Encryption Enhancements

Things have been really busy at Own Web Now with the new suite of products, specifically encryption (and no, thats not the big surprise or the big feature bump for ExchangeDefender as promised for each month in 2010). I’ve been all over the country personally talking about the value of all of these solutions, particularly for the MSPs.

Yes, the traditional model for software and services is to mark things up and bleed the client dry with support and maintenance fees. But the business of software and hardware has changed and many service providers now take over full maintenance of computer networks – remotely. When those service providers leave holes in the protection (by not providing SPAM filtering, not providing web filtering, business continuity, encryption, etc) they leave the clients exposed to issues that inevitably create more support issues and cost the managed services provider more to fix than to have provided protection in the first place! This is why we’ve changed the business model behind ExchangeDefender and why so many service providers have gotten behind ExchangeDefender – it just makes more sense for MSPs.

Partner Organization

When I say that we’re all about partners I actually mean that: not just in the way we distribute our software without competing or integrating with the tools like Autotask and ConnectWise – but where it’s the most meaningful: creating software solutions with our partners that are dictated by the users themselves.

We have added a few “user” conveniences that let the user know what’s going on. For example, when the user receives an email from the encryption service they are thrown to the login screen where they are typically paralyzed. Now we have some helpful text there letting them know what to do.

We’ve also included the ability to reset the password. The recipient still has to remember their PIN of course since we don’t want the internal IT departments resetting the users password over the weekend and deleting their tracks.

We’re also changing the email notifications to HTML to extend your branding power, adding an audit log (so the users can tell when their account passwords are reset) and also adding the notification so that the sender is notified when the recipient accesses their message. This is in addition to the encrypted attachment addon we delivered a few weeks ago.

Next

We are always working on the product and I just, again, want to take all our partners that put up with us in 2009 while we were making it possible for us to make our development with ExchangeDefender so rapid. I hope you like the results.

I’d like to thank Everon IT crew (Danny Sears, Chris Gordon and Josh Clifford) for being so fantastic to work with and offering up suggestions. If you’re working with OWN, we want your input and we want to make the stuff that will make profits.

Extending White-label Branding for ExchangeDefender

In January we introduced a white-branded version of ExchangeDefender so that all the URLs and SSL certificates could carry a name that was white branded across all of our solutions. As you may imagine, there are a ton of entry points into ExchangeDefender so branding them all is sometimes a challenge because they are all linked.

As ExchangeDefender Service Providers you now have an extra configuration switch under the SPAM reports. With ExchangeDefender 5 we gave you the option to brand the ExchangeDefender SPAM Reports with your own From and SMTP Address so that the report came directly from your organization.

Those reports were linked to the https://admin.exchangedefender.com, and after today you’ll also be able to select which server those reports link to. So if you go for the white branded option, you can also link to the white branded URL.

As always, the colors, logos, taglines and product names remain the same. All that we’re adding here is the ability to remove *.exchangedefender.com from yet another layer.

P.S. We’re still going to add the switch not to send the SPAM report when there is no SPAM to actually report. I just haven’t figured out the switch on the support side that says “Don’t provide ExchangeDefender support for missing SPAM reports if they turned off their SPAM reports when they are empty.” 😉 Like I said, it’s all connected.

ExchangeDefender Grows Again

First of all, thank you for your tremendous support of ExchangeDefender 5 and to all of our partners that make it possible for us to keep on building ExchangeDefender and growing it into a significant part of business. We’re growing again – and with growth comes responsibility to do it in a way that is reliable and improves availability – so we’re announcing a new IP address range that ExchangeDefender will soon start delivering mail from:

Introducing ExchangeDefender – LA3:

206.125.40.0/24 (or: 206.125.40.0/255.255.255.0)

If you are currently using IP restrictions (highly recommended) please add the range above to your IP restriction list which should include at least 65.99.255.0/24 and 64.182.140.0/24. You can download the Exchange 2003 and 2007 IP Restriction Guide here. The process takes less than a minute so please take care of it as soon as possible, by March 29th, 2010 at the latest.

For your convenience, here is a guide on how to add this new range to Exchange 2003 and 2007. If you’re enforcing restrictions on your firewall then it will depend on the manufacturer but should be pretty straight forward.

Exchange 2003

1. Open Exchange System Manager

2. Expand Servers, servername, Protocols, SMTP

3. Go to properties on Default SMTP Virtual Server

4. Go to the Access Tab and then click connections

5. Click Add on the IP restrictions and select Group of computers. The subnet address is 206.125.40.0/24

Confirm that you still have at least 65.99.255.0/255.255.255.0 and 64.182.140.0/255.255.255.0 present. Do not remove any IP ranges.

Exchange 2007

1. Open Exchange Management Console

2. Expand Server Configuration and select Hub Transport

3. On Exchange 2007 select Default servername receive connector and go to properties

a. On SBS, the connector may be called SBS servername Internet

4. Navigate to the Network tab and click add on Receive Mail from remote servers that have this IP address and set the IP as 206.125.40.0/24

Confirm that you still have at least 65.99.255.0/255.255.255.0 and 64.182.140.0/255.255.255.0 present. Do not remove any IP ranges.

Support

If you have any questions or concerns please open a support request at https://support.ownwebnow.com. We’ll begin notifying clients via phone, email and postal mail (US only) starting 3/17/2010.