ExchangeDefender 7 & Managed Messaging

Later this week I will be sending invitations for an exclusive webinar covering ExchangeDefender 7. We will be doing a preview on March 17th, beta the week after that and full ExchangeDefender 7 release roughly 2-4 weeks after that depending on how broken things are. The beta window is very open and we will not ship it until it is perfect.

I, however, wanted to offer you a direct update on how things are going at Own Web Now because we are getting a ton of praise but also some concerns about the changes we are making and how the marketplace in general is developing. In particular, I wanted to address the areas of our service that are not perfect and what we are doing to address them:

1) Phone Support – The good news is that we have a lot of new staff to help you around the clock. We also have more personnel dedicated to the portal operations and one frustration many of you have experienced is our VoIP service. There have been reports of bad call quality, extensions not working, phones ringing dead in Australia and so on. We’ve made adjustments to all of these areas and I hope you’ll start to see significant improvement here.

2) NOC Alerts – We have been asked over and over again to provide an email feed in addition to the NOC blog postings. I want to make it clear that we will never do that. However, we will soon start delivering service alerts via SMS, online service monitor as well as to your RMM and PSA software. We simply have to have a failsafe way of contacting you and email is just not the way to deliver service alerts. This will probably be the biggest improvement that will come from the Managed Messaging part of our product that will be available across our products.

3) Client Software Support – Typically, this has not been an issue but we have gotten some louder requests for help with Outlook troubleshooting, DNS troubleshooting and connection troubleshooting. This part of the service is not something that Own Web Now is responsible for, workstation side of the management is our service providers responsibility. Since we make all our revenues with our partners, I have always encouraged my support staff to go above and beyond when the partners encounter an issue in the field but there is a limit to that as well.

4) Client Training – This is an area that we will dedicate a lot of our resources to going forward. We (all of us) simply must do a better job helping the clients understand all the failovers and redundancies that are built into the system and how to use them. Anyone that honestly expects a Microsoft environment to be foolproof and have a 100% reliability, respectfully, must not have been around Microsoft software for more than a month. Every month we deal with a slew of security and performance patches released by Microsoft along with a ton of other vendor partners that are continuously releasing security and bug fixes. Keeping this entire infrastructure at an optimal level is a job (for a lot of folks) that work around the clock testing, deploying, managing and addressing problems. Outsourcing the email infrastructure does not mean those problems are eliminated, it just means someone else (Own Web Now) is dealing with them around the clock. We all have a vested interest in helping our clients understand the many failsafes and alternatives in the system and I can honestly tell you that we’ve spent and incredible amount of money to make sure that email is always available.

I appreciate the feedback, good or bad, at all times and encourage you to keep it coming.

We’ve been working extremely hard on ExchangeDefender 7 and the Managed Messaging and all the support infrastructure behind it (Exchange 2010, Shockey Monkey… yes, even SharePoint). I hope you like what you see in 10 days, all but 3 feature requests have made it into ExchangeDefender 7 UI and the feature board is blank!!!

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp