Billing Issues
As some of you may have noticed with emailed notices, there is an issue with the billing this month. We are addressing this issue at the moment, updating invoices and correcting charges at the moment and expect to have it resolved by tomorrow.
We will update this blog post with the details of the issues that caused the problem and will be following up directly with the partners that were affected.
Update 3:22 PM EST: At this point we have correct invoices in the system and will be restoring order processing shortly. We are leaving both the correct and the voided invoice in the system for the benefit of those that were charged incorrectly so you can match up refunds with the correct charges.
New ExchangeDefender Exchange Essentials
ExchangeDefender is excited to announce a redesigned Exchange Hosting Essentials service aimed at entry level market. By providing an affordable and hassle-free way to purchase, provision and budget Exchange services we are hoping to give our partners a better way to design solutions for small business email problems.
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When we first introduced Exchange Essentials a few years ago, we created an offering with cost reduction in mind, by allowing the users to compromise on support, redundancy and features in order to get the product that fit their budget. What we found out with the product matrix is that interest is primarily polar – client either demands the lowest price or the highest set of features for the buck but nothing in between. In numerous discussions with our most successful partners we’ve come up with a better plan that more closely matches the way service providers offer Exchange services within their plans.
This old matrix is now history.
We agreed with our partners that the model needs to be simpler – to budget, to position and to customize with clients specific needs in mind.
We’re starting off with the low entry level price of $3.99 per user, billable monthly with no contract, commitment, minimum or maximum and a powerful Exchange platform to run their business on. This gives our partners a competitive pricing point to offer an entry level service and keep them under their control, brand, management and centralized billing.
We’re making additional features simple and easy to add on as well. As each client has unique demands and requirements, we’ve made each functionality easy to add on as necessary giving them predictable costs that are easy to budget as the business grows and needs more sophisticated solutions. Don’t want to deal with SPAM or want to keep vulgar content out? That’s just $1. Business continuity in the event of an outage? Just another $1 more. Compliance Archiving? Encryption? As the business demands grow these additional features can be added and removed as necessary giving our partners unprecedented control.
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Our agenda is simple: We want to deliver the most affordable, most flexible way to get businesses running on Exchange in the cloud. We have a lot of partners that are still managing their own on-premise Exchange deployments that will need massive upgrades with low ROI and we believe that many will take advantage of this affordable way to get into the cloud while maintaining the profit margin and client control. We believe that many of our partners serve small business clients on older infrastructure that may have hesitated pulling the trigger on the cloud migration because of upgrade requirements, long contracts and commitments.
With our announcement today, ExchangeDefender is making a tremendous offer – come to the cloud and we’ll pay for the first year. No minimums, contracts, commitments or prepayments. The faster you act, the more you’ll save.
Get in touch with your account manager today and let’s come up with a plan to get your clients to the cloud you own.
4th of July Promotion
What a better way to celebrate the summer than with deals and discounts? Our featured product is Compliance archiving. Compliance archiving allows your company the ability to maintain control over your access to certain emails and attachments up to a period of ten years. ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive ensures the integrity of your messages, by automatically copying the message to the archiving system as soon as the mail enters your system. With the journaling technology accompanied with the program, ExchangeDefender is able to provide a full archive that keeps track of all messages, inbound, outbound, and even internal messages. Compliance Archive is complete with searchable templates that allow you to quickly detect messages that may contain certain identifiable and critical information such as a social security number or credit card number. Because there is no charge for Compliance Archive and you only pay for the storage space you use, Compliance Archive is affordable and therefore available to smaller businesses as well. If Compliance Archive seems right for you or your clients, please contact us so that we may get you started and continue to provide the best service to you.
Click the video to learn more about our Compliance promotion valid from June 27th- July 11th. Contact us to obtain the code to use when opening Hosted Exchange+ Compliance users, and receive $3 off Exchange and $2 off Compliance Archiving after opening 5 sets. Contact us at partners@exchangedefender.com or 877-546-0316 to obtain the code.
Disclaimer: In order to receive the $2 off Compliance Archiving and $3 off Hosted Exchange, you must purchase Full Hosted Exchange of 5 mailboxes or more. The compliance accounts will then correspond to those 5 mailboxes. Maximum order of 50 mailboxes per partner.
Invoice CSV
We’ve recently made some changes to the Invoice System to make things more clear and easier for our clients who bill their clients individually. We now have a csv generator for invoices. If you navigate to your company in the support portal then click on the Invoice tab you will find all of your invoices going back to when your services started with us.
Simply click on the csv next to a specific invoice it will generate a csv for your use that can be opened in Excel. It’s generated to group the categories of service types together.
This is a cleaner alternative to the old way of copying the invoice from the portal and pasting it into excel that we’ve seen some of our service providers do in the past. Now you can split, subdivide, categorize with ease. If you would like even greater control over individual accounts so they can always exist within their own company, provision accounts directly through your own Shockey Monkey portal.
If you have any questions regarding this feature email me at cody@ownwebnow.com
-Cody Savage
Domain Password Expiration
A major feature folks have been requesting from ExchangeDefender for a long time is better password policies. The first step in that direction is going to be having the ability to support password expiration. We have moved forward with this request as we realize the importance of forcing password changes on a security platform. One feature that was implemented recently that you guys might have seen pop up in your admin portal is domain Password Expiration.
If you navigate to a specific domain’s configuration you can see you now have the option to implement 30, 60, or 90 day password expiration for all the users on a domain. Initially when the feature is enabled it will tag all the current accounts on the domain / domain aliases, then depending on what option you selected 30,60,90 days out upon logging into the admin portal it’ll require the user’s to change their password before allowing any other functionality. Clients can be proactive about changing their password regularly and avoid the prompt by using the Password Change in their own settings after logging into the portal.
However, I think we know that that will not generally be the case. Once their password has expired upon logging into the Admin Portal they will be redirected to change their password before they will be allowed to login.
If you have any questions regarding this feature email me at cody@ownwebnow.com
-Cody Savage
St Patty’s Day Promotion
Come celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with our promotion going on, starting March 17th and ending April 17th. We are offering $3.00 off Full Hosted Exchange with an order of 5 mailboxes or more. Just use the code: XDLUCKY16 when ordering your mailboxes. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free emailing us at partners@exchangedefender.com or calling us at (877) 546-0316.
Support Portal Maintenance
We’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for the lengthy outage that our support portal had. We were doing a massive backend software upgrade that did not go as planned and took longer than expected. Any changes made by our staff on your behalf will be added into the portal to ensure the continuity of what was created/modified. Again, I’d like to thank you all for your patience.
How ExchangeDefender Protects You From Ransomware
There has been a lot of news coverage of the new wave of ransomware infecting businesses, encrypting hard drives and data on network shares and creating a “ransom” demand in order to unencrypt it. Initially these viruses traveled as typical viruses do – as executable attachments or inside zip files. Most popular of these was CryptoLocker which has made millions of dollars from businesses that didn’t have adequate protection, most recently from a Hollywood hospital that paid $17,000 to get it’s data back. But ransomware has taken a more evil turn – traveling not as an executable that users have been trained to avoid but as a macro inside Word and Excel documents that users often open without a second thought.
As with any threat, it’s important to layer protection and defend your business with a good firewall, good desktop security product as well as a perimeter scanning service we provide through ExchangeDefender.
ExchangeDefender Layered Protection
Before we discuss how ExchangeDefender protects you from ransomware, the most important aspect of IT security isn’t prevention – it’s education:
If you receive an attachment of any kind from a source you don’t recognize: do not open it.
If you receive an attachment from a source that you do recognize but it looks and feels suspicious: do not open it. If the email address looks wrong, if there are misspelled words, unusual formatting or unusual activity: stop.
But let’s talk about prevention. Our partners have many options of using ExchangeDefender to stop the spread of dangerous malware.
Attachment & Content Type Blocking: The following process is the most flawless, but most disruptive, way to address an epidemic. You can choose to let ExchangeDefender block attachments that are used by Microsoft Office documents. We do not recommend this route but it’s nice to know it’s there for the events in which people are getting infected and virus scanning has not been able to pick up threats faster than they are infecting systems.
OLE Virus Filtering: ExchangeDefender will block macro (.vbs) attachments outright. But with the rise of Locky ransomware we now also scan Microsoft Office documents and look for infected and dangerous malware placed in those.
Known Threat Sources: ExchangeDefender also blocks dangerous content before it’s even an issue. Most of the threatening content is sent from the same sources that are popular with spammers, hackers and malware distributors: hacked PCs, servers, and blog sites. We maintain a realtime list of networks that spread dangerous content and routinely block their ability to infect our users.
Firewall & Site Blocking: Ultimately, the largest single source of infections isn’t the ExchangeDefender protected or hosted mailbox – it comes through Yahoo mail, Gmail and other non-business email service. If you aren’t blocking those at your work you need to be.
What else can be done?
As mentioned above, client education is the #1 way to address these. Contact our marketing department and ask them to build you a branded best practices flyer for email and Outlook (Hosted Exchange clients only). There are very simple ways to tell when a message is not from your bank or from UPS.
Establish a regularly scheduled backup system for all critical client PCs.
Layer your antivirus protection. No, one AV vendor is not enough and ExchangeDefender uses several commercial and dozens of proprietary data sources to detect and isolate dangerous content. No matter how much you love your single AV vendor and they claim they are the best – like everyone else they will have an infection evade their scan. If you only have one AV engine, consider adding something like ClamAV to your arsenal.
Establish a review of policies and security implementations. We often see that partners rarely configure ExchangeDefender or monitor it in a way that gives them actionable intelligence. The same can be said for client PCs: Are you monitoring your AV implementations? Are you checking that users aren’t turning off AV or firewalls? Are you looking at strange traffic patterns, use of private proxy or VPN networks to evade network security policies?
CryptoLocker and Locky are neither the first nor the most dangerous threats networks face. But with ExchangeDefender, education and layered security we can keep most online outbreaks from affecting business operations.
Take full advantage of our Holiday Promo before it’s too late!
It’s time for the holidays and we want to help you end your year on a strong note. Don’t forget to take advantage of our current promotion running from Deceber 17th- December 31st! When ordering 5 mailboxes or more, just type in the code “XDHoliday and you will receive $4.00 off your order of 5 or more Hosted Exchange plus SharePoint mailboxes. Happy Holidays from all of us here at ExchangeDefender!
Billing Compliance & Reporting Changes in 2016
ExchangeDefender has always been a partner-focused organization and we’ve always done everything in our power to assist partners when bill payments became difficult. Unfortunately, with 2016 our upstream vendors are implementing stricter controls which will see some of our services stop to function on accounts that are seriously past due. Here are current policies as they stand:
Payments for all services are due on the 1st of the month. Any users with active service subscriptions at this point make us liable for licensing fees.
If your credit card is declined it will be automatically attempted on 1st, 2nd and 3rd of the month (regardless of whether it’s a weekday or the weekend).
By the 5th of the month you will receive an email, a support ticket and a personal phone call alerting you to the problem with the billing with an option to pay for the service with a new credit card, Paypal or check (United States only).
If the invoice is not paid by the 10th of the month, services are suspended and there is a $10 late fee.
If the invoice is further ignored by the 15th of the month, all services will be suspended with the account subject to deletion. Logging into the support portal will show you the following:
While we regret the inconvenience these changes will be causing, they are not up to us. Our vendors, who control and own licensing that you may be renting on a monthly basis as a subscription, can deactivate their license if it is not paid. While we are liable for the entire license count, there are certain promotional licenses for trials, educational, non profit and special licensing and new management software (that come with new servers) give some vendors advanced control over their licensing.
But we really cannot pay because _____.
Unfortunately, there is no way to get around not paying the bill for the services rendered. The only way to maintain service is to transfer the service directly to us or one of our partners for billing.
What if we disagree with the invoice / items?
You have 30 days to contest items on an invoice. Pay for the seats you do not have an issue with to keep legitimate services free from any restrictions.