Q4 company updates, and a message from Vlad
ExchangeDefender security solutions experienced a burst in demand that has not let up, and neither has our development output. I’ve been involved in the strategy and our roadmap more than I’ve been in several years and I wanted to give you an informal update on some of our awesome projects and Q4 progress before we turn our attention to 2021. Hopefully we can help you.
Encryption
Encryption has been an undisputed heavyweight champion of sales in 2020 and we’ve heavily invested into the service that is now being used by our clients to secure everything from email stock trade notifications to doctor office sms/txt delivery of lab results. The ability to sell this product a-la-carte without ExchangeDefender (or MX/DNS changes) has significantly expanded our market and reach, while the ability to encrypt and distribute messages via web and sms/txt to mobile devices has opened up the application and use case scenarios exponentially. The demand for the product has not slowed down, and we’re already working on the 3rd update to this service in a year.
The bad news is that due to the demand we’ll stop partner training on December 1st, and Encryption sales will officially stop for 2020 on December 11th (expected to resume in late January 2021). We have a very large enterprise and government presence where most of the contracts, deployment, and projects happen in late December (and with Covid / office / travel restrictions our schedule is already packed).
XD Updates
We are making significant upgrades to our core ExchangeDefender features, and most of them are focused around productivity and management efficiency. For example, we’re starting our ExchangeDefender Outlook/OWA Addin beta later this month. We’re simplifying the way for you to implement and manage DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. We’re launching some other exciting features as an addon pack, which should help many organizations that need better controls to police notifications, confirmations, spear phishing attempts, and full transport rules. Where we’re in highest demand at ExchangeDefender is professional email services, where we’re brought in to assist with a specific email problem. Over the past year we’ve been hired to run mail audits, security audits, insurance company hired us to double-check in house IT, we’ve built several SMS/txt/email gateways, and almost on the hourly basis: security protocol implementations. It’s getting to the point that business email delivery and issue troubleshooting is a full time job. The future of cybersecurity looks bright!
Exchange Essentials
Because business is ultimately about making money, we’ve been pressed to return the Exchange Essentials service. Listen, I understand it, budgets are going to be tougher in 2021 and everyone is going to need an affordable but secure Exchange experience. Even if cuts aren’t crucial, for some organizations it makes sense to spend IT budgets elsewhere other than a $15 mailbox (most people these days spend their time in Outlook on their phone than on the desktop)
We’re bringing Exchange Essentials back at $4.99 for a limited time.
P.S. This is gonna sell out by Christmas, so if you have an opportunity and need us to hold some seats please call us at 877-546-0316, and let us know.
Wrkoo
We decided to give Wrkoo Startup away for free with no limits when we were first looking to shut down our offices in March — we knew small businesses were not prepared for an extended “work from home” and that keeping everyone informed was on every managers mind. We gave Wrkoo away for free to everyone that worked with our partners, everyone that had ExchangeDefender, and aggressively promoted it here in Orlando because we wanted to help our community. We are truly all in this together because small businesses depend on each other. This is a rather expensive marketing write-off, but we’ve pledged to keep it free through at least one quarter after the USA gets vaccines.
Through this time we’ve heard from people who are using Wrkoo to provide customer service, to send out invoices, to track time, to manage entire projects, we have a translation service that runs on it, and a business vertical of every kind. And with ExchangeDefender we keep on connecting business productivity with the way people actually work and communicate when they need to get stuff done. We couldn’t be happier to have been a part in someone getting their business together in the cloud. Throughout all this mess, Wrkoo is the way we keep everyone accountable and on the same page. I know it can do the same for your business, or recommend it to a friend.
Corporate Encryption Upgrade – What Did We Change?
The restructure of the encryption portal was driven solely to enhance the user experience. The ExchangeDefender Encryption Portal gives users central access to all encryption messages, contacts, advanced encryption options groups, SMS, URL as well as a full audit log. All available from a secure site, available via desktop and mobile.
Let’s take a look at what’s new:
For Contacts, we have made it easy to be more productive by saving contacts you often send messages to.
Click, Create New Contact and provide the name and email address. It is that simple.
Basic vs. High Security
Primarily High Security requires the recipient to create a profile to ensure the message is not compromised by a 3rd party. We strongly encourage the use of High Security. Basic Security also provides end-to-end encryption, but does not require the recipient to register with ExchangeDefender.
Advanced Options are located on the right hand side of your screen, these features were created to enhance the user experience and to offer more flexibility for the user.
- Automatically destroy the message after # days.
- Notify this user when the recipient reads this message
- Password protect this message
- Notify me when the recipient reads this message
- Actions allowed for recipients: Allow Reply/Forward or to Print
Groups
ExchangeDefender Encryption also supports groups. You can add contacts to a group by clicking on +Create New Group and providing information about your contacts. At any time, you can also click on the + icon next to the group name to +Add more members or click on the red X button to remove from the group.
Send encrypted messages via URL (Website)
ExchangeDefender Encryption enables you to send encrypted messages to web sites and services while maintaining the security and custody of the message contents.
The system generates a short URL that can be copied and pasted into Slack, Teams, Facebook, social media, or any other web site. URL Encrypted Messages are the most popular features as it provides a secure authentication layer, automatically deletes contents, and provides tracking. Simply type your subject, message, attach documents and click Send and a dialog box will pop up with the link to the message. You can copy and paste this link and everyone with the access to it.
Send encrypted messages via SMS
Send encrypted messages to mobile devices via SMS / text messages. This feature is highly sought after by doctors, attorneys and insurance personnel that are frequently interacting with clients that are on the move. “We’ll just text it to you” is an easy way to deliver a secure message via the recipient’s mobile phone number.
The recipient receives an SMS message with a link to the secure encrypted message. They will click the link, the default web browser on the phone will go to the secure SSL-encrypted web site to show message contents.
Internationalization
ExchangeDefender encryption portal has adopted Internationalization by designing the portal to be adaptive to various regions without engineering changes.
Audit Log
Every action related to encryption is listed here and reflects what was done even after the messages are gone.