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
Outlook Add-In (New Features)
Over the past few weeks, we’ve improved some core functionality inside of our Outlook SMTP Security Platform. We’ve reviewed customer feedback on a few issues, features requests and overall usability. In addition to the software improvements, we’ve introduced a new feature available to all ExchangeDefender Pro customers (not available in Essentials).
This new feature is called the Robot Filter. The feature allows for automatic processing of newsletters into a sub folder within your inbox. Messages that are deemed to match the extensive rule set are quickly processed and sent to this folder.
This works for existing (unread) messages and new messages that arrive after Outlook has been launched. Also if you come across a message that was missed, you can use the “Flag Robot” button to report that sender and catch future messages. Now when you come into work, you don’t have to spend hours going through your daily newsletters. However these messages will still exist perfectly save inside of the Robot Filter folder to be reviewed at your convenience. In the event you locate a message that you don’t want flagged, you may click the button that says “Always Inbox” to have the rules skip the designated sender.
You may also use the “Report Spam” anywhere inside of your inbox to quickly flag a message and submit the headers to us for improved filter results.
Use our product and if your not happy tell us how to improve, that’s all we ask!
Your feedback shapes our future developments, so tell us what you need.
We have something new to show you
It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a year since we launched our ExchangeDefender Migration Service. Thanks to many partners and clients who trusted us with their email we’ve been able to hear many compliments and even more suggestions about true problems employees face with email every day.
We’ve been in the lab for the past few months looking at how we can help and what we can do to eliminate those issues, improve productivity and create a more accountable email infrastructure that so much business gets done on. So we have something to show you and I hope you will join us for a webinar that covers it all:
Thu, Nov 6, 2014 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
Software
The biggest complaint we’ve received from end users is the overwhelming amount of non-human email that makes it’s way into the Inbox and at times simply overwhelms any actual communication that needs to be taking place. While there are third party solutions to address this trend they all retail for 5x more than even the reseller cost of ExchangeDefender! We’ve built it into ExchangeDefender Pro free of charge.
Needless to say, we look forward to showing you how it works and how much more your clients will love you for it!
Service
Migrations was just the tip of the iceberg of dealing with email problems. The part that can’t be seen – and often gets ignored as a consequence – is the mounting cost and issue of archiving, encrypting, protecting, securing and auditing all the data that lives in employees Inbox.
While we’ve been selling encryption and archiving products and services for years, we found that implementation was often incomplete and did not get the constant tweaking and adjustment it needs to meet the requirements of the organization in the first place. We’re stepping up both the education and the “Service & Audit” controls as a part of an effort to enhance the value of our security solutions.
In closing.. as email becomes more critical, more scrutinized by the employer and regulatory bodies alike, grows in size and in importance to daily business – the old way of set it and forget it implementations is being challenged. At ExchangeDefender we look forward to leading both in education and actual feet on the ground, helping you with as much or as little client interaction as you need. As we have proven with a year of migrations, we can help our partners grow and now we also look forward to helping you expand the consulting portfolio.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO
ExchangeDefender
P.S. Yes, the webinar will be recorded and available for download shortly after the event.
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.
Development Log
Over the past few months I’ve taken the time to update several different aspects of our product offerings. The updates and products we decided to implement were prioritized based on bugs & feature requests that had been submitted properly through our internal support portal.
First on the list was our Outlook 2010 & 2013 SMTP Security Add-in, which also applies to the desktop agent. We’ve added several new features, improved performance and fixed a few bugs. Listed below are the enhancements we’ve added based on user feedback.
- Added the ability to view & manage alias accounts.
- Added the ability to disable automatic refresh.
- Added a direct link to the user’s web portal.
- Fixed a link causing quick links to not work properly.
- Added version numbers to the settings page.
- Updated the “Dismiss All” label to “Review All”.
- Window size & state are now persistent between restarts.
- Added the ability to resize the window.
- Added the ability to resize columns.
- SPAM counts are now listed next to the addresses.
- Right click menu has been added.
- We’ve added the ability to trust an entire domain.
- Updated Documentation
- Updated Publisher Information
We’ve also went through an updated most of the online documentation since we’ve undergone such dramatic changes throughout the years. New images have replaced old instructional images, revised steps and procedures for various platforms and even structured the documents to allow for easy navigation. You can find all of the updated documentation here: http://www.exchangedefender.com/documentation.php
Several core internal programs have also been updated to allow our highly trained support staff to escalate and speed up response time for some of our more complex requests. One area of improvement has been geared towards Compliance Archive and simplifying the process to retrieve an export of a user’s mailbox.
We’re currently working on bringing several enhancements to LocalCloud. We’ve had several clients report issues with client stability. So we are working on a performance update, which will also allow for automatic updates in the future. We are also working on enhancing the Web Sharing file uploading service, by enhancing the upload controls and server-side timeouts.
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.
What the VP of Development does at ExchangeDefender
Here at ExchangeDefender we have a wide range of products and service offerings. With close to seven years with ExchangeDefender, I’ve designed and written a majority of the software that is offered as a part of continuously growing platform. This includes several of our key systems such as: Encryption, Compliance Archive, Web Sharing, LocalCloud and even our service ordering & account provisioning! The only areas that I don’t touch directly are mobile applications, we have additional developers who designs and tackles any issues that may arise on our mobile platforms.
Throughout the course of the day I find myself working on various bugs and communicating with our team to ensure that bugs and new feature requests are considered and placed within our internal development pipeline. Recently I’ve been going through our old documentation and working on updating that with fresh information detailing step, by step how to use our products.
Keep in mind that it takes a while to develop and test fixes to assure they don’t introduce other problems. There are no quick fixes or features, everything we implement needs to work well across web, desktop and mobile devices and our support staff needs to be trained and alerted of these upcoming features. So if you have a bug or feature request that is absolutely something that we must fix and/or implement, we would love to hear about it! However, due to my schedule and workload I’m typically a very hard person to reach. So first open a ticket in our portal, our highly trained technicians will review your ticket and possibly collect further information. After which, they will then escalate the ticket into a bug or feature request. Once in this section, it will be reviewed every Friday to see just how we can make our services even better!
Here at ExchangeDefender we want to help you fill your services portfolio with everything your client needs to operate their business successfully. We strive every day to be the absolute best for all of your service needs. So please (I cannot stress this enough) if you think we are falling short due to a software glitch or missing feature, let us know!