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November 2011

General

cupMany small to medium-sized businesses rely heavily on marketing tips and advice that they can get for free from the Internet; at least in the early years of their business.  While this is fine and dandy, your business’s marketing efforts need to be specific and catered to what matters most to your target market and to your current customers. So, I have a few quick tips for you which I think will help you get a better response rate from all your marketing efforts.  To increase the success of your mailing campaigns, advertising, email marketing and the number of leads you get from your website or events, when marketing to clients:

“Use the least amount of words as you can to get your message across! Less is More!”

Here are 2 reasons why, with marketing, LESS is MORE:

#1: When you use as few words as possible, you will be removing all of the extra “stuff and fluff” and keep only the key points of your marketing message highlighted.  This will, in turn, make your message clear, more focused and easier for the reader to understand what you want them to know or do in a timely manner.

#2: Just like you and your business, the people coming in contact with your marketing are BUSY!  When someone reads a piece of marketing collateral or sees an advertisement, they do a quick scan of it.  If it looks too long right off the bat, many people will decide not to even invest the time required to read through it.

A GREAT acronym to remember when creating marketing is K.I.S.S.! KISS

K – Keep 

I – It

S – Simple &

S – Straightforward

How does ExchangeDefender “K.I.S.S.”?

At ExchangeDefender, we keep our marketing simple and straightforward in a variety of ways. First, we have identified our niche and our target market. Second, our product line is very specific, easy to understand, and we market the features that our partners are most interested in. Third, we don’t hide anything; all of our services come packaged all-inclusive to create more profitable offerings for our partners. Lastly, we tell partners what they need to know to have a better more successful partnership with us.

When marketing becomes clear, more focused AND more people actually read the whole message that you are trying to relay – you significantly increase the potential of your efforts!  “K.I.S.S.” is a great way to leverage your marketing to be sure that your client base is receiving the information that you want them to get in an easy fashion for all parties. Also, it is also great to incorporate a call to action with your marketing message so that the customer will know what to do with the information that they are reading, thus also creating a quicker result from your marketing.

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735

General

Most of us have taken at least some time off during the Thanksgiving holiday week, to relax with friends and family, overeat, and over shop. It’s all in the name of the grand American tradition. But before we all shift into a lower gear (hopefully) and reflect on what we’re giving thanks for this season, let’s take a moment to consider a few unique features of ExchangeDefender that might qualify for the list.

Here are just three of ExchangeDefender’s great features and why we’re thankful to have them every day:

Web File Sharing

Whether ExchangeDefender protects your own Exchange server or a Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 account with us, the web file share library is built in to every user account. The web share library makes it easy and safe to share important documents, photos, videos, and more over the web without having to worry about whether they’ll get there or if they’ll be secure, or deal with the complexity of a separate subscription and license from another provider.

We’re thankful for this feature because most of us despise spending valuable time messing with large or grouped email attachments, and are quite happy never to have to do it again. As the information we want to share grows in size and “richness,” the scalability and flexibility of ExchangeDefender Web File Sharing are just what users need, and the simplicity can’t be beat – there’s no need to manage any additional subscriptions, fees or licenses, but Web File Sharing is always available.

LiveArchive

The LiveArchive service is always on to ensure that no matter what, whether your email server crashes or the power goes out in the office, users will always be able to access critical email and stay productive in case of anything. Using ExchangeDefender’s secure standby servers, up to a year’s worth of inbound and outbound email is available and actionable through Outlook Web Access at all times.

We’re thankful for LiveArchive because it’s one of the industry’s, best-kept-secret, Awesome Deals. It’s always on, powered by Exchange 2010 across two data centers, archives sent and received mail, and users never have to deal with training, management, maintenance, or software installation. Why is it a best-kept-secret Awesome Deal? Because LiveArchive – and the ability to resume work right where you left off no matter what happens – is included with every ExchangeDefender account. It’s astonishing to realize that other email providers charge as much as $49 per user just to be able to keep working in the event of a technical glitch or outage.

