ExchangeDefender Q4 Partner Webinar
Thank you for your business and another fantastic year. We want to help you close out the quarter and 2013 strong – so we would like to invite you to a webinar that will cover a lot of ground in terms of development, service implementations, new service launch and some marketing information.
Thursday, December 5th Noon-1PM EST
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/922075737
We know things tend to slow down in December as folks close books, work from home, plan the new year and so on – so if you can’t make it, it will be available for download same day. If you can make it to the live webinar we have some surplus swag so come help us give away the last few tablets we have laying around.
On the side..
I had a chance to attend the ConnectWise conference earlier this month and talk to some of our larger partners that were surprised with everything that we do at ExchangeDefender and how much more business we can help drive through our solutions. These best practices, the experience from the field, the partner input and feedback is how we build this company and how we channel it to help our partners grow and win.
Thing is, very few partners actually leverage everything we put together and the long tail at ExchangeDefender is indeed very long. We do our best to blog, present webinars, attend conferences and produce content that is available all over the place. But in order for it to be effective in your organization there needs to be a level of discipline in reviewing and aligning these solutions with your business. We have the benefit of tons of partners that work with us and help us fine tune our products and features – and we spend a lot to make sure it gets to you.
Which brings me to my point – I know that time is scarce and that you can’t track all your vendors at once or go over quarters worth of information all the time. We have staff whose sole job is to create specialty presentations and webinars, meet with your technical and sales staff, help with custom solutions and presale consulting as well as with your end users. As your partner, not competitor, we are here to help you win, but if you’re interested you gotta let us know.
We’re doing all we can to reach you and I’d like to ask a favor: If we aren’t reaching you please let me know why. If we aren’t getting you the info you need through our blogs, newsletters, partner emails, custom webinars, web site, support portal, Facebook, Twitter, community events, seminars and so on I’d love to hear what else we could be doing.
Welcome to Orlando
Many of our partners are in town for the HTG, ConnectWise and associated vendor parties so I wanted to take a moment and give you some ideas on how to best leverage us, your vendor, for greater success. Despite popular opinion, we’re not at the conference for the sole purpose of handing out swag and filling up trade show floor space with banners and marketing junk.
We’re here to inform you – We know you’re busy. We know we have a ton of webinars. I hear this a lot – yet you spent a ton of money to be out of your office for days and the best way to earn some extra ROI on your trip is to talk to us about what is going on at ExchangeDefender. You may not use every single product we have, you may not stay on top of every single blog post we write or announcement we make – so feel free to ask about what is new, what has changed and if any of your previous issues have been resolved. We are always adding to our solution portfolio and we know it end to end so we’re the best folks to give you a 10,000 foot view of our company; and can drag over a sales or technical person to explain the full details in a second.
We’re here to connect you with other partners – IT providers are not all the same. Many of our partners specialize in specific verticals and have developed custom stuff using our API, so if you are thinking outside the box we can likely get you contact info for partners that work in the same vertical or have a different way of using or positioning our solutions.
We’re here to give you the whole picture – If you don’t tune in to every webinar or haven’t spoken to anyone at ExchangeDefender in a year chances are you’re missing out on a lot of development. We can quickly walk you through everything that has changed and put it in a context of why we are doing so. For example, we recently launched ExchangeDefender LiveArchive 4 and it is no longer based on Microsoft Exchange. Why? It’s not due to the cost. It’s not due to the licensing. It’s not due to the complexity – it’s because our long term business goal for LiveArchive is to create a full redundancy for your entire communication experience – not just email. With LiveArchive 4 we can now provide failover email solution that also includes your contacts and your whole schedule, so you’re missing absolutely nothing when your mail server goes offline. Understanding what we are doing, and why, is a great way to make sure your clients are getting the solution that continues to solve their evolving problems as they count on you more.
We’re here to give you a quick rundown of everything new – If you’ve made it this far you’re in minority, most people just skim blog posts. That is fair, we do it as well. Information overload is serious business and you can only take in so much every day. Well, if you stop by our booth we can talk to you about what we’ve done, what we’re doing, what is coming down the pipe and so on.
We’re here for feedback – Most importantly, we are here to hear from you. You’re welcome to call us 24/7 but if there is something that really bugs you about our service or something that is working out really well but needs some tweaking, we are here to get the big picture for you so we can sell it to our management and developers. Our entire solution stack has been built on partner feedback and it’s the single most valuable takeaway (yes, even more important than new partner acquisition) from conference events.
To sum it up: Stop by, say hi, ask us what’s new and tell us what we could be doing better. And please don’t ask us where Vlad is, he is more of an imaginary character like the Wizard of Oz than an actual participant of day-to-day business 
Anastasia Wiggins
ExchangeDefender Client Software
We are proud to present the first release of the new Client Software infrastructure that is starting to include all of our ExchangeDefender solutions under one look and experience. As I’ve explained before, we are bringing the same ExchangeDefender web experience to your Desktop/Outlook as well as the mobile world of iOS and Android. Lot’s of new stuff so let’s get started.
Branding: The most demanded feature for the Outlook and Desktop addin. You don’t have to customize things either, all the product names, logos and colors will be pulled down from ExchangeDefender based on the user login.
We are adding search as well as message previews to ExchangeDefender quarantines. This gives our clients true, live access to the SPAM quarantine and makes the system respond in realtime along with the ability to instantly print, whitelist or deliver the message.
Previews are great for clients that need immediate access and don’t want to waste tons of time waiting for emails to be released and delivered to their Inbox – they can access them right away!
