Announcing LiveArchive 4
After extensive beta testing and taking tons of feedback on the design and future of LiveArchive, we are proud to introduce you to our newest version of ExchangeDefender LiveArchive. Available today and with all your email already loaded into the new system. What’s new?
New LiveArchive goes beyond email business continuity – it not only caches your inbound and sent mail but also keeps your contacts, calendars and appointments. It’s available anytime you need it via a secure web site, it is easily accessible from your smartphone and it even use IMAP to get to it from your email software like Outlook or Thunderbird.
Just remember to bookmark https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com
This was an enormous undertaking as a result of everything we’ve learned through the year of running the massive failover service. We’ve retired Microsoft Exchange as it simply could not scale or effectively provide the kind of service the new IT demands. When LiveArchive was conceived most business users had a central server and workstations in close proximity to it, so the biggest demand was to at least be able to access email if anything went down.
In 2014 and beyond things are a lot more complex and everything is in the cloud that never goes down, right? 
Truth is not just that the cloud is far less reliable than advertised but that there is often no centralized point of backup or control of corporate data. Some information is in Exchange, some is on your phone or your iPad, some is on another cloud file sync service and third party subscription services take care of the rest.
Our design challenge with the new LiveArchive was clear: Look beyond email and create a central point of business continuity for all corporate communications. We have built a massively scalable and redundant platform that can pull and receive information from third party services.
This is what we have delivered with LiveArchive and this is the future of ExchangeDefender as a business – providing security and backup for the cloud.
What does it look like?
With Microsoft out of the picture the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook Web Access is replaced with a scalable UI that works great in any browser you may have – which is convenient when you consider the growing variety of mobile devices and tablet/laptop platforms. Just point your browser to LiveArchive and it will find your grid as you authenticate.
During the beta testing process we recommended that our partners configure dormant profiles on their clients mobile phones so that when the downtime does happen they are just a few clicks away from setting up a full communications platform. In fact, once you switch from your native email platform to LiveArchive the experience with the mobile device is exactly the same, it’s very hard to tell the difference.
Please don’t wait for your infrastructure to crash before you look at setting up LiveArchive, partners that don’t track passwords and configurations tend to reset clients ExchangeDefender password as a first impulse reaction to an outage and then deal with another stack of problems on top of the actual outage. But we got you anyhow – our iOS and Android apps will be on the market soon and they deliver the full experience of the LiveArchive right inside of the app.
Don’t worry, you won’t even have to remember the LiveArchive address once you install the app, it’s right there on the shortcut bar:
In summary, it’s cold outside and now is the time to check this out.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x500
vlad@ExchangeDefender.com
We’ve Upgraded Exchange Essentials
Let’s face it, not all businesses need mission critical, data center redundant, year-long business continuity backing their operations. They just need an effective system to communicate and collaborate. Say hello to ExchangeDefender Exchange Essentials 2013. Here is the executive overview:
Microsoft Exchange 2013 Mailbox (10GB)
ExchangeDefender Essentials Security
5 days of business continuity (Emergency)
Private Branding + White Label
24/7 Support via portal, phone and chat
Just
$7.99$6.99 / month
This highly redundant offering is a perfect starter email solution for a company migrating from SBS or in-house server solution. True, it doesn’t have long term business continuity of LiveArchive, compliance, encryption, migration assistance or data center redundancy but if you need to manage your budget this is a great way to do it.
One more thing: For the next month we will be offering a discount of $1 that will be locked in for at least one year, so it’s yours for just $6.99 per user per month. Of course you can rebrand it and adjust the pricing to compensate you for provisioning and rollout.
But what if it goes down?
Exchange in the cloud is the same as Exchange in your office, there is no magical version and from time to time it will have issues. We have a redundant and clustered deployment so when we have to do maintenance or when there is an unexpected issue, we can shut down servers without interrupting service. But let’s say something significantly bad is going on and everything goes lights out – what now? Well, we have ExchangeDefender Emergency backing you up and giving you access to 5 days worth of email archive that you can search, view and reply/compose from. You continue to work until your Exchange mailbox is ready.
This in fact is the biggest and easiest upsell in our cloud portfolio: Once you show your users how easy it is to be able to send and receive email when there is an outage, just tell them you have another solution that also gives them access to all their contacts and appointments – along with a year worth of items available for them. Oh, and it works on your mobile device as well so you don’t have to be stuck in front of a PC with a web browser. For just $2 a month more you can have ultimate peace of mind knowing that you’ll never have to worry about your mail.
But Vlad says this is not for business? Is it?
As an expert (not meaning smart, meaning I’ve been through enough email outages to know better) I cannot in good conscience recommend a solution that I know has a potential to cause downtime. ExchangeDefender Essentials was built as a way to compromise on data center and business continuity systems in order to create a budget friendly service.
My personal opinion of the potential pitfalls is not the corporate representation of the product or everyone that works here: We support the product around the clock, we spare no expense when it comes to creating a high end product, we have built what we believe is the most effective and most powerful email solution on Exchange 2013. But if something has a potential to go down, when the rock solid one costs just $2 more, I just cannot hide my contempt for it, that’s all. Take it with a grain of salt as you do all opinions. This is just one of the differences with ExchangeDefender, we are here for our partners and our clients – not investors. We want to give you every benefit we can possibly come up with so you can win in the market and make your clients happy.
To sum it up
Enjoy. If you have any users on SBS this is a great opportunity to get them on a solid platform for $6.99 with the discount through the end of January 2014.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, ExchangeDefender
vlad@ownwebnow.com
Welcome to Orlando
Many of our partners are in town for the HTG, ConnectWise and associated vendor parties so I wanted to take a moment and give you some ideas on how to best leverage us, your vendor, for greater success. Despite popular opinion, we’re not at the conference for the sole purpose of handing out swag and filling up trade show floor space with banners and marketing junk.
We’re here to inform you – We know you’re busy. We know we have a ton of webinars. I hear this a lot – yet you spent a ton of money to be out of your office for days and the best way to earn some extra ROI on your trip is to talk to us about what is going on at ExchangeDefender. You may not use every single product we have, you may not stay on top of every single blog post we write or announcement we make – so feel free to ask about what is new, what has changed and if any of your previous issues have been resolved. We are always adding to our solution portfolio and we know it end to end so we’re the best folks to give you a 10,000 foot view of our company; and can drag over a sales or technical person to explain the full details in a second.
We’re here to connect you with other partners – IT providers are not all the same. Many of our partners specialize in specific verticals and have developed custom stuff using our API, so if you are thinking outside the box we can likely get you contact info for partners that work in the same vertical or have a different way of using or positioning our solutions.
We’re here to give you the whole picture – If you don’t tune in to every webinar or haven’t spoken to anyone at ExchangeDefender in a year chances are you’re missing out on a lot of development. We can quickly walk you through everything that has changed and put it in a context of why we are doing so. For example, we recently launched ExchangeDefender LiveArchive 4 and it is no longer based on Microsoft Exchange. Why? It’s not due to the cost. It’s not due to the licensing. It’s not due to the complexity – it’s because our long term business goal for LiveArchive is to create a full redundancy for your entire communication experience – not just email. With LiveArchive 4 we can now provide failover email solution that also includes your contacts and your whole schedule, so you’re missing absolutely nothing when your mail server goes offline. Understanding what we are doing, and why, is a great way to make sure your clients are getting the solution that continues to solve their evolving problems as they count on you more.
We’re here to give you a quick rundown of everything new – If you’ve made it this far you’re in minority, most people just skim blog posts. That is fair, we do it as well. Information overload is serious business and you can only take in so much every day. Well, if you stop by our booth we can talk to you about what we’ve done, what we’re doing, what is coming down the pipe and so on.
We’re here for feedback – Most importantly, we are here to hear from you. You’re welcome to call us 24/7 but if there is something that really bugs you about our service or something that is working out really well but needs some tweaking, we are here to get the big picture for you so we can sell it to our management and developers. Our entire solution stack has been built on partner feedback and it’s the single most valuable takeaway (yes, even more important than new partner acquisition) from conference events.
