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July 2009

General

As many of you are aware, we have been working on some very advanced PSA integrations with Autotask and Shockey Monkey over the past quarter. We have integrated our baseline statistics into both products. We have also extended our support portal to both so that tickets opened in your portal can be quickly assigned to our teams for resolution. We even help with the agreements and user counts, synchronizing the mailbox counts, GB’s, etc to your own portal so you can keep all your business intelligence no matter which PSA you use. Limited subset of these features is also available with ConnectWise (will be expanded to the same full functionality set when their API matures/stabilizes).

Right now, we need some volunteers that are willing to discuss the business value and technical implementations of our integration efforts.

If you use Autotask and like both Autotask and Own Web Now, I would like to invite you to a quick podcast so we can discuss what the joint efforts are doing for your business and your PSA experience with Autotask. The advantage is that you’ll get the integration done first, it will be handled by one of our senior engineers and you’ll get all the benefits of our business training going forward.

Interested? Contact Travis Sheldon at travis@ownwebnow.com.

P.S. Documentation on the above is not available at this time, it will be available in August. Support for any of the above is not available from Own Web Now Corp, Autotask Corporation, ConnectWise or any other third party. Purpose of this blog post is to get individuals interested in promoting their business and technology implementation know-how and benefit both companies.

General

Greetings from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. Thanks to all our partners for visiting our booth, we are officially out of really good swag!

Earlier today Travis and I held the first SMBUP session for ExchangeDefender. The acronym stands for Smack My B* Up, and gives our partners the ability to dish out all the angst, anger, frustration and impatience they have with our products and processes: both with us and with our other partners. For many years I have done my best to create systems and encourage partners to provide feedback so we can improve the most painful parts of doing business with us.

This may sound unconventional and definitely takes some thick skin, but we wanted to do something new. Traditionally, software is designed on the input of focus groups. Fixes are then applied throughout the production process and tweaked in functionality and features based on feedback.

This is different. I wanted to know what our partners really disliked about our business and our products so that new ones are built to avoid those problems.

Letting the partners vent directly at me and directly with each other could create a potential gang warfare mentality. However, we have worked on cultivating our partnerships long enough to know that our partners have our best interest in mind because we are doing this to take care of them and their clients.

What happened? My partners at WPC came with complaints that were not critical or combative – instead, we got the problem and the proposed solution pathway, mitigation and recommendations based on the other partners who have not (yet) experienced an issue.

Tune in over the next 60 days as we document, disect and provide a solution to the problems we were made aware of today.

In case you’ve ever wondered just what we mean by partnerships this is it. Technology companies  working towards pleasing the common client base.

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

ExchangeDefender

Please visit us in booth #1346 at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans March 13-16th.

microsoftwpc

Next week we will be sponsoring the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. If you are attending, please stop by booth #1346. We have a number of new plans that we are excited to discuss. If you are missing the event, we will also be at the CompTIA Breakaway in Las Vegas, MSP University in Santa Ana, ConnectWise Summit in Orlando and a handful of ASCII events and user groups. This is in addition to the many ASCII, MSPU, Autotask, Microsoft TechEd and HTG events we have participated in so far this year.

So the obvious question should be: why go to all these events when the economy is doing so poorly? Over the past year we have seen many companies go under or slow down significantly because they were not prepared to address the demands of the marketplace. Companies that have survived and are now thriving are doing so thanks to solid management, execution and product matrix. I personally feel that we are at the greatest wave of change on the Internet ever since it started being used for commerce and business. Business demands for Internet applications are changing, as are support requirements, making many of the old technology business models obsolete. In order to stay at the front as an innovator in this industry, we have to work closer with our partners and our clients.

My one agenda for 2009 was to convert many of the experimental and community projects into professional services our clients and partners could count on. This involves working very closely with our partners to develop the features the clients are actually working on, not necessarily the ones we think we can sell. This interaction has so far been responsible for our PSA as well as the PSA integrations with Autotask, ConnectWise and Zenith Infotech. It has also resulted in record growth in our revenues and profits, some of which we are contributing to community projects to encourage everyone to work with us more closely.

So consider this an invitation – we want to work with everyone. Feel free to email me to get started.

-Vlad

To download the remainder of the newsletter please click here.

General Hosted Services

As noted previously (and discussed in our portal, conference call and newsletters) the enhanced SMTP security policies are now in place. Going forward, all SMTP traffic on our networks (inbound and outbound) will have to pass through ExchangeDefender in order to reach it’s target server. This network change affects all servers and all networks controlled by Own Web Now Corp.

If you have a requirement for plain SMTP connectivity for mail relay please either consider establishing a VPN directly to your server (if you are a dedicated/virtual customer) or upgrade to Microsoft Outlook and use RPC-over-HTTPS proxy available for our hosting customers. If you require SMTP for your client needs (Thunderbird, Outlook Express) please use SMTP-over-SSL (TLS) in your setup.

Despite enhancements in the security products and reduced cost of antivirus products, SMTP based attacks have continued to rise through 2009. We are committed to protecting our customers and limiting exposure that comes with an open SMTP port.