Thank You
It goes against all marketing laws to write a blog post about a service or product you’re trying to pimp. Thankfully, my marketing folks have a few days off for Thanksgiving and my blog publishing credentials still work.. so on behalf of the whole team at ExchangeDefender, thank you for a wonderful year. We hope you had a wonderful day and I wanted to share something we’re all thankful for from the business perspective because it’s not all about the money.
Thank you for your faith – When I first started Own Web Now Corp, I only promised to get your yellow pages ad on the Internet for $99. Fast forward 20 years, we have entire companies (large ones at that) trusting us with their entire communications chain from email to backups to business continuity. We deliver and manage that service from three continents on what has traditionally been very unreliable software and perpetually breaking hardware. The level of faith our clients put in us to make their data safe and secure every day is something we’re beyond thankful for.
Thank you for your trust – Our very business exists out of the core distrust for the content on the Internet. Our tagline is “I kill SPAM for a living.” Yet in a world that is increasingly antagonistic and unpleasant, we’ve found people on every continent that trust us to get their mail around safely and securely. That’s a level of trust that is hard to express the appreciation for – seeing how nearly 20% of our time goes towards audits, checks, monitoring, adjustments, drills, and tests.
Thank you for your feedback – It’s hard to say this with a straight face since it’s become the industry joke in a way that Microsoft outright dismissed partners issues without an ounce of sincerity. Personally, I mean every word of it. We’re far from perfect. But I appreciate the feedback in all areas of our business and I always tell my employees to treasure it. “This is a business. Competitive business. If a client is complaining they are doing the dificult work of trying to make things work. Treat feedback as if your job depends on it – because that client could have taken the easy route – just moving it somewhere else that this problem doesn’t exist. It’s not bitching, it’s free troubleshooting!”
Thank you for your loyalty – We’re lucky to have a massive client retention rate – we don’t take it for granted either, we work very hard to maintain it and we still have clients with us that have been here since 1997. If there is a legacy behind this business it’s that when you do a good job and care about the service you’re delivering, people will stick with it because they know you’re on their side. That loyalty behind Own Web Now is what made ExchangeDefender possible, with ExchangeDefender we were able to build Shockey Monkey and with the new partners that brought us we’ve been able to become more valuable and get migrations, support, billing and soon every service you may need. Even the really stickly, legal and complex ones like Encryption and Compliance Archiving.
As a team, we’re thankful for this and much more. We hope you had a wonderful day, in US and abroad, and we thank you for your business. Always.
New Corporate Encryption
It has been a while since we’ve upgraded the ExchangeDefender UI but as you’ve seen with our other products and services, we’ve got something big coming over the next quarter: redo of all of our web interfaces to be more responsive and more useful. We’re starting with Encryption simply because it’s our most popular service. Allow me to unpack this upgrade as it’s a lot more comprehensive than it seems.
First thing you’ll notice is that ExchangeDefender will begin integration with 2FA/OTP for an additional layer of security. Two factor authentication, one time / disposable passwords, security tokens and so forth allow the users to login and use the service only if they have their password as well as a company issues OTP device. If your users tend to use the same password on multiple sites or like weak passwords that they never change please give us a call and let us set you up with a device.
On the exact opposite spectrum of concern, there are recipients of encrypted messages that generally don’t want to provide their email, name, etc or fill out long forms. For sites that interact with third party recipients (Encryption, Web File Sharing, Local Cloud, etc) we’ll now allow social media authentication as a login.
Inside the product itself you will find a fully functional email client with a responsive interface that quickly loads data without page refresh or long delays.
Since we have so many clients that actually live inside these interfaces and do bulk of their work there, we even have a lighter mode that hides a lot of the navigation and branding and helps you preserve some screen real estate.
We’ve made massive improvements to the functionality of the product as well. With so many of our encryption clients (and corporate clients) demanding a more functional email experience we’ve decided to eliminate Outlook and Gmail from the equation entirely. With the new encryption product you’ll be able to send emails, attachments, respond, forward messages and print from the site directly.
