Shockey Monkey Reloaded
This week the development team has been focused on cleaning up Shockey Monkey. This process is mainly composed of three focused categories (UI, Performance, and Bug/Warning Fixes). I would say this has been the largest update to Shockey Monkey since it was originally created over seven years ago. This update should also help lay the framework for any future additions or tweaks.
User Interface
– We’ve applied a consistent look and feel across the entire portal.
– Implemented a themed backend that allows quick and easy branding.
– Improved cross browser support
Performance
– Improved loading performance across the portal.
– Minified most of the JavaScript files to reduce fetch & loading times.
– Implemented more session variables to reduce the amount of queries.
Bug Fixes
– Decreased Disk IO access by resolving more than 1000+ warnings that were constantly being written to a local log file.
– We’ve fixed a handful of bug over the past few weeks and have been continuing to resolve these issues as we enhance the portal.
– If you have a bug, submit it here: https://support.ownwebnow.com/create.asp?item=development
Performance is being improved in several ways across the Shockey Monkey portals. The first thing we did was minified thousands and thousands of lines of JavaScript. The compression ratio on average across all of our scripts was about 65%, which is very good. We’ve also been fixing trivial “warning” messages as we progress through the code. By resolving these warning messages that are generated on the back end, it reducing the amount of disk IO that is required to store this information. Typically this is not a big deal, but multiply that by 1000’s of warning and you get some nasty seek times.
If we go a little bit into the cleanup of the User Interface, it was a project that was mainly focused on consistency. We are also making sure that the look and feel between browser types is very similar. There are also a few special features of the new UI that will really help bring the User experience to a new level. One of these features is the ability to view any page in “Full Screen” mode. What this does is remove the top and side menus from the portal. This allows you to manage any page without the annoyance of having to resize or scroll to achieve simple tasks.
We have a lot more information and a ton more features that we are saving for the unveiling. If you would like to be a part of the Shockey Monkey Reloaded webinar on Thursday, December 1, 2011 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST, visit the following link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/812869640.
Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com
Dual Decryption Core Technology
Last week we have made a lot of improvements across several of our products. Monday & Tuesday were bug squashing days, we went through the bugs that have been submitted via https://support.ownwebnow.com/create.asp?item=development and resolved most of the outstanding issues. Remember, if you have an important bug make sure you submit it to our development queue. The rest of the week was spent implementing our new message decryption engine across several of our platforms.
One of the most common and repeating issues was in regards to rendering issues with messages viewed at https://encryption.exchangedefender.com and SPAM previews through ExchangeDefender. While most messages would render without any problems, there were still those handful of clients who had issues with some messages. Typically this was caused by the use of different 3rd party e-mail clients that would use an unexpected RFC type or submit the data using a weird/foreign content-encoding type. This is even more prevalent in SPAM previews, because most of the time those messages are garbled or gibberish! So that makes the decryption process even more challenging!
So these last few months, we’ve been examining a new core technology to decrypt these messages and help bring more legible content to our users and their clients. With this new decryption core it handles most MIME types flawlessly and adheres to most RFC standards for messages. We ran it through several test cases where previously: “the messages was unpleasant to read” and it converted them to “a perfect rendered instant of the original message”. However, there are still the few instances where our old engine is better than the new decryption core.
That’s why we’ve implemented dual decryption core technology. This is a custom implementation that will programmatically decide which engine is best to use on a per message basis. First, it examines the message and tries to load it with the new decryption engine, while it decodes the message it makes note of any issues that have occurred upon the decryption process. If there was an issue, it will run the message through the second decryption engine and compare the results, then render the best instance of that message.
You’re going to see a lot of rapid development over the following months here at ExchangeDefender. Like I discussed in previous posts, we’ve starting to implement SOAP across several platforms and it’s really taking hold. The Compliance Archive enhancements, Decryption Engine enhancement and even planned Shockey Monkey Dynamic Callback Mechanism have all been made possible by the use of SOAP that we’ve implemented here at ExchangeDefender over the past several months.
Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com
ExchangeDefender LoadBalancer
On a random basis, one of the most pressing issues faced by our customers was mail delivery delays. These random delays happen to only about 12% of the nodes, however, due to the sheer volume of mail processed by our inbound network that 12% would inevitably cause our staff and customers quite an inconvenience.