To sum it up: Stop by, say hi, ask us what’s new and tell us what we could be doing better. And please don’t ask us where Vlad is, he is more of an imaginary character like the Wizard of Oz than an actual participant of day-to-day business 
Anastasia Wiggins
Answering With The Cloud
Every new wave of technological advancement brings nuances that make it difficult to make the exact comparison to the problems old technology solved. The easiest way to promote the new stuff is to talk about all the new great things it does, but what do you say when you are questioned about things that are no longer a problem in the 21st century?
One of the questions we are usually asked is if a company has enough bandwidth to rely on Hosted Exchange.
Fair question. When the small company first started it’s Exchange deployment in late 90’s early 00’s it had all it’s employees in one site and every desktop was on the LAN. Fast forward to 2013 where most employees have mobile phones that are in constant sync with the Exchange deployment over the WAN. Remote offices, road warriors, executive laptops at home – now each user has several devices connecting to the Exchange server at the office and there would be actual net savings in bandwidth if the Exchange server went to the cloud!
To be fair, these “infrastructure concerns” are typically coming from the IT employee who is trying to protect his job with inferior solutions: Your sales process should focus on actual business operations concerns around business continuity, security and compliance. Here are some ways to differentiate the cloud model with the DIY model.
Just how reliable is the cloud version? What happens when it goes down?
Well it uses the same software that you would run in your office so it is comparable to your existing experience. The difference with the cloud is that the systems are much larger and far more redundant so they can conduct more maintenance without affecting operations because it’s not a single server. Maintenance keeps small problems from becoming big problems and when there are issues they are posted here so you know exactly what is going on.
Cloud Exchange is also redundant across two data centers so if there is a networking issue that impacts one you will still be in business.
In the event of a catastrophic outage, where your cloud Exchange is actually down, you can rely on ExchangeDefender LiveArchive which gives you last year worth of email including all your contacts, calendars and appointments with full realtime access to send and receive even over a mobile device.
What about backups? What if they go out of business? How can I be sure I have my data?
You’re protected in several ways, the most immediate one being Outlook 2013 cached mode. Because Outlook 2013 is included for free we will upgrade all your workstations to store all your email locally on your workstations or laptops so it will be protected by the local backups first.
We also provide business level backups of your entire organization and we can do it on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis so you can snapshot your mail and keep it here or off site in a safe deposit box on a portable USB hard drive. We can even automate the process by keeping this information on BDR systems in our data center.
There is also an option for Compliance Archiving – we can store up to 10 years of email and have it available for immediate search without additional devices or appliances. It’s just another service available to protect your data.
To be honest, the concept of backups worked in the old days where organizations had small servers or single instance storage with a single RAID – cloud deployments are scalable, using multiple servers with DAG that keeps copies of the data in multiple locations. Because these systems are built for scale they offer more flexibility and more data copies – but we can certainly help you sleep easier at night by providing these additional services that make sense if you’re not so sure about the cloud.
What about security? I hear the cloud is hacked a lot! I have compliance to worry about as well.
The threat of having your security compromised is real regardless of where your Exchange is. One thing you can be sure of is that providing the level of monitoring and security layers available in the cloud would make an office server solution very expensive. ExchangeDefender provides stated Security Procedures document, Data Destruction Document, is SSAE 16 certified and undergoes multiple security audits every year – how about your IT employee?
We already mentioned Compliance Archiving, the system that gives you realtime access to 10 years of your email, where you can quickly locate any inbound, outbound and even interoffice email that matches search criteria. If you have HIPAA concerns, ExchangeDefender will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) so you’re covered and have full access to your mail without worrying if it has been tampered with by the IT staff.
Security is really a matter of monitoring, technology and user awareness. ExchangeDefender has a lot more resources and higher end firewalls and DDoS protection service to address security problems when they pop up, patch the systems quickly because it can offline redundant servers, filter suspicious traffic and more that we cannot do affordably for you in the office. But what we can do is implement requirements for password rotation, we can deploy RSA SecurID for one-time passwords, we can monitor usage patterns and more.
Summary
Sometimes it’s hard for people stuck in the old model of IT to quickly accept how change has provided for better solutions to old IT problems. The key to a successful client relationship and a sale is not to argue some preconceived notions about IT but to explain the advances in technology and all the better stuff they will get from the cloud.
While everything about technology can be debated endlessly by the tech world, technical implementation to suit business has been taken out of the clutches of IT departments and placed into control of executives who have a more practical view of technology. Try asking two IT people: “What’s the best way to backup data” and see how many answers you get. Asking an executive will get you a different, more practical answer: We need to be able to continue work as usual within X hours but we need to have access to Y years of data in case of an audit.
ExchangeDefender and our partners are constantly evolving the best technology and the best local people around the world to solve these IT problems. Sometimes starting the conversation and framing it in a way to explain the advancement we’ve had in the past two decades when it comes to email is more difficult than just providing the solution. We hope this helps and if you need more info please do not hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
ExchangeDefender Migrations & Support Business Model
ExchangeDefender Migrations & Support Services is off to an incredible start. But I’ll be first to admit that as usual, marketplace adoption of our solution is slightly different from the way we expected it would be. This webinar will briefly explain our services and business model and then dive deeply into the way our Migrations & Services business has been adopted so far by our partners and how everyone is leveraging these services for a profit. No two small business IT Solution Providers are alike – there are MSPs, ISVs, VARs, specialists, technicians, large IT departments and small contractors to Fortune 500 that are leveraging our services to deliver solutions to teams small and large – and one thing they all have in common now is that they have a partner that can help them scale and quickly offer cloud solutions that are not just latest and greatest but also supported and implemented end to end:
ExchangeDefender Migrations & Support Webinar
http://www.exchangedefender.com/media/XDMigrations.wmv
01:52 What’s new
05:47 Migration Services
08:30 Does it make sense?
10:14 Support Services
12:45 Does it make sense?
14:53 Promotions, Strategy, Win-Win
16:39 Migration Overview
23:08 Migration Overview
25:47 Profit Opportunities
29:10 Migration Fees
33:36 Migration Assistance
38:06 Migration Parallel Tasks
47:28 Cloud = No More IT Problems?
I cannot stress this enough: This is an invitation to a partnership. Migrations & Services is not a product you pick off the shelf and throw into an invoice – it is a project oriented rollout where we do as little or as much as you would like us to do. We can do the migration. We can do the support. We can do the software rollout. We can move the email. We can manage the DNS and manage the VIPs that need their iPhone and iPad configured. We can even bill the client and pay you a commission. We can do anything and everything you want us to do: But the point is that you can build a huge business by being a part of this. Let’s talk.
ExchangeDefender Migrations & Support Services are about giving you scale. About giving you freedom and time to pursue more profitable ways to be more valuable to your clients while leaving the complex, annoying, time consuming and frankly thankless tasks to us. Please download the webinar and hear what our partners have done with us so far, how they are structuring these deals, what they are charging for it, how they are executing side projects and how everything works in real life.
I urge every single one of you reading this post to email me at vlad@ownwebnow.com and sit down for a conversation about what this can do for you. No pressure, no sales quota (after all, you’re talking to the boss), no tricks, schemes or purchase required: This is the biggest opportunity we are presenting to our partners in the 16 year history of our business and I am personally the one spearheading this effort because without you none of this would ever be possible.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender Reputation Scoring
When you send an email through ExchangeDefender it is checked for the presence of viruses, malware, SPAM and other dangerous content. It is our responsibility to make sure that the mail crossing the network, both in and out, is safe and that we are notcontributing to the flood of junk across the Internet. This is the story of our outbound network and it’s working great.
We also have another network, outbound-jr (affectionately nicknamed junk relay) where the rules are a little more relaxed. Some organizations have business case scenarios thatrequire them to send out null sender messages (maintenance, bounces, oof replies), some like to send bounces, some have massive email notification systems (RMM, transactions, etc) and they are on the line of legitimate andjunk mail as a choice. Since junk classification is handled by computers, (not humans), sometimes-legitimate mail is not being accepted for delivery.
