What Are Managed Services? " Managed services " is an offering of many businesses that provide Internet services. In the past couple of years, it's a term I've used to describe what I offer in my Blackfly Solutions Drupal and CiviCRM hosting business . You may not know whether you would want such a thing, since it's a very badly named thing. This post will try and give a reason for why managed services is a thing at all, how it can be a good thing, and why it may be what you want. Here's the short version: managed services exist to fill the gap between what machine automation can reasonably provide and what people actually want. In a subsequent post, I'll explain how containers can be a useful tool for delivering managed services. What Do You Mean by Services? A "service" in the "managed services" context is the consumer-oriented one, i.e. something a consumer wants that they get from a service provider. For example: "hosting for
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy Like happy families, successful mass mailings are easily taken for granted as normal, but they are more an exception than a rule. Most mass mailings fail in one or more ways. And the ways that a mass mailing can fail are probably more diverse and interesting than you think. So when you ask "why am I not receiving my mass mail" or "so-and-so isn't getting my mass mail", it's rarely a simple answer. Even if it used to work fine. To put some perspective on this - if you're getting only 10% of your mass mail opened, it's not bad. Industry-wide, a 7% click through seems to be about average. In this post, I'm going to follow a piece of mass mail and show you all the different ways it can fail to be successful. I use CiviMail for my mass mailings, and but I think most of it will be tool agnostic. To keep it simple, I won't try and go through all the ways you