The Official OpenRain Blog

OpenRain Founder and CEO Preston Lee is delivering a lunchtime seminar on “Best Internet Practices For Business” on September 10th at the Chandler Chamber of Commerce. Topics include an overview of Internet best-practices provided to OpenRain’s Online Business Platform customers:

• Website necessities and common mistakes.
• Email marketing and newsletters.
• Pay-per-click advertising basics.
• Tracking and analyzing website visitor traffic.
• Content writing tips for search engine optimization.

Food will be provided. Seating is limited. $5 for members, $10 for non-members. Advance online registration is required.

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The best new business leads are referrals from happy clients, so when we recently received these great testimonial blurbs from active OpenRain web products and services clients, we just had to share the love!

“The team at OpenRain was easy to work with, took time to explain the process, handled our needs efficiently and gave us our own Project Manager…that went above and beyond to make sure we were kept in the loop on their progress and responded to our questions and additional requests with care and concern…If you’re looking for reliability, ease of use, quality production, and great people to do business with, go to OpenRain.” -Al A., Business Owner, OpenRain Client

“OpenRain has been working with us on a major undertaking for the past year and a half, on a high visibility Ruby on Rails application that interacts with the complex data model…During this time, OpenRain has come to be seen as valued and respected members of our website team who are fully integrated within the group of developers. OpenRain has also provided consultation and recommendations on our server architecture and scalability and are actively engaged in process improvements. Throughout OpenRain has been professional, knowledgeable, and an asset to our team…and come highly recommended both as software engineers and architects and particularly as Ruby on Rails developers.” -Kristen L., Business Manager, OpenRain Client

“…will go above the call of duty to make sure what they develop is what you are looking for. I’m looking forward to the long term benefits from all their efforts and a continued relationship with their office as my business grows.” -Ryan O., Business Owner, OpenRain Client

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OpenRain Software is smack dab in the middle of a rapid-fire marketing event campaign, hosting three separate ribbon-cutting parties for Tempe, Chandler and Gilbert businesses over the course of several weeks to promote our small business web presence product. Tempe was last week, Chandler this week, and Gilbert next week. That’s a whole lot of wine and networking! Here’s a quick video of our Chandler Chamber ribbon cutting this past Wednesday. Also check out some great pictures courtesy of @casademora!

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We had a last-minute need to record a 60-second OpenRain radio ad for our small business web development/design/consulting product, and managed to coerce Flo Geck into the office this morning to record the voiceover. I’m sure you’ll agree that Flo has a wonderfully soothing voice, and the final product came out awesome! (Hopefully you’ll soon be hearing her on our phone system as well.) Flo handled the production process very professionally and had production completed in under 30 minutes. Here’s the final 60-second radio ad. Enjoy!

60 Second Ad – Final Cut

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OpenRain silently launched the Online Business Platform at the beginning of 2009 to give small businesses a sophisticated web presence on a tight budget. The Online Business Platform takes custom web design, easy-to-use content management (CMS) capabilities and social media integration, and wraps the whole package in a fully managed, fixed-cost web presence complete with monthly consulting services and automatic software upgrades.

It’s the most valuable parts of web for your business: technology, online marketing, and business guidance boiled down to an easy to use website and predictable development process. Anyone with a web browser and small marketing budget can now build and maintain a 100% unique, professionally guided web presence that will be the center of both your online and offline marketing campaigns for years to come. This video highlights just some of the current features of OpenRain’s Online Business Platform technology.

See http://openrainapp.com for details on the Online Business Platform and to request a free custom quote!

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Mutually beneficial, win-win partnerships should be built to last. And to create all that good, predictable business mojo, you need to incentivize participation on both ends. We’ve done this in the past, but have not created a formal program… until now.

Today we’re officially introducing OpenRain Partner programs to all our clients, vendors and other affiliates to incentivize these lasting bonds. Clients and vendors with formal relationships established in over three month intervals will now receive discounts on our already competitive development rates. When qualified as a marketing partner, businesses complementary to OpenRain’s core market (such as vertical partners in the design, hosting and support spaces) are also eligible to receive  four-figure referral bonus as well as free co-branded marketing materials!

Good referrals from trusted sources to reputable businesses are the cornerstone of organic business development, so participation in all of these programs will be limited and provided only to other reputable firms and individuals. Contact us to discuss!

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OpenRain is proud the announce a new “Whitepapers” section of this blog, also accessible via a link at the top of the page. These documents are targeted at business owners wanting to learn more about the web and its effects on business. Abstracts are provided: for free PDF copies, shoot us an email at sales@openrain.com, or via online form.

All whitepapers may be redistributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative license.

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Props to OpenRain’r Marc Chung for having the action_mailer_tls Rails plugin featured in Advanced Rails Recipes: Snack Recipe 47, Send E-mail via Gmail.

Note that the official plugin is now on github. We would have continued to maintain the URL that went to print, but no one told us we’d be in the book!

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We’re happy to announce that OpenRain’s free/Open Source software projects–including all Ruby gems, Rails plugins, system scripts and other code previously released for free under OpenRain copyright–is now available for consumption via the Apache License v2.0. It may take a while to update various LICENSE, NOTICE and README files, but rest assured, if you’re using one of our F/OSS projects you can now tell your boss it’s licensed in an OSI-approved manner.

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New phone number: 1.623.691.7869

Try to contain your excitement, but we just implemented a shiny new phone system. It’s not exactly something you’d ask Santa for, but a critical piece of business infrastructure nonetheless. Last year we decided to try a Skype-based strategy and, well… let’s just say we had smiles when we turned on the new system.

We chose Cisco/Linksys SPA942 IP phones (currently ~$115 from Newegg) using VoicePulse SIP services in California proxied by an Asterisk server on our internal network. The awesome part is that we’ve been using the new system for about a week, and have seen crazy better call quality at negligible additional usage cost. The SPA942 has an outstanding price/performance ratio, giving you four lines, built-in web server configuration, PoE, voicemail, headset, tons of OSD menu options and other schwag for a little over 100 bones per unit. For all practical purposes that’s more than enough juice for a developer who only makes a couple calls per day.   

The increased SIP quality is also showing about 4x the bandwidth usage of our previous Skype hardware. While we could have a crappy Skype-to-Non-Skype call at ~4K/s before, a better SIP call takes about ~10K/s/channel, as reported by our T1 gateway. Using QoS prioritization at the border we’ve managed to avoid quality issues so far, but time will tell.

So, if you regularly have conference calls with us, we’ll probably give you our brand new 1.623.691.7869 number and a nice extension to dial into!

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