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.
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.
We’ve been exceptionally busy recently and to help us make sure we respond to everyone fairly and promptly we will, for the time being, only be offering support by email.
If you do have a query please email hello@lamplightdb.co.uk with as much detail as possible (but please, no personally identifiable information) and we’ll respond promptly. If we do need to speak or see what’s happening we’ll arrange a convenient time to call or Zoom.
Thank you for your understanding. As you may have seen we’re currently recruiting, including two new positions in the Support and Community team, and we do intend that this is a temporary measure to help us manage high levels of demand.
As we continue to grow we have four new positions open across all our teams, including an apprenticeship. Full details are at www.lamplightdb.co.uk/join-us – if you know of anyone that’d be interested do pass it on.
Are you unsure how groups/lists work in your Lamplight system? Maybe you use them already, but aren’t sure how to set up a new one or edit an old one. This training can help you with that.
We’ll be looking at how to set up a basic auto group/list using information from profiles. These groups/lists be used for a number of things including mailing lists based on people who’ve signed up for a newsletter, or to identify service users with specific support needs, for example.
We’ll also introduce data views, and show how to create one that includes profile information. You can use these to view your groups/lists, perhaps to create a report, or a register containing contact information.
The training will be via Zoom from 2 to 4 p.m. on Tuesday August 11th. Places cost £40 + VAT, and each one includes an individual half-hour training follow-up call. You can find a full outline on our website.
If you’d like to join, please contact us. If you’re interested but can’t make this date then do let us know, and we’ll be in touch about future dates.
For everyone who couldn’t join us for the Zoom chat about Lamplight communications, the video is now available. Our next chat will be on different types of reporting and templates – more details coming soon.
If you already use groups/lists in your system and want to learn more, why not come to our bitesize training session next Tuesday afternoon? It will cover creating groups/lists based on activity records, for example your work or referral records, in a number of ways. Have you ever wanted a list of everyone who attended a particular workstream in the last year, or all women in a postcode area who were referred to you in 2019? We can show you how.
We will also look at creating data views based on your activity records, so that you can find the details of what people have attended, or the outcome scores of everyone who attended your advice sessions, for example.
You can see the full outline here.
If you’d like to take your reporting to the next level, get in touch. The training will take place from 2 – 4 p.m. on Tuesday 14th July, and places cost £40 + VAT per person, including a half-hour individual follow-up session for each attendee.
We’ve recently added a new notification which appears as a pink box at the bottom of your screen when a record is being saved. This is a small enhancement designed to show you what’s going on—and it’s more informative than the whirring wheel! It will tell you when your record is saving, and once saving is complete you may also see a confirmation of the new ID number.
Eagle-eyed system administrators out there may have spotted a new option the main system admin menu: Manage group and data view templates (although you may well call ‘groups’ ‘lists’).
This lets you save a group / data-view pairing as a template so you can quickly view the results. Templates will be listed in the main menu under groups (or lists) > view. Clicking on them there will immediately open up the group and data view.
So if you’ve got some groups and views that you use regularly in combination, setting up some templates will save you a few clicks.
When you’re working from home, communication becomes even more important than usual.
On Wednesday 24th June at 10 a.m. we will be hosting an open Zoom session where we’ll talk about communications in Lamplight, including using the Communications Module. We’ll be looking at sending emails and letters, using groups and starting a communication from the work record. We’ll also be explaining the new Word templates that let you set up your letter or document combining Microsoft Word formatting with Lamplight merge fields.
This session will take around 45 minutes, and is recommended for system admins.
If you’d like to come, send us an email and we’ll let you know the meeting details nearer the time.
If you couldn’t make it to our last video chat on remote working, database operators and security, why not take a look?