As more and more companies begin to depend on email for the main source of communication for their business, mail delivery time becomes a major factor when partnering with a hosting vendor. Because of the critical need for instant delivery, we had to quickly overcome our growth and produce an immediate solution.
The Unforeseen Weakness in Round Robin
After the ATS power outage earlier this quarter we were forced to reevaluate or solutions across the board and make drastic improvements. One of the areas that desperately needed a redesign was our inbound mail load balancer.
In the early days of ExchangeDefender we utilized a round robin based load balancer. In short how it works is the MX records for ExchangeDefender clients are pointed to both our Dallas datacenter and our Los Angeles data center. After the SMTP connection hit either data center, the connection was then forwarded off to any random inbound node in the virtual server list.
Until earlier this year, the round robin design worked quite well, however, as the number of messages being processed grew, so did the delivery delays. We started to notice that the load balancer that was able to previously balance the connections was no longer balancing at all. Day after day, we saw some inbound servers having upwards of 200 concurrent connections at a time. More than half of the other inbound nodes in the respective data center had no connections at all.
The biggest issue preventing the round robin configuration from working was the randomized assignment of which data center would be used and which inbound server that would receive the connection. To begin to tackle the issue, we had to re-evaluate the entire load balancing solution because you can never properly balance a round robin based connection. We switched our load balancers to use a weighted least connection based routing scheme. Upon activation it seemed to balance connections a bit better than the round robin connection. Nearly an hour after activation however, we saw a large queue size being placed on a few inbound nodes.
Brand New Logic
To completely resolve the issue, we had to introduce additional logic to the load balancer. The recurring issue we faced was the basic nature of SMTP. An SMTP connection for one “message” being transmitted could equal four concurrent open connections. Therefore, naturally, the connection count cannot be relied upon for load balancing. We then decided to leverage our queue reporting service which reports the number of queued messages and open conversations with unique IPs. Finally, we created a PHP script that runs on the load balancer and splits itself to check the connection counts across all nodes every 10 seconds. We used a very simplistic formula for load balancing:
If(($numActiveServersInSite >= ($numServersInSite / 2)) && ($nodeConnections >= ($nodeAverageConnectionCount + 50)) && ($nodeConnections <= $highThreshold)){Shutoff new connections}
In non-code terms, we now calculate the number of servers in each site (DC). If there are more than half of the servers offline in a site, the load balancer will no longer shut off new node connections. If the current node connection count is either greater than the high threshold or has 50 active connections above the average connection count of servers in the site then it will shut off the node.
The End Result
After implementing the new load balancer algorithm we saw drastic improvements of balanced connections and delivery times for inbound messages. The most notable improvement took place on September 10th where we processed 2.8 million messages and we saw minuscule delays across the board and received zero complaints about deliver delays.
Travis Sheldon
VP Network Operations, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x757
travis@ownwebnow.com
ExchangeDefender Enhances Dynamic HTML Content Filtering and more…
This week I’ll be recapping some issues that may have affected multiple clients in the past week within the ExchangeDefender realm of our portfolio. Before I get to those items, I’d like to take this time to thank some of our partners who were extremely helpful and truly honor up to the title of partner. A couple of these issues required client side testing that we would not be able to emulate as they involved third party transactions and notifications.
The first multi-client issue we resolved last week was a content filtering issue. We received a couple of reports that ticket updates from one of the major PSA vendors were getting pretty mangled by our filtering, we had a couple of partners step up with excellent samples in .msg format, that allowed me to dive into the message content and header information to track down what portion of our filter was causing the issue.
Basically, as technology continues to grow and migrate more towards email as the primary method of communication, email content itself is becoming more rich and interactive. In the past, emails with form tags and rich html were often phishing scams, but in this case it was a significant amount of mail flow from a reputable source to probably a large portion of our client base. In order, to resolve the issue we basically turned the filtering dynamic from a flat (almost boolean) logic to a very dynamic, multi-level, per domain/ip policies. Thankfully, one of our partners was able to provide documentation from their PSA vendor that provided whitelisting guidelines. Once we received that, we were able to move forward, and make a portion of filtering that has been pretty rigid in the past into something more dynamic and flexible to reflect current email content. Please see the basic layout of the new web tag workflow:
The second issue we tackled involved our Encryption service’s feature that allows folks to reply to an encrypted message directly from the portal in an encrypted manner. Currently, on our primary smart host we use a very strict anti-spoofing measure that does not allow folks to relay as “from” a wide variety of free mail services. We had to put this measure in place to improve overall mail reputation and we’ve seen marvelous results so those changes will always remain in place. However, we hit a road block when someone from one of these free mail services attempted to relay an encrypted message because our anti-spoofing measures would not accept the messages in their current format.
