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
Shockey Monkey – 30 days later
Many of you first heard about Shockey Monkey when it launched about a month ago at CompTIA. Now nearly a month later, and well over 1,000 portals strong, Shockey Monkey has been an overwhelming success. It has consumed nearly all of our development resources as the delivery of Shockey Monkey and it’s deep integrations is critical to all of our partners success in the cloud.
We have done a great job with the feedback that you’ve given us and are on-schedule to deliver the Service Manager functionality next week. In fact, it will be the core subject of our townhall webcast next week, and it’s a great time to ask questions as the entire team will be present:
Shockey Monkey Townhall – Service Manager
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/656778440
We have already shipped the Import/Export Wizard and Email integration and we have committed to delivering full ExchangeDefender suite to each Shockey Monkey user – free or pro. With the portals generating an enormous amount of email, and our partners relying on them more and more, we simply had to make sure you would stay in business in case of a catastrophic data loss event. Let me repeat that – when you sign up for Shockey Monkey, your organization gets full ExchangeDefender free of charge.
Why?
I have been asked this question in a number of ways: Why do I need Shockey Monkey? Why do I need Autotask or ConnectWise if I can get Shockey Monkey? Why would I use this if I already have a PSA? Why would you develop this if you’ve already developed integrations to other PSA’s. Allow me to answer this in two parts.
1. Regardless of which PSA solution you have, you will have Shockey Monkey by the end of September. Our investment in Autotask and ConnectWise is not going away, but we have a huge need for services that we could not offer through third parties because of both legal and development (API) constraints. First, in order for our partners to win in the cloud their name and logo must be the first – the only – thing the client sees. Our partners spend an enormous amount of time building their brand and client trust & loyalty: so we must deliver a solution that makes it easy for our clients to manage their cloud solutions with a brand that is uniquely our partners. Everything from checkout to self management to documentation is Own Web Now’s responsibility to provide, and by integrating it with the rich experience we deliver in the Service Manager there is only one way to do it.
2. Let me say it again – our investment in Autotask and ConnectWise is not going away. Shockey Monkey does not compete with these solutions nor is it designed to replace them. However, the level of self-service and client management we deliver as a part of Shockey Monkey is not yet possible with the third parties, but we still expect you to count on them for support management, billing integration, executive reporting and service statistics.
To sum it up: We have designed Shockey Monkey for you, to help you build a better client-friendly cloud business. It’s free and it’s really all about you and your users. You need Shockey Monkey because your users need this feature set and these products. If you don’t provide it, someone else will and we’re here to help you win.
That said, I encourage you to go ahead, sign up, and check it out. And please make sure to register and tune in next Wednesday.
I will be discussing this today, live, around 1:05 at MSPU in Washingon DC: http://www.mspu.us/livebootcamp