Reducing the cost of ExchangeDefender

I have a privilege of presenting and attending many of the industry events that we sponsor through ExchangeDefender / Own Web Now and I am always confronted with a question: “Well, company X does it for Y cents less but they don’t do or Z”; I then go on talking about our PSA integrations, about how our billing sync keeps multiple platforms from charging the clients improperly – most people tune out during this – because service providers are typically not concerned with the soft costs but only the hard cost of the feature set.

Over the past 6 months we’ve dedicated a lot of time at Own Web Now to prove that is the wrong way to think about reselling services. Why? Because everyone with the solid reporting can tell you just how expensive the process of supporting and billing clients properly is – often magnitudes more than the service itself! We’ve already covered the billing and PSA integrations extensively, part of ExchangeDefender (“7”) is bringing the business concepts and integrating the products closer to your overall goals: being more profitable by offering users self-training.

Training

Published under our white-label-brand are several videos that highlight the most frequent questions answered by our partners support. You’re welcome to download all of these and upload them directly to your web site, or link to them directly at our white brand site. The videos are shot in high resolution, are easy to understand and are very, very short. 

Video: Changing Settings
Guide to accessing the admin portal, changing passwords, time zone, what happens to SPAM and SureSPAM.

Video: Encryption
Guide to sending encrypted mail, general security & business etiquette, etc.

Video: Sharing Large Files
Guide to sending large files, setting security & notification alerts, using document libraries in mailing lists.

Video: LiveArchive Business Continuity
Guide to continuing to work and send/receive email when the Internet connectivity goes down.

Video: Managing Whitelists and Trusted Senders
Guide to accessing quarantined SPAM, reviewing junk mail for false positives, managing whitelists and adding trusted senders.

All of the videos are available for download in a zip file (trainingvideos.zip, 12 Mb) and we recommend making them available prominently on your web site – your staff will be pointing your clients to them frequently.

My personal thoughts on the changing service provider landscape are no secret and I’ve been very vocal about the need to focus on features as well as bottom line expense of delivering those features on my personal blog. It is something we firmly all of us believe at Own Web Now and we’re committed to helping you become more profitable with our products in more ways than one.

Thank you for your continued support and working with us. Efforts like this would not be possible without enormous support from our partners and we’d like to extend our thanks to Jacee Dobbs (@Anchor Network Solutions) for helping us with the content suggestions. Got something you’d like to see in our products? Let us know.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

P.S. If you’re interested in the links to our private label site please open a support request. For obvious reasons we don’t want to have links from Own Web Now / ExchangeDefender.

Encryption Enhancements

Things have been really busy at Own Web Now with the new suite of products, specifically encryption (and no, thats not the big surprise or the big feature bump for ExchangeDefender as promised for each month in 2010). I’ve been all over the country personally talking about the value of all of these solutions, particularly for the MSPs.

Yes, the traditional model for software and services is to mark things up and bleed the client dry with support and maintenance fees. But the business of software and hardware has changed and many service providers now take over full maintenance of computer networks – remotely. When those service providers leave holes in the protection (by not providing SPAM filtering, not providing web filtering, business continuity, encryption, etc) they leave the clients exposed to issues that inevitably create more support issues and cost the managed services provider more to fix than to have provided protection in the first place! This is why we’ve changed the business model behind ExchangeDefender and why so many service providers have gotten behind ExchangeDefender – it just makes more sense for MSPs.

Partner Organization

When I say that we’re all about partners I actually mean that: not just in the way we distribute our software without competing or integrating with the tools like Autotask and ConnectWise – but where it’s the most meaningful: creating software solutions with our partners that are dictated by the users themselves.

We have added a few “user” conveniences that let the user know what’s going on. For example, when the user receives an email from the encryption service they are thrown to the login screen where they are typically paralyzed. Now we have some helpful text there letting them know what to do.

We’ve also included the ability to reset the password. The recipient still has to remember their PIN of course since we don’t want the internal IT departments resetting the users password over the weekend and deleting their tracks.

We’re also changing the email notifications to HTML to extend your branding power, adding an audit log (so the users can tell when their account passwords are reset) and also adding the notification so that the sender is notified when the recipient accesses their message. This is in addition to the encrypted attachment addon we delivered a few weeks ago.

Next

We are always working on the product and I just, again, want to take all our partners that put up with us in 2009 while we were making it possible for us to make our development with ExchangeDefender so rapid. I hope you like the results.

I’d like to thank Everon IT crew (Danny Sears, Chris Gordon and Josh Clifford) for being so fantastic to work with and offering up suggestions. If you’re working with OWN, we want your input and we want to make the stuff that will make profits.

Extending White-label Branding for ExchangeDefender

In January we introduced a white-branded version of ExchangeDefender so that all the URLs and SSL certificates could carry a name that was white branded across all of our solutions. As you may imagine, there are a ton of entry points into ExchangeDefender so branding them all is sometimes a challenge because they are all linked.

As ExchangeDefender Service Providers you now have an extra configuration switch under the SPAM reports. With ExchangeDefender 5 we gave you the option to brand the ExchangeDefender SPAM Reports with your own From and SMTP Address so that the report came directly from your organization.

Those reports were linked to the https://admin.exchangedefender.com, and after today you’ll also be able to select which server those reports link to. So if you go for the white branded option, you can also link to the white branded URL.

As always, the colors, logos, taglines and product names remain the same. All that we’re adding here is the ability to remove *.exchangedefender.com from yet another layer.

P.S. We’re still going to add the switch not to send the SPAM report when there is no SPAM to actually report. I just haven’t figured out the switch on the support side that says “Don’t provide ExchangeDefender support for missing SPAM reports if they turned off their SPAM reports when they are empty.” 😉 Like I said, it’s all connected.

ExchangeDefender Grows Again

First of all, thank you for your tremendous support of ExchangeDefender 5 and to all of our partners that make it possible for us to keep on building ExchangeDefender and growing it into a significant part of business. We’re growing again – and with growth comes responsibility to do it in a way that is reliable and improves availability – so we’re announcing a new IP address range that ExchangeDefender will soon start delivering mail from:

Introducing ExchangeDefender – LA3:

206.125.40.0/24 (or: 206.125.40.0/255.255.255.0)

If you are currently using IP restrictions (highly recommended) please add the range above to your IP restriction list which should include at least 65.99.255.0/24 and 64.182.140.0/24. You can download the Exchange 2003 and 2007 IP Restriction Guide here. The process takes less than a minute so please take care of it as soon as possible, by March 29th, 2010 at the latest.

For your convenience, here is a guide on how to add this new range to Exchange 2003 and 2007. If you’re enforcing restrictions on your firewall then it will depend on the manufacturer but should be pretty straight forward.

Exchange 2003

1. Open Exchange System Manager

2. Expand Servers, servername, Protocols, SMTP

3. Go to properties on Default SMTP Virtual Server

4. Go to the Access Tab and then click connections

5. Click Add on the IP restrictions and select Group of computers. The subnet address is 206.125.40.0/24

Confirm that you still have at least 65.99.255.0/255.255.255.0 and 64.182.140.0/255.255.255.0 present. Do not remove any IP ranges.

Exchange 2007

1. Open Exchange Management Console

2. Expand Server Configuration and select Hub Transport

3. On Exchange 2007 select Default servername receive connector and go to properties

a. On SBS, the connector may be called SBS servername Internet

4. Navigate to the Network tab and click add on Receive Mail from remote servers that have this IP address and set the IP as 206.125.40.0/24

Confirm that you still have at least 65.99.255.0/255.255.255.0 and 64.182.140.0/255.255.255.0 present. Do not remove any IP ranges.

Support

If you have any questions or concerns please open a support request at https://support.ownwebnow.com. We’ll begin notifying clients via phone, email and postal mail (US only) starting 3/17/2010.

OWN Sync for ConnectWise

At last years ConnectWise Summit we released what is arguably the most sophisticated integration of cloud services in ConnectWise – not only do we post statistics into ConnectWise but we use the web services API (integrator login) to integrate our support directly into ConnectWise without using the ConnectWise network or a ConnectWise CAL. This makes OWN cloud services beyond comparison with anything else in the MSP industry because we are a software company that actually supports it’s products – for free!

