Valentine’s Day Promotion
This year we’ll be focusing on our existing partner base even more. We’ll be cutting back on some of the road shows a bit and refocusing those resources to more efforts to reach out and help our current partners. We’re still offering migrations to our platform free of charge, if you aren’t aware of what we’re able to do, please give us a call at (877)546-0316.
Another step we will be taking is adding more promotions to help your growth. This month we’ll be showing you some “Love” for Valentine’s Day. Please be sure to keep an eye out in your physical mailbox. We sent out a “little something” for you guys to help you save some cash.
If you haven’t received a postcard from us by the end of next week reach out to to us we can get it to you electronically. If you need help with anything or have any questions about our free migration service please give us a call or email me and we can get the ball rolling.
Hosted Exchange – Configuration Checker
Throughout the day we receive hundreds of requests for new services and existing account modifications. Luckily we automated this process from a very early stage and this helped to prevent 99% of account provisioning errors. Believe it or not, there was once a time where everything was processed manually!
However on occasion when there is a hiccup, then it’s simple a matter of locating the source of the issue. While issues on our end are rather easy to diagnose and fix, it’s not always as simple on the partner’s side. There can be a handful of issues that can arise if the account is not properly configured or contains an invalid parameter.
This is why we’ve implemented a well overdue feature integrated directly inside the service manager. If you select the drop down box next to any Hosted Exchange account, you will see a new option called “Check Configuration”.
After selecting this option you will be brought directly to the “Check Configuration” page. It will automatically populate the email address from the previous screen and run the initial check. Also keep in mind that you are able to test other accounts without leaving this page.
It will perform several checks including: Syntax, Server Location, Provisioning, MX Record, Autodiscover and validates that the account is protected by ExchangeDefender. In the event an issue arises you have the option to either “Email” or “Open Ticket” which will automatically include the onscreen results.
We believe that solving the issue promptly makes for a better long term relationship. So if there are any features or adjustments we can make to help smooth the transaction between you and your clients, don’t hesitate to let us know! Our support staff eagerly awaits the opportunity to speak with you about how we can continue to improve our process!
Windows Web Hosting Hardware Upgrade
Platform Upgrade
If you follow our NOC you’ll notice that earlier this week we had a hardware upgrade to our Windows Web Hosting platform. Our team put in extra hours to minimize the amount of down time you and your clients would experience. The key components of the upgrade were RAM and CPU. This resulted in better performance for you and your clients.
Do I as the partner need to do anything?
There is absolutely nothing that you need to do on your end. The upgrade took place on the server side and no changes need to be made on your end. It was a seamless transition and everything from data to host IP addresses remain the same. You and your clients can use the same great product as you always have.
Additional Perks
An additional perk is on the backend of things. The new hardware allows us to perform backups and recoveries more efficiently than what was previously available. This means less down time for you and your clients in the event of a disaster.
Moving Forward
The hardware upgrade was smooth transition. Over the past few days we have seen increased performance. In addition to performance enhancements we now have a more efficient way of backing up your data. As technology is always changing we look forward to making more improvements for you across all of our platforms!
ExchangeDefender – Licensing (Enhanced)
Over the years we’ve always had a desire to increase the aspects of reporting in several areas. However due to time restraints and prioritizing our efforts towards ensuring we made our platform completely stable and continuing to provide a rock solid solution, we had to defer until later.
This has been the case for the last few years. We all worked insane hours to ensure that everyone had an awesome product, that they would be proud to call their own! Now we are enjoying the fruits of our labor and focusing on creating more of the eye popping visual features that will really help showcase our product!
As a result, I’m proud to showcase one of our latest ExchangeDefender features.
While signed in as a (Service Provider) account, you can view the licensing page located under: Licensing->Management. Here you could see the total seat count for the desired domain at a glance. We’ve expanded this to also include the ability to list each individual account under the domains. This is a toggle-able option that is off by default to help limit the initial page load for those who don’t want the extra information.
Not only that, you also have the ability to save and download a PDF of the current view. This has been highly requested by several users as to provide them the ability to keep archived copies of their seat counts each month for financial records. Other users have simply expressed the need to print these reports, which we have also implemented with one click access.
Lastly we understand that our partner’s clients also like to be kept in the loop about their spam information from time to time. Listed next to every domain is the ability to view and print the current SPAM statistics for that account. All of this information is simply one click away, quick and easy access to the information your clients want to see!
Stay tuned we’re working on even more exciting features to help ease the load of bringing a new client on-board and continuing to manage that account!
File Extension Customizations
Much like my last blog, I’ll be focusing on items I’m seeing low utilization on. This week I’ll cover file extension blocking. We’ve given you control over the file attachments that get are allowed to pass through the filter.
Some of you were part of our testing of the software and may have forgotten you set these settings. They’ll be going live, please remember that if you decide you want to now allow these items there is an update cycle that needs to happen and due to the nature of change it takes longer than our usual alias updates and such. So please login to admin.exchangedefender.com and make the changes you wish to make, there is no need to open a support request for this, this hopefully jars your memory.
There is an “exception list” these extensions we will not allow for deviation from our standards of scanning:
.ade, .adp, .bat, .chm, .cmd, .com, .cpl, .exe, .hta, .ins, .isp, .jse, .lib, .lnk, .mde, .msc, .msp, .mst, .pif, .scr, .sct, .shb, .sys, .vb, .vbe, .vbs, .vxd, .wsc, .wsf, .wsh
This is obviously for the security of your clients.
Profit opportunities you may be overlooking
Since coming back from our last trade show, I’ve been going over my notes. I focused on items that partners were unaware we offered. And the two products that keep popping up in my notes are Business Encryption and Compliance Archiving.
We offer business grade lexicon based and policy based (already included in ExchangeDefender pricing) encryption services. The lexicon based encryption adds a flexible layer to your data leak protection. You can configure keyword matches as well as dynamic regexp patterns. The regexp patterns are used to catch specific content and encrypt it or re-route it to a manager for review. As part of the service, we’re able to help you set up dynamic rules built around your client’s requirements to ensure we’re meeting their desired results.
On top of that we also offer Compliance Archiving. This product meets eDiscovery request requirements that require the ability to search for communications in an environment that cannot be edited. Also, you can increase productivity and limit support exposure with your clients. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of enormous corrupted mailboxes, because people don’t want to delete items and mailboxes getting locked out due to quotas.
As we see the market for just email shrink in pricing (due to non business products being purchased by businesses), we have to ensure that we offer specialized value add items. These are becoming increasingly important by the day.
If you have any questions ability the capabilities or pricing of these products please give us a ring and speak to anybody here and we’ll guide in the right direction.
Below you can find links to the product pages:
Corporate Encryption
Compliance Archiving
Don’t forget our number is (877)546-0316.
Holiday Project Cutoff
As many of you are painfully aware, the most convenient time for most small business IT work is between Christmas and New Years day when most employees try to take time off and technology changes have the least impact on productivity.
The deadline for ExchangeDefender Migrations is December 5th. If you are planning to delegate some or all of the migration work to us during Dec 20 – Jan 3 window the contracts need to be in our hands and schedules set by the end of this week.
Our ExchangeDefender Migrations service is an extensive consulting, planning, management and technology offering in which we do all the work of moving your clients from where they are now to our ExchangeDefender & Exchange 2013 platform. From server to desktop to employee, technology to training, we do the whole thing. The secret to being able to do this successfully and effectively is tons of preparation and admin work and in order to have it done by the end of the year requires some advanced scheduling. Thank you for your understanding.
If you haven’t relied on us for migration assistance we should talk and soon. Even if we’re only taking care of the backoffice mail migration and not interacting with the client or desktop alone, it’s totally worth it. Partners often involve us in desktop support side as well, where problems can be extensive and random and fixing obscure “weird” issues that your technicians are seeing for the first time usually leads to hours of searching through forums attempting one home remedy after another – we’ve been down many of those roads and can make things move much faster as you onboard your new client.
As one of my partners and good friends recently told me: “I really love the technology business, except for the technology part.” and she is right, the amount of effort required to get just the basic stuff working consistently and across so many operating systems, devices and weird case scenarios is where most partners bleed out their otherwise profitable contracts. Which is why so many just make ExchangeDefender deal with all things Exchange and Outlook.
On behalf of the whole team here at Own Web Now, ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey, we wish you a happy (and prosperous) holiday season!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
Operations Projects this Summer
This summer has been and will continue to focus on adding more infrastructure for capacity and redundancy purposes. Earlier in July the focus was on rebuild and upgrade for Local Cloud. Due to the success of the platform, we need to make some changes to allow for the deployment multi-site support on the storage hosting/replication side of the software. The changes allowed us to get some new hard ware in place as well. This upgrade has improved the platform’s stability and growth potential. Once the changes to Local Cloud hardware upgrades were completed, our development team also made numerous changes to the software side of the platform that our VP of Development discusses here.