A change that we are considering implementing, is a stricter set of monitoring and access restriction controls on outbound-jr. The first of these is a restriction on open SMTP ports, which often contributes to open relay mass mailings. This can be accomplished by rolling out a service that will deny access to outbound-jr if a client’s port 25 is accessible from the Internet (outside of the ExchangeDefender network). Traditionally this has been managed by IT departments and partners, but with a constant barrage of overly aggressive SPAM methods, the ability for most to manage this without security threats or incidents is an overwhelming issue.
To counter these threats and provide the most effective and best solution possible for our partners, we are soliciting feedback and beginning the alerting process to clients that have port 25 open without IP restrictions to the ExchangeDefender network. If there are no major objections to enforcing IP restrictions to port 25 (after all, if you have external client that requires SMTP relay access they can always use the SSL port) then we are considering adding this as a service requirement.
Thoughts? Opinions? Let us know via phone, chat, support tickets or just email me at vlad@ownwebnow.com
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender M&S Services Division
Over the past 16 years ExchangeDefender teams have brought some remarkable products to the cloud and enabled service providers to solve common small business problems and still fit in the company budget profitably. As we have grown so have our partners, around the world, and we’re happy to announce the new service division that will build upon that success.
When I speak to our most successful partners the most common problems IT Solution Providers encounter is that of scale. The opportunities in the marketplace are tremendous and taking advantage of them all would require working around the clock and through the weekends. With our market threatened by large companies with cheap solutions and poor service, it becomes even more important to show flexibility, portfolio diversity and customer service: namely, if the client wants to move their email and document storage to the cloud over the weekend to minimize operational impact we have to make that happen.
ExchangeDefender is excited to bring that dream to reality for many of our partners.
Our ExchangeDefender Migration Service is a project-oriented solution that works on our partners behalf to organize, schedule, execute, document and support a migration effort. Our ExchangeDefender Support Service is a subscription-based service meant to continue white-branded support of the client once they are in the cloud around the clock. Through both solutions, and through our partners, we can deliver cloud based solutions small businesses want at the price they want to pay with the level of service they can rely on. Our mission is very simple.
It’s critical for our partners to trust the process through which we intend to implement and support the cloud. In order to trust us you need to be able to understand our process, consider all the typical “what if” cases and properly fit our projects with your own model. In order to explain it all and go through all the details we will be holding a live webinar that I would like to invite you to:
ExchangeDefender Migration & Support Service Webinar
Oct 9, 2013 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
Registration: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/686418297
Please take the time to join us as we will be taking questions live as well as discussing existing migration and support projects that will not be a part of the recorded webinar. While the projects and our process are very intuitive and simple, the devil is in the details and there is more to migration and support than moving mail and answering technical questions.
The focus of the new division is service. We are not just representing us, we are representing your brand. We are not just supporting our product, we are becoming a part of your support and escalation process. We are not simply a software company, we are a service provider too. As you’ve noticed through the blogs and through our expanded portfolio, we are growing up a lot and assuming more responsibilities to help you grow faster.
The single greatest growth opportunity for SMB IT Solution Providers in a decade is here and now is the time to take advantage of it. I urge you to join us and work with us to our mutual success. We certainly work forward to it and have put and incredible amount of effort into this.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com
(407) 536-VLAD
LocalCloud 2.1
We’ve released an update to the desktop version of ExchangeDefender LocalCloud. We’ve spent a few days sifting through bugs reported via (The bug section) @ support.ownwebnow.com for ExchangeDefender LocalCloud and those are the ones we focused on and fixed. Listed below are the hand full of bugs that were isolated and corrected. You can find the most recent version (v1.2), here.
· Fixed an issue that would cause the application to crash upon launch.
o This issue was caused by invalid .ICO files being supplied for branding. Even though it explicitly states that you must provide .ICO files for the Product Icon:, we had users uploading (jpg, gif, png) files.
· Fixed an issue that would prevent files from being deleted from the cloud upon request.
· Fixed an issue that would cause the application to continuously download/synchronize files.
While out team was busy correcting the issues reported for the desktop version of LocalCloud, we finalized our initial Web Version of the file sharing software. The web interface is a slightly trimmed down version of the Desktop Software, for what should be obvious reasons.
The Web Interface Offers, (Fully Integrated – into the admin.exchangedefender.com (USER) control panel.) the ability to view, download and upload files to your personal /shared LocalCloud accounts.