Ever since that release we’ve been hounded by partners to provide the missing piece of the cloud in the integration: billing.

The beauty of cloud solutions is that clients can manage themselves – MSPs can be more profitable because they don’t have to waste expensive engineer hours to do mundane tasks like password resets and account additions/deletions/changes. Users can self-service themselves and the MSPs are there to provide an SLA and high end support.

Cloud certainly paints a pretty picture – until the last day of the month when some unfortunate accountant or MSP owner has to spend a few hours sitting around, clicking through companies and agreements and updating the billing counts by hand. We counted – it takes 8 clicks to update an agreement from the main CW screen. Per company. Per agreement. We can do better than that 🙂

Meet OWN Sync for ConnectWise – the one click agreement sync framework that takes all of OWN services and updates them in seconds. The first time you run it you will be prompted to set service default prices that you charge your clients. This will save you a ton of time on data entry:

The second screen will allow you to adjust those prices – so if you charge different rates for different companies you can do so here:

Just match the companies with the services, review your prices, click finish and you’re done. All seat counts are simultaneously sync’ed and you’ve just turned that “invoice day” into a half day Friday.

We’ll start rolling the software out to our ExchangeDefender Service Providers on Monday. You can download the brochure here. Please note that this is only available to our service providers, and while it does update all of our services across the board, it is only available to the partners that resell the $150/$200 MSP package.

So you asked what we’re going to do for our MSPs to make it worth not going one mailbox at a time – this is the first step! For the next step you’re really going to want to check out our newsletter today about ExchangeDefender 6 details.

ExchangeDefender Snow Storm Special Webcast

Many of our partners across North America are snowed in and need some entertainment: Join Vlad Mazek, CEO of Own Web Now and chief architect behind ExchangeDefender for a demo and live walkthrough of all the new features in ExchangeDefender. It starts in an hour:

http://bit.ly/a4SkTN

Brief registration is required, as is a sense of humor. It’s a live, unscripted demo! Starts at 2 PM EST today, February 11th.

ExchangeDefender Encryption & Compliance Archiving

Last week we introduced ExchangeDefender Encryption and ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive. Both features are free for ExchangeDefender clients and built into the product. Thanks to your overwhelming feedback, both are also capable of being enabled or disabled per domain so that you can create multiple levels of ExchangeDefender for your client base.

Please take a moment to watch a ExchangeDefender Encryption & Compliance Archiving launch video.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp!

I know it’s a cliché, but help us help you! We’re soliciting commentary about the following video:

Preliminary Training Video: Encryption Video

The idea behind this documentation video is to provide our MSP & Enterprise partners with the video you can place on your own web sites and showcase your own image. When you view the video please note that we will be recording individual videos for our partners with the first and last slide completely branded for you. We’ll also be providing the script and the PowerPoint so you can record your own modifications or voiceovers.

The big idea is that ExchangeDefender 5 is your product and as you build a revenue stream on message security, compliance and encryption it helps to project your own image and your own brand.

Vlad: We’ve heard it over and over again about the pain our partners go through when they onboard the clients and have to train them. We understand why you don’t place training videos on your web site, but we want to meet you half way – we’ll produce videos branded for you and our marketing team will help integrate ExchangeDefender and eventually all of OWN into your brand.

So please, send feedback to vlad.xd5@ownwebnow.com and let us know if we’ve missed anything. Audience is the IT administrator or end user and it’s produced primarily for our partners. We will have different training videos for our partners and our partners staff.

With these features, our ExchangeDefender migration and launch is complete. Please keep on pouring in the feedback, as most of you know, we’ve adapted ExchangeDefender as we’ve rolled it out and it is one of the things we intend to sustain. We’re listening and you can scroll through this blog for evidence that we’re taking your feedback and putting it to work QUICKLY.. This new ExchangeDefender has been out for less than 2 months and it’s by far the most popular thing we’ve ever done so for that.. Thank you!

ExchangeDefender Re-re-releases & Previews

Earlier today we had a fairly embarrassing circumstance that came out as a result of our weekend migration. You can read about it here in detail, suffice to say the messages were not releasing from the SPAM quarantines due to a change in the reserved words in SQL. What I’m getting at is that as a developer you have to have a sense of humor about what you do when undocumented, unknown issues get past the test suites and make you look like a fool.

But as the demotivator says: Perhaps your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others. Today was one of those days and even though we isolated the issue very quickly, we still looked like fools and the team was determined not to have this issue come up again. We sat down and developed a solution to the issue of message releases.

Web Re-Release Feature

Scenario in the long long ago (yesterday): When a message is released it is taken out of the quarantine view because it makes no sense to keep on displaying the quarantined messages once they have been released.

New! (as of 4 PM): When you access the quarantine view you will now see another icon toggling the display of released messages. By default, once you release the message, it will not be displayed in the listing. But if you click on the released message button, we will show you all the messages you released recently. We will still have full preview of the message available and the ability to trigger a release again!

It may seem trivial, but it’s quite valuable: MSPs spend a lot of time trying to assist users with SPAM releases that get eaten by antivirus, antispam, IMF or anything else in between – and since we got to taste that frustration in our own failure today, you can kiss that problem goodbye.

Email Digest Preview

Once upon a time (this morning): If you attempted to release an email or trust a sender directly from the email SPAM Report you would only get the message vitals – from, to, subject and date.

New! (as of about noon): Now when you release a message from a SPAM report you get a full message preview. No more wondering what that message contained if it didn’t get there immediately or guessing if you just whitelisted a forged SPAM – you’ll know immediately! With full HTML rendering and images.

I apologize for the inconvenience this issue caused and I can tell you that everyone @ OWN was all over the issue immediately both trying to fix it right away and help our partners and users. When we fixed it we didn’t just move on – we decided to immediately implement features that are going to be valuable to our partners right away.

This is the level of commitment my entire team has to our partner and client base. I want you to know that I truly appreciate your business and if you like this feature you owe a bit of gratitude to the team at Readycrest Ltd: Paul Bonathan, Chris Walton and Justin Sands spent a lot of time past the the quitting hours to help us test and deploy this.

Have a wonderful day!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO, Own Web Now Corp

ExchangeDefender Web Security Launch

Dear Partners,

Please join me this Thursday (January 7th @ 3 PM EST) for a live webcast covering the launch of ExchangeDefender Web Security Suite. The webcast will be live and you’re welcome to dial in and post questions. If you cannot make it, recording will be available for download later on Thursday.

What’s the topic? It’s become evident that threats are migrating from the email and SPAM to the web where few users are adequately protected. Even worse, most users have little or no protection outside of their corporate offices while most users browse the web with older and unpatched browsers that make easy targets. As more of our applications and communications move to the web, ExchangeDefender is launching the following products this Thursday:

ExchangeDefender Web Filtering – Agent based web filtering solution is designed for Windows PC’s and operates as a service that blocks URL requests at the TCP level. This way we can intercept dangerous traffic even if it is sent through anonymizer proxy or a port other than 80/443. Because each agent is user authenticated, each ExchangeDefender can have their own block policy that is refreshed every hour with either your custom URL lists or over 80 categories of web sites sorted by content.

ExchangeDefender Web Sharing – The web sharing and collaboration needs have grown beyond the feature offerings of FTP and ExchangeDefender is delivering a platform for file sharing and distribution. ExchangeDefender Web Filtering allows users to upload content to their private site, email links, be notified when downloads happen, automatically destroy files after a certain amount of time and more.

ExchangeDefender LDAP Integration – For larger enterprises, user management is a pain. With ExchangeDefender LDAP integration, our user list is in complete sync with your Active Directory or any other LDAP user database. Our agent monitors any account modifications, additions and deletions and replicates them to the ExchangeDefender network.

We will continue to release new components of ExchangeDefender throughout January and February because the scope of our platform is immense – we want to explore and collect feedback on each and every piece and make sure our partner base is educated.

We are holding partner Lunch & Learn events where either I or one of my senior engineers will walk your staff through our product and discuss any integration ideas or best practices. If you’re interested, let me know.

So tune in: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/991505921

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO, Own Web Now Corp