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January 2012

General

Over the weekend of 01/27/12 – 01/29/12 our team successfully deployed Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 to our ROCKERDUCK cluster. Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 brings a whole slew of fixes and new features but three were a primary reason for expediting approval of SP2.

Cross Site OWA Redirect: In the event of a data center failure prior to SP2 any OWA clients that attempted to login into an OWA site under maintenance would be redirected to the CAS servers in the secondary data center would have to login again. With SP2 users will silently be redirected and logged into the secondary site CAS servers

OWA Mobile: Quick and efficient mobile version of OWA that is used by clients who do not have rich smart phones

Address book policies: With address book policies we will now be able to support customers that have multiple ‘entities’ or organizations that need to be “separated” but still allow certain sharing functions like address books.

While we do currently provide GAL segregation, Address book policies will allow us to provide clients with a granular level control address lists for users in the organization.

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

General

To continue to elaborate on the value of Emergency’s feature set to keep your customer’s moving. Remember that the POP3 and IMAP deployments can be applied to any mobile device of your choice or any email client of your choice. POP3 and IMAP4 function on the standard ports for both SSL and Non SSL traffic. The only feature set needed by you to keep them fully functional during an outage and beyond the web client (which provides FULL functionality), would be to furnish them with an SMTP server to relay through.

The Mail Client/Mobile device should be set up to the following ports at emergency.exchangedefender.com. Everything requires authentication and they’re set to be the same as our current ExchangeDefender Essentials primary email address and password.

POP3
   *110
   *995

IMAP
   *143
   *993

Next week I’ll follow up with screen by screen set ups for iOS, Android, and other popular desktop browsers, in case you’re not familiar enough with the URL and port assignments in the settings for these clients. If you have any questions about the features discussed here feel free to shoot me an email and I’ll try to help you out as best I can.

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

General

e3-white backExchangeDefender Essentials has been released out of beta. Everyone is running the 2.0 suite in production as of earlier this week. This is not news – both Vlad Mazek, our CEO, and Carlos Lascano, VP of Support Services and R&D, have blogged this week about the release. The biggest noteworthy item with the release is the inclusion of a new piece – ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency (E3). I’ll leave you to the other blogs to read about the details of E3, but to sum up, it’s a scaled-down business continuity solution that we felt it necessary to include in order to make Essentials worthy of the ExchangeDefender name. And it’s free, built into ExchangeDefender Essentials for every user.

You may be wondering, why do we keep releasing more versions of our products? Aren’t the ones we have already supposed to meet the needs of our small and medium sized business clients? And why do we keep making things free?

Let’s take these separately.

Why do we keep releasing more versions of our products? Aren’t the ones we have already supposed to meet the needs of our clients?

It’s all about price points, people.

Sometimes ExchangeDefender, the full flagship suite will make sense. The ExchangeDefender suite was designed to fully protect users with LiveArchive, Encryption, Web Filtering, Secure Web File Sharing, and much more. Thing is, this complete solution is just $2 per month per user.

Just the same, in some cases the client won’t want or need all those security features, and will be looking for ways to reduce costs and simplify. As Vlad Mazek, our CEO, said in his recent post about the launch of Exchange Essentials Emergency (E3), “I cannot advise you on the level of risk you or your clients are capable of taking on, or guess what your tolerance level for downtime and performance killing issues may be. All I can do is offer the best product at the best price point and let you pick what fits your budget.”

This is where ExchangeDefender Essentials comes in.

In the great compromise between features and price, the classic Goldilocks question, there is no one absolute right answer. But with the version 1 beta launch of Essentials we learned that the reality of small business outages was such that some kind of business continuity was so often needed that we simply couldn’t reconcile delivering a solution branded under our name without it.

But again, in the compromise between features and price, we ended up building this into the offering for free. While we haven’t formally released the new pricing structure for Essentials 2.0 just yet (it’ll be out February 1, we are more than comfortable announcing that E3 will definitely be free. Which just begs the next question.

Why do we keep making things free?

This is where E3 becomes really important. As far as we know, none of our competitors or quasi-competitors is offering anything like this. We are giving away business continuity because we believe in value, and we believe in our partners. We believe in giving our partners a competitive advantage where and when we can, because ultimately that is a competitive advantage for us, too. ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency is free because we want you to have it, and deploy it with your clients.

