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
Shockey Monkey – Service Manager Updates
This week has been focused towards the cleanup and redesign of the Service Manager. It’s a very large module built inside of Shockey Monkey and required a lot of special attention to assure the new code did not interfere with any existing interface mechanics. Everything has gone very smoothly and today we will be finishing the last few sections, before publishing the changes to the remote portals. With the new publish, everything should look a lot cleaner and loading times have been reduced dramatically.
Next week we have a few focus points that have been requests for quite a while. First on the list will be SLA management. We have been notified of several issues with the current SLA system and will be working towards resolving those problems. Next, as several of you have noticed the “Projects” section has not been updated to match the look and feel of Shockey Monkey v2.0 yet. We also have several back-end enhancements we will be implementing into the code base over the course of the week.
We’ve delayed the updates to these sections on purpose. We didn’t want to simply re-theme these areas, but transform them into something more powerful! We originally designed these sections a few years back and the scope of implementation was limited. Now that we integrate with several platforms and have a more advanced understanding of how everything works and plays together, we hope to make these sections something amazing!
Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com
Rockerduck: What Will My Client See During an Outage?
In my previous blog entry I overviewed the failover procedure for Rockerduck and what ‘technically’ goes on in the background during a failover. This blog entry will focus more on the client experience during and after an outage.
Imagine that Jim and Kelly are both a part of “ABC Company LLC”. Jim is very hip with his new Apple laptop using Office 2011 and his iPhone 4s. Kelly still uses Windows along with Outlook 2007 and when she is out of the office she uses her Blackberry Torch connected through Blackberry Enterprise Server.
Currently, everything is working properly and all systems are operational.
If MBOX2 was to go offline, MBOX1 would take over actively hosting DB2 (Which was hosted by MBOX2). This type of failure is an inter-site failure and results in an immediate switch to the passive copies. Customers will see no downtime as long as there is a good copy of the database available.
What happens if Dallas goes offline?
As described in my previous blog entry, disastrous failures are not automatically failed over. At this point, both clients would be offline from their mailbox and unable to access, create or modify items.
However, in following my previous blog entry we would be able to activate our fail over procedure.
After 15 minutes of electing to activate our fail over procedure clients should receive the update DNS records for cas.rockerduck.exchangedefender.com to point to Los Angeles. All clients would then be able to reconnect to their mailboxes and service should resume as normal out of Los Angeles with the exception of Blackberry Enterprise Server which cannot be setup for fault tolerance in our network design.
After repairing/resolving any issues in Dallas, we would then begin to resynchronize the databases from Los Angeles to Dallas. Once all database copies are up to date we would then reconfigure DNS to point to Dallas and resume service as normal. All in all with a disastrous failure we would be able to recover from the event in 15 minutes once the recovery process is executed.
Travis Sheldon
VP, Network Operations, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x757
travis@ownwebnow.com
Marketing is All About Planning!
Here is a quick Marketing tip about the importance of planning! The objective of great marketing is creating something today that will bring you success in the future. The key to that is good PLANNING!
Marketing is the glitz and glamour and creative side of business, right? Most of the time, yes, but other times it is what sets a company up for future success or failure. Let me give you an example, let’s say that there is a new book written about how to use current Social networking sites: Facebook , Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. The marketing campaign for the new book could have been amazing, book signings, billboards, commercials, you name it… However, with the public becoming more and more technically savvy, social networking sites and communities are changing almost daily. Once a book is written and published it is stagnant. The information contained within its’ covers is in the past and cannot be updated. Therefore, the sales of a book like this will likely be terrible. No one wants to read something that will no longer be true next week.
Take this lesson of poor planning and put it into your business. Business owners that don’t plan ahead are constantly playing catch-up with their competitors that are better prepared and proactive. Stop that from happening to you. You can be the leader!
Devote some valuable time really planning ahead exactly what you want your business to look like and the message that you send out to your prospective clients. Set aside some time to plan out what you want to achieve, sales goals, new products or services, etc., and build marketing campaigns around those goals and you will see that you are much more efficient and proactive. Goals set guidelines and guidelines provide structure. It is so much easier to be organized and stay on point when structure is in place. However, leave some room for creativity!!! Don’t just plan for next week or next month, but strive to look on a grander scale to a year and beyond.
Remember, success is about setting goals and having a plan and strategy to get there! Good luck!
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
ExchangeDefender Essentials with LiveArchive?
Most of our partners are very familiar with our LiveArchive product which is the core of our offering:
LiveArchive is an enterprise-grade business continuity platform that lets you resume work right where you left off if the Internet connection was interrupted or other technical glitches got in the way of getting things done. Powered by Microsoft Exchange 2010 in multiple data centers, LiveArchive delivers a robust and redundant solution that is secure, reliable and free! The best part of all is that LiveArchive is always on, constantly archiving your sent and received mail, so there is no maintenance or management to worry about in case of an outage.
LiveArchive is of course powered by Microsoft Exchange 2010 and has a fully redundant infrastructure spread across two different data centers for ultimate reliability. It also holds a year worth of email, making it… extremely expensive.
ExchangeDefender Essentials
ExchangeDefender Essentials was built with almost the exact opposite goal from ExchangeDefender. It was designed to be affordable, to be a core of what every business needed to protect, secure email and assure business continuity. To make it affordable, ExchangeDefender Essentials does not come with LiveArchive. Or Encryption. Or Web File Sharing. Or Web Filtering.
Of all those awesome components that should be a basic requirement of any Exchange deployment, LiveArchive is the most valuable one but the reality of small business is that budgets are tight and sometimes you have to make a sacrifice.
It explains why ExchangeDefender Essentials has been one of our best selling products in 2011.
ExchangeDefender Essentials Changes
Earlier this fall we announced that we intend to turn ExchangeDefender Essentials into a market leader.
We will do so with a massive cut to the price.
Why? Because the antispam world has standardized it’s basic offerings around $1/month and we can do much better than that.
But is price enough to make the switch? We didn’t think so.
So we built an affordable business continuity product for ExchangeDefender Essentials.
I would like to invite you to participate in the beta of this new product. If you currently have a client on ExchangeDefender Essentials please email vlad.beta@exchangedefender.com and provide the domain name that is currently running on ExchangeDefender Essentials. We’ll enable the new archiving product for them.
ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency – e^3
We’re currently calling this product ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency or E^3 (e-cubed).
The idea is, once your mail server or your access to email is interrupted, you can continue to work elsewhere – through the emergency system! (We realize it’s corny, it’s the best we could come up with on a short notice, if you’ve got a better name let us know). Here are some specs:
– Access to past 5 days of email (goal 14)
– Secure Web and IMAP access
– Access to all inbound mail
– Ability to send mail via Web
– Powered by Linux
– Mobile access… nothing to install or configure, works automatically via MX replication even while your server is down (unlike snapshot server agents or WebDav/API connections) so it works on Exchange, GroupWise, Google Apps, BPOS, anything you can modify the MX record for.
Initially we will offer this product with five (5) days of mail and hopefully increase to two weeks (14 days) over time.
We realize that the major objection is that the product is not based on Microsoft Exchange 2010, that it doesn’t have data center redundancy, that it’s not available for a year, etc – all of which are fair arguments – but they hold true as criticisms of all of our competitors. Most of which will not include this feature free of charge.
We will.
We also believe this is something that will make our partners far more competitive in the marketplace and finally give many of you a good reason to move from our competitors to us or give something to those more budget conscious clients.
We look forward to having another great year and hope this gets you fired up about 2012. If you’d like the details about the price cut coming to all ExchangeDefender Essentials clients please feel free to ping me privately (NDA required; in a nutshell: You’re going to love it)
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Shockey Monkey–Accounting Module
This past week the main focus on the development side was to bring the accounting module up to standards with the new version of Shockey Monkey. This was no easy task and required a lot of code revisions and new implementation methods. In total: 20,000 lines of code had to be “reviewed” and modifications/additions made where found necessary.
The first thing you will notice is that the GUI has been brought up to standards to match the current look, feel and flow of the 2.0 design. The next things that we addressed were outstanding bugs within the system and new bugs that were created as a result of the upgrade. I won’t go into details here, but you can read about the bugs that we fixed here. Finally the last thing many of you will notice is the ability to set your “currency” within the Shockey Monkey Portal.
You can modify the currency displayed inside your portal on a Global level by going into your branding settings. Here you will notice a new section called “Regional Settings”.
Next week our continued focus will be on improvements to the core and Service Manager enhancements, while we continue to fix bug reported by our Partners within the scope of Shockey Monkey.
Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com