All these features are coming next week but we’re far from over: our Enterprise Encryption is getting a massive facelift as well. You’ll soon be able to create a full Compliance and Policy manager role that will be able to inspect and report on what is going through the encryption system. You’ll also be able to create specific encryption policies that will help route messages within the organization for manager approval, HR screening (man-in-the-middle role), content traps and much more very soon.
We hope you like it.. because it’s coming to the entire ExchangeDefender / Shockey Monkey universe. Our more ambitious goal is to build an entire application suite where organizations can more effectively manage their mail flow securely but also turn it into an actionable and accountable platform that doesn’t obsess with “inbox zero” and anxiety over email overload. The future looks bright.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO
ExchangeDefender
Remaining Relevant In Email Security
Sometimes perspective matters. Allow me to offer you mine as the CEO of ExchangeDefender.
Last week we held a huge webinar to announce the biggest addition to our business in over a decade. One that will see our business grow exponentially over the next few years. The response from the people that have attended the webinar has been fantastic. But if we’re being honest, we had more partners apologize for not being able to attend the webinar and ask for the recording than we had in attendance for the webinar. As always, we provide a direct link to it a few days after the event but this time we did something different.
Recognizing that our partners are swamped and busy running their business, we went a few extra steps. We called every single attendee that came to the webinar. Less than 5% answered the phone or returned the voicemail. We shot a quick 5 minute video to summarize the content of the webinar for people that are too busy. We created flyers.
Today I wrote up a bullet list summary of our webinar, again for everyone’s convenience, but I buried the big announcement as a single line bullet point half the way through the writeup and asked the marketing department to use half the newsletter to highlight our marketing and advertising efforts.
Why?
I have no doubt our new support service will be a smash hit. In fact, we’ve already been overwhelmed with the response to it. Not only will it make partners that offer these services instantly more profitable (because we’re doing the work) but it will open up a marketplace for partners that didn’t have an expertise in email security, compliance, encryption and other “real business concerns” a venue to provide the service now that someone else is going to stand behind it. I’m not worried about us, we’re doing great.
I am, however, worried about many of you. I totally understand not being able to get to a webinar, an hour is too much to ask. But if you can’t answer the phone or return a voicemail.. what are you doing to give yourself a chance to grow a business? If you’re too busy to answer the phone or see what the vendor you already work with can do to make you more effective and profitable, how are you going to implement and promote those solutions that are designed to help you? If you’re too busy with work to actually improve your work and to make it profitable, then how do you grow? How do you improve your odds to survive and thrive in an environment where big players are working tirelessly to eliminate and displace you? How do you learn about delivering the new services clients need and how do you talk to them before someone else reaches them?
We owe our business to our partners. Loyalty is a pretty big thing for me personally because I’m here thanks to the thousands of people that chose to trust us. Our business responsibility is to have your best interest in mind.
And with that, I wanted to highlight marketing. The IT world is changing and the concerns businesses face with their technology are going beyond uptime and reliability. I have assembled a great team at ExchangeDefender not just to help you deliver these services but to educate you and to help you promote that service to the business community you serve. Helping you double profits on our services next year is a short term goal. Making sure you remain relevant, profitable and successful 3-5 years from now – that’s where my mind is at.
-Vlad
P.S. I don’t mean to criticize anyone; I understand the time is scarce and you have a million webinars, phone calls, emails, voicemails and social media notifications. You know best how to spend your time and the last thing on my mind is trying to offend or guilt you about not attending the webinar – if you read this that way I apologize and I hope you give it another shot. Truth is, we track this stuff: partners that show up for our webinars, that take the time to consider the solutions and work with us to implement them do 23x better financially a year out (from Aug 2016 to Aug 2017) than those that don’t show up or answer the phone. Those are the numbers I know and the numbers I can track. I want that kind of success for all my partners. I have no doubt we’ll be killing it with support next year – but I feel like my responsibility to you, to all of our partners, is to help you grow. And I can do that much better through marketing efforts than we are doing right now. Hence the highlight.