We know it will help you sell more solutions and more Exchange 2010 hosting and support services and training services and then some and address all the needs of your clients of all shapes and sizes.

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 Marketing

As the world gets more and more socially in tune and connected, it is vital for marketing to change in order to effectively reach those social networks. As I explained in my last blog post, the traditional 4 P’s of marketing are essential to effectively market your products and services. That is still true; however, there is also a new theory or approach of marketing that has been outlined by a few sources as the new wave of marketing. This change is due mainly to the way that the world communicates and the way that the world engages in doing business has changed.

The strategy of the 4 P’s of marketing has been in use and referred to since the early 1960’s. Obviously, a lot has changed in the business world since that time. Marketers and businesses set the stage and controlled the markets as a whole. There were not a lot of differences or features associated with products and services. Nowadays, the marketing world is completely different!!! Now, the client/customer is in control, most markets have separated or fragmented into multiple ones making it harder to reach groups. Also, there are so many alternatives, choices, and competition when it comes to products and services. Social media and the way that people communicate have been major players in the change of how successful marketing is done.

As with anything, especially in business, as trends change, you must adapt if you want to stay ahead of the curve and be successful with your business. To apply that way of thinking into marketing, here is a new idea for a fresh marketing framework, replace the 4 P’s with the 4 E’s:

Product > Experience 

Place > Everywhere

Price > Exchange

Promotion > Excitement

Product > Experience

In the old model, the first “P” was “Product”, which is about highlighting a single product or service. Now, products change constantly, features are added, the design changes, etc. By switching the first element to an E for Experience, you can stop focusing on just the product and start thinking about the overall experience for your target market. A great way to start doing this is to discover the process that a customer goes through when looking for something to purchase. To help to pinpoint your customer’s experience with your product or service, start asking yourself questions: How do customers shop for their products and services?, When do purchases occur?, Who or what influences buying decisions?, What happens after something is purchased?, Do they buy again? If you aren’t asking yourself these types of questions it will be hard to understand the customer experience, thus being able to better market your offerings to them. This is important because when you focus your marketing efforts to revolve around the experience rather than just the product you can really tap into what is most important for your customers.

Place > Everywhere

In the old model, the second “P” was “Place”, but now it is not about bringing customers to a certain place it is about being where the customers are. Start by switching the second element to “Everywhere”, because everywhere your clients are, you can be! Now to grab attention you don’t have to interrupt and pester, you have to intercept and capture consumers in their time and meeting them on their terms. A great way to take advantage of this is to advertise and market where your clients are. Use social media; take advantage of Facebook and Twitter, etc. Social media is a great avenue to announce changes, promotions, offers, etc., because customers don’t have to search for things, it is brought to their attention while they are engaging in their normal everyday habits; thus, making the process easier for them, and also making buying decisions easier for them.

Price > Exchange

In the old model, the third “P” was for “Price”. Literally meaning, we provide you a product and you give us money to pay for the product, period. By switching the third element to “Exchange”, you can highlight the value of the product. In this part of the equation you should ask yourself: What is my client paying for?, What does my client want in our products or services?, What are we willing to offer them? These questions will help you to determine the exchange that will happen when something is purchased. There will not only be a monetary exchange, but also an exchange of value. You will provide value to your clients because your products and services give them a solution to their problems or needs.

Promotion > Excitement

In the old model the fourth “P” was for “Promotion”. With the new model, in essence, it hasn’t changed because there will always be a promotion or offering with marketing, however, now that focus has shifted to the “Excitement” that surrounds the promotion. The key ingredient to reach people is to target what matters to them, hitting on emotions, needs, etc. When you can generate energy and passion in what you are selling to your market, excitement is born. When there is excitement about a product or service people talk about it! This is where the new wave of communication takes over. Coupled together, word-of-mouth and social networking take that excitement and create a buzz about your products and services.


How is ExchangeDefender Utilizing the New 4 E’s of Marketing?

Experience: We understand the “Customer Experience” in working with ExchangeDefender. We want to make the experience great for our partners and very simple. We make all of our solutions very user-friendly and easy to use. We provide training materials, whitepapers, support documentation, videos, and marketing collateral to make it easy and beneficial to have a partnership with us.