The solution lied in having PHP use an alternate route to deliver messages generated by this script only, without altering the SMTP configuration. So after digging through pages and pages of configuration notes for the mail() function in php, I kept finding that you can pass “other parameters” to your SMTP process within the command. However, I only found folks had successfully used it in the past to rewrite the “from:” address, which we were already doing successfully.
Apparently what folks failed to mention is that what the “additional parameter” is doing is just appending your arguments at the end of the SMTP command defined in your php.ini file. Once you reach that point, you basically can run a different SMTP configuration for any script on demand instead of just blindly relying on whatever smarthost the server is running. To make the rest of this story short, folks using free mail services can now reply to Encryption messages within the portal without any issues.
Here are some tips:
1. Before submitting and subsequently waiting on a ticket, please take a look at the Knowledge Base inside of the portal. We’ve recently consolidated a large amount of information from our previous help blogs to make sure everything we’ve made available, can be viewed in one location. We’ll be taking a look at outdated items over the next week to make this a very valuable resource.
2. Rely on the portal. https://support.ownwebnow.com is where we are available 24/7. Remember there’s no such thing as too much information, but there is such a thing as not enough information. To avoid back and forth interactions, always error on the side of too much information it will always save you time.
Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737
ExchangeDefender Redundancy: Technical Implementation Details
In August our core data center in Dallas Texas suffered its worst outage in the past 8 years after an ATS power failure. Since the power outage was due to the ATS, backup power was not able to be routed to the redundant feeds to all our servers and as a result critical services were knocked offline. ExchangeDefender’s core focus is on-time clean mail delivery, and inbound mail delivery speed was impacted but was still available and processing mail for all customers. One of the most beneficial features of ExchangeDefender is LiveArchive which acts as a continuity solution for ExchangeDefender clients by keeping an additional copy of all client inbound and outbound mail. During the outage, LiveArchive was knocked completely offline for the first time since release. The full scale outage of LiveArchive prevented clients on Hosted Exchange and ExchangeDefender from being able to reach their continuity solution, creating lots of issues for partners and their clients. The outage caused us to reevaluate the redundancy in our solutions across the board starting with additional ExchangeDefender nodes and implementation of LiveArchive in our Los Angeles Data Center.
Today, I would like to update you on what we’ve done and announce the immediate availability of the new solution that will work even if one of our data centers is offline completely for an extended period of time.
Complexity & Size Problems
The biggest complexity of the additional LiveArchive network was accepting mail between multiple datacenters and routing it to the nearest network, and finally synchronizing the mail between with remote networks. Due to amount of mail processed by ExchangeDefender on a daily basis, we were prevented from using the built in redundancy in Exchange 2010 like Database Availability Groups and Microsoft software load balancers for OWA and SMTP.
On average our Dallas LiveArchive network processes and stores over 115 million messages a day. By adding redundant LiveArchive networks we will automatically double our message processing count on our Exchange transport servers due to synchronization between networks. The additional overhead would also create immense load on our network if we utilized Database Availability Groups as our Dallas network is already storing over 382 TB of data. The notion of having a desynchronized network or increasing LiveArchive mail delivery time was not a viable solution as LiveArchive would then fail as a continuity solution.
The Solution
To overcome the obstacles and limitations we faced, we started to develop custom solutions to tie in with our LiveArchive networks and redesigned our network layout and made minor changes to the LiveArchive storage length in Los Angeles to one month.
The first issue to tackle was the Active Directory layout as we could not tie Active Directory into our already established and quite frankly rock solid Dallas Active Directory network. In the event of another catastrophic failure in Dallas the inability to contact the primary Active Directory network would render the Los Angeles copy useless unless we create them as unique sites. Although this was possible, we felt with the power of our automation between ExchangeDefender and LiveArchive was better suited for the job as the above solution would cause too many changes to occur during a failure, including many DNS changes. We decided to have unique Active Directory domains between sites and we hooked user account creations for Los Angeles into our ExchangeDefender provisioning.