Message Encryption

ExchangeDefender Message Encryption provides a free and transparent encryption mechanism that enables businesses to quickly comply with SOX, HIPAA, SEC and local government requirements for personal information encryption. Create global encryption policy for domains or email addresses, and instantly encrypt specific messages without policy rule management. ExchangeDefender Message Encryption extends business security beyond the usual technical constraints without management headaches, software installations, or additional fees.

We’re thankful for Message Encryption for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the simplicity it delivers for regulatory compliance. While we also offer a Compliance Archive solution as a stand-along service as well, the Message Encryption feature satisfies some important privacy requirements. Unlike other email and security providers who charge add-on fees upwards of $10 per month per mailbox for message encryption services, ExchangeDefender includes both On Demand and policy-based encryption functionality with every account. This is really what we’re grateful for, because it’s such a huge opportunity for the markup, to build a healthy margin into the resale.

So on that note, I hope you had the happiest of Thanksgiving holidays.

lcDo you find this information useful?

If you’d like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it affects you and your clients, visit Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB, conduct live webcasts and podcasts with industry leaders and more.

Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777

Hosted Services Support

The past two weeks have been rather stressful and unpleasant for our partners and your end users on DEWEY due to the recent outage that left 17% of the users without full access to their entire mailbox for two weeks. Not only has this been our longest outage with any service, but it also has been one of the most “bumpy road” recoveries we’ve ever experienced. Our partners and their end users could compare almost every step of the recovery to pulling teeth; every step of the way, we let them down.

We’re extremely sorry…this was (and still is) extremely unfortunate, but we have learned a lot from this experience.

Here’s a quick break down of the experience:

10/31/11 – Users on two databases both lost connection to Exchange.

11/01/11 – Users are switched to dial tone recovery mode. Users with mobile phones lose contacts and calendar events on next sync.

11/06/11 – Users on DB2 regain access to old mail, but lose access to any new mail, contacts, or calendar entries since the outage began.

11/07/11 – Mailbox data for users on DB2 is fully restored; new and old data merged.

11/17/11 – Users on DB3 regain access to old mail, but lose access to any new mail, contacts, or calendar entries since the outage began.

11/19/11 – Mailbox data for users on DB3 is fully restored; new and old data merged.

In speaking to partners along every step of the way we heard every issue experienced by end users with the biggest issue being the dial tone recovery. During dial tone recovery any users with ActiveSync based connections will lose all Exchange contacts and calendar items on next sync after dial tone is activated.

When you break down our responsibilities and duties to our clients, at the very minimum, we need to provide a live running service as quickly as possible. Technology and software unfortunately have issues and can break, but as long as we can minimalize the direct impact faced by end users we can generally get through issues without upsetting a lot of partners. By erasing all cached access by mobile phones with the temporary mailbox, we put a lot of stress on our partners.

We are considering a disaster recovery policy control for partners..

The policy controls will give partners control of how we treat each mailbox during an outage. In giving partners the ability to control how we respond, this will greatly improve the overall experience during an outage and will allow the partner to provide direct expectations to their clients.

For instance, say partner ABC123 Computers has a client, Big Electric Company, with 10 mailboxes.

The partner wants to mark 3 users as “Do not activate dial tone” as these users are mobile and depend on their contacts and calendars and they cannot afford to lose them once dial tone is activated.

The partner then marks the CEO and CFO as “Do not reimport data after outage” as the partner plans to reimport cached data because the CFO and CEO cannot work on dial tone mail alone.

By allowing the partner to directly control our recovery process for mailboxes, the partner will then be able to set direct SLA expectations for their end users during the outage.

Plans for the future…

FutureIn the event that we experience another catastrophic failure (anticipated 6+ hours of downtime), we will wait at least one hour before activating dial tone recovery for mailboxes that are not opted out.

During the first hour, we will reach out to all partners via telephone whose mailboxes are not opted out from dial tone recovery to make them aware of the expected experience for end users. If the partner wishes to not activate dial tone recovery we will activate the mailbox option in service manager to opt out of dial tone recovery. Additionally, partners could ask (via support ticket) that the dial tone activation to be postponed for a few hours later if the partner wants to advise the end user to disable ActiveSync.

