Mobile – XD Business Communicator
XD Business Communicator is one of our latest additions to our mobile software suite. Extending the functionality and portability of our ExchangeDefender product line, this app keeps your connected!
Quarantine
You have the ability to manage your SPAM & SURESPAM quarantines. You can view each message in real time with a life preview pulled directly from our secure network. In the event you come across a message that has been caught by mistake, you can release the message for delivery. You also have the ability to whitelist (trust) a sender to ensure future mail delivery from that specified contact.
Encryption
Another useful feature packaged within the mobile application is the ability to generate an e-mail message ready for encryption. This feature will start a new message with [Encrypt] prepended to the subject line. This will ensure the message is sent through our encryption mail delivery channels. The only thing left for you to do is enter the recipient and message body and hit send.
LiveArchive
In the event of a catastrophic failure and your mail server is down or inaccessible, you have direct access to your live archive account. By clicking the button labeled Livearchive you will be signed directly into your business continuity account. This provides a quick and workable solution in the event of an emergency!
2FA
This feature is one of our newest additions. If you have 2FA enabled on your ExchangeDefender profile, this will allow you to generate a one-time use authentication code to access your account. Upon attempting to sign-in to your online profile, you will be prompted for the 2FA code which will be available on this mobile device. Those who required increased security, this is the feature that will help bring that comfort home!
About
We’re constantly providing updates to our applications. The about page display general information about the application and information about what’s changed between software revisions.
SMTP Security Outlook 2010, 2013 & Desktop Client – Major Update
Today we’ve published an update to the Outlook 2010, 2013 and Desktop Client SMTP Security application. This update addresses several bugs, performance issues and even a few feature requests!
- We’ve added the ability to view and manage alias accounts. (See Figure 1)
- An issue where the submission of multiple spam messages at once has been fixed.
- Messages submitted as SPAM are now sent to the “Junk” folder.
- Fixed several performance issues relating to “Hanging” or “Freezing”.
- We’ve fixed the issue that was causing the “Add-In” tab to be renamed.
- We’ve added the ability to disable the automatic refresh cycle. (See Figure 2)
- Fixed an issue that was causing compliance messages to not populate.
- Fixed an issue that caused the quick links to not work correctly. (See Figure 3)
If you currently have the add-in installed, simply close and re-launch outlook. If you had our most recent version previously, the add-in should automatically update. However, if you notice that an automatic update did not occur, simply uninstall the old version and obtain the latest version.
Downloads
Figure 1 – Ability to view and manage alias accounts.
You alias accounts will populate in this list in the order of the main account, then followed by domain and users alphabetically.
Figure 2 – Ability to disable automatic refresh intervals.
You now have the option to disable the automatic synchronization.
Figure 3 – Fixed an issue that caused the quick links to not work correctly.
Clicking this link will sign you into your web management console automatically!
ExchangeDefender 2014 Strategy Webinar
It’s important for our partners to understand what we are doing, how and why. We put more priority than most other companies mostly because we are small and the only way we succeed is if our partners do as well. With the MSP and IT marketplace wondering which vendors are going to make it through the year all you have to ask yourself is if you will – because if you do so will we. Everything we are doing at ExchangeDefender (and Shockey Monkey) is about helping our partners grow faster. To hear about it in detail please download the webinar we recorded yesterday:
ExchangeDefender 2014 Strategy Webinar
http://www.ExchangeDefender.com/media/XD2014Strategy.wmv
Growth
Every partner I talk to is focused on growing their revenues. Unfortunately growth, as predicted years ago, is coming at a more expensive rate than it did years ago. Not only is there a smaller pool of customers to pick from but the talent is scarce as well – so you will spend more on marketing and more on staffing.
By taking care of migrations, customer service, billing and even marketing assistance ExchangeDefender can help partners acquire more business and deliver more solutions faster. While that sounds like middle management lingo the truth is that you can grow faster if you can deliver more because you aren’t doing all the work yourself.
This is why we are doing what we are doing – our partners look to us to take care of the time consuming, schedule inconvenient, error prone and delicate parts of managing email and cloud solutions. They look to ExchangeDefender to create accounts, move email, configure Outlook clients – all simple and trivial activities that are remarkably time consuming and take lucrative projects into barely breakeven business. If ExchangeDefender can do it for you for free, why would you want to do it yourself?
Limited Time Opportunity
SBS is dead. Microsoft has priced out the rest of it’s solution stack way out of the typical IT budget of a small or medium sized business and when you layer on the cost of management and the cost of IT talent you see why the change is so significant. Even sophisticated IT providers are looking at the onsite infrastructure as a pain point because talent to manage those devices and servers is so expensive and so difficult to replace, combined with the incessant marketing for the cloud it is a losing proposition on multiple levels.