The second issue was mail delivery design between sites. The original design of LiveArchive mail routing would cause the LiveArchive copy of inbound mail to always be routed to Dallas for delivery to LiveArchive. The Achilles heel of the design was always in mail that was delivered to Data Centers outside of Dallas as it would cause the original mail delivery to be delayed a few seconds as a copy was dispatched to Dallas. Up until a few months ago our original design was acceptable and was only cause minor delays about twice a year. As the amount of mail processed increased, the delays became more noticeable. Mail delivered to networks outside of Dallas began to see increased processing time and eventually took twice as long compared to mail that was accepted by Dallas. By adding an additional LiveArchive network in Los Angeles we were able to route mail that arrived in Los Angeles to our Los Angeles LiveArchive network.
The final issue was mail synchronization between sites. We took advantage of the powerful extensions into Exchange by creating a custom Transport Agent that would copy submitted messages from each ‘local’ LiveArchive message to the remote network for processing. By utilizing custom routing and Edge servers we were able to successfully copy mail and provide real time processing and delivery between both LiveArchive networks.
In the event of a failure in either site, ExchangeDefender mail will automatically fail over to an additional DC and all LiveArchive mail will route to the network with available heartbeats. Upon creating an outage notification, our team will modify the DNS records for https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com to route to Los Angeles. To access the Los Angeles LiveArchive network directly users can login at https://la.livearchive.exchangedefender.com
Bookmarks:
LiveArchive: https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com
Los Angeles LiveArchive Cluster: https://la.livearchive.exchangedefender.com
Please make sure your clients are
Sincerely,
Travis Sheldon
VP Network Operations, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x757
travis@ownwebnow.com
How to position and sell Exchange messaging
Have you considered adding hosted Exchange or other cloud messaging solutions to your portfolio? If not, you’re already behind Microsoft, Google, IBM and many others. Even if you have considered it, the marketplace is getting flooded with cloud marketing and you need to be savvy to get your solution front and center and not get displaced by he competition. Here is how!
Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 Essentials: while they’re only two simple, reliable solutions, they pack a powerful punch that solves a wide variety of small business messaging and collaboration challenges. When we surveyed our partners, 90% of them told us that Hosted Exchange is their single best “foot in the door” or relationship builder product. This is because small businesses are becoming more and more dependent on their messaging technology, while the cost of deploying and managing it continues to skyrocket. They need affordable, reliable messaging technology to support their unique businesses – and Hosted Exchange + SharePoint and Exchange 2010 Essentials from ExchangeDefender offers small businesses of all kinds an attractive combination of rich features, affordability, security and flexibility.
Differentiation
Our small business clients certainly have options when it comes to cloud-based messaging solutions – Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps for Business are two major alternatives with which many small business clients may be familiar. Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 Essentials from ExchangeDefender are fundamentally different, offering users the familiar Microsoft Outlook user experience at an unbeatable value with the flexibility to deploy just the right tools that the business needs.
Some SMB clients don’t want or need a full-featured messaging and collaboration solution and want to minimize their costs of maintaining basic functionality. While Google Apps for Business offers an attractive price point with “pared down” messaging features, its unfamiliar interface may turn off folks who are comfortable with the Microsoft user experience. Exchange 2010 Essentials delivers the best of both worlds – minimal complexity using Outlook Web Access protected by ExchangeDefender Essentials along with the ever-popular Public Folders and Distribution Groups at a competitive price point, just $6 per month per mailbox. Clients can even integrate with their existing copies of Outlook to get that fat client experience they know and love.
Feature/Benefit Discussion
Some SMB clients will require more advanced features like message encryption or archiving for regulatory compliance, and may find the messaging features included in Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps for Business lacking – security, encryption, and archiving aren’t included in Google Apps for Business, and while Microsoft Forefront protects Office 365 email users, archiving, encryption, and e-discovery aren’t included. Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 delivers the full Microsoft Outlook experience with SharePoint’s powerful online portal and groupware functionality, including ExchangeDefender protection and our Live Archive service. Integrate with Blackberry Enterprise Server, split domains, brand the portal experience and leverage the “tried and true” Public Folders feature if desired, as well, all for only $10 per month per mailbox.
Whatever your clients’ needs are, you can get your foot in the door and start building a strong relationship (or deepen an existing one) with the powerful combination of Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 Essentials from ExchangeDefender. Now you can offer your clients an attractive combination of rich features, affordability, security and flexibility on our globally-redundant infrastructure that even most large enterprises cannot build in-house.
