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
Changes coming to ExchangeDefender SPAM Reporting
Over the past year you have seen us integrate our suite of communication applications under a single interface in the ExchangeDefender family. We’re making Exchange, ExchangeDefender Antispam, LocalCloud, Web File Sharing, Encryption, Compliance Archiving and Reporting, Web Filtering and even Shockey Monkey come under a single beautiful and seamless user interface. Our clients live inside of an interface that helps them communicate with each other, customers, vendors and outside partners and having bits and pieces of the functionality spread across many platforms is just not an optimal experience anymore.
On September 12th we will be unveiling changes to our reporting, unifying the control panels and creating a full seamless experience across all of our applications. We are extending the experience to the mobile and Outlook plugins so that you can get access to the same information no matter what sort of device or location you are in. It’s what we are working towards.
Email SPAM Quarantine Reports
To understand the necessary changes it’s important to note how ancient some of these ideas are:
When I originally designed email SPAM reports people didn’t live inside of Outlook. There were no iPads or iPhones and the smartest portable device was the 3com Palm Pilot V. Originally the only problem I had was making sure that technically inept people had a seamless way of seeing the junk mail that we quarantined.
We will first unveil the consolidated SPAM Quarantine reports. Email reports were the first technology that gave users insight into what ExchangeDefender was quarantining as SPAM but over time they have not been able to keep up with the more efficient, realtime, searchable and managed reporting we have available on our web site, Outlook plugins, desktop agents, mobile software and so on. While many have moved on from the legacy email reports platform, many have kept the old email reports running in parallel with the new software and for the most part those reports get ignored and just contribute to wasted space and bandwidth for the user.
We have changed the behavior and style of email reports to address this problem. If a user does not review their SPAM reports (doesn’t click on anything) for over 30 consecutive days, the mail reports will continue to flow but will not include the usual full quarantine message listing. They will instead be presented with a link to their ExchangeDefender web control panel where with one click they will have full access to the realtime SPAM data with the ability to read, respond and release messages, manage whitelists and settings.
But Vlad, my clients need access to this it’s the most important part of your solution!
I understand. The email reports are not going away for people that actually use them. But if they don’t use the email report to release a single message in more than 30 days… Let’s face it, they aren’t using them. And if they are only using them to look at stuff then the more optimal experience is through the Outlook Addin or the desktop agent. If we’re mistaken – go ahead and reenable their full reports – but if another 30 days goes without a single message release/whitelist, it will be reset to consolidated message.
We believe this change will address the complaints frequently raised by our clients and our partners about the wasted storage and mailbox resources that go towards SPAM reports that nobody opens. Even worse, users at times look at a SPAM report that is weeks old and attempt to locate SPAM messages that are long gone.
With the new SPAM reports they will have a convenient and quick way to access SPAM quarantines and settings. Furthermore, the system will automatically track their usage and adjust the SPAM reports from Full to Consolidated to make sure we aren’t slowing their experience down. Of course, if at any time the users feel they need more detailed access to the SPAM quarantines we urge our partners to install the Outlook addin or Windows Desktop addin or configure links to the control panel or HTML5 mobile app to give the user full and realtime control over their mail.
In October we will be beta testing native apps for ExchangeDefender as well so I hope we can continue to expand the solution portfolio to our clients both in a way that is meaningful and with the times.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com
Benefits of Cloud Computing
In today’s traditional small business office, the best managed in-house servers are still a liability. Unmanaged in-house servers are time bombs. Why do I say this? Because the hardware used to manage your business is still onsite. From my experience, most hardware is unfortunately sitting unsecured in a closet that also houses cleaning products and printer toner or somewhere under a desk with a Post-It note on it stating, “Do Not Power Off.” With LOB applications and other SMB services such as hosted email, compliance archiving, and file sharing in the cloud; your business has nothing onsite to own, update, maintain, or repair. This makes your availability and accessibility to data and services accessible from any Internet connected device.
Availability of Data and Services
No matter how redundant you think your onsite technology is, your efforts will pale in comparison to the most basic Tier 1 data center requirements, standards, and uptime. Consider this: There are 525,800 minutes in a year. Tier 1 data center are required to maintain an uptime of 99.671%, or 523,870.78 of those 525,800 minutes. That means that the lowest tier data center (Tier 1) cannot exceed a downtime of 1,729 minutes annually. For those of you converting the number into hours or scared of math, this equates to no more than 28 hours a year of downtime. While you may be thinking a day plus 4 hours is a lot of downtime, the majority of this time is scheduled maintenance that would be needed anyway regardless where your equipment was located. Even with a minimal guaranteed uptime of 99.6%, your company is still minimizing downtime by utilizing cloud services.
What if the onsite equipment started to fail. If you are a company with no one on staff dedicated to technology issues, you now have to add additional hours to your downtime to locate and schedule professionals to diagnosis, repair, and test a fix. This doesn’t include any additional hours for physical equipment that may need to be order to complete the repair. If you’re an I.T. professional, wouldn’t it be great not to have to worry about monitoring, maintaining, updating or repairing in-house servers on a consistent basis? Imagine the time you could then dedicate to working on your business.
Accessibility of Data and Services
I, like many others I know in various industries, work remotely. There are times when I’m summoned to the office for special events, meetings, or conferences; but other than that, I work in the cloud. From my home office and using something as small as my iPhone, I can access tickets in our support portal, make and receive business calls, send and receive company email–and if necessary, even compose a blog post. Although the majority of time is spent performing these activities on my iMac strictly out of comfortability, point being our company can operate anywhere with minimal technology. Traditional desktop and LOB applications are being redesigned to operate in a cloud environment–thus breaking the symbiotic relationship between software and desktops/servers. With cloud computing, gone are the days of blue screens, random restarts, and incompatibilities between OS and applications.
If you are a Trusted Advisor in technology for your clients, you can no longer afford to carry around the liability of maintaining data or services on a retiring platform. The wheel has been created. The cloud is here to stay. You can’t continue ignoring the future and pushing your clients on technology you are only familiar with, i.e. SBSers. You have to relinquish the “Admin” ego and implement the best solution for your clients need. Today, those needs no longer involve bloated expenses for hardware purchases. By offering cloud services, you can offer your clients a worry-free environment where their data is available and easily accessible.
Global Businesses are integrating Cross Platform Communications but are they ready?
Businesses globally are adopting cloud services and solutions to merge communications across multiple platforms. The days of convoluted practices to remotely access information, documents, and people are long gone and mobile communications with tablets, smartphones, laptops, and even consumer appliances are now accessible from anywhere, at any time.
The biggest problem with this new frontier of technology accessibility is the fact that it is run very much like the “wild wild west.” There are not yet business standards or practices for the solutions, applications, communications platforms, or security, which creates what some might deem as a lawless environment for mid-sized businesses that once held ultimate control over their networks.
Though this description may seem extreme or far-fetched, the reality is that it is not that far off, especially given the state of mobile device adoption in the workplace or what some might call BYOD.
ExchangeDefender is providing ways for VAR’s, MSP’s, Master MSP’s, Solution Providers, Cloud Brokers, and distributors to provide customers with a set of standardized business practices and solutions, that can help clean up the mobile and technology driven wild wild west.
This has been accomplished by identifying key areas in which businesses today require standardization and best practices to control and manage their internal networks, communication, and documents through cloud-based solutions.
These are:
Communications – Email, messaging services, file sharing, collaboration, and content management solutions.
Communication is the lifeblood to any business. By standardizing on a hosted exchange solution, businesses can rest assured that they will have access to their information from anywhere in the world at anytime. This coupled with Sharepoint, Lync, and CloudShare services provides a complete email and messaging solution that can be provided, to give customers business grade messaging across all device platforms.
Security, Business Continuity, and Compliance – Antispam, encryption, compliance, archiving, and backup solutions.
The importance of keeping communications secure, free from outside eyes, constantly backed up, and available when needed is key to any business practice. Some businesses require specific levels of compliance in order to maintain legal requirements. Having this information can significantly increase an IT companies credibility by assuring that their customers meet all of the compliance, archive, and ecryption requirements set forth by their industry.
Infrastructure – Dedicated Servers, Virtual Servers, colocation services, and Web hosting.
Cloud infrastructure solutions provide businesses with cost effective ways of providing global resources without the high costs of hardware and maintenance. Virtual servers significantly decrease energy consumption and overhead costs, while increasing productivity, redundancy, security, and availability for workers across multi office or single location deployments.
As medium sized businesses continue to flourish and remote offices, mobile workers, and interconnected personnel continue to thrive; cloud services will be at the frontline of standardization practices for business.
ExchangeDefender partners will remain ahead of the game and able to provide all of the necessary solutions to take away any concerns customers may have about having a secure global network, whether it is a traditional, mobile, or hybrid network.
Having discussions and marketing about the growing