Don’t misunderstand what we are saying – the “move to the cloud” is not something that will go on for years. Last massively deployed SBS version launched in 2008 and those servers are well out of warranty by now. Over the next 2-3 years most of those customers will make it to the cloud and past that point the “move” will no longer have a significant amount of clients to make it worth while holding 6 figure Exchange and SharePoint specialists on staff.
This is why we are doing what we are doing – providing migration and support assistance to help you get your clients to the cloud is our embrace of the marketing and the pressing need in the marketplace. At the time that everyone is demanding it. If you aren’t talking to your clients about the cloud someone else is and the time to move them is now – but should you hire people just for a short term project to get this done? We feel like we can help there as well.
Success Beyond Traditional IT
I am always asked by partners and IT folks what I would do if I were in their shoes right now. What would I focus on?
I, Vlad Mazek, would focus on building up a larger revenue stream. The more money you have coming in and the more profitable you become the more bets you can make. I don’t sit in your shoes and I don’t know which specific terrific opportunities you may have in your local region – but I know that the only way you can take advantage of them is if you have the funds to market yourself and the time (read: employees) to convert the opportunity into cash.
This is why we are doing what we are doing – our smartest and biggest partners realize that the bottom of the traditional IT is going to fall out from the profitability chain and will no longer drive value. However, if you hold on to your clients and help them with the mobile, cloud, devices and so on there is a way to sustain margins and move on up.
Tune in, join up
Download the webinar and hear us out – it’s remarkably easy to get into the cloud with ExchangeDefender and so many people are already marketing the solution to your customers that the sales and value proposition is already clear to them: They just need to know how you’re going to help them do it.
We are at the greatest point of SMB IT – you’ve never been able to build a more sophisticated IT environment for less – and many small businesses are jumping on the opportunity. This is your chance to be a part of it without having to do a lot of work, without having to hire a ton of people, without having to work weekends and most importantly: Without having to lose your clients to a third party or pricing power.
We believe that the opportunity in SMB IT has never been bigger than it is now: It should be evident by the fact that we are providing these services without any additional costs. We are literally putting our money where our mouth is: We want to reward our partners for years of loyalty and give you an advantage in the marketplace. Eventually we will start charging for the migration services as bigger and bigger projects show up but right now you have nothing to lose and lots of new business to gain. Call us and let’s get this started.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
ExchangeDefender Q1 Meeting
ExchangeDefender is off to a fantastic start and we wanted you, our clients and partners, to benefit from the developments we have under way. We’re strongest and most profitable when we work together and the opportunities we are identifying now will not be open for a very long time so tune in and hear what we’re doing in 2014:
Thursday, January 23, 2014 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/164640976
ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey are taking on new challenges in 2014, the problems businesses face with cloud and mobile services are drastically different than they were in the traditional office client-server-LAN model. As a partner-only company we want you to be on the same page and understand how we can help you grow going forward.
Webinar will be recorded and available on Thursday in our recorded webinars section of the Social tab.
Brief Agenda
Our Q1 meeting will cover the business and technical developments on Q1 and Q2 agenda. Namely, we are doubling down on what works and cutting what doesn’t. Here is the webinar schedule:
Migration Sales Conversation – Role play of MSP and CIO conversation, how to effectively position the migration service in the language that a business owner can undertand. We’ll go over how to explain the process, describe the new service, inform them of the events that will take place during the process and how the problems will be addressed.
Shockey Monkey Update – Brief discussion on the Shockey Monkey strategy and implementation of new integrations with ExchangeDefender, iPhone, Android, internationalization (new languages), wider release of the Unicorn and direct partner model for Shockey Monkey sales to any small business that could use it.
ExchangeDefender Compliance Strategy – Update about the changes to ExchangeDefender Pro and our suite of compliance, failover, backup and file sharing/sync services. We will discuss the way ExchangeDefender creates a platform for secure and compliant communications.
This will be an event for both your techies and your business staff, the opportunity we have to help our partners to get into the cloud the right way and keep the clients protected and compliant with regulatory requirements is a lucrative one – and we are putting all our resources behind you.
See ya on the webinar!
-Vlad
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, ExchangeDefender
Announcing LiveArchive 4
After extensive beta testing and taking tons of feedback on the design and future of LiveArchive, we are proud to introduce you to our newest version of ExchangeDefender LiveArchive. Available today and with all your email already loaded into the new system. What’s new?
New LiveArchive goes beyond email business continuity – it not only caches your inbound and sent mail but also keeps your contacts, calendars and appointments. It’s available anytime you need it via a secure web site, it is easily accessible from your smartphone and it even use IMAP to get to it from your email software like Outlook or Thunderbird.
Just remember to bookmark https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com
This was an enormous undertaking as a result of everything we’ve learned through the year of running the massive failover service. We’ve retired Microsoft Exchange as it simply could not scale or effectively provide the kind of service the new IT demands. When LiveArchive was conceived most business users had a central server and workstations in close proximity to it, so the biggest demand was to at least be able to access email if anything went down.
In 2014 and beyond things are a lot more complex and everything is in the cloud that never goes down, right? 
Truth is not just that the cloud is far less reliable than advertised but that there is often no centralized point of backup or control of corporate data. Some information is in Exchange, some is on your phone or your iPad, some is on another cloud file sync service and third party subscription services take care of the rest.
Our design challenge with the new LiveArchive was clear: Look beyond email and create a central point of business continuity for all corporate communications. We have built a massively scalable and redundant platform that can pull and receive information from third party services.
This is what we have delivered with LiveArchive and this is the future of ExchangeDefender as a business – providing security and backup for the cloud.
What does it look like?
With Microsoft out of the picture the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook Web Access is replaced with a scalable UI that works great in any browser you may have – which is convenient when you consider the growing variety of mobile devices and tablet/laptop platforms. Just point your browser to LiveArchive and it will find your grid as you authenticate.
During the beta testing process we recommended that our partners configure dormant profiles on their clients mobile phones so that when the downtime does happen they are just a few clicks away from setting up a full communications platform. In fact, once you switch from your native email platform to LiveArchive the experience with the mobile device is exactly the same, it’s very hard to tell the difference.
Please don’t wait for your infrastructure to crash before you look at setting up LiveArchive, partners that don’t track passwords and configurations tend to reset clients ExchangeDefender password as a first impulse reaction to an outage and then deal with another stack of problems on top of the actual outage. But we got you anyhow – our iOS and Android apps will be on the market soon and they deliver the full experience of the LiveArchive right inside of the app.
Don’t worry, you won’t even have to remember the LiveArchive address once you install the app, it’s right there on the shortcut bar:
In summary, it’s cold outside and now is the time to check this out.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x500
vlad@ExchangeDefender.com
We’ve Upgraded Exchange Essentials
Let’s face it, not all businesses need mission critical, data center redundant, year-long business continuity backing their operations. They just need an effective system to communicate and collaborate. Say hello to ExchangeDefender Exchange Essentials 2013. Here is the executive overview:
Microsoft Exchange 2013 Mailbox (10GB)
ExchangeDefender Essentials Security
5 days of business continuity (Emergency)
Private Branding + White Label
24/7 Support via portal, phone and chat
Just
$7.99$6.99 / month
This highly redundant offering is a perfect starter email solution for a company migrating from SBS or in-house server solution. True, it doesn’t have long term business continuity of LiveArchive, compliance, encryption, migration assistance or data center redundancy but if you need to manage your budget this is a great way to do it.
One more thing: For the next month we will be offering a discount of $1 that will be locked in for at least one year, so it’s yours for just $6.99 per user per month. Of course you can rebrand it and adjust the pricing to compensate you for provisioning and rollout.
But what if it goes down?
Exchange in the cloud is the same as Exchange in your office, there is no magical version and from time to time it will have issues. We have a redundant and clustered deployment so when we have to do maintenance or when there is an unexpected issue, we can shut down servers without interrupting service. But let’s say something significantly bad is going on and everything goes lights out – what now? Well, we have ExchangeDefender Emergency backing you up and giving you access to 5 days worth of email archive that you can search, view and reply/compose from. You continue to work until your Exchange mailbox is ready.
This in fact is the biggest and easiest upsell in our cloud portfolio: Once you show your users how easy it is to be able to send and receive email when there is an outage, just tell them you have another solution that also gives them access to all their contacts and appointments – along with a year worth of items available for them. Oh, and it works on your mobile device as well so you don’t have to be stuck in front of a PC with a web browser. For just $2 a month more you can have ultimate peace of mind knowing that you’ll never have to worry about your mail.
But Vlad says this is not for business? Is it?
As an expert (not meaning smart, meaning I’ve been through enough email outages to know better) I cannot in good conscience recommend a solution that I know has a potential to cause downtime. ExchangeDefender Essentials was built as a way to compromise on data center and business continuity systems in order to create a budget friendly service.