Do you find this information useful?
If you’d like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it impacts your clients join at Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB along with numerous webcasts, podcast with industry leaders and more.
Sincerely,
Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777
Introducing Geographic Redundancy to ExchangeDefender Services
As you may be aware, we had our first network-wide outage in our primary data center (Dallas) back in August and our redundancy plan did not deliver on the promise that we should expect. Our CEO went over the details of the outage and during his webinar, we made a promise to revamp our network and infrastructure to prevent the impact this had on our partners moving forward. Once all services were restored, we began playing the outage backwards to figure exactly what went wrong and how we can eliminate the possibility of it ever happening again.
The items that floated to the top were LiveArchive’s failure and an unforeseen level of reliance on Dallas by our Los Angeles ExchangeDefender network. Our Exchange Architect and lead engineer, Travis Sheldon, outlines the changes made to our LiveArchive structure to ensure that if Dallas goes lights out, LiveArchive can keep on to ticking without missing a beat.
That leaves changes to our mail processing. Once the outage happened, our ExchangeDefender NOC team was overseeing the mail flow going to Los Angeles, however, the failure point was the processing speed. The processing speed delay basically blew out all of our disaster recovery metrics that showed us that LA could handle the load on its own. The team’s task quickly became finding the delay within the process. In this case, our transparency became our worst enemy. The fact that we log everything to make it accessible to our partners for their clients was causing the delay. Our Los Angeles nodes were attempting to write data back to an unresponsive database. Think about that for a second, every step of the way for every email we process, was now attempting to update data to an unresponsive network. Needless to say this delay in processing caused all of our queues to grow explosively, thus causing massive delays in delivery.
The other major part of the outage was our outbound network. At the time, our multihomed smart host cluster was at the time housed primarily in Dallas, with standby nodes in Los Angeles. Here’s the problem, since these nodes weren’t in production they did not have active access tables, which basically rendered them useless. So now we had our trail of blood and tears of how and why we failed, but we also had a blue print on how to ensure history didn’t repeat itself. Here is what LiveArchive side of LA looks like now:
So in addition to the new LiveArchive Exchange 2010 cluster in Los Angeles, here’s what we did:
1. We increased the hardware and bandwidth capacity by 80% in Los Angeles. This brought it on par with our Dallas network, which has in the past and with ease handled the load during peak on its own without delays. In addition, we also increased our capacity in Dallas an additional 20%, this is accommodate future growth without having to experience any processing delays.
2. We deployed master to master replication of all of our core processing databases. So now our ExchangeDefender Los Angeles nodes do not rely on any Dallas resources for mail processing. This means two big gaps were closed, if there were a Dallas outage, processing speed would not suffer and that our logging would not need to be sacrificed in the name of processing speed.
3. We doubled our outbound capacity in Los Angeles and they’re live servers instead of standby. This way if an outage occurs, all routing/access/archiving/encrypting rules are already up to date and ready to go. As an added benefit this expansion increased our outbound processing speed and capacity by 80%.
The lessons we learned from this event will only allow us to provide you with better and faster service, so you can in turn deliver the same to your clients. We’ve already successfully stress tested our new infrastructure on multiple occasions with great success and we’re confident about the future of our solutions.
I have worked with many of our partners through the years and, if you don’t mind, I wanted to share some resources that I find most of our partners are not aware of. As the person that oversees all of our support services I can tell you that frustration is a part of the game and we can extend a much better service when you’re plugged into everything that the support side of ExchangeDefender as an organization offers. Here are some tips:
1. Make sure all of your employees are reading our NOC site. http://www.exchangedefender.com/noc While the NOC alerts sync up with Twitter, Facebook and our support portals, our NOC site provides a lot of useful information about how to explain the problems that happen. Our clients are aware things will go down from time to time so keeping them in the loop is critical.
2. Make sure all your employees are in the support portal and that the information is correct. Have you ever had the frustrating experience of opening a ticket only to be asked for more information? We find that most tickets that aren’t addressed by us immediately (and our average response time is a topic for a different blog) can drag on and a quick call can often resolve it. We’re in support, we won’t call you to sell you stuff. But if we have a number to call we can figure things out very rapidly.
