We are glad to be one of the winners of this year’s Red Herring 100 Asia Awards. The award recognises our outstanding performance in terms of product innovation, quality of management, business strategy as well as financial performance.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Red Herring, it is a prestigious investor-oriented technology magazine. Each year, its editorial team award the top 100 new and innovative technology companies in Asia, selected from a pool of more than 500 applicants based in 16 countries/regions including China, India, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Australia and Vietnam. Click here for the complete list of winners.

On another note, we have some really exciting news for you next week during the Office 2.0 Conference. Stay tuned!

A series of unfortunate events occurred, but EditGrid is there up and running 70 minutes later. It is normal our customers will complain to us for such a long outage, especially those who use our service for the serious work. I would see this as a lucky event which allows us to experience what is disaster recovery. Lucky? Yes, not many Web 2.0 start-ups got an opportunity to demonstrate their robust recovery plan (or the lack thereof).

Since we believe that EditGrid is not only known for its amazing amount of features, but also the transparency that we deliver to our users, I will try my best to explain all the work we have done during the 70 minutes of outage. In addition to your applause for our having done a good job, this article serves another purpose, that we owe publicly our users some improvements to the system that are of critical help to prevent another such incident from happening, or reduce the affected time even when it occurs unfortunately. If you are impatient, you can skip to the last paragraph.

We begin with some background. It was just yesterday, that we got an alert on our production system, a preventive alert that warned us of our growing user base and usage exceeding the capacity of our system. As a result, we deployed an extra machine into the production server farm, and arranged another stand-by machine.

Today at around 15:10 (all time are UTC hereinafter), we received an alert on our production system, the same alert occurred yesterday. Obviously, we begin to believe that the alert is again due to the same preventive warning, which is fired when our system responds too slowly to requests. For the first few minutes, we examined the servers one by one, trying to locate the cause. We examined every component but cannot find a clue on why they suddenly become slower than normal.

Starting from around 15:20, we noticed that the number of requests going into the servers started to reduce sharply, and eventually stopped a couple of minutes later. We believed that this is due to failure of the automatic recovery mechanism. We then went through all the servers, attempting to restart each component manually. Interestingly, one specific component, after being stopped, took forever to start.

At around 15:40, we eventually identified it to be a failure of the database server. The database process is running, but when we issue it a request, we simply got no response, not even an error. Having confirmed this behavior using a few different machines, we believe that it has to be the problem of the server itself. We decided to restart it. The result is what everyone can expect. Upon start-up, the server immediately crashed.

We tried a vast number of varying configuration parameters, but the database server still refuses to start. We attempted to resort to converting the backup database server into the primary one. It turns out that due to a totally unrelated event, *all* the backup database servers stopped replicating the primary server a number of hours ago. If we wanted to promote it as a primary server, we have to wait until it as replicated all the changes till the time we stopped the primary server. We have stop-watched, and this will take over an hour to finish.

On the other hand, we began searching the web for solutions to the reasons the server crashes. We identified a bug report for the version we are running that sounds related. Coincidentally we have recently started testing a newer version of the database server in our QA environment. With a little bit of hesitation, we copied the new version into our production system (which takes some time due to the overseas file transfer) and attempted to start the new version. It worked!

It only seemed to work. It works when we created a spreadsheet, but not when we attempt to login. Then we noticed a lot of errors from the server, complaining about invalid indexes on some tables. We immediately executed some SQL queries to repair the corresponding table indexes and everything really worked. Time flew, and it is already 16:30.

Can we do better? We are not in a position to make sure our database have no bug. But we should be alerted when the backup database server failed to keep synchronised with the primary server. We should also have better mechanisms, than enumerating all servers and components, to identify the faulty one. In the best case, the outage can be much shortened. We will definitely learn from all events and keep our service stable. In any case, you can rest assured, that your data are still here, though it may take some more time for them to be recovered.

You may have heard the buzz. The second Office 2.0 Conference is going to be held on 5th - 7th September, 2007 in St. Regis Hotel, San Francisco — and we are going there. While it will be a lonely 12-hour trip from Hongkong to San Francisco for us, we will find familiar company at the conference — CentralDesktop, ThinkFree as well as our friends in the OpenSAM consortium are among some of the partners on our growing partner list that we’ll be meeting there. Some of them we’ll be meeting in person for the first time. We’re looking forward to that.

At the conference we will launch the EditGrid iPhone edition. The iPhone has taken mobile productivity to the next level, and we will demonstrate how EditGrid can help our users take advantage of that to get real-time updated data on their fingertip. This is also to celebrate the iPhone experiment in the Office 2.0 Conference.

In case you don’t know it yet, the second Office 2.0 Conference, organised by Ismael Ghalimi of IT|Redux, is not only a conference to explore the future of online productivity and collaboration but also an annual gathering for Office 2.0 folks to meet, learn and have fun. The conference line-up is impressive. It follows the tantalising success of the first Office 2.0 Conference. Follow the buzz here.