Everywhere: We go where our market is! We attend and sponsor the same tradeshows and conferences that our partners and target markets attend. We know that you are looking for solutions and partners that will help you to more effectively service your clients and offer them valuable products and services that will help to better run your businesses. We also stay plugged in with social networking, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and post blogs to keep you updated on what we are doing and how we can help you be successful.

Exchange: With all of our offerings there is a lot more than just an exchange of money for services. We offer our partners value! All of our offerings are all-inclusive – we don’t nickel and dime for advanced features. We believe in an all-you-can-eat strategy, which in turn provides value for you. We also provide free support, training, and best practices to our partners.

Excitement: We provide excitement with our products and services by catering to what the channel and our partners are looking for. We listen to word-of-mouth, social networking hype, and the needs of our partners and strive to fulfill those needs with our solutions. Also, we create excitement around our company because we are very passionate about our offerings and our partners and truly believe that we provide great solutions to our partner base. 

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com

General

As you may have already figured out from Carlos Lascano’s post (“ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency”), the beta period for ExchangeDefender Essentials 2 suite has concluded and everyone is currently running the suite in production. I wanted to offer you a bit of executive perspective as well as the success this product has had so you can position it appropriately in your solution stack and sales management.

First of all, ExchangeDefender suite is the king and product that should be the leader in the solution stack when it comes to email management. We know it will help you sell more solutions and more Exchange 2010 hosting and support services and training services and then some because it addresses all the needs businesses of all sizes have when it comes to email. And for just $2 it’s hard to find a business that would pass on it with LiveArchive, Encryption, Web Filering, Web File Sharing and so on built in at no cost.

Sometimes.. businesses have tight budgets and are willing to make compromises. For them, we offer ExchangeDefender Essentials. Sometimes both the businesses and their IT Solution Providers (you) are willing to make extreme compromises, so we offer CloudBlock.

I cannot advise you on the level of risk you or your clients are capable of taking on, or guess what your tollerance level for downtime and performance killing issues may be. All I can do is offer the best product at the best price point and let you pick what fits your budget. It’s your choice.

ExchangeDefender Essentials was born out of the compromise between features and price. Philosophy of our flagship ExchangeDefender product is security and features without compromise. Unfortunately this is not the philosophy we share with the majority of our competitors and our partners were at the disadvantage when trying to position our service against the marketplace that starts with basic SPAM & Virus filtering but charges for everything else that we consider bare minimums for an email solution. We compromised and offered ExchangeDefender Essentials – but with the 1.0 one compromise that we could not sleep with is the fact that it had no independent business continuity built in (your mail wouldn’t bounce but you wouldn’t be able to access it until your service was restored). ExchangeDefender Essentials 2.0 addresses this problem and goes well beyond the call of duty as it’s most popular in small business.

Reality of Small Business Outages

ExchangeDefender protects businesses and organizations of all sizes. This is what made LiveArchive an undisputed champion of business continuity for companies with redundant Internet connections, large maintenance windows and an all-Microsoft network infrastructure.

Small business outages and service interruptions tend to be different. There is only one Internet connection. Only one server. Standardization is not frequent – some folks are on Outlook, some are on Thunderbird on a netbook, others may only work on their Blackberry or iPad. It depends.

ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency (e3) was built to solve this technology challenge by using open standards. While you can access ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency via the web securely (https://emergency.exchangedefender.com, you can also setup a POP3 account on any device, even without commercial software (Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail) across multiple software platforms and set it in a dormant/inactive state. When it’s needed it can be enabled and the client is back in business.

One more thing, ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency it’s free.

As for one final thing.. the pricing will be revealed in February and all subscribers to Essentials will automatically have their pricing lowered to the new rate. By popular demand we will also allow direct purchases of ExchangeDefender Essentials for partners who would rather not be involved in the billing activity for smaller accounts.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
(407) 536-VLAD

ExchangeDefender Hosted Services Support

Last quarter we launched a slimmed down version of ExchangeDefender to be packaged with Exchange Essentials 2010 and as a standalone product. This product was launched to provide a similar price point and feature set as some less robust Spam & Security solutions out in the channel. However, we were never comfortable with not offering a bundled-in business continuity solution. Enter… ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency.

