Smartsheet.com Blog

It's been a busy week at Smartsheet. On Monday, we received a mention in the Wall Street Journal. The article, entitled 'Keeping Track of Business' highlighted project collaboration tools for small and medium businesses. The article called out that Smartsheet is easy to use and doesn't require training. It also featured a few quotes from our customer, Brad Jefferson, CEO of Animoto.com.

Yesterday, we had the pleasure of stopping by Jackson Fish Market for a joint interview with Robert Scoble. Brent Frei and Hillel Cooperman kicked off with a spirited discussion of how to build a truly usable application which requires no adoption. Our CEO, Mark Mader followed up with a demo of the new Smartsheet release, which will be available via a public beta in July.

I am reading the latest news on the Microsoft bid for Yahoo. The New York Times reports that “Google emerged over the weekend with plans to play the role of spoiler.” But a spoiler for whom? In the cloudy world of paid search, a Microsoft/Yahoo union may provide more options for a market currently dominated by Google. Today, it is widely known that it is tough to duplicate Google’s paid search results on any other search engine. This gives Google the ability to quickly add new concepts into their algorithm such as the quality score introduced a few years ago. Google’s own site tells marketers that position is based on a variety of elements, including quality, bid rate and potentially hundreds of other factors.

Mark presented on a conference call today for The Working Group. A very cool social network focusing on enterprise 2.0 solutions and how they can help companies become more productive from the inside out.

I find it interesting that the dialogue around enterprise 2.0 is still so focused on adoption. Companies are talking about how you go about finding teams with enough pain to adopt an entirely new solution and how do you encourage and assist with that adoption?

In my mind, enterprise 2.0 - much like web 2.0 - should not be focused on how we can force the enterprise to ‘adopt’ new solutions because these solutions are in their best interest. If a solution works for a team inside a company, they will use it. It is our job as software developers to ensure that the learning curve (if we want to be true to the web 2.0 moniker) is nominal.

I posted a few weeks ago on our multivariate testing effort which substantially improved our conversion rate on landing pages. Chris Heine from MarketingSherpa just posted an in depth look at the project.

This is Maria Colacurcio, VP of Marketing at Smartsheet. A few weeks ago I presented at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago. My presentation was in tandem with Bob Bergquist, CEO of Widemile, another local firm who does multivariate testing to optimize landing pages and paid search campaigns.

Did you know that only 60% of marketers are doing any testing on their web sites? With all of the technology available today, this statistic surprised me, especially since our multivariate testing campaign had such incredible results. After the Widemile project, I spent not one dollar more on paid search and got two times the subscriptions to Smartsheet.

At 5:40pm Pacific Standard Time, Smartsheet.com was forced to go offline due to a widespread power issue that that impacted our SAS70 certified data center, managed by Rackspace in Dallas, Texas. We are thankful that no customer data was impacted by this event and we apologize for the business disruption this may have caused you.

Without listing the numerous exchanges we had with Rackspace support, we can assure you of three things:

• the events leading to the temporary power failure were exceptionally rare - especially in the sequence in which they occurred
• Rackspace, a world class managed service provider known for their zero-downtime network, followed their stated procedures to ensure that all customer data and our servers were safely powered down and restored following the event