The second application to receive an upgrade was LiveArchive. One of the nodes for LiveArchive used for new clients needed a storage redesign to improve stability of the environment. The bottom line of LiveArchive is that uptime takes massive priority over the mail storage. We sell this as business continuity and the rebuild focused around that, should we ever encounter a storage issue event, we now have the ability to pretty quickly restore availability of the service, which was not the case previously.
Once that was completed, we worked meticulously with one of more important applications, we moved on to Compliance Archive. We understand the value of this offering and the redundancy requirement for folks to make sure this data is not lost. We spent a good part of the summer adding additional replication live replication procedures. This means that should the live database ever be affected we can immediately fail over to the live replicated copy.
The next month will be dedicated to improving the capacity and performance of our email scanning infrastructure. We will be adding 40% more processing power to our Los Angeles site. This will resolve an issue have been experiencing during extreme peak situations with processing speed. This type of build out is something that will come with no downtime expected.
What I do as the Partner Communications Manager at ExchangeDefender
Day-to-Day
My primary role as the Partner Communication Manager is to work with our partners on a day-to-day basis. It is my job to ensure that all of our partners are up to date on everything that we do and to be available for any sales or billing related issues. As the Partner Communications Manager I am your number one source on anything not related to support or development. If you need to have a conversation about any of our products, need marketing collateral, have a billing question, or just need general information, I’m the person to contact. You can even talk to me in person at the shows! J
Working with us
If you are in need of marketing collateral, have questions about your account or need to talk about a prospect you can contact me directly at: anastaisa@ownwebnow.com or 877-546-0316 x 739.
Help us help you
When it comes to marketing collateral the typical turnaround time is 48 hours, but can be 72 hours if we are receiving a high volume of requests. Once I receive your request I will email you letting you know I have received it and request any additional information I may need.
Sales Inquiries:
When speaking to our partners I’m often asked to provide a quote for a prospective client. Often times the only bit of information I get is the price quote. This is great and it’s a start but I need more. Not only does having all the info help me, but it helps you. It allows me to be more effective in giving you a comparable quote. From speaking to our Partners I know the end user is very price conscious, but they typically do not fully understand what they are getting with an uber cheap mailbox. Then when something breaks and your client *thinks* they are paying for a backup you’re the one cleaning up the mess and end up losing money on something you didn’t even sell to them. Point being, details are key!
We are here for you
Here at ExchangeDefender we want to make sure we meet all of your needs. If you’re not utilizing us to the full extent, then you’re overpaying us. I’m here to help with anything business related, including marketing collateral and billing questions, so utilize your resources!
What the Chief of Operations does at ExchangeDefender
The responsibilities of my position are fluid. They fluctuate between managing the personnel and technology needs of the company. My responsibilities can include at least the following:
- Feature Request Reviews – Analyzing feasibility and ROI.
- Staffing Decisions – Anything from time off requests, to hiring, to terminations and everything in between.
- Disaster Management – When something really bad happens, I get to make the tough decisions.
- Infrastructure Management
- Trade Show Roster Management
- And when my engineers are unable to solve an issue, I become the defacto Linux and network administrator.
If you need to escalate an issue, always reach out to Frankie Guiliano first since hes my support manager. Generally that means he has a faster pulse to current issue and may be able to resolve your issues faster. If you’re unable to reach a resolution you can email me. Now I only make one request, link me to your ticket that includes diagnostic information. This will allow me to trace the issue technically or if it’s a situation involving one of my employees.
Once I get an email, the first thing I do is go through the ticket since it allows me to review the details of the actual problem myself. I think we can all agree that once we’re frustrated with a situation our judgment becomes cloudy and we get short sighted, it’s human. So I like try to gain a non-angry perspective from the facts available, which I like to assume are part of the ticket. From there, I have to decide how to remedy the situation, which may include: making platform changes, employee reprimands, saying something close to “no” in as few situations as possible.
If you’re running into a situation with our platform that you’re finding falling short, please let me know. Some changes take more time than others, but I can assure you that I will look into the changes and if they’re workable, I’m willing to make them. One of the things that I offer as a differentiation point when I speak with folks, we will always to fit what your needs are for your clients.
If you have any questions, please reach out to me at carlos@ownwebnow.com.