These Things Matter To Me

A bit of a break from sysadmin work, have been learning some affiliate stuff for some volunteering I’m doing.

Notes to self:

• Once you sign up for Amazon Associates, you get access to refferal links, astore creation, widgets, and developer tools.
• The management interface is a little ‘web 1.0′ (calendar days have giant drop down for every day of the month), but clear and well organized.
• Reports (not just earnings, but mere clicks) are delayed 24 hours, so if you’ve made a mistake/sent the wrong link, you may not notice for a bit. 
• Amazon’s kickback is not dynamic, but it is variable. If you only refer one item, it’s 4%, 9, 6%.
• Because reporting is so delayed, this link checker is pretty handy. It tells you the page your link goes to, and what ID is associated with it. A nice sanity check when you start getting paranoid.

Further thoughts about Amazon’s delayed reporting:

I don’t want to complain too much about this, because in general, Amazon’s setup was friendly enough for me to pick up pretty quickly. But it definitely sticks out in this era of near-realtime reporting.  We can watch our bit.ly click’s update in as they come in.  Even the blackbox Google Adsense reporting/Analytics, though delayed, is less than a full day behind.  I’m only a few days into this, so I may find an alternative way to get these results.

In Google Apps there are users, and there are administrators… of everything.  A Google Apps administrator has the permission to change anything and everything about a domain’s settings.

Wish: Google would let organizations create administrators of just some things. 

As it stands,  organizations are unable to give administrative power in an a la carte manner via the Google Apps Dashboard. This can bring  extra burden to organizations who typically would let first level support handle basic account stuff, and leave more delicate configuration changes to a select group of people.

This can result in the person you trust to change your SSO server configuration, having to be the person who resets a user password.

Not optimal.

When your pilot is small, it’s fine limiting your Google Apps cabal to a small set of administrators who have the power to change anything in the Google Apps dashboard, but who rarely get called on to support uesr requests. But once your Google Apps implementation grows, that design doesn’t scale so well.

Google Apps does have an API which has led to many 3rd party tools, (some costing $30,000+), which may allow customers to more finely tune administrative rights, but this basic characteristic would be most welcomed in the native Google Apps Dashboard, as most pilot users will need this before they commit to anyting enough to buy 3rd party tools.