Upcoming Service Changes

We have some cool new stuff going live before New Years that you need to be aware of. It’s been a very busy season for every elf in the workshop so we’re taking some time off after Christmas, please read below I promise it’s important.

Encryption

This service continues to be our focus as we bring up massive changes to UI across the product line and Compliance stuff in general for one simple reason – it’s in heaviest demand. If you aren’t building a business on it, we should talk. In the meantime, we have a huge facelift to the Encryption Notifications.

Now I don’t know about you but our old encrypted mail notifications looked more like a Nigerian Prince scam than legitimate business notifications. We now have beautiful HTML/txt email notifications for the entire notification chain and of course your colors and your logo will be front and center. After the ExchangeDefender UI upgrade is complete, this branding will be customizable down to the domain-level so that recipients can identify the organization directly instead of the MSP/VAR/reseller. Mobile looks pretty good too.

We have some new stuff happening with reporting, audit and log control that’s coming to the Compliance Officer section of ExchangeDefender launching in early 2018. If you have any feature requests, we’d love to hear them.

P.S. We know, we know, you want to send attachments through portal replies. It’s in the works. In the meantime, Web File Sharing does this stuff safely, securely and with a ton more compliance flexibility.

Fake / Vanity / Service Accounts

If you have fake, vanity, group, service, dog and generally non-person accounts in our support portal, they will be suspended next week.

We’ve announced this change several times this year and it’s going live next Wednesday. The reason is long and boring but it showed up in our numerous audits that looked at the our change control, service order and change mechanisms… and long story short, we nearly flunked it because you cannot have unidentified personnel change control of service records. Ooops.

Now I know, I know, I hear you… “But Vlad, business case scenario, my techs all need to see the upda..” – I know. And we have already solved that problem. If you have an engineering team that works as a group and all of them need to get updates when one person makes a change or request, we have a policy driven system in place to handle notifications. If you go to your company and edit company details you will see the following at the bottom:

Put any email, distribution list, PF address, etc there and every update, order, notification or (insert reason for having a vanity account) will be copied automatically. You can also check the box if you don’t want admin-level updates being sent to the group account. If you do, you will see a new checkbox on every ticket update (Admin CC) that will allow you to manually forward ticket updates for that specific ticket to your group.

Chat

While I have you on that page disabling vanity accounts (click on your profile and write down your PIN somewhere), we are going a step further in terms of support. As I mentioned on many webinars this year, our product and our service is going to get a lot more chatty and user-oriented. No, we’re not going direct or trying to cut you out of the food chain but the reality is that in order for us (and you) to be more valuable to our clients we need to communicate faster to our users when there are issues. Hence the changes to support, additional services for support handling, more features for notifications and upgrades to all the UIs and so on. One new addition that is already live is our public chat – it’s available on every page at ExchangeDefender.com in the lower right hand corner.

Tapping this button will launch a live chat and my entire company (myself included) is available on it and can be pulled in on demand. If you use your email address AND your PIN, my staff will be able to help you as if you were logged into the support system and opening a ticket. They won’t make service changes for you (see above about SOC1 & SOC2 audits) but everything else will be the same as opening a ticket.

Google Suite / Gmail Compliance Archiving..

Finally, yes we’re now providing Compliance Archiving for people on the Google business mail platform. We’ve tested and certified on the Google G Suite Business Solution ($10 and up, it should also work with the $5 one)

Reoccuring Invoices

Finally, a bit of a bugfix (with some additional functionality) that should help with billing. Many of you use our Shockey Monkey platform to manage accounts, users and to do reoccuring billing. After the system upgrade to PHP7 our infrastructure for reoccuring invoicing didn’t allow for changes to reoccuring invoices (oops) so we’ve had to go back and not just fix the issue but add more flexibility to it. Here is the new look:

The new Last Time Generated field allows you to reset the clock so to speak and rerun any invoices you may have skipped.  This is very much a temporary fix but we’ve had a lot of good feedback from folks that aren’t on top of their billing that this new feature helps solve those problems so it’s staying. Lot’s of new stuff on the SM front in 2018.

2017

We hope you had a great one. For us, it’s been a rather arduous rebuilding year that has seen us make massive upgrades to our infrastructure, redesign of our data centers, upgrades to backoffice stuff, dropping a lot of vendors that weren’t up to the challenge and while I wouldn’t wish this kind of workload on any of you, I’m really in love with what we’ve been able to do this year and all the opportunities it now opens for us and for our partners. While losing some flexibility has certainly cost us some business, it has brought a lot of predictability and stability across the board. While outright replacing a lot of gear and subsystems was really painful, everything that we’ve redone has reduced our problems and issues to a nil. And while all of this has been rough at times, sticking with the process, standards, audits and the way we run the business has brought a new level of resilience and optimism that I haven’t seen here in a long time. I don’t recommend it, but the results are incredible.

With that, I’m confident that everything we have in the works now will make everyone we serve far better off in 2018. Next few years are going to be amazing as we bridge that gap between the old world of email, compliance and encryption with the new world of on-demand service and realtime communications.