Emergency is the business continuity solution that is now bundled in with ExchangeDefender Essentials. It will capture a copy of all incoming email in similar fashion, but only inbound mail with a retention policy of 5 days for all items. This email is accessible via web portal and POP3/IMAP4 (although currently we are limiting the ability on the POP/IMAP to just download messages (to avoid open relay situations). So your clients will be able to continue to do business with the ability to receive, reply to, and create new emails from their real email address during an outage. Remember, that our 7 day spooling/mail bagging system is still in place so a combination of the two should minimize your client’s inconvenience.

The web portal is available at:

https://emergency.exchangedefender.com

Credentials:

Your primary user email address with ExchangeDefender (you cannot log in with an alias address) and your current ExchangeDefender password.

 

 

Once you log in all of your email will be available, with your identity pre-configured for use. There is no additional set up required. You can start reading and firing off emails as quickly as you can type.

Setting up Outlook (remember Read/DL message access only currently)

Fill out the information as below:

 

 

Your email address and user name are the same as your primary address in ExchangeDefender. The POP3/IMAP4 server is emergency.exchangedefender.com. Everything is on the standard ports for both SSL and non.

 

 

Our CEO, Vlad Mazek, will be providing a broader overview on emergency and its feature set when we officially roll it out in the next 2 weeks.

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

ExchangeDefender

This week we have been going through the final stages of our XDSYNC v2.0 deployment. Everything has performed great and has been operating as intended inside of our test environments. We are still on schedule and should have this published later today. There are a few key points I would like to cover before we release this new distribution for download.

How does XDSYNC work?

XDSYNC works by establishing a connection to our servers and running a series of checks against the provided domain information. You authenticate by providing the primary Domain and Password for the accounts. The software will then translate this and examine all sub domains for the population process.

The sync process is unidirectional and will pull the existing structure from your Exchange Server. It will then take that structure and mirror it inside of ExchangeDefender. This is important to pay close attention to and understand! Once you enable XDSYNC, you should do ALL of your account creations on the Exchange Server. You should no longer manually create accounts inside of ExchangeDefender.

The sync process allows you to pull all mail addresses associated with (Mailboxes, Distribution Groups and Public Folders). When we pull in addresses from (Public Folders & Distribution Groups), we flag these addresses on the backend as being non-mail accounts. This allows us to exclude these addresses from the billing cycle and also limit certain functionality due to these being non-mailbox accounts.

What about the Password Sync Component?

I mentioned this briefly in my last blog post and essentially everything is the same. Starting today any user account that has the password changed, it will be flagged in the back-end. If enabled XDSYNC will pick up these requests and reset the user’s password on the active directory level.

That is the basic logic of how XDSYNC operates and what you should expect if you choose to install this application. If used correctly, it will make your IT management life a lot easier and help reduce the mundane tasks of adding users to both systems. It will also enable your clients to have control of their password management, while you maintain the higher level management of the servers.

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com

General

Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010, the ExchangeDefender security suite, our offsite backup solution, and other products from ExchangeDefender are remarkably easy to manage – the Service Manager enables even completely non-technical users on your team to provision and manage our full suite of services in a clean, simple web-based interface.

The simplicity of this solution and ease of management is one of the reasons that ExchangeDefender has been successful since 1997. We want to make your business more profitable, and we’re always working on incremental improvements.

One of the biggest projects that the ExchangeDefender team has been involved with recently has been the launch of Shockey Monkey 2.0, “Reloaded.” Shockey Monkey is a free business management platform which was developed in-house by ExchangeDefender team. Shockey Monkey delivers support board and ticket management, client relationship management, project management, invoicing and billing, tasks and scheduling, sales pipeline and opportunity management, and the most unique feature, the client portal. Clients can open and view Support Requests, adjust their settings and preferences, access the Service Manager to provision and manage their own ExchangeDefender services, and more.

By combining the power of the Service Manager with the Shockey Monkey Client Portal feature, you can deliver a self-serve portal, allowing clients to manage their own ExchangeDefender service accounts, that not only helps you focus your valuable time and resources on more valuable functions, but also helps your clients see you as an important component in their technology management strategy.

