Essentials Launch
Please join us next Thursday, February 16th, at noon EST for the launch of ExchangeDefender Essentials suite.
Click here to register now, limited capacity:
We have blogged a lot about ExchangeDefender Essentials, E^3, Emergency and we’re officially launching it next week. This is our biggest competitive product launch so please make sure you tune in for special pricing offer that will be extended only during the webinar (you can lock it in, no purchase necessary).
Talk to you next Thursday!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x500
(407) 536-VLAD
How Buzzwords and Jargon Get in the Way of Selling Compliance Archive
ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive is a secure, long term storage, recovery and eDiscovery system that ensures compliance with regulatory requirements established by IRS, HIPAA, SOX and SEC. ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive functionality is provided free – we only charge for the cost of storage. ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive uses the latest Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server technology to archive, index and replicate messages safely and securely. All data is further encrypted and backed up offsite to ensure ultimate resiliency in case of a disaster.
Makes perfect sense, right? The problem is, when you say something like this to many small business owners, it makes them feel very uncomfortable, even if meeting a compliance requirement is really important to them. And as we all should know, uncomfortable clients tend to keep their wallets closed.
The key to selling Compliance Archive to the small business is very simple: lose the buzzwords and jargon. Think about it this way: those small business owners are experts at some line of business that is NOT technology, and are choosing both to trust in and to pay for someone else’s knowledge and expertise in their chosen line of business, which IS technology.
Certainly, small business clients usually need some education, particularly during the sales process. That’s a part of your job as the technology expert, too. Rather than deliver your message in jargon and acronym-laden tech and compliance speak, though, the better way to win is to highlight the benefits of compliance email archiving beyond just actual compliance itself. It’s as if we are losing something by leaving our clients to “translate” for themselves, and it makes it harder to sell compliance archiving services.
It turns out that may be exactly what it is. We’ve learned from our partners that small business clients rarely care about all the regulatory compliance acronyms and regulation language or details – they just want the peace of mind of knowing they meet the requirements. Business decision makers also don’t like the idea of paying for “regulatory compliance,” but they love the idea of being able to find any email they sent or received over the past 10 years without having to buy extra servers, more software or deal with cumbersome MS Outlook. Even better, most everyone understands and is comfortable with a flat per-user storage fee (just $3.99 per month) that isn’t dependent on any measured unit of storage.
When you address the real problems and speak in a language of true benefits that people want, you’ll find there are far fewer objections over price and questions about features they don’t understand, and that deals close more quickly and more smoothly.
Do you find this information useful?
If you’d like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it affects you and your clients, visit Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB, conduct live webcasts and podcasts with industry leaders, and more.
Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777
Core Stability & API Extensions
These past few weeks the development team has been focused on improving internal core processes across our Shockey Monkey and ExchangeDefender products. The goal was to encompass all of the changes and issues reported throughout last year and implement solutions going forward. We’ve also been working on developing the foundation for many exciting additions that will premiere at various times throughout this year!
One of the core implementations that happened last week was a revision to our Hosted Exchange account automation software. This component is responsible for handling the ordering process for Hosted Exchange, Public Folders, Distribution Groups, and External Contacts. What this translates into is a “faster & more accurate” ordering process for our partners and their clients. We’ve also implemented a more intelligent logging system that will allow us troubleshoot and possibly script automatic corrections when an issue does occur within our software.
We’ve also been making several additions to the public API as we speak with more and more partners who are interested in having a viable integration into our software. We recently added the ability to limit results based on a ‘lastupdate’ timestamp and implemented several invoice methods to retrieve information from the accounting module. We are still working on and exploring the possibilities of enhancing the current Restful API and implementing a SOAP counterpart.
So in summary, we have finished our January goals and have completed the majority of the core framework for our future projects. I can’t discuss these projects yet, but once they get closer to release I will provide a technical overview of how they work and what to expect when using these applications.
Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com
How Customers and Communication Has Changed Marketing
As the world gets more and more socially in tune and connected, it is vital for marketing to change in order to effectively reach those social networks. As I explained in my last blog post, the traditional 4 P’s of marketing are essential to effectively market your products and services. That is still true; however, there is also a new theory or approach of marketing that has been outlined by a few sources as the new wave of marketing. This change is due mainly to the way that the world communicates and the way that the world engages in doing business has changed.
The strategy of the 4 P’s of marketing has been in use and referred to since the early 1960’s. Obviously, a lot has changed in the business world since that time. Marketers and businesses set the stage and controlled the markets as a whole. There were not a lot of differences or features associated with products and services. Nowadays, the marketing world is completely different!!! Now, the client/customer is in control, most markets have separated or fragmented into multiple ones making it harder to reach groups. Also, there are so many alternatives, choices, and competition when it comes to products and services. Social media and the way that people communicate have been major players in the change of how successful marketing is done.
As with anything, especially in business, as trends change, you must adapt if you want to stay ahead of the curve and be successful with your business. To apply that way of thinking into marketing, here is a new idea for a fresh marketing framework, replace the 4 P’s with the 4 E’s: 
Product > Experience
Place > Everywhere
Price > Exchange
Promotion > Excitement
Product > Experience
In the old model, the first “P” was “Product”, which is about highlighting a single product or service. Now, products change constantly, features are added, the design changes, etc. By switching the first element to an E for Experience, you can stop focusing on just the product and start thinking about the overall experience for your target market. A great way to start doing this is to discover the process that a customer goes through when looking for something to purchase. To help to pinpoint your customer’s experience with your product or service, start asking yourself questions: How do customers shop for their products and services?, When do purchases occur?, Who or what influences buying decisions?, What happens after something is purchased?, Do they buy again? If you aren’t asking yourself these types of questions it will be hard to understand the customer experience, thus being able to better market your offerings to them. This is important because when you focus your marketing efforts to revolve around the experience rather than just the product you can really tap into what is most important for your customers.
Place > Everywhere
In the old model, the second “P” was “Place”, but now it is not about bringing customers to a certain place it is about being where the customers are. Start by switching the second element to “Everywhere”, because everywhere your clients are, you can be! Now to grab attention you don’t have to interrupt and pester, you have to intercept and capture consumers in their time and meeting them on their terms. A great way to take advantage of this is to advertise and market where your clients are. Use social media; take advantage of Facebook and Twitter, etc. Social media is a great avenue to announce changes, promotions, offers, etc., because customers don’t have to search for things, it is brought to their attention while they are engaging in their normal everyday habits; thus, making the process easier for them, and also making buying decisions easier for them.
Price > Exchange
In the old model, the third “P” was for “Price”. Literally meaning, we provide you a product and you give us money to pay for the product, period. By switching the third element to “Exchange”, you can highlight the value of the product. In this part of the equation you should ask yourself: What is my client paying for?, What does my client want in our products or services?, What are we willing to offer them? These questions will help you to determine the exchange that will happen when something is purchased. There will not only be a monetary exchange, but also an exchange of value. You will provide value to your clients because your products and services give them a solution to their problems or needs.
Promotion > Excitement
In the old model the fourth “P” was for “Promotion”. With the new model, in essence, it hasn’t changed because there will always be a promotion or offering with marketing, however, now that focus has shifted to the “Excitement” that surrounds the promotion. The key ingredient to reach people is to target what matters to them, hitting on emotions, needs, etc. When you can generate energy and passion in what you are selling to your market, excitement is born. When there is excitement about a product or service people talk about it! This is where the new wave of communication takes over. Coupled together, word-of-mouth and social networking take that excitement and create a buzz about your products and services.
How is ExchangeDefender Utilizing the New 4 E’s of Marketing?
Experience: We understand the “Customer Experience” in working with ExchangeDefender. We want to make the experience great for our partners and very simple. We make all of our solutions very user-friendly and easy to use. We provide training materials, whitepapers, support documentation, videos, and marketing collateral to make it easy and beneficial to have a partnership with us.
Everywhere: We go where our market is! We attend and sponsor the same tradeshows and conferences that our partners and target markets attend. We know that you are looking for solutions and partners that will help you to more effectively service your clients and offer them valuable products and services that will help to better run your businesses. We also stay plugged in with social networking, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and post blogs to keep you updated on what we are doing and how we can help you be successful.
Exchange: With all of our offerings there is a lot more than just an exchange of money for services. We offer our partners value! All of our offerings are all-inclusive – we don’t nickel and dime for advanced features. We believe in an all-you-can-eat strategy, which in turn provides value for you. We also provide free support, training, and best practices to our partners.
Excitement: We provide excitement with our products and services by catering to what the channel and our partners are looking for. We listen to word-of-mouth, social networking hype, and the needs of our partners and strive to fulfill those needs with our solutions. Also, we create excitement around our company because we are very passionate about our offerings and our partners and truly believe that we provide great solutions to our partner base.
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency
Last quarter we launched a slimmed down version of ExchangeDefender to be packaged with Exchange Essentials 2010 and as a standalone product. This product was launched to provide a similar price point and feature set as some less robust Spam & Security solutions out in the channel. However, we were never comfortable with not offering a bundled-in business continuity solution. Enter… ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency.
Emergency is the business continuity solution that is now bundled in with ExchangeDefender Essentials. It will capture a copy of all incoming email in similar fashion, but only inbound mail with a retention policy of 5 days for all items. This email is accessible via web portal and POP3/IMAP4 (although currently we are limiting the ability on the POP/IMAP to just download messages (to avoid open relay situations). So your clients will be able to continue to do business with the ability to receive, reply to, and create new emails from their real email address during an outage. Remember, that our 7 day spooling/mail bagging system is still in place so a combination of the two should minimize your client’s inconvenience.
The web portal is available at:
https://emergency.exchangedefender.com
Credentials:
Your primary user email address with ExchangeDefender (you cannot log in with an alias address) and your current ExchangeDefender password.
Once you log in all of your email will be available, with your identity pre-configured for use. There is no additional set up required. You can start reading and firing off emails as quickly as you can type.
Setting up Outlook (remember Read/DL message access only currently)
Fill out the information as below:
Your email address and user name are the same as your primary address in ExchangeDefender. The POP3/IMAP4 server is emergency.exchangedefender.com. Everything is on the standard ports for both SSL and non.
Our CEO, Vlad Mazek, will be providing a broader overview on emergency and its feature set when we officially roll it out in the next 2 weeks.
Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737
XDSYNC V2–A Technical Overview
This week we have been going through the final stages of our XDSYNC v2.0 deployment. Everything has performed great and has been operating as intended inside of our test environments. We are still on schedule and should have this published later today. There are a few key points I would like to cover before we release this new distribution for download.
How does XDSYNC work?
XDSYNC works by establishing a connection to our servers and running a series of checks against the provided domain information. You authenticate by providing the primary Domain and Password for the accounts. The software will then translate this and examine all sub domains for the population process.
The sync process is unidirectional and will pull the existing structure from your Exchange Server. It will then take that structure and mirror it inside of ExchangeDefender. This is important to pay close attention to and understand! Once you enable XDSYNC, you should do ALL of your account creations on the Exchange Server. You should no longer manually create accounts inside of ExchangeDefender.
The sync process allows you to pull all mail addresses associated with (Mailboxes, Distribution Groups and Public Folders). When we pull in addresses from (Public Folders & Distribution Groups), we flag these addresses on the backend as being non-mail accounts. This allows us to exclude these addresses from the billing cycle and also limit certain functionality due to these being non-mailbox accounts.
What about the Password Sync Component?
I mentioned this briefly in my last blog post and essentially everything is the same. Starting today any user account that has the password changed, it will be flagged in the back-end. If enabled XDSYNC will pick up these requests and reset the user’s password on the active directory level.
That is the basic logic of how XDSYNC operates and what you should expect if you choose to install this application. If used correctly, it will make your IT management life a lot easier and help reduce the mundane tasks of adding users to both systems. It will also enable your clients to have control of their password management, while you maintain the higher level management of the servers.
Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com
Exchange Identity Switcher
One of the most common questions that our support team receives with Hosted Exchange is “How can my client choose which email address I want to send as?” and many partners are shocked to hear the answer “You can’t”.
The above limitation has always existed in Exchange as you can only have one “outgoing” address. Sure, you can create another profile in Outlook and send via SMTP or create a distribution group and add send-as rights..but what do you do if you’re on hosted exchange and you don’t have the freedom to control addresses and configurations at will or find it rather rudimentary?
*Drum roll*
Now you can…
For the first time (as far as I can tell for any hosting provider) partners/clients will have the ability to control their outgoing address in our Hosted Exchange.
Utilizing our API and a brand new API designed by the ExchangeDefender team for direct client Exchange interaction we now can extend the ability for clients to control their outgoing address on the fly.
The current beta product is a windows based application and will soon be converted to an Outlook 2010 plugin.
If you or your clients are interested in test driving this software please reach out to me directly: travis@ownwebnow.com.
Note: This only applies to rockerduck.
Travis Sheldon
VP, Network Operations, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x757
travis@ownwebnow.com
Encrypted Attachment Issues
Over the past couple of weeks we have been researching some reports regarding encryption not handling attachments correctly. During the process, the error that kept printing on the back end processing was ““Content-Type: application/ms-tnef; name=”winmail.dat” Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64””. If Outlook sends a message using the RTF format (which is not very common outside Outlook) for bold text and other text enhancements, it includes the formatting commands in the winmail.dat file. Receiving email clients that do not understand the code therein display it as a stale attachment. To make matters worse, Outlook may also pack other, regular file attachments in the winmail.dat file. That’s the bad news, the good news is that fix is a piece of cake.
In Outlook 2010 you go through File, then Options and check the box below:
In Outlook 2007 you go through Tools, then Options:
1. Go to the Mail Format tab.
2. Under Compose in this message format:, make sure either HTML or Plain Text is selected.
3. Click Internet Format.
4. Make sure either Convert to Plain Text format or Convert to HTML format is selected under When sending Outlook Rich Text messages to Internet recipients, use this format:
5. Ok to submit.
Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737
Business Continuity and ExchangeDefender
It’s winter! And winter is a GREAT time to talk about business continuity with your clients. For most of us, in the continental US at least, the winter months bring the highest likelihood of weather-related business disruptions. Where I live, we spend about a quarter of the year under the constant threat of snow storms that will cripple transportation and make it impossible for anyone to travel anywhere safely.
Business continuity is the ability of an organization to continue to function after some kind of event that could hinder its operation. These events need not be those highly unlikely natural disasters, or terrorist attacks, or national emergencies. Events that affect business’ ability to operate can be seen every day—snow storms, simple hardware failure, network security breach, power outage…the things that can get in the way of a business that depends on IT are many and one needn’t far to find them.
Business continuity is all about planning how to keep the business up and running in the face of any of those things that can try to slow or halt operations.
Frankly, business continuity planning can be an intense and complex process, but it’s worth undertaking because there’s no way to short cut the kind of risk assessments and SWOT analysis that you’ll need to make the appropriate decisions for protecting the business. It can also be relatively simple in many cases, particularly for smaller businesses. There’s not enough space in this blog for a full discussion of the business continuity planning process with clients, though it’s important to note that we have a wealth of resources available to our partners that deliver in-depth explanations and step by step instructions, available at www.exchangedefender.com/XDUniversity.php .
In a world where so much communication happens digitally, and our dependence continues to grow, delivering continual access to messaging can be one of the most important elements of business continuity planning. A particularly powerful and unique tool that accomplishes this within the Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 solution from ExchangeDefender is LiveArchive.
Using ExchangeDefender’s secure standby servers, up to a year’s worth of inbound and outbound email is available and actionable through Outlook Web Access at all times. Neither you nor your client has to actively manage this service in any way – the LiveArchive service is always on to ensure that no matter what, whether the power goes out in the office or the office team gets snowed in or anything else, users will always be able to access critical email and stay productive.
Do you find this information useful?
If you’d like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it affects you and your clients, visit Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB, conduct live webcasts and podcasts with industry leaders, and more.
Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777
Utilizing the 4 P’s of Marketing in your Business
If you want to develop a sound and successful marketing plan for your business or simply just want to perfect your strategy, you must first start at the beginning.
A marketing campaign to draw in clients starts with a full understanding of what your company has to offer and how all of your products and services can help your target market. In other words, you are marketing not only your services and products to prospective clients but also your company as a whole.
Marketing is loosely defined as “The performance of business activities that directly impact the flow of goods and services from the producer to the consumer or user.” This seems like it should be a simple task yet there is so much “clutter” in the world that makes marketing your products and services, at times, difficult. I have written previously in another post about the importance of marketing your services as a solution to a problem or need that your clients currently have. A great way to really narrow in on this is to analyze your marketing efforts and outline your company’s 4 P’s. For those not familiar with the marketing phrase “The 4 P’s” or “The Marketing Mix” it stands for: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion.
To explain how this strategy can be implemented I will use us, ExchangeDefender, as an example. In other words, to develop a successful service offerings marketing plan, there must be a product or service (Product = ExchangeDefender) available to the consumer at a place (Place = Available online through our Partner Portal) for an acceptable and outstanding price (Price = Partner pricing available in the Partner Guide) with proper promotion (Promotion = advertisement in various forms: Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Newsletters, Websites, Promotions and offers) so the consumer is aware of the product (ExchangeDefender) and its advantages.
The actual task of marketing your services is getting out in the market place. Since there are many offerings of all types, sizes, and benefits from your competition, it quickly becomes evident that success is unlikely without some planning and actual implementation of the 4 P’s. Without a plan, the service or product that you are trying to promote stands little chance of successfully marketing its benefits and solutions to your target market. By using variations of these four components you have the ability to reach multiple consumers within your target market.
In addition to that, creating a successful marketing mix that will increase results often takes experimenting with what “works” with your target market. The key is to not always depend on “one” mix, but you should explore other avenues and also use different mixes with depending on what a client needs. The combination and coordination of these elements will be more effective than depending on just one. It is important that you coordinate all elements so that the prospective consumer is not being sent mixed messages that can cause confusion – Make things simple! When things are simple, the buying decision is much easier for the client to make.
In summary, be sure that you cater to a niche market and that your product is geared towards the need of that market. Be sure that your price is within the budget of that market, and that you are distributing your product or service where it will be seen by that market and be easily accessible and attainable. Lastly, steer your promotion to solve the problems that clients are experiencing.
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com