The accounts you have access to will be located in the left panel and their content is located to the right. You can easily transverse through the file structures to either upload or download a desired file. Complete with real time file upload & download status and located at the bottom of the screen is your storage quota. Now you can view & access your files from virtually anywhere.
Blogging Something New
If you’ve followed our blog for a while you have seen us mostly focus on the product development, support, marketing and all things related to ExchangeDefender. No change there, but I have something new: we have chosen to start adding more technology consulting content that can help you with our solutions.
As we have grown so have our partners. Many of whom are hiring technical and business staff that doesn’t have in-depth knowledge of the increasingly complex and legally challenging landscape of modern communications. As our solutions help businesses manage operations, communicate, store data and collaborate it’s on to us to help you tell a compelling story.
Simply put, we are doubling down on the educational and training resources at ExchangeDefender.
Our webinar on August 28th will feature a lot of new stuff and we will cover the new versions of ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey, Unicorn, LocalCloud and several new initiatives meant to help you grow your business and make your clients more efficient. We will use this blog as a run up to that webinar, posting educational content that will give you more background about everything we are doing, how we see our partners taking advantage of our solutions, where opportunities are and what potential pitfalls you need to avoid.
You have to pay attention. Or choose to ignore it. I have many conversations with our partners on the polar opposites of satisfaction with our content: To some our information and our people are priceless – for others there is just too much stuff and stuff is hard to find. Strategically, after much debate and internal arguing, we have chosen to continue putting out more content and Google search for specific questions that folks ask us for from time to time. If you can’t find it on the web site, call us or chat with us and we’ll track it down. I have to be honest with you – the business IT is now far more serious than it was 5 or 10 years ago, the legal exposure is great, dealing with liabilities and regulatory compliance is a challenge that is a part of our value proposition. We will take our time to train you and make you successful because if we cannot jointly solve these problems and help our clients succeed above those that don’t care… then there is no reason for us to be in business. I truly believe that and the whole team at ExchangeDefender believes that.
We believe that our most profitable days are ahead of us which is why we are spending money on these solutions just as others are trying to sell theirs for scrap: The difference now is that the easy money may have already been made and the most profitable projects ahead will require skill beyond IT and ability to provide guidance beyond what can be found in a quick Google search.
We will help you as little or as much as you need us and on behalf of the entire team here, thank you for your business.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
vlad@ownwebnow.com
877-546-0316 x500
ExchangeDefender Managed Launch
We are holding a very special webinar on August 28th to announce the launch of a new service to supplement our ExchangeDefender Exchange, SharePoint and Lync offering. If you currently work with ExchangeDefender and have a growing business I cannot possibly encourage you more than to attend this event and learn what we are doing to make it possible for you to grow faster. Please register as soon as possible as seating is limited and recording will be available only to active partners:
Wed, Aug 28, 2013 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM EDT
Seriously, if you attend one webinar of ours this year.. make it this one. People have been begging us to offer these services through our partners since the launch of Managed Messaging last year and we’re going at it 100%.
We have a limited availability of the new services we will be announcing and they will be limited to our active partners as we hire on more people and scale the service out to meet the demand that we expect to be off the charts.
If you have not had a chance to hear our last webinar, please take a look at it. We have spent the past 9 months on reengineering our new solutions and implementing a new level of discipline across the organization including the SSAE16 audit. The amount of work, efford, training and migrations we have executed has prepared us to take this next leap into helping our parters grow faster.
As you will hear me say repeatedly during the webinar, the time to gain a massive market share in the cloud is now. This is likely the only time you will get to properly position your solution as the one that has support backing and is designed and managed for business, not for freebie advertising sales. While we do not have anything against the solutions offered by Microsoft and Google, the problem businesses have with communications are far different than those of consumers and everyday email consumers. Communication is critical to a business, as is compliance, protection from lawsuits and ability to enforce corporate policies, encrypt sensitive information and have an organization that will answer the call and help with an email issue any day.
Please join us. We feel that the hundreds or thousands of dollars you will earn on the very first deployment are well worth being there. You need to understand the business model and we are here to help you build around it.