3. Rely on the portal. https://support.ownwebnow.com is where we live. All of our communications, alerts, NOC, service monitoring and staff have this open whenever they are at their desk. Monitors around the office show how many issues are being worked on, what everyone is up to, which changes are being made. While we love to talk to our partners we have to take your security into account so make sure that everything goes through there. Yes, we do escalate stuff to Vlad from time to time.
4. Most importantly: Save the info below.
I have been with Own Web Now for years and I often like to tell people that I’ve known Vlad Mazek before he knew how to speak English. If there is anything on the support side that I can help with please feel free to contact me. So much for the introductions, look forward to with you all.
Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737
July Update
We have so much new stuff ready to go this month that I just couldn’t wait for the newsletter to be published. I’m taking a moment away from all the craziness to update you on what we’ve been up to this month. For full details you will have to look at the newsletter and join us for the webcast:
New ExchangeDefender
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/275688153
August 4th, 2010 at noon EST
You really want to clear your schedule and attend this webcast, some of the stuff discussed during the show will not be in the recorded webinar, nor will be the offers that we’ll extend to our partners that are on top of it all. Plus you’ll get exclusive peak of all the new stuff joining the Shockey Monkey family!
New Office
Last weekend we moved into a beautiful new office on the 12th story of The Plaza in the heart of Downtown Orlando. We’ll soon have live webinars, webcams and other stuff to let you interact with the staff and keep an eye on us. If you’re ever in Orlando we’d love to have you stop by at 121 S Orange Ave.
New ComplianceArchive
We’ve spent a lot of time working on the new ComplianceArchive product. This effort was far too big to bundle in with the ExchangeDefender 7 launch and we’ve learned a lot about how different parts of our client base rely on archiving. On the high end, we have financial and regulated industries that need high end compliance for legal reasons. In SMB though, we have the packrat mentality, and archiving is done more for locating items quickly. Obviously there is a price difference between different solutions as they are built to a different spec for a different purpose.
New International Numbers
ExchangeDefender 7 launch caught us by surprise – huge surprise. We haven’t been this busy in years and we’ve never seen a faster adoption of our product than in the past few months. As a result we have had to shuffle personnel around for training purposes and addressing the peak hours. Temporarily, we’ve been forced to reduce our phone support hours for Tier 2 from 24/7 to 4AM – 8PM EST and our support portal hours from 24/7 to 4AM – 1AM.
We have also had to evaluate a lot of negative feedback we’ve received about our phones. This was addressed in the move and I hope many of you can appreciate the difficulty in establishing a VoIP presence in multiple countries. So here are the new numbers we are currently testing:
Australia: 02 9037-4202
UK: 08435570373
New Hosted Exchange Pricing
The launch of Microsoft’s new Office 365 has caught many of our partners by surprise. Not to worry, we have a very competitive new pricing scheme that will be announced during the webinar. Keep in mind that we do not encourage pricing competition but you need to make alternatives – so consider www.CloudBlock.com as one.
Oh, the new Compliance Archiving…
We’ve pretty much rewritten everything.
· Written on top of .NET 4.0 Framework
· Supports Exchange 2007 SP1 & Exchange 2010
· Can be installed on any windows machine (XP, Windows 7, SBS, etc). (Does not have to be installed on the exchange server)
· Extreme validation and real time response validation.
· Service does NOT REQUIRE administrative login credentials, runs as local system.
· Allows management of an unlimited number of Hosted Exchange Servers for Compliance.
· Multithreaded service model, supports up to 10 running threads at one time.
· Start/Stop Service is handled gracefully to allow any pending threads to complete the step they are on then terminate.
· Archived mail is check for integrity, if an insert fails due to (bad connection, error in record, etc).. it will roll back any previous actions for that message.
· Attachments are now stored as individual records, this will allow attachment searching and direct download of attachments.
· Removed the DISK IO dependency from the program, messages are no longer written to disk. Everything is done in memory.
Looking forward to seeing you all in August and on behalf of the entire ExchangeDefender team, wishing you continued prosperity, our partners grew 21% in Q2!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender 7 Followup
As we mentioned previously in the ExchangeDefender 7 Bugfix update, the move to ExchangeDefender 7 has gone remarkably well. This is in no small part a tribute to our partners who have helped us beta test the solution. So thank you for making ExchangeDefender 7 a success for everyone.
Over the next two months we will be holding series of webinars to cover the new solutions that are part of ExchangeDefender 7. Past year has seen ExchangeDefender grow in both features as well as pricing points so we want to help explain how ExchangeDefender can help boost profits when it’s positioned, sold and implemented the right way.
