Mayflower 2.0 Migrations are here!

We are happy to announce that we are now officially taking orders for Mayflower/MyFamily 2.0 site migrations. We have been developing, testing, tweaking, and refining. We’re thrilled to see the results of this enormous effort, and we know many of you are eager to see your MyFamily 2.0 sites migrated safely as well.

Order your Mayflower 2.0 migration now by visiting http://spokt.com/mayflower and proceeding through the checkout process for any 2.0 (or 1.0) sites you’d like migrated before the upcoming MyFamily.com shutdown.

Our Mayflower tool will capture all Discussions, Media (Photos & Videos), Files, and Members. All the replies, names, dates, and avatars are included. We migrate the tags for posts and albums for photos. As with 1.0 migrations, we do not capture the calendar items, personal email inbox, or family trees. Depending on the queue size when you sign up, we anticipate the migration will take between 1-2 weeks to complete and for the MyFamily data to be visible in your Hub.

Click Here to Order Now! »

Advanced Early Access Program

We will be working with a select group of you as part of our secondary quality assurance process. If you A) are available to work directly with our support team and B) can provide clear, concise feedback during your migration process, then we invite you to participate in this early access phase over the next week week or so. This is a first-come, first-served opportunity, and we will have limited capacity for this initial group, so if you’re interested please place your order and contact us immediately.

To participate, visit http://spokt.com/mayflower and place your order. Once that’s completed, please email us immediately at mayflower-2.0@spokt.com with the subject line “Mayflower 2.0 Early Access Participation”. We will move your migration to the front of the queue, and someone from our support team will work directly with you one-on-one to get the data migrated into your Spokt Hub.

New Feature: Member Edit for Admins

This is a quick update to let you know that we have released a major new feature to Spokt: member account edit for Hub admins.

A number of our Hub admins have been asking for a way to help their members manage their accounts. We’ve been listening. Admins can now edit the accounts of all members within their Hub, with one caveat: every member retains the ability to override the admin edit feature should you feel you would like to maintain control over your own account.

For now, Spokt profiles reach across all Hub memberships. A change to a member’s profile will affect that member on all of their Hubs. For this reason, we ask all admins to proceed with extreme caution and etiquette as they interact with their members’ accounts. Please be sure to make only those changes which are sanctioned by a member.

So, what exactly can admins edit? Well, everything. If you can edit it on your own profile, an admin can edit the same info on the Hub members’ profiles as well. Name, username, email address, password personal information…admins can even upload an avatar on their members’ behalf.

We are eager to put as much power in the Hub admins’ hands so they can effectively “manage” their Hubs, and we hope this feature goes a long way toward helping us achieve this much requested goal.

Let us know in the comments what you think about this new feature, either as an admin or as a member of a Hub.

Have a great weekend!

– The Spokt Team

New Feature: Account Merge Tool

We’ve created a new video outlining how to merge Spokt member accounts using our new Account Merge tool. Please watch the video below, and carefully follow the directions. An account merge, once performed, cannot be undone.

If you currently have 2 or more Spokt member accounts (all for the same member/name) and would like to merge them into one account, you can use the tool illustrated in this video. Please let us know if you have any questions in the comment section below.

Thanks!

Mayflower Update

What a week it’s been.

We are happy to report that we have now successfully completed more than 95% of the migration requests that we’ve received. A challenge that was doomed to take months only last week has been tamed into submission this week, and we couldn’t be more pleased with the results our efforts have brought.

With millions upon millions of records added to our database and tens-of-thousands new members this last week alone, we’re a bit overwhelmed by how busy things have become. We are receiving quite a bit of feedback both on our blog and in our support queue. Most of the messages we’re receiving are glowing, like the following:

“Spokt team – you are beyond awesome! Import completed and 100% sucessful – any minor gliches were addressed by your team promptly…Hooray!”

“I must admit that I was a fence sitter. A friend on another site that is offering import services has been keeping me abreast of their import said more than a couple of weeks ago that he had been notified that his data had been retrieved from MyFamily and that he would be notified when it was ready to view on their site. I have not heard anything further, so I’m thinking that they must be having some problems.
However, I have been allowed to log into one of the sites that have been imported to a Spokt hub. Kudos to you guys!”

“Dear Spokt family, we could not be more pleased. I like it just the way you did it. The search you gave us serves as the solution to most of my questions and in general it is refreshing to look at all this familiar stuff in a new and excitedly fresh way! It feels every bit a Family History gathering place. The fine search facility makes every surname important.”

“Announcement of import occurred on July 31st. Got my notice to beginning import 5 days later. Only had to re-identify 2 users. Import was flawless and only took minutes. Great job! My users are pleased.”

“I am thrilled to report that the Spokt team got right on it! They immediately looked into and resolved my import problem, and it looks like we have everything now! There are some duplicates in the photos, but I can deal with that. I am just so relieved and appreciative of the dedication shown by the Spokt staff. Well done!!”

“Over 10 years worth of posts with 740 users and as far as we can see not one post or user missed.
Yup there are some differences between MyFamily and Spokt. But nothing that can’t be resolved over time.
When you know that your data is a) safe, b) back in the land of the living and c) never at the mercy of a 3rd party again, all for less than one good meal and not the price of a small car, we for one (or 740!) are more grateful than words can express.
So we will say simply, in caps – THANK YOU each and every one of the hard and long working staff!!!!!!!!”

However, there are a handful of you who have had a less than perfect experience. We want you to know we are aware of you and the issues you’ve reported, and we are working hard to make sure you get everything you need to make your migration a success so you can have the peace of mind you’ve trusted us to provide.

We are working on a major blog post (coming right up) which will outline the most recent questions that have been asked by admins and members alike. This should help answer many of your questions and give you an idea of what to expect now that the migration has been completed.

We kindly ask that you continue to be patient and carefully read through the known issues in the next blog post before you contact Support. If your request or question is covered there, please sit tight and wait for an official response from us regarding the solution we’ve come up with. We know we can offer a favorable answer to most (if not all) of the questions you are asking, but in order to do this we NEED to be able to commit the majority of our resources to creating solutions, rather than answering repeat questions. Thank you for understanding, and thank you for all of your continued support, trust, and assistance in making Spokt the best MyFamily replacement on the planet.

– The Spokt Team

Mayflower Imports: Week 1

We recently launched the final Mayflower stage last week and we have seen quite a few successful imports since then. Happy customers makes us happy. We’ve checked in on those of you with completed migrations, and your enthusiastic and grateful responses have made the countless hours and sleepless night seem worth it.

That said, we’ve been watching the queue shrink in size more slowly than we’d like; importing the actual data—gigabytes and gigabytes of your precious memories—is taking much longer than we anticipated. Your content is safe on our servers but the job’s not done until you can see it in your own Hub.

We really appreciate your patience as we work through the many migrations we’re performing. Some of you have waited for an entire month. If you were preparing a microwave dinner, a few days would be an eternity. If you were riding the actual Mayflower from England to America you’d still have a month of sea sickness left. Not to mention the scurvy!

Your imports would all be neatly completed in a few months if we were the types to pinch our pennies, find a TV program and sit on our couches as we wait it out.

But that is not who we are.

We are in the process of upgrading our server capacities, buying more bandwidth, and restructuring our back-end network connections to be geographically closer together for improved speed. We are going over every line of code to squeeze every bit of performance out of it. We won’t stop working for you!

We won’t give up on you, and we’re so grateful that you’re not giving up on us. Please keep cheering for us and encouraging us—it is the best medicine for overworked souls. Once your import is finished and your Hub is buzzing, consider taking a moment to thank the individuals who have been working extreme overtime for the past two months and probably won’t get a break before 2015.

Mayflower Imports Are Here

Your Mayflower journey is coming to an end. We hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far.

We are pleased to again welcome you (and your data) to your new Spokt Hub with our release of Mayflower Stage 3 – Site Imports!

The last few months have been a hurricane of work for our team, and if we were in a betting mood we’d bet things will remain like this for the foreseeable future. But today represents a major milestone for you and for us; today we begin importing many rescued MyFamily sites into Spokt.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t offer our extreme appreciation to all of you for your unmeasurable patience and perseverance. Thank you!!

Next Steps

If you are a member of a Spokt Hub where someone else (presumably an admin) has initiated the migration, then you do not need to do anything.

If you have initiated the migration(s) from MyFamily, you will receive an email notification once each site is processed through the import queue. You may also visit your “Mayflower Status” page to manually check on the status of an import. As you can imagine, we have a large number of sites which are queued for import. We truly appreciate your patience as your site works its way through the queue.

Once the import is processed, then you will see a button labeled “Finalize Import” on your Mayflower Status page. Once clicked you will be guided through the final steps to connect the old MyFamily site to the proper Hub, auto-matching members between sites, and subsequently importing your site.

After working through the queue, these final steps should take you a few minutes. We automatically match up any connections that we can find between your Spokt Hub members and MyFamily site members. Any unconnected Spokt members will be matched up manually by you. The remaining MyFamily members will be assigned the same (or similar) username which they had at MyFamily, as well as a temporary password so they can log in easily.

Once again, thank you for your patience and support over the past number of weeks as we’ve worked to prepare this update for you. We hope this process finally brings you the peace of mind you’ve been waiting for knowing that your data is safe and secure!

Have a great day!

The Spokt Team

P.S. Please note: DO NOT add, modify, or delete any content or login/username on your MyFamily site. We strongly recommend that you leave your MyFamily site as is until it is closed down by MyFamily at the end of September.