By:
On:
In: Lamplight

September’s a great time for learning new skills! If you use groups/lists in Lamplight but are unsure how to start setting up your own, or how to edit the ones that you have, this bitesize training could be for you.

We look at what groups/lists are and how to set up a new one based on information held in your system’s profiles. This could be demographic information, support needs, interests, membership information — whatever personal details you capture in a profile.

We also introduce data views, a handy tool which you can use to add additional information to your group/list for a report or register, for example. We’ll guide you in creating a new data view using profile details.

The training is this Friday, 22nd September, from 10 to 12, and will be via Zoom. Places cost £40 + VAT and include an individual half hour training follow up call. For a full outline, please see our website.

If you’d like a place, please contact us. If you’re interested in a place on this training on another date, please get in  touch and we’ll let you know about future sessions.

By:
On:
In: Customer updates

Thanks to everyone for bearing with us through the downtime that we experienced yesterday. This was caused by an issue that AWS had with their servers, so unfortunately was not in our control. As a result of this we’ve looked at how we use their services, and have spread that usage over all 3 of their London zones, rather than the 2 we had previously. This will help to increase our resilience should this happen again.

AWS have closed this as an issue today, so the service should be back to normal.

By:
On:
In: Customer updates

A big apology to anyone who experienced the outage of Lamplight this morning. Unfortunately the problem was with our service provider, AWS, and so out of our control. We worked with them to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Our systems are set up so that they automatically detect any problems, and if we experience an unusually high demand new servers will come into service within a couple of minutes so that normal service is restored. This morning there was a delay within AWS, our server provider, and the additional servers did not come into service as we’d expect. Unfortunately this was beyond our control, and we had to wait for the underlying AWS delays to resolve.

In the past we’ve considered spreading our servers to multiple locations to avoid problems like this, but found that it is either cost-prohibitive, or would mean that data would be located outside the UK which is not acceptable to many of our customers.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience that this outage has caused you.