This is where you can help us out. Email webinar@ownwebnow.com with questions or suggestions for content that would help you and your staff get more out of ExchangeDefender. We are currently planning webinars covering all aspects of the product sales, positioning, marketing and ongoing support. This is your opportunity to have us design educational material around the topics you have problems with.
July
ExchangeDefender will be at the Microsoft WPC 2011 in Los Angeles and CompTIA Breakaway in Washington DC. We look forward to meeting you in person.
Our new site, projecting the ExchangeDefender brand, will be launching later this month.
We are moving our headquarters to a brand new space in a beautiful building in Downtown Orlando.
The redesigned archiving product will be made available this month as well, we look forward to sharing it with you.
All in all, our July will be insane!
Documentation, Webinars & More
We’ve received a few inquiries about the ExchangeDefender guides for ExchangeDefender 7. Here they are. You can download the PDF and forward it along but if you wish to customize it and use your own logo, download the PPT.
ExchangeDefender Domain Admin Guide (pdf)
ExchangeDefender Domain Admin Guide (ppt – brandable)
ExchangeDefender Service Provider Guide (pdf)
Note: You probably do not want to distribute the Service Provider Guide but we’ve made it available just in case.
Training videos will be available today as well at www.exchangedefender.com
ExchangeDefender 7 Bugfix Update
It’s been nearly four days since the launch of ExchangeDefender 7 and we wanted to offer you an update on how things were going. In a word: astonishing! This is the best launch we’ve ever had by a country mile and for the first time ever we’re not receiving complaints about the UI, mostly thanks to the marketing and client facing documentation being delivered well in advance. We’ve been receiving glowing compliments on the new UI and we’ve worked extremely hard on the QA process.
Gabriel Gonzales has been in charge of the QA followup process for ExchangeDefender so if you’ve found an issue with it, you’ve spoken to Gabriel or Frankie. We wanted to make sure that all management levels were available to you with a clear development schedule so we can fix problems right away. The average turnaround time on bugs to fixes has been under an hour.
Good news: Great feedback, lots of excitement about the new product and happy clients.
Bad news: It’s not perfect. Lot’s of performance enhancements in the works, new marketing in the plans and the ExchangeDefender Gold program coming soon.. but in the meantime, here is the list of fixed bugs just in case you’re asked about them by your clients – the bugs have been fixed.
Encrypted Email New Account Enrollment Not Working
After properly inputting all the required information into the New Account Enrollment form the end user would click on the “Enroll” button but it would not create the account or move on to the next screen. Status: Fixed
ED7 Branding locked up
When trying to set up the Branding for the through the ED7 configuration portal the “Default Footer” text box is greyed out and does not allow any changes. Status: Fixed
ED7 Cannot delete Domain account through SP portal
When trying to delete a domain account through the SP level ED admin portal client receives the following error:
“ Account Not Deleted
Could not delete [domain] because it does not belong to you.” Status: Fixed
ED7 Change Configuration drop down at the SP level coming up blank
After selecting the change configuration from the drop down menu next to a domain at the SP level the resulting page comes up blank and any changes cannot be submitted unless everything is filled in. Status: Fixed
Encrypted Email attachments not opening
End user cannot open an attachment from an encrypted email that has spaces or any special characters in them.
For example: P60 Year End Certificate.pdf Status: Fixed
ED7 Compliance Archive
When the end user tries to click on a message stored in the ComplianceArchive they are unable to view the message. Status: Fixed
ED7 WebShare e-mail link Not Working
Recipients receive an “Error – Page Not Found” when clicking the link in the email from Web Share. Status: Fixed
ED7 WebShare unable to Upload and Download documents
End User receives a “File cannot be Downloaded” error from the WebShare portal. Status: Fixed
ED7 Mail Logs not Displaying correctly
Trying to search the mail logs for an Outbound message and instead of displaying the result as “from” their client “to” the outside recipients the “Search Result” comes back as if it was an Inbound message. Status: Fixed
ED7 Empty Blacklist After Migrating from ED5
During the transition from ED5 to ED7 the contents of the blacklist from ED5 do not show up on ED7. Status: Fixed
On behalf of my entire team, thank you! Thank you so much for working with us and being amazing partners in development and launch of our flagship product. We couldn’t ask for more. Thank you!
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp