Shockey Monkey Reloaded
This week the development team has been focused on cleaning up Shockey Monkey. This process is mainly composed of three focused categories (UI, Performance, and Bug/Warning Fixes). I would say this has been the largest update to Shockey Monkey since it was originally created over seven years ago. This update should also help lay the framework for any future additions or tweaks.
User Interface
– We’ve applied a consistent look and feel across the entire portal.
– Implemented a themed backend that allows quick and easy branding.
– Improved cross browser support
Performance
– Improved loading performance across the portal.
– Minified most of the JavaScript files to reduce fetch & loading times.
– Implemented more session variables to reduce the amount of queries.
Bug Fixes
– Decreased Disk IO access by resolving more than 1000+ warnings that were constantly being written to a local log file.
– We’ve fixed a handful of bug over the past few weeks and have been continuing to resolve these issues as we enhance the portal.
– If you have a bug, submit it here: https://support.ownwebnow.com/create.asp?item=development
Performance is being improved in several ways across the Shockey Monkey portals. The first thing we did was minified thousands and thousands of lines of JavaScript. The compression ratio on average across all of our scripts was about 65%, which is very good. We’ve also been fixing trivial “warning” messages as we progress through the code. By resolving these warning messages that are generated on the back end, it reducing the amount of disk IO that is required to store this information. Typically this is not a big deal, but multiply that by 1000’s of warning and you get some nasty seek times.
If we go a little bit into the cleanup of the User Interface, it was a project that was mainly focused on consistency. We are also making sure that the look and feel between browser types is very similar. There are also a few special features of the new UI that will really help bring the User experience to a new level. One of these features is the ability to view any page in “Full Screen” mode. What this does is remove the top and side menus from the portal. This allows you to manage any page without the annoyance of having to resize or scroll to achieve simple tasks.
We have a lot more information and a ton more features that we are saving for the unveiling. If you would like to be a part of the Shockey Monkey Reloaded webinar on Thursday, December 1, 2011 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST, visit the following link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/812869640.
Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com
ExchangeDefender Q4 Webcast on Thursday
I have to admit, I’m very excited about the Q4 webinar on Thursday. It looks like this will be our best attended webcast of the year and I’ve got a ton of stuff to present, explain, position and help you make money with. The profit structure of the MSP space has been changing rapidly so come see how OWN partners stay ahead of the curve and beat out the likes of Microsoft and Google when it comes to closing.
Seating is limited but if you register you will be able to watch the webinar recording at your convenience.
ExchangeDefender Q4 Webinar
Thursday, October 27, at Noon EST
Here is a brief summary of what we’ll cover:
– Brand new web site with all of our products and services on one site
– Realtime Network Operations Center that keeps you in the loop
– Launch of our new ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive email solution
– Geographic redundancy for all ExchangeDefender services
– Launch of LiveArchive 3 in Dallas and Los Angeles
– Enhanced integrations with Kaseya, LPI, nAble, GFI Max, Quotewerks, etc
Other Items
We’re starting to open up our 2012 roadmap and we’re really looking for feedback. ExchangeDefender Gold program is underway and some of you have started receiving calls from my management – help them help you. If you’d like to talk to me directly and don’t want to hit my cell phone, I will be at the HTG / Preday / ConnectWise event and have an open schedule, claim a spot:
ConnectWise IT Nation + HTG Appointment Request
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QPL9NZB
Beyond that, we’ve really kicked up the blogging on here to the next level. There is new content on nearly daily basis and we’re getting amazing feedback from our partners so we’re going to keep at it. This is typically more detailed stuff than you’ll ever get from me but that’s the point, if you want to stay in touch and be in the know now you can. Here are some of the posts from the last week:
How to position and sell Exchange messaging
ExchangeDefender Redundancy: Technical Implementation Details
Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 vs. Exchange 2010 Essentials
Introducing Geographic Redundancy to ExchangeDefender Services
The Persuasive Power of Discounts and Trials
Shockey Monkey & Keeping It Clean
The Persuasive Power of Discounts and Trials
Upselling Downtime–How to Properly Position Business Continuity
My staff spends far more time, collectively, with you than I ever can and they are experts at their pieces. What you read here is not just their opinion, these are the best practices we pick up in the field working with you day-to-day. Best of all, you can read it anywhere, anytime – no need to wait for a conference, no need to sit through a long webinar and you can easily forward it to the appropriate people in your company. We hear success stories about how these articles have already made a difference in our partners sales staff and marketing, not to mention given folks that interact with the services on a technical level a much better understanding of how these products behave on the very basic level.
Talk to you tomorrow, I look forward to it!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, ExchangeDefender
(407) 536-VLAD
ExchangeDefender 7 Beta Launch Webinar
This Wednesday we will be holding a webinar to introduce you to the ExchangeDefender 7 beta launch. The one hour show will be recorded but you really should attend the live event as we’ll be answering questions after the show:
Please click below to register:
Wednesday, April 6th, 1PM – 2PM EST
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/120736520
The first part of the event should be attended by the business decision makers, sales and marketing personnel. We will be discussing the new business model behind ExchangeDefender 7 and the key changes that will make the new product a lot more profitable for your existing sales. We are making a lot of changes based on feedback and market demands.
The second part of the event should be attended by the technical employees that will be a part of the product deployment.
Important: The only way to gain access to the beta sites is to attend the live webinar or watch the recording. Future sales of ExchangeDefender will only be supported through companies that go through the free product training and going through the beta process will allow you to skip some of the required training.
Preparing for Disasters
The entire United States is snowed in, with the exception of Florida which is experiencing drought and wildfires. On the other side of the world, east coast of Australia is expecting major floods. No matter where you live, the weather is trying to get in a way of work.
Just because the weather is not cooperating does not mean you are down. All it takes is a lot of planning a few tips and tricks and some process. Join us for an hour of success stories and secrets our partners have shared with us about how their services have helped their clients continue working.
Thursday, January 13th, 1 PM EST
Is this just a major pitch for ExchangeDefender? Not really – naturally we spend most of our time talking to our partners about ExchangeDefender and how it helps them manage and plan for unforeseen events such as the ones caused by the weather. Reality is that regardless of the disaster, some common sense practices can put you at a major advantage and most of those practices are developed when you go through an outage.
We want to share some of the ideas, tips and tricks – along with some forms and promotional collateral – that has made us and our partners successful.
But since you asked about ExchangeDefender…
We have two really popular pieces in ExchangeDefender that our partners win deals with over and over again.
LiveArchive is an Exchange 2010 replica server that sits in our data center and replicates all inbound and outbound mail in a spare Exchange 2010 mailbox that your clients can access at any time. When their servers go down or Outlook crashes, they can just login at https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com and continue working. Best part – no maintenance! The LiveArchive is always on, no configuration or management needed. More info.
FailPOP is new for 2011 and built on a massive POP3/IMAP/SSL infrastructure. It’s created when you add ExchangeDefender users and they are provisioned at the time the account is created. When disaster strikes all you have to do is power on your profile and it becomes your new mail server – all free and built into ExchangeDefender. I know you may wonder: But isn’t LiveArchive better? It depends. LiveArchive has up to a year of your users mail already on and is powered by Microsoft OWA 2010. But FailPOP can be used for extended outages and accessed quickly and easily from mobile devices as well as desktop software without using webmail. More info.
The biggest part of our partners success is not ExchangeDefender – it’s planning the implementation and educating clients on how to take advantage of it. Tomorrow, we hope to share some of the tips and tricks with you.
Please sign up for the webinar and we’ll email you the collateral: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/641992257
The recording will be posted here shortly after the webcast but since you’re snowed in – we’ll do our best to entertain you and keep you warm!