The Shockey Monkey Client Portal is completely brand-able and customizable, down to the specific price points for ExchangeDefender products that appear in the Service Manager, ensuring that you’ll always promote your own brand and that you’ll be able to mark up and turn a profit on the services.

With all that said, here are a couple of important thoughts regarding the powerful combination of ExchangeDefender Service Manager and Shockey Monkey Client Portal:

First, it’s optional. You have the ability in your Service Provider portal to completely disable the Service Manager feature so clients cannot see it when they log in to their portals.

Second, it’s just not right for everyone. In some cases, a key part of the value you’re adding to your relationship with the client is alleviating the burden of managing and administering technology services. It may not make sense for you to offer clients the ability to do this themselves.

Third, however, many find that it does make sense, as it can be a huge time saver, efficiency builder, and profit booster for your business. Imagine not getting those calls about adding aliases or turning off the email accounts of terminated employees – how much time would your team have to dedicate to more important projects and client issues? What could the impact be on the bottom line if that time was available?

Fourth and finally, full documentation on the ExchangeDefender Service Manager is available at www.exchangedefender.com, and detailed training on the Shockey Monkey Client Portal is at www.shockeymonkey.com.

Do 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.

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

ExchangeDefender Hosted Services

One of the most common questions that our support team receives with Hosted Exchange is “How can my client choose which email address I want to send as?” and many partners are shocked to hear the answer “You can’t”.

The above limitation has always existed in Exchange as you can only have one “outgoing” address. Sure, you can create another profile in Outlook and send via SMTP or create a distribution group and add send-as rights..but what do you do if you’re on hosted exchange and you don’t have the freedom to control addresses and configurations at will or find it rather rudimentary?

*Drum roll*

Now you can…

For the first time (as far as I can tell for any hosting provider) partners/clients will have the ability to control their outgoing address in our Hosted Exchange.

Utilizing our API and a brand new API designed by the ExchangeDefender team for direct client Exchange interaction we now can extend the ability for clients to control their outgoing address on the fly.

The current beta product is a windows based application and will soon be converted to an Outlook 2010 plugin.

If you or your clients are interested in test driving this software please reach out to me directly: travis@ownwebnow.com.

Note:  This only applies to rockerduck.

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

General

This past week we have revisited a piece of software that was originally written over two years ago. Since our initial launch of XDSYNC back in 2009, it has become a widely used application among our partners. For those who may not be familiar with XDSYNC and what it does, let me explain.

XDSYNC is a service that you install on your local Exchange Server for accounts you wish to have protected by ExchangeDefender. The application monitors the structure of Active Directory & Mail Users and automatically provisions existing and newly created accounts into the backend system of ExchangeDefender. This allows an almost hands free experience for our partners when it comes to managing additions and removals inside of an organization.

Over the years one of the biggest requests has been for two additional components to this software. The first request was to have the ability to restrict/block an account on the server from being included in the automatic provision list. The second request was to implement a way to synchronize passwords between ExchangeDefender and the remote Exchange server. These requests have finally come to surface in our newest release of XDSYNC!

Exclusion List

The exclusion list is very straight forward. Upon configuration of XDSYNC you will notice an additional tab within the software. This tab will be populated with the current list of mail users on the Exchange Server. You simply check any accounts you wish for the software to ignore from the processing component and they will not be sent to Exchange Defender.

Password Sync

This process is currently being designed in a single direction due to limitations within the Windows environment. Initially it will not touch any existing users that existed before installation. The password change event will be triggered upon a password change request within ExchangeDefender.

For Example:

· Either an admin or users changes the password on “test@yourdomain.com”.

· This account is now flagged for “Password Sync”, if enabled.

· The next time XDSYNC pings for changes, it will be included on the list.

· The change gets processed and the password is updated on the Exchange server.

You may also notice from the screenshot we have included a “Notifications” section. This will allow you to enable and configure a recipient to be notified each time an account is either added/removed from ExchangeDefender via XDSYNC.

We are very excited to release this new version as it takes advantage of many code advancements and should operate at much higher level of performance than the previous version. Good news is that the new version is currently undergoing testing and should be released Friday of this week!

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com