This will be the most important event EditGrid has ever participated in after the Under the Radar: Why Office 2.0 Matters conference. We’d love to reach out to more partners and customers and we hope that you’ll join us there.

August 2007 Release (rev 9580)

The most notable new features in this release are:

• Share-to-Email - Having enjoyed sharing your spreadsheet with other users seamlessly in EditGrid? From now on, you can also share your spreadsheet to those who does NOT have an EditGrid account in just a few clicks! Let’s invite your friends to edit together by going to “Share > Share with others > Add Emails” now!
• Spreadsheet Redirection - You can share your spreadsheet with others in EditGrid without the hassle of e-mailing the document again-and-again, but do you need to notify your friends of the spreadsheet’s link being changed when you rename your spreadsheet? Inspired by MediaWiki, we’ve avoided the hassle by supporting spreadsheet redirection after renaming/changing of ownership! Simply select “Create a new redirection” when you rename the spreadsheet/change the ownership, the old permalink will be redirected to the new permalink!
• Find-and-replace - We never forget to make EditGrid closer to your Excel experience. You can now replace the phrase in your spreadsheet in EditGrid as you usually do in Excel. Go to “Edit > Replace” or simply click the short-cut “Ctrl+h” to open the find-and-replace dialog and start replacing!

Enhancements:

• Skip request for page/static/tt/grid/widget/sort at grid loading (#6426)
• More user configurable workspace listing (#6421)
• Clones remote data when copying a book (#6891)
• Initialise mark revision text box with old description (#5284)
• Allow user to choose which workspace to save for new spreadsheet (#6847)
• Improved cloning performance
• Allow user to choose which workspace to store the newly imported spreadsheet. (#7106)
• More efficient workspace loading

And some major bug fixes:

• Allow add and remove remote data on a writeable spreadsheet opened in read-only mode (#6963)
• Better escaping for web fetch (#6964)
• Import of lotus 1-2-3 file types (#6960)
• Select area where input is unchanged during undo/redo operation (#7003)
• Auto-expand after double-clicking a cell (#7096)

We always listen to our users, and the August 2007 release is a direct response to your feedback. In this release, we introduce three new features to make sharing spreadsheets easier: “share to email” , “spreadsheet redirection” and “find-and-replace”.

Share to Email

When you invite someone to view or edit a shared spreadsheet, the last thing you should worry about is whether the co-editor is a registered EditGrid user or not — he/she should be able to access your shared spreadsheet regardless whether he/she is a registered user or not. With the Share to Email feature rolled out in the August 2007 release, you can now invite your friends to work on the spreadsheet together quicker and easier by just keying in an email address that you know.

To use this feature, click the option on the “Share” tab, enter the email and message at the “Add Emails” section and an invitation email will be sent to your friend. EditGrid will attempt to match the email address with the user database to help you locate your co-editor. Existing EditGrid users can also merge back the permissions from the temporary account by just logging in. Regardless, the co-editor will be assigned a temporary account so he or she can decide whether to view the spreadsheet only or edit it by registering a new account.

Spreadsheet Redirection

An alternative way to share a spreadsheet is to send the permalink to your friends. Inspired by MediaWiki’s Redirect syntax, we are now supporting spreadsheet redirection after renaming the spreadsheet. This feature saves your time from notifying your friends after you had any spreadsheet renamed. Simply select “Create a new redirection” after you have renamed the spreadsheet, and the old permalink will be redirected to the new one!

Spreadsheet Redirection Screenshot

Find-and-replace

You can now replace the phrase in your spreadsheet in EditGrid as you usually do in Excel. Go to “Edit > Replace” or simply click the short-cut “Ctrl+H” to open the find-and-replace dialog and start using this feature!

Find-and-replace Screenshot

With spreadsheet sharing functions enhanced, it is now your turn to invite your friends to work on EditGrid. Our wiki and forum are the best places for our new users to and start with. We value your feedback, as always.

We are excited to announce our partnership with Infoteria, the No. 1 provider of EAI software in Japan. The integrated product OnSheet is an EditGrid fully localised into Japanese and integrated with Infoteria’s flagship product - ASTERIA WARP.The partnership marks an important milestone of EditGrid’s global partnership strategy. A press conference was held on July 25 and it caught the attention of major Japanese IT media including @IT, ZDNet Japan, NikkeiBP, ITMedia Japan and a few others.

The beta version of OnSheet was also released on the same day. (A passionate user already wrote an review of OnSheet’s performance on iPhone.) OnSheet is currently free-of-charge to all users and the subscription version will be available in October.

OnSheet Home Page

OnSheet Login Page

OnSheet Spreadsheet Interface