Several times throughout the last five years of StatusGator, we have received requests for organizational accounts. As more and larger teams have joined, there’s been a steady increase in requests for multi-user accounts. We are proud to announce that StatusGator Organization accounts are now available on our Start Up plan and above. Our first implementation of this is quite simple: separate user accounts are joined together by linking them to a parent Organization record.

Public status pages have risen to become an essential requirement for all publicly facing web services. A well-constructed status page is a hallmark of a customer-centric organization. Status pages provide transparency and help reduce customer support requests during an inevitable outage. With sufficient component details, they can serve as useful information hubs for customers experiencing issues. There are numerous services to make setting up a status page simple and inexpensive.

The debate around allowing employees to work from home is now moot. Due to these unusual times, businesses must have the ability to handle the majority of their primary functions remotely. The implications of this are pretty broad in scope and have IT shops scrambling to address the concerns of how to monitor the applications that enable efficient work from home strategies.

Exactly two years ago, Microsoft announced Teams at an elaborate launch event in New York City. Hailed by many as a “Slack killer“, Teams was positioned by Microsoft as a group messaging platform. It was clear from the start that they took aim directly at Slack and its numerous competitors. Slack even acknowledged the encroachment of Microsoft in a full page ad in the New York Times.

A lot of teams are asking us about how to do incident management when you’re suddenly remote. We understand. Going remote can be scary, and few things are scarier than having a service outage you aren’t prepared for. Nobody wants to be in a situation where an important service is going down and the engineer who can help isn’t answering on Slack. And if your company isn’t used to working remotely, it can be harder than ever to be on the same page during an incident.

Has this scenario happened to you? You found a service. A SaaS product or hosted service: it could be anything. Maybe it’s a continuous integration service or perhaps it’s a service for capturing comments on your web site. Let’s call it Useful Service. You sign up, and you’re happy with it. Now you depend on it and your fortunes are tied to it. But day in and day out, it’s there for you, working reliably. Then all of the sudden: it’s not.

You set up a status page. Your colleagues have already subscribed to it and are getting all the required notifications. Now internally everybody is aware of the status page service. But now there is the next challenge - make people outside of the company aware of it and use it.

What does it take to write a GDPR compliant privacy policy? It was easier than we realized! This is a continuation of our series on ensuring StatusGator complies with the terms of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR has very specific requirements for privacy policies. Companies must provide clear and accessible information about the personal data they collect and what they do with it.