Speaking of the need for realtime alerts, some of our clients really liked old email reports because they would get that daily reminder of all their SPAM. We’ve introduced a new feature with the ExchangeDefeder Outlook addins (desktop has had it for years) that will pop up a reminder that there is new SPAM waiting for you every 30 or 60 minutes.
LiveArchive & Compliance Archive
Just one more.. well, two more things. We are adding access to LiveArchive and ComplianceArchive so it’s never more than one click away.
LiveArchive will give you a one click access to the full web experience of a fully functional webmail client now with contacts, appointments and a year of your email.
Compliance Archiving is being embedded right into the product – you will be able to quickly locate, open and even filter down messages by subject, sender, recipient and date. This will allow people with very large mailboxes to quickly get to the messages that may have been received years ago with a quick search.
One of the biggest improvements in the actual infrastructure of the Desktop and Outlook 2010 & 2013 addins is that the addin will automatically update itself whenever a new version is released. Unfortunately, you will have to uninstall the existing addin and install the new one from here, but this will be the last time!
As always, all our software is available for download here.
Hank Newman
VP, Development
Exchange Migration Conversations
Many of our partners have been asking about the migration collateral as well as the experience our partners and their clients have on these calls. What is being discussed? How are you being introduced? Do you try to sell? What sort of information do you provide? What kind of guarantees do you provide? Relax. It’s a process and a very flexible one at that with two goals in mind: Reassure the client and identify any problems up front.
Pre-call (Partner)
Prior to the call with the client, ExchangeDefender and our Partner get together and go over the new opportunity. We discuss all the obvious stuff – domain names, current technology, current problems, any special personnel or solutions in place, timelines, etc. We determine how ExchangeDefender will be introduced (sometimes as ExchangeDefender, sometimes as “migration team” and other times just by the name) and which solutions we are to discuss during the call.
We do not sell to the client on the call. It is partners responsibility to evaluate the needs and requirements the client may have for more complex things like corporate encryption, long term archiving, Outlook addins and so on. However, sometimes we can explain the technical and business implementation matters better because of our experience with them and we make sure we get our partners permission to talk about those items. Sometimes partners have a third party encryption or compliance product they prefer over ExchangeDefender so we try to make sure we follow the plan the partner has laid out for their client and assist in what they want to do.
Initial Client Call (Partner & ExchangeDefender & Client)
Partners typically arrange a phone call between the client, themselves and us and we get on the line with our questionnaire and go through the typical barrage of questions that lead us in the direction the client deems to be most important. This is critical: Always let the client guide you through their problems so you can address them. Based on their prior experience, company management may have different concerns than their IT team or previous IT Solution Provider; they may not be the right ones to answer the questions you may be asking; they may provide more detail of where the company is going and give both the partner and ExchangeDefender an avenue to help mitigate some risks and problems that will show up down the road.
During the initial talk we identify their primary problems and concerns; identify the contact points and vendors they rely on; timelines or dates around which no service interruption should take place; regulatory compliance requirements and activities, etc.
The purpose of the first call is to introduce our process, make adjustments and determine the correct plan of action.
Followup Partner Call (Partner & ExchangeDefender)
There are always surprises and opportunities the more we talk with our clients. The purpose of the followup call is to divide up the work and discovery process and begin the assessment. While some partners will allow us full control of the process and trust us to do the work end-to-end, others may prefer to do parts of the migration process themselves (installing their own RMM, making backups, etc) and we plan our course of action during this call.
Without getting extremely granular on every detail, the technical process of a migration is not complex. The complexity comes from problems, issues and limitations that come up during the mailbox move. So one of the first steps after we deploy the ExchangeDefender Business Monitoring tool (or our partners RMM choice) is to deploy bandwidth monitoring tool and verify the speed of the Internet connection around the clock. We go through the mailbox infrastructure and identify large mailboxes that are appropriate for Compliance Archiving, run tests and so on. The goal of the followup is to get an understanding of what can and cannot be done, what timelines we may be looking at given the limitations and restrictions and to match up calendars and migration schedules.
Followup Client Call (Partner & ExchangeDefender & Client)
Followup calls are optional and frequently handled by the partner but ExchangeDefender does offer to be a part of the whole process of explaining our discovery and our recommendations about compliance, encryption, DNS control, migration, LiveArchive business continuity, upgrading of various desktops and systems, viability of the Outlook addins or third party vendors or remote office migration plans.
The initial process is all about gathering ideas, suggestions, problems and solutions and running them by your client. It’s never going to be foolproof and we’ve heard this one often:
“You are very reassuring and seem to have a good grasp on how all this works. I’m happy about that. My concern is with things that you don’t know about and things that we don’t bring up that will break the system after the migration. We don’t want to be in a situation where you just tell us that you didn’t know about it because we didn’t tell you”
The above problem is inevitable, it is commercially impossible to both provide an economical move and a fool proof one. So we focus on the process at hand, we do only what we write into the contract and then we deal with anything that may be outside of that contract through other means. It doesn’t make all the clients happy – which is unfortunate – but it gives them something they can count on and a process they can understand.
As we go through the migration, every step is clearly communicated to the partner. They are armed with tons of branded collateral and every message we send out also has their logo on it. We can send the notification directly to the partner or to the partner and the client contact. Whenever a mailbox moves, whenever a DNS record changes, whenever a login is about to be made or profile reconfigured – we send out notices.
For more details on the collateral and the process notifications and the actual migration and technical stuff, stay tuned. There is new stuff being added every single day and a lot of it is customized with each given scenario. The key to migrations is planning and constant communication. So we’ll obviously have more and more of it here.
-Vlad
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, ExchangeDefender