Once the original (or backup) database is back online we will once again reach out to all partners who have not opted out of mailbox data restore to let them know of the expected experience for end users. If the partner wishes to opt the mailbox out of data restore then the mailbox will remain on the dial tone database until the recovery of data for all users on the affected database is completed.

If you think the outage policy control would be a beneficial add on to our Hosted Exchange service, please let me know travis@exchangedefender.com.

Travis Sheldon
VP Network Operations, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x757
travis@ownwebnow.com

General

Black Friday is one of the, if not THE, biggest shopping day of the year! Take advantage of this and shop for yourself! We are running a one-day promotion for Compliance Archiving for only $1.00/user.  This is a promotion is solely for partners only, and not for resale. 

Are you curious as to what Compliance Archiving is all about? What does it include? How do I use it? What are the benefits?

Check out the Compliance Archiving page of our website, http://exchangedefender.com/features_compliance_archiving.php.

Black Friday Ad

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a great offering that you will want to take advantage of! Simply enter the coupon code “XDBlackFriday” when ordering Compliance Archive and you will receive the great $1.00 price point for all of the accounts that you order, and they will stay grandfathered in at the rate for the duration of the account!  This promotion is ONLY valid on Black Friday, 11/25/2011, so don’t hesitate!

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735

General Support

StarIn the coming weeks I’m going to be taking a, “Did you know?” approach to my blog as I keep running across items that are offered in our feature set that folks find surprising that we offer that would have saved them time had they known. These items are part of ExchangeDefender that folks don’t come across often but they are there. The first topic we’ll touch are White listing and trusting senders.

One of the more common inquiries that arise out of the Trusted Sender is why does it seem to not work consistently. Here’s the logic behind the Trust Sender function in ExchangeDefender. Trust Sender will in essence white list that specific sender address to that specific recipient address. The times when folks over look these details and it turns into a problem are as follows:

Domain administrators often “Trust Sender” from SPAM Czar under the assumption that the sender is being trusted for the domain, the feature set has not changed it will still white list that sender to that specific recipient.

Senders that use disposable email addresses like carlos+is+cool+3425223@exchangedefender.com work around the mechanism, since the from address is always different, so this type of sender is better suited for a domain level whitelist.

That takes us to the options for whitelist formatting. ExchangeDefender will access the following types of entries:

user@domain.com Basic per user whitelist
domain.com Domain level whitelist
a.domain.com Third level domain whitelist
123.123.123.123 IP address whitelist
123.123.123 /24 whitelist

All this information can actually be found in our Knowledge Base inside of our support portal.

Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737

Hosted Services

Hosted email can be very simple – pay one flat price per month per mailbox for a set of great services that meets all the client’s needs. Yet some providers choose to make it very complicated – just determining what the per-mailbox cost will be can seem like solving an algebra problem. Hidden add-ons and fees abound, and add up very quickly to costs much higher than anticipated. When anything changes, like storage needs or mailboxes or additional services, account changes can be complicated, may affect the price dramatically (which wreaks havoc on your profitability), and can be difficult to manage.

At ExchangeDefender, our Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 offering makes it very simple. For one flat, all-inclusive rate per mailbox per month, you can offer your clients a hosted messaging solution that is flexible enough for their varying needs today and tomorrow, and robust enough to enable you to turn a profit on every mailbox every month.

“Under promise and over deliver”

promises ave and realiry wayLet’s say your client, like so many small businesses, indicates in the sales conversations that they “just need a basic email solution” that will work and keep them safe and secure. Well what if you could offer that to them, at a great price, with all the features that they could ever want to “add on” later built right in and ready to go when that time comes?

ExchangeDefender Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 solution comes with full ExchangeDefender protection, an Outlook desktop license, Live Archive service, web filtering, web file sharing, and even more great features built right in. If your clients don’t need or want any of them, you can simply disable them. You can deliver that fully-customized functionality with just the click of a button in your management portal. There’s no migration, no additional provisioning or payments, no updates. It’s just that simple, for you and your clients.

