So you’ve got a backup plan for your computer data (you do don’t you?) and you have started using SaaS services to ensure you have access to your business information from anywhere. But what plans do you have in place for the day that some bright spark takes to your telco’s infrastructure with an angle-grinder or back-hoe?

Thousands of services on the Telstra network were effected when vandals managed to cut 2 fibre optic cables in Sydney’s west on Saturday. Many businesses and homes they are still without service. The Sydney Morning Hearld is reporting that -

About 5000 western Sydney homes and businesses remain without phone, internet and cable television services after vandals cut a Telstra communications cable.

Even though this type of incident doesn’t happen everyday, it is not a one-off occurrence. Almost 20 years ago when I was working for Telstra someone with a big grudge and even bigger angle-grinder stepped into a communications tunnel in front of a major central Sydney telephone exchange and proceeded to take down tens of thousands of services. There are also numerous tales of cables being dug up during roadworks, general construction and even whilst laying other cables.

So what would you do if you came into work this morning and their was not telephone, internet, eftpos terminal …? Use your mobile? Ever thought how mobile phone traffic is carried across the network?

” … there are still thousands of customers without services like phones, Foxtel, internet, businesses without Eftpos and several base stations are still not working for mobiles …”
-Warwick Ponder, Telstra spokesman from SMH article [my emphasis]

So that area can forget about using their mobiles as a backup, unless they decide to do business away from the out of action base stations.

The chances of you not having communications are not restrictred to Telstra customers or Sydney. Char Polansky at Essential Keystrokes had to deal with a hi-speed cable outage just a couple of weeks ago. Char asked readers of her blog for suggestions to get around not having communications. My suggestion was that she develop a relationshipship with another small business where she could set up her laptop and work from their premises (this is my suggestion to everyone by the way).

What would you do if you couldn’t communicate digitally with the world?

BTW - Go and have a look at my article in the latest edition of The Calm Space. It has a suggestion that might be useful during short term outage.

Yesterday in the Linkedin BloggersYahoo group, Karen Ferrero asked a question about Highrise.

I am looking into some lightweight and user-friendly CRM packages for
my individual use. I really like Basecamp and see some good reviews
on Highrise. Can anyone with some experience actually using Highrise
give me their opinions on it? I would really appreciate it.

I dropped Karen a quick message back saying I loved Highrise and that I would fill in more details offline if she was interested. Stephen Collins from Acidlabs quickly jumped in and asked me to share more of my Highrise story with the group.

I’d actually appreciate you telling us all a short story of how you use
Highrise and for what purposes. I think those of us that don’t already
use a CRM system will gain a lot and those that do might gain
additional insight. I would certainly appreciate you sharing your
experiences.

So instead of just sharing with the Linkedin Bloggers Group I thought I would share with you all how I use Highrise and the difference that it has made for Working Solo.

My Highrise story starts in October last year - I was using Outlook for emails and contacts but having been a previous user of ACT is was looking for something a little more (but not as muc of the full CRM offering that ACT provided). I’d been using Basecamp for projects since earlier in the year, was very impressed and decided to give Highrise a go.

The export/import process for my contacts from Outlook to Highrise was a breeze. I then set to work allocating tags to each of my contacts. I love the flexibility that tags give me to sort contacts on any range of things - clients, suppliers, friends, family, colleagues (many of my contacts fall across multiple categories). I can also add tags for things like “referred by Sue” and then count up all the wonderful people that Sue referred to me and send her a person thank you note. The tags have allowed me to be a lot more efficient when finding information and people.

One of the things that I love the most is being able to see every contact’s history on one page. I can see their co-workers, an photo (I like to upload an image in particular for my clients so I get a more personal feel for them), contact details, images or files, and even bio information. Saves me time hunting things down in different places.

I also love the ability to use Highrise to track emails to and from my contacts. I’ve set up Outlook (yes I still use Outlook as an email client) with rules so that when I receive and email from a person in my contact list a copy of the incoming email is sent to my Highrise dropbox and filed next to the email address of the sender. If I’m in Highrise and click on the contact’s email address Outlook will open a new message with the recipient’s email address in the to field and my Highrise dropbox in the bcc field so that I can have a copy of the sent email filed against the contact’s record.

Even though I do an email backup to my external hard drive every Friday evening, using the Highrise dropbox option has been a great back-up alternative. I have peace-of-mind knowing that Highrise has all my emails to and from my clients, suppliers and major contacts covered even if the external hard drive has a problem (I don’t really need to worry about all the miscellaneous emails anyway).

As I use Basecamp for tracking to-do’s relating to the business I don’t really use the task option in Highrise for anything else except some personal reminders and tasks. It is great that I can see at a glance the tasks that are group under the headings of Today, This Week, Next Week, Later. I can see that changing though as I start adding extra team members to Working Solo. Instead of sending emails regarding things or people they want me to follow up, they will just be able to send me a follow up task instead.

The other thing that makes Highrise cool are the Cases. I have set up Cases for each of the internal Working Solo projects that I’m working on (client projects are tracked through Basecamp). This allows me to keep a track of all notes, communications and information relating to that project without having to check across multiple contacts.

Now all I want to do is find someone who can write me some hooks to link the API for Highrise to some of my other favourite SaaS applications like Campaign Monitor and Saasu.

All in all Highrise is a perfect fit for the way that I work and run Working Solo. 37Signals (the company that created Highrise) are quite clear that they don’t design their applications to be all things to all people, but it is a perfect for for this working solo business owner (soon to be team working solo??)

So … I hope this has answered Karen and Stephen’s questions about how Highrise works for me. If you have any questions or want to share how Highrise might work for you then just leave a comment.

Well for New Zealanders the title of this post could be “just off the fibre” … but not for us Australians.

Marc Lehmann just posted the following on Twitter -

NZ has announced fibre to the home. Meanwhile our Telco’s sell DVDs via snail mail. I like the vision NZ has gained recently.

I agree with Marc about liking the direction that NZ is heading with many things and this “fibre to the home” project is  a nice piece of icing on the cake.

Back when I was working at Telstra there were discussions and trials about fibre to the home.  That was 15 YEARS AGO!!!

It’s time to start jumping on our telcos and governments and demanding more.  Fibre-to-the-home could make a big difference to the way people access your business.