Westglenn Blog

Web programming to help bank with misprinted marketing material

Jeff Trotman — Mon, 23 May 2011 03:46:56 +0000

A few years ago, we got a call from someone we knew who worked at a large bank. They had just realized that there was a mistake in the material for a large marketing campaign. The marketing material, which had already been mailed out, pointed to a URL like http://www.largebank.com/OfferA. The problem was that the website was actually http://www.largebank.com/OfferB.

Within 4 hours of their initial call to us, we developed and delivered to them an ISAPI filter that they could load on their webserver that would automatically redirect someone who typed in the wrong address to the correct address.

Rapid ASP.Net site migration

Jeff Trotman — Mon, 23 May 2011 03:33:46 +0000

Recently, a company approached us about helping them with their website. This is an online company whose website is their entire business. Our client’s relationship with the original website developer had soured and they needed to make a change. The original developer was also the current hosting provider of the website.

The project used these technologies:

ASP.Net
IIS 7
SQL Server
Url Rewriting
Microsoft Enterprise Library

Some of the user data (passwords, credit card numbers, etc.) was encrypted using the original developer’s private key, which they obviously weren’t willing to share – so we had to figure out a way to decrypt the data using the existing keys and then re-encrypt them with new keys.

Since the website is the company’s entire business, downtime had to be minimized. Originally, the client had planned on moving the website to GoDaddy.com and had signed up for a hosting plan that offered unlimited SQL Server database storage. After we looked into it, the plan did offer unlimited databases, but each database couldn’t exceed 200MB.

Due to this, Westglenn hosted and maintained the site for the client for a couple of months until a new long-term partner could be found. Once the permanent hosting provider was found, Westglenn worked with the new company to facilitate the final transition.

In summary, Westglenn was able to quickly move the site from the original provider and keep it up and running until a long-term solution could be worked out.

Google Apps lets you use Gmail for corporate email

Jeff Trotman — Mon, 23 May 2011 02:22:50 +0000

Recently, we were helping a client who had fired their IT provider. Among the services the old company handled was hosting our client’s corporate email so we needed to find a replacement email provider for them.

After years of having an in-house Exchange server, Westglenn moved to a hosted Exchange service over a year ago and have had very good results with that. (Venturenet is who use and I’ve been very happy with them.) Even though that has worked well for us, this client had 15-20 mailboxes and while $5/mailbox/month isn’t terribly expensive – I didn’t think that this client was interested in paying $100/month for email so I wanted to look for another option.

Enter Google Apps. (To be fair, Google Apps offers more than email, but that’s the focus of this post.) I was able to set up their organization to use Google Apps and it’s completely free. (Shortly after I set them up, Google changed the rules so that now you can only get 10 mailboxes for free, but they are letting existing customers stay on the free plan.)

Users can check mail on the website (looks just like Gmail) but the email address isn’t someone@gmail.com, but someone@company.com where company.com is their domain. They can also still use Outlook, which was a big deal for them. Some of the users already had Android phones, so getting their corporate email on their phones was a snap.