We offer ExchangeDefender Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 to our partners for $10 per mailbox per month, with additional discounts available based on volume. You get to mark this up and charge your client at your discretion. We typically see the service being resold for $15-20 per mailbox per month, providing a nice healthy margin to the MSP partner. And the price includes everything, with no fine print or hidden catches. $15 a month for a full-scale, customizable Microsoft Exchange email service sounds very appealing.

It’s easy to manage, so you’ll spend a little less time managing each client’s changing email and messaging needs, which adds up to big impact on the bottom line. Remember that when the fee is fixed, the goal is to minimize your internal costs for managing and delivering each service to each account, to be most profitable.

Do you find this information useful?

lcIf you’d like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it affects you and your clients, visit Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB, conduct live webcasts and podcasts with industry leaders and more.

Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777

ExchangeDefender Shockey Monkey Webinars

This week the development team has been focused on cleaning up Shockey Monkey. This process is mainly composed of three focused categories (UI, Performance, and Bug/Warning Fixes). I would say this has been the largest update to Shockey Monkey since it was originally created over seven years ago. This update should also help lay the framework for any future additions or tweaks.

User Interface

– We’ve applied a consistent look and feel across the entire portal.

– Implemented a themed backend that allows quick and easy branding.

– Improved cross browser support

Performance

– Improved loading performance across the portal.

– Minified most of the JavaScript files to reduce fetch & loading times.

– Implemented more session variables to reduce the amount of queries.

Bug Fixes

– Decreased Disk IO access by resolving more than 1000+ warnings that were constantly being written to a local log file.

– We’ve fixed a handful of bug over the past few weeks and have been continuing to resolve these issues as we enhance the portal.

– If you have a bug, submit it here: https://support.ownwebnow.com/create.asp?item=development

Performance is being improved in several ways across the Shockey Monkey portals. The first thing we did was minified thousands and thousands of lines of JavaScript. The compression ratio on average across all of our scripts was about 65%, which is very good. We’ve also been fixing trivial “warning” messages as we progress through the code. By resolving these warning messages that are generated on the back end, it reducing the amount of disk IO that is required to store this information. Typically this is not a big deal, but multiply that by 1000’s of warning and you get some nasty seek times.

If we go a little bit into the cleanup of the User Interface, it was a project that was mainly focused on consistency. We are also making sure that the look and feel between browser types is very similar. There are also a few special features of the new UI that will really help bring the User experience to a new level. One of these features is the ability to view any page in “Full Screen” mode. What this does is remove the top and side menus from the portal. This allows you to manage any page without the annoyance of having to resize or scroll to achieve simple tasks.

ReloadedWe have a lot more information and a ton more features that we are saving for the unveiling. If you would like to be a part of the Shockey Monkey Reloaded webinar on Thursday, December 1, 2011 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST, visit the following link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/812869640.

 

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com

Hosted Services

technical_support_outage_advisoryA few weeks ago (10/31/11) our DEWEY cluster suffered a major outage at the result of old conflicting RAID policies that led to the dirty dismount of 50% of the DEWEY databases. Immediately, our team started the recovery process, which unfortunately took longer than ever expected (More details @ https://www.exchangedefender.com/noc) and prompted our side to start developing a new solution for DEWEY users to restore and maintain the expected service availability and reliability.

Lets be forthright…DEWEY has been somewhat of a nuisance not only to our staff, but also to our partners and your users.

Overall, Exchange 2007 was a drastic leap and improvement from Exchange 2003, but still lacked many features for service providers or any rapidly expanding company such as the ability to properly scale the solution and implement additional failovers after initial deployment. In comparison, I think of Exchange 2007 as Windows Vista – it brought a lot of new features and easier management from 2003, but after a year of management it feels like a bad tease.

Over a year ago, we decided to immediately start offering Exchange 2010 as soon as it RTM because we felt we hit the ceiling in terms of scalability with Exchange 2007. Sure, we could add more CAS servers and MBOX servers, but that would eventually end up with partners having multiple configurations to keep track of for clients in the same company. Taking everything into account Exchange 2007 was no longer the road we traveled down for new deployments.

Going back to DEWEY, we started experiencing more frequent issues in terms of reliability over the past six months. Between services failing to respond in a timely manner or even worse, not responding at all we knew we had to provide a solution before our partners clients threw up their hands to say “I’m done!”.

Upgrade, Upgrade, Upgrade

In order to provide a solution we must keep a few essential components in mind:

1. The upgrade must be seamless with no mail loss and no major service interruption.

2. The upgrade must be automated. We can’t expect partners to import/export data or reconfigure Outlook.

3. The upgrade must be scheduled so partners are kept in the loop on the migration progress.

4. The upgrade must be flexible for partners who want to slowly migrate or for partners who want to immediately move.

Unfortunately, Exchange 2007 does not provide the ability to seamlessly move users directly to any remote Exchange 2010 cluster (i.e. Rockerduck), but we can upgrade to a local 2010 cluster, then move the client to ROCKERDUCK.

The Solutions is Here…

In the past few weeks we have deployed and successfully tested a 40 user migration from 2007 DEWEY to 2010 ROCKERDUCK with very minimal effort on the partner’s end. Below is a rough overview of the process which was designed for a 2 week migration for clients:

solution1. Partner adjusts autodiscover CNAME record to NEWDEWEY (2010).

2. Move requests get created from 2007 DEWEY to 2010 DEWEY (Week 1, Monday).

3. Users on DEWEY will remain on 2007 throughout the work week.

4. Move requests will be finalized on Friday evening. Users will now be serviced on 2010 DEWEY (Week 1, Friday).

a. Users with BES devices will remain on 2007 until the final move to ROCKERDUCK.

5. Users come in on Monday, restart Outlook.

6. Move requests to ROCKERDUCK are created (Week 2, Wednesday).

7. Partner adjusts autodiscover record to point to ROCKERDUCK (Week 2, Friday at close of business).

8. Move requests will be finalized Saturday evening (Week 2, Saturday).

9. User comes in on Monday, selects “Repair account” on ‘Email Accounts’ list. User is now serviced on ROCKERDUCK.

10. Users re-setup ActiveSync and any Blackberry Enterprise Server accounts.

With the above outlined process users should not see any service interruption nor will users have to recreate their Outlook profiles.

Travis Sheldon
VP Network Operations, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x757
travis@ownwebnow.com

General

dddWhether you are a current partner of ExchangeDefender or just interested in working with us, ExchangeDefender University is a great resource for you to use in order to have a successful partnership with ExchangeDefender.

During the rebranding and rebuilding of the new ExchangeDefender site, we have added all kinds of new information to ExchangeDefender University. We have a Training section where we have all of our training videos and deployment guides available to assist you with the set-up and implementation of our services. There is a section titled Start-up Guides which includes deployment guides and corresponding instructional videos for some of our most popular services. There is also a Partner Resource section that includes everything that you will need to be profitable with ExchangeDefender Included in Partner resources are links to the following:

· Marketing Collateral

· Current Promotions and Special Offers

· Profitability Best Practices

· Frequently Asked Questions

· Upcoming Events & Webinars

· Partner Testimonies

There are also links to all of our other websites, like the Support Portal, our Corporate ExchangeDefender Blog, the Network Operations (NOC) Blog, and our Knowledge Base.

In addition to all of that, there is a step-by-step walk through process of how to successfully work with ExchangeDefender. It runs through a Portal Tour, Account Management, Placing an Order, Managing Services, and how to go about Getting Help. Just click on the big blue arrow to get started. When you are finished there is a link in the last step that will bring you back to the ExchangeDefender University homepage.

Visit http://www.exchangedefender.com/XDUniversity.php!

ExchangeDefender University is a great tool to utilize – and a great site to bookmark and refer to! Please take advantage of it – it is there to help you every step of the way! And of course, if you have questions…don’t hesitate to Contact Us!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735