Rolling out Outbound-JR

On Thursday, February 10th, 5 PM EST we will be discontinuing access to outbound-xd servers as noted in the previous blog posts and emails. While many people have already switched their mail flow to outbound-jr.exchangedefender.com, some may still be using our legacy systems that are being decommissioned. Please take a look at all the servers in your organization and make sure you’re routing your email appropriately:

outbound.exchangedefender.com – used for personal non-automated emails that require absolutely highest IP reputation.

outbound-jr.exchangedefender.com – used for server notifications, NDR, out-of-office responses, automated messages, confirmations, devices (fax machines, etc) and non-groupware servers.

ExchangeDefender outbound network will continue to work as-is. The new JR network is designed to fit the emerging need among our client base as email communication matures and the need to tie in all servers, applications and notifications becomes necessary. By being able to “shape” this traffic, we can better assure your email delivery.

Please note, outbound-jr does not impact your ability to use LiveArchive as the replication of all the mail you receive is not done by the outbound servers. It also does not impact your ability to send out attachments, encrypted messages so on and so forth.

We look forward to announcing the new products and services that are being built around the outbound-jr and we hope that you’ll find them extremely valuable (large file sharing, notification services, on-demand mailing lists, marketing mail services, etc).

Introducing ExchangeDefender Essentials

Last week we announced our messaging portfolio for 2011. If you missed it, the recording along with the webinar and podcast is now available.

Did you miss the webinar? Here is the recording:

Webinar Recording (wmv movie 45 Minutes)
Webinar Slide Deck (pdf)
Webinar Podcast (mp3 higher quality audio)

The biggest news of the day was ExchangeDefender Managed Messaging, combining all the services necessary to go to the cloud in one affordable package. The second biggest announcement was regarding CloudBlock. Finally, we wanted to plug a hole in our product portfolio that was dictated by the marketplace.

Why?

ExchangeDefender was designed as an all-inclusive solution: protecting you from SPAM, providing business continuity, archiving mail for easy access via LiveArchive, delivering web file sharing functionality as well as web filtering. We felt that we had to protect the client entirely because if we left a hole in the security portfolio the client could be easily exploited.

Our competition saw all of these “necessities” as ways to earn a quick profit. By offering bare bones product and getting people that shopped on price they could easily mark up add-ons as the clients realized they needed them.

It’s important to note that not all companies are made the same and not all IT departments design their networks in the same way. Some have appliances for web filtering, some rely on third party services for web file sharing, others have appliances for archiving purposes. How the network is designed is largely up to the IT department and the specific company needs where some ExchangeDefender features may feel superfluous. This is something that many of our service providers told us was their biggest advantage by going into a client and a way that ExchangeDefender alone lands managed services contracts:

“We go down the feature list in ExchangeDefender and we ask them if they have that feature in their current solution. Yes or no? How much are they paying for that? We then present our managed services plan and just go through their current costs and repeat: We can knock that off your bill so you won’t have that fee to pay again. As we go through their expenses we make our managed services product much more appealing and it always leads to sales.”

We have seen a great number of partners that don’t want an all-in solution and instead want a barebones product. We feel that CloudBlock will help those looking at the price as the only objective. We also feel that ExchangeDefender Essentials will fit the middle ground, where you want your own product with your own brand and margins but a huge discount for only selling the essentials.

What?

ExchangeDefender Essentials is ExchangeDefender without all the enterprise stuff: No LiveArchive, no Web Filtering, no Web File Sharing, no Encryption, no SplitMX, no FailPOP and no compliance archiving.

ExchangeDefender Essentials provides enterprise-class SPAM and virus filtering, mail queueing when your mail server goes down, outbound SMTP relay and all the core technology within ExchangeDefender to keep your network secure. It can be centrally managed, connected to your PSA and is fully supported by us.

Most importantly, ExchangeDefender Essentials is 50% cheaper than ExchangeDefender. It comes with no minimum, no contract requirements and is available on all new account.

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

ExchangeDefender Feedback Loop Emails

Starting tomorrow, ExchangeDefender will be implementing an FBL – feedback loop. The purpose of a feedback loop is to alert system administrators when their email systems are distributing dangerous content.

Initially the FBL will be implemented with ExchangeDefender Service Providers and will only send an email to the SP contact once a day. The email will contain list of domains and violations made from each domain along with the IP address. For example:

From: ExchangeDefender FBL <fbl@exchangedefender.com>

To: Me

Subject: ExchangeDefender Relay Violation

myspamexample [65.99.255.222] is attempting to relay mail from xyz123@comcast.net which is not an ExchangeDefender protected address.

This attempt has been blocked through our security policy but the source server/network should be examined as this is usually the first sign of a compromised system. Systems can be easily compromised and used to spread malware and spyware. When hackers can no longer use these systems to relay SPAM, they tend to use them to launch DDoS, large scale attacks or attempt further security compromises.

Please investigate and address the security issue. Ignoring these notices and underlying security issues can result in a restriction of your ability to relay outbound mail through ExchangeDefender, land your domain/IP on an RBL blacklist and reduce your IP addresses sender reputation. 

We have been monitoring the explosion of malware and are addressing a record number of security compromises daily. Last quarter we implemented an SMTP monitoring process as a part of ExchangeDefender and we hope that with web filtering, the FBL test gives us more insight into security problems on your network that can help you manage your network more securely.

First emails will go out on December 1st, 2010.

Announcing free Email-to-Autotask gateway powered by ExchangeDefender

Autotask, The World’s #1 Hosted PSA Solution, is also Own Web Now’s preferred PSA platform. We have more clients using Autotask to manage their IT business than anything else out there and we have the richest integration into the product not just in the antispam space but across the cloud. Autotask has promoted us a ton so a year after our huge launch at Autotask 2009 conference we’re glad to provide a bit of a payback and reward all the Autotask and ExchangeDefender clients for working with us.

Announcing the first free, secure, email-to-Autotask ticket gateway.

Here are some highlights:

• Automatically converts inbound and outbound mail to Autotask tickets.
• Supports attachments and HTML messages.
• Designed using secure Autotask Web Services / API
• Allows for default rule and custom rule sets depending on sender email address
• Allows customized Queue, Priority and Account mappings
• Works in the cloud, no server or client installation or configuration required
• Did we mention that it’s free?

So how do you get started? Well, make sure you’re in our portal and using ExchangeDefender. Click here to get started. Login to ExchangeDefender and go to Configuration, Autotask. Just provide your Autotask credentials and we’ll pull down your priority titles, queues and contacts.

Then pick the email address to serve as a default gateway. This address will still get all the inbound messages, a copy of it will automatically create tickets with the default priority, queue and contact information you provide here.

For even more flexibility, you can create custom policies based on who the ticket is coming from. This is fantastic if you have appliances or solutions that don’t have direct Autotask integration but need to be managed anyhow – just point those reports to the appropriate queue. If you have a VIP client that always gets priority treatment, you can accomdate it here as well.

Business-wise, this will save you thousands of dollars compared to whats on the market. It will make you more efficient and it will give you a single place to look for new support requests – EVERYTHING now automagically ends up in Autotask!

Tune in tomorrow for another announcement with our preferred PSA platform and check out Autotask and ExchangeDefender if you aren’t using us already. 😉

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.