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
ExchangeDefender 7 User Collateral
ExchangeDefender 7 is officially less than two weeks from going live and you need to prepare your clients for it. While the new user interface is more intuitive than ever before, faster and simpler, people hate and resist change. Take a moment to download the user guides and send them along to your clients. We have ExchangeDefender branded PDFs that are ready to go:
Download ExchangeDefender Branded PDF Guides:
ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007/2010 Agent Guide
ExchangeDefender Email Reports
ExchangeDefender Web File Sharing Guide
If you have some time we recommend that you customize these guides for your client base. Below are PowerPoint 2007/2010 versions of the documents listed above. Make sure you replace “ExchangeDefender” with your product name and “your IT Solution Provider” with your company name.
Download Brandable PowerPoint Guides:
ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007/2010 Agent Guide
ExchangeDefender Email Reports
ExchangeDefender Web File Sharing Guide
Please make sure your clients are aware of the changes and familiarize them with the new look and feel of the site. This is the largest UI change we’ve had in the past 8 years and from prior experience, giving your users a heads up will make all the difference in the world when it comes to product and service satisfaction.
Thank you for all your support and your business, we’re counting down the days till May 30/31 when the new product officially goes live!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender 7 Beta Launch
On Wednesday we held our largest webcast ever and the amount of praise we have gotten from you is astonishing – not surprising though, considering that all but 3 features you requested made it into the product. We want to make sure we meet the expectations and make the product as perfect as possible – so we’d like to invite you to test drive it and tell us what needs to be fixed.
We are less than a month away from the launch of ExchangeDefender 7, the largest product and the largest upgrade in the company history. With ExchangeDefender 5 we changed the way you think about communications security and we made it affordable for everyone. With ExchangeDefender 6 we upgraded the entire backend of the network to sustain your growth and the emerging threats and market demands. With ExchangeDefender 7 we are introducing a brand new, unified, user experience.
So, are you ready? Here you go, URLs and instructions are in the document:
http://www.ownwebnow.com/blog/media/ExchangeDefender7Beta.pdf
Sincerely,
Vladimir Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender Chief Software Architect
ExchangeDefender 7 Beta Launch Webinar
This Wednesday we will be holding a webinar to introduce you to the ExchangeDefender 7 beta launch. The one hour show will be recorded but you really should attend the live event as we’ll be answering questions after the show:
Please click below to register:
Wednesday, April 6th, 1PM – 2PM EST
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/120736520
The first part of the event should be attended by the business decision makers, sales and marketing personnel. We will be discussing the new business model behind ExchangeDefender 7 and the key changes that will make the new product a lot more profitable for your existing sales. We are making a lot of changes based on feedback and market demands.
The second part of the event should be attended by the technical employees that will be a part of the product deployment.
Important: The only way to gain access to the beta sites is to attend the live webinar or watch the recording. Future sales of ExchangeDefender will only be supported through companies that go through the free product training and going through the beta process will allow you to skip some of the required training.
ExchangeDefender MSP Alerts
Thanks to so many of you that participated in our ExchangeDefender 7 preview last week. The beta is a week or two away and we are still putting some finishing touches on the features that will ship down the road after the initial core launch of Security, Continuity and Compliance. Today we have an open ended question regarding one of the features and we hope you take a moment to let us know what you think.
If there was a single value proposition we are making in ExchangeDefender 7 it’s the managed aspect. You are no longer subscribing to a tool, you are getting a service that protects the most important tool businesses have on the Internet. Without email, the company may as well take a day off.
We are building in a MSP interface to ExchangeDefender that will monitor all servers protected by us. Every 15 minutes we will poll your email server from all of our data centers and if nothing can connect to it, we will issue an alert.
Question: When should we notify you?
We are aiming to create a configurable alert system on top of the service so it can notify you if 4 consecutive tests have failed (in this scenario, we couldn’t reach your server for an hour) or we can issue an alert every time we cannot connect to your mail server. We don’t know what’s right – if too many alerts are sent, will the alerts be ignored. Likewise, if too few alerts are sent will you be finding out about an issue from your client?
We initially intend to make alerts available via email and SMS and through professional RMM services tools LPI and Kaseya and PSA from Autotask and Shockey Monkey.
If you have a suggestion please login to https://support.ownwebnow.com and click on Resources > Features and create a new Feature request. ExchangeDefender 7 is 100% based on the feedback from the new feature request category filled out by our partners, keep on using it if you want the product to fit you better!
ExchangeDefender 7 & Managed Messaging
Later this week I will be sending invitations for an exclusive webinar covering ExchangeDefender 7. We will be doing a preview on March 17th, beta the week after that and full ExchangeDefender 7 release roughly 2-4 weeks after that depending on how broken things are. The beta window is very open and we will not ship it until it is perfect.
I, however, wanted to offer you a direct update on how things are going at Own Web Now because we are getting a ton of praise but also some concerns about the changes we are making and how the marketplace in general is developing. In particular, I wanted to address the areas of our service that are not perfect and what we are doing to address them:
1) Phone Support – The good news is that we have a lot of new staff to help you around the clock. We also have more personnel dedicated to the portal operations and one frustration many of you have experienced is our VoIP service. There have been reports of bad call quality, extensions not working, phones ringing dead in Australia and so on. We’ve made adjustments to all of these areas and I hope you’ll start to see significant improvement here.
2) NOC Alerts – We have been asked over and over again to provide an email feed in addition to the NOC blog postings. I want to make it clear that we will never do that. However, we will soon start delivering service alerts via SMS, online service monitor as well as to your RMM and PSA software. We simply have to have a failsafe way of contacting you and email is just not the way to deliver service alerts. This will probably be the biggest improvement that will come from the Managed Messaging part of our product that will be available across our products.
3) Client Software Support – Typically, this has not been an issue but we have gotten some louder requests for help with Outlook troubleshooting, DNS troubleshooting and connection troubleshooting. This part of the service is not something that Own Web Now is responsible for, workstation side of the management is our service providers responsibility. Since we make all our revenues with our partners, I have always encouraged my support staff to go above and beyond when the partners encounter an issue in the field but there is a limit to that as well.
4) Client Training – This is an area that we will dedicate a lot of our resources to going forward. We (all of us) simply must do a better job helping the clients understand all the failovers and redundancies that are built into the system and how to use them. Anyone that honestly expects a Microsoft environment to be foolproof and have a 100% reliability, respectfully, must not have been around Microsoft software for more than a month. Every month we deal with a slew of security and performance patches released by Microsoft along with a ton of other vendor partners that are continuously releasing security and bug fixes. Keeping this entire infrastructure at an optimal level is a job (for a lot of folks) that work around the clock testing, deploying, managing and addressing problems. Outsourcing the email infrastructure does not mean those problems are eliminated, it just means someone else (Own Web Now) is dealing with them around the clock. We all have a vested interest in helping our clients understand the many failsafes and alternatives in the system and I can honestly tell you that we’ve spent and incredible amount of money to make sure that email is always available.
I appreciate the feedback, good or bad, at all times and encourage you to keep it coming.
We’ve been working extremely hard on ExchangeDefender 7 and the Managed Messaging and all the support infrastructure behind it (Exchange 2010, Shockey Monkey… yes, even SharePoint). I hope you like what you see in 10 days, all but 3 feature requests have made it into ExchangeDefender 7 UI and the feature board is blank!!!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp