Guest Blogger: Evelyn Wang, former OrgSync Marketing Intern, Student at the University of Texas at Austin

As I grow older and hopefully wiser, I have come to the conclusion – communities matter. Before coming to college, I never fully comprehended the importance of having a group of friends and belonging to a community. Not to say, I didn’t have friends before college, but from elementary to high school my classes were filled with the same 30 students. Everything was familiar and structured; I knew where I belonged and fit in.

However, everything changed after graduating high school. We all went our separate ways – different colleges and different life paths. From my class, I was one of the three people that went to The University of Texas at Austin. When I arrived at UT, things were certainly different. I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and I was definitely not “in Kansas anymore.” Like most freshman, I had a difficult time adjusting to college. Actually, that might be an understatement. I had an extremely difficult time adjusting to college. Everything about it – the unfamiliarity, the people, the campus size, the crowded sidewalks and hallways, all the idle time I had, and the absolute lack of freedom from not having a car in Austin, it spun my world around.

As a freshman, I would have never thought I’d stay at UT long enough to graduate, let alone miss UT. But here I am, attending my last semester at UT, a bit disappointed that my college career is almost over.

So, how did I manage to turn things around, succeed and have a different opinion about UT? In hindsight, it was definitely the people I connected myself to through the communities I joined my first year in college. By joining a Freshman Interest Group and an organization called Christians On Campus, I was able to meet and befriend people who shared my interests that would ultimately be the support I needed to succeed at UT.

Student groups provide a sense of belonging.

With encouragement from these friends, I soon joined a business club, the McCombs Diversity Council and was able to expand my network and become more involved in school. I can say with absolute certainty I would NOT have continued my studies at UT if it were not for my involvement in these groups. I would be living at home in Dallas, attending UTA, never leaving my comfort zone, and definitely not growing as a person.

The three student organizations I joined early on helped me form a group of friends and become a part of a community. I met peers that helped me enjoy my college experience, and who have probably influenced and impacted my life in ways I will never know. This was essential to my development as a student and in many ways saved my college career. Student organizations and communities on campus matter more than most people realize. Connections keep people growing and developing, and I was certainly no exception.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos at SXSW

This past March, the SXSWi opening keynote speech, presented by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, highlighted the importance of developing a strong company culture and explained his company’s revolutionary vision of customer service.

As I listened to Tony’s presentation, I found myself inspired by the fact that Zappos’ adherence to company culture and core values helped land them on Forbes list of Top 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2009.

Zappos’ philosophy of success is similar to that of OrgSync’s in many ways. Above all, we believe strongly in adhering to company culture and core values. At OrgSync, our success is driven by three core values: 1) Giving the customer the largest stake in the future of the OrgSync platform, 2) Empowering organizational leaders through technology, and 3) Making positive contributions to our communities.

First, as a hosted solution, we believe that development of a premiere product is best accomplished by giving our clients the largest stake. Every month, we encourage our clients to meet with our in-house development team to discuss new product ideas and trends. Through this method of communication, our development team is able to quickly design and implement new features for the entire client base to use. Moreover, OrgSync recently released an Application Programming Interface (API) that will provide campus IT departments the flexibility to create automated processes based on the needs and requirements determined by the school or organization. OrgSync also has a 24/7 customer support line that clients are encouraged to call whenever they need a question answered.

Eric and Jeff at NCLC

Second, OrgSync seeks to empower organizational leaders through technology. The OrgSync team has a strong background in higher education, and involvement in campus organizations. In fact, the very idea to create the OrgSync solution was generated from our co-founders’ experiences in running multiple student organizations at The University of Texas at Austin. Members of the OrgSync team are also regular attendees of the International Leadership Association Global Conference, the National Collegiate Leadership Conference, which is hosted on OrgSync, and the Lone Star Ruby Conference. OrgSync’s involvement in these conferences expresses commitment to innovation and leadership that will best serve OrgSync’s client base.

Lastly, OrgSync aspires to make positive contributions to the Austin tech community, and the communities of its clients. In February, OrgSync sponsored the Austin Twestival hosted by media maven Michelle Greer. Also, earlier this year, our company organized a daylong social media campaign on Twitter to raise over $1500 for Clean Water, whose objective is to provide sanitary water to natives of Africa.

OrgSync’s Cayce Stone uses the phrase “Everybody wins!” to summarize the OrgSync philosophy. By adhering strongly to these core values, OrgSync to provides a solution that makes management of your organization more efficient.

That following Monday morning, I received an email from Tony detailing where I could find more information about Zappos culture. He informed me that a copy of the Zappos Culture book I had requested would be arriving at my doorstep soon, and also extended an offer to visit the Zappos headquarters next time I am in Las Vegas. Thanks again Tony for being an excellent role model!

As many of you know, OrgSync has seen substantial growth this past spring and summer.  To prepare for the launch of over 50 new campuses, we spent the summer upgrading our hosting platform.  We believe scaling our applications and databases will be an ongoing effort and have made it part of a larger initiative to transition our development team from startup to enterprise mode.

Prior to this summer we hosted our platform at Joyent.  Joyent was an affordable third-party hosting solution that allowed us to stick to our bootstrap model.  However, as we continued to expand OrgSync’s functionality and user base, we began experiencing reliability and scalability issues.  As a result we discovered several technical constraints that hindered our ability to scale while maintaining acceptable uptime for our users.

Once it became evident that we would need a more robust hosting solution we began exploring our options in “cloud computing” through Amazon Web Services (www.amazonaws.com).  We were initially wary of such a bleeding edge solution because of the risk of getting lost in unfamiliar territory.  Thankfully, Rightscale (www.rightscale.com) allayed most of our concerns.  They’ve created an application that simplifies the process of working with Amazon’s virtual server instances and data persistence system, and they have a comprehensive support platform to get IT personnel up to speed.

The transition to our new hosting platform took about 8-10 weeks to complete, and the capabilities and controls we now have are phenomenal.  With our new partners we have developed an extremely scalable solution that allows us to respond quickly to load. Any component in the system can be swiftly replaced; our data is backed up every 10 minutes to an offsite location, and no single component can bring the application down for an extended period.  We also have the ability to specify the availability zones of our servers, giving us a large degree of disaster tolerance.

We are extremely excited (and relieved) to have fully completed this transition.  We can now rest assured that as our user base continues to grow we will be able to scale our applications and maintain a high level of uptime that all of our clients deserve.