able to restore data on behalf of their users within seconds. So we’ve revamped the user impersonation function, making it more intelligent, easier to use, and even faster than it was before.

We’ve also integrated our Admin Dashboard into the application itself. Admins now have a single, consolidated view into their backup coverage, 30 days of Google Apps service health history, and their storage usage.

Finally, we’ve done a lot of work below the waterline. We back up terabytes of data for thousands of businesses, and are constantly improving our backend services to maintain our position as the highest-rated backup app on the Google Apps Marketplace.

We’ll be describing the new functionality in Spanning Backup v3.0 in a series of posts over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned. 2012 is off to a beautiful start!

How to Assign Spanning Backup Seats to Your Domain Users

1. Go to your Google Apps Admin Dashboard.

2. Click on Spanning Backup under Marketplace Services towards the bottom of the page.

That will take you to this page:

3. Click add next to all of the users you want to back up. As you add users, they will appear in the Paid Seats box to the right.

4. Click the save user access settings button. If you successfully assign all of your paid seats, the number next to Purchased will match the number next to In use, and the number next to Currently selected will be 0. If you don’t want to use all of the seats you paid for right away, that’s fine. Just make sure that the number next to In use is the number of users you want backed up.

You’re done! Backups will automatically run every day for the users you just selected.

Venture Technology Groups Mitigates Risk With Spanning

[Editor’s Note: This is the fifth post in a new Q&A series with Spanning customers. Keep an eye out for new posts to learn more about how our customers are using Google Apps, how they’re using Spanning for backup, and tips they have for other businesses looking to “Go Google”.]

Tom Pace,
Venture Technology Groups

Why did you choose Spanning Backup for Google Apps?

Even though Google’s servers should not lose information, it’s always possible. To easily backup our data on Amazon’s servers as well as Google’s is a great solution to achieve backup redundancy.

Spanning provides the ability to access data without using the Google interface. When I was told this, that was a huge selling point because when servers are down, and if everything is stored online, the ability to access our information is critical.

Did you consider any other backup providers, and what do you think about the other options out there?

Yes. We considered about 3 other providers. No other option seemed to be as ‘hands-off’ as Spanning. Spanning is a great deal for what you get, and the customer service is fantastic as well.

Tell us a bit about your setup process with Spanning Backup? What is the good, bad and ugly of the setup?

It was pretty much as simple as informing the team at Spanning which users to backup.

That’s it. Done.

What prompted you to back up your businesses Google Apps data initially?

More than any other reason, it was risk mitigation. Pure and simple.

Have you ever restored data using Spanning Backup? How would you describe the process?

Fortunately, I have not only had to restore any data for testing purposes. It is not a complicated process, and this feature is paramount in selling the cloud strategy to old-school colleagues.

What new features would be most useful to your business?

I would like to be able to access backed up files without going through Google Apps – in case there is an outage and I cannot access Google. If there were a way to search for a file that was needed and then download it directly through Spanning, it could be very beneficial. It would also be helpful to be able to search for files to backup.

How does Google Apps fit within your organization IT/cloud strategy?

The less I have to manage in house, the better. That said, I need to ensure that data being stored off-site is available after a disaster strikes.

How much of your business’s content/data is in Google Apps?

Currently, it’s mostly email, calendars, contacts and some product spec sheets. It’s a big shift for users to get them using the spreadsheet, presentation and word processing apps. I think that once there is better email/docs integration, more users will use it. The docs need to resemble local drives that users are familiar with in order to appeal to many populations.