We have taken a little break from feature development to concentrate on improving our infrastructure. We are currently getting ready to move the system over to a larger cloud-based hosting platform. With this new platform, we’ll be able to rapidly scale up to any amount of capacity we need, with professional 24×7 monitoring.

Its amazing how many moving parts are behind a commercial-grade application. There have been a lot of behind-the-scenes changes needed to get us ready to make the move. Just to name a few of the subsystems that have been revamped:

• File management—all files are now on secured cloud storage, and its possible to attach the same file to multiple project objects.
• Outbound email—notifications now go through a third-party sender to keep them from being marked as spam.
• Monitoring—more complete monitoring of all sub-systems. We actually have three different kinds of monitoring: errors, traffic patterns, and performance metrics. This allows us to proactively deal with any performance problems and react to errors even if no one reports a problem.
• Backups—improving the backup system to allow rapid restoration of individual accounts, and let account administrators manage their own backups.
• Content Delivery—all static page content (like javascripts, style sheets, etc.) has been placed on a worldwide CDN to help pages load faster.

Some of our feature development is “stuck” behind this release—for example, we’ve greatly simplified the way you attach thumbnails to shots, elements, etc. This and other improvements will be seen once we do the cutover, which is currently scheduled for the weekend of April 17th.

If you haven’t done so already, please check out the help articles and FAQs at the support site: http://support.shotrunner.com

Cheers, Cameron