My personal opinion of the potential pitfalls is not the corporate representation of the product or everyone that works here: We support the product around the clock, we spare no expense when it comes to creating a high end product, we have built what we believe is the most effective and most powerful email solution on Exchange 2013. But if something has a potential to go down, when the rock solid one costs just $2 more, I just cannot hide my contempt for it, that’s all. Take it with a grain of salt as you do all opinions. This is just one of the differences with ExchangeDefender, we are here for our partners and our clients – not investors. We want to give you every benefit we can possibly come up with so you can win in the market and make your clients happy.
To sum it up
Enjoy. If you have any users on SBS this is a great opportunity to get them on a solid platform for $6.99 with the discount through the end of January 2014.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, ExchangeDefender
vlad@ownwebnow.com
ExchangeDefender Q4 Call Summary
Last week we held our latest partner call for the year and announced a number of solutions that you have been asking for. We have two new products that our partners have been very successful with and we’re now opening them to our entire partner base. I encourage you to download and listen to the webinar because we go over quite a bit, as we will on the blog in the coming days:
ExchangeDefender Q4 Partner Briefing
http://www.ExchangeDefender.com/media/ExchangeDefenderQ4.wmv
11:13 Exchange Essentials 2013
16:54 Exchange for Business
24:52 Exchange Defender Android & iOS
30:10 2014 For Us
34:01 2014 For You: Threats
37:37 2014 For You: Opportunities
That said, here is a brief summary:
Exchange Essentials 2013 – We are launching an affordable Exchange 2013 offering to help you compete with inferior Exchange hosting solutions. There is no pretty way to put this – some people don’t think they need data center redundancy, full ExchangeDefender, SharePoint/Lync, compliance or business continuity. We have been offering Exchange 2010 Essentials for years and now we’re adding 2013 to that portfolio at $7.99/mbox: easy, redundant clustered infrastructure, ExchangeDefender Essentials and our 24/7 support.
Exchange for Business – The exact opposite of Exchange Essentials, this is the full suite with our best failover, business continuity, business tools like Compliance Archiving & Encryption. But there is more: this is a concierge deployed service – we will migrate your clients data and their configuration if you’d like but we’ll definitely take care of setting up all the services for you and confirm everything is setup as it should be. We find it that some of the larger accounts don’t quite cross their t’s and dot their i’s so we will make sure we have someone here to manage this rollout end to end and make sure it’s deployed right. Since it’s going to save us some support costs and time we’re knocking off $1/month off what it would cost you to put these products together separately. Keep in mind that competitive solutions for archiving start at $10 by themselves so charging less than $25-35/month for this $16.99 offering would be considered a pretty big Christmas present on your part.
ExchangeDefender Mobile for Android and iPhone – And now on to something free: ExchangeDefender is coming to mobile in a big way and our iPhone and Android apps will be on your devices in time for the holiday break (depending on the Apple store approval). We are bringing quarantine access, SPAM management and previews, LiveArchive and other stuff to the app to give your clients a better handle on email. We are looking for ideas and suggestions but we already have plans to integrate LocalCloud, Compliance Archiving search and more right in the app so all of your information is always at hand. There are no plans for Blackberry or Windows Phone versions at this time due to each platform making up less than 1% of our current mobile user base.
Brief note on availability: We will be open during the last week of the year but we will be working on a skeleton crew while everyone will be in training December 30th – January 3rd. During this time most of the sales staff will only be available for an hour or two on the phone and executives might only be available after hours. It is important for us to get 2014 started right so these days of training and planning will take precedence over regular operations.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, ExchangeDefender
vlad@ownwebnow.com
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
ExchangeDefender Outlook 2013 Integration
We’re happy to announce Outlook 2013 addin for ExchangeDefender. You can download it here and you won’t have to use anything but Outlook to access your most frequently used ExchangeDefender functions such as management of SPAM quarantines, whitelists, stats and so on. The plugin will refresh the data every 30-60 minutes (or in realtime if you prompt it to do so) and it’s just that simple.
What I would like to discuss now is the future of the platform. As you may have seen on this blog, there has been a significant amount of mobile development on our Shockey Monkey platform. All of that is coming to ExchangeDefender as well this quarter.
It gets even better: Now that we have ExchangeDefender Outlook addins for Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 (in addition to our Desktop addin, our web portal) we are looking to extend these addins to incorporate additional ExchangeDefender features to the everyday Outlook experience: LiveArchive Business Continuity, Encryption, File Sharing, Compliance Archiving Search and Recovery, LocalCloud, Chat and more. By further integrating these services with your mobile and desktop (or Outlook) experience we are able to provide a more cohesive and collaborative office experience no matter where you are or which device you are using. This is a significant challenge but one that we are working on every day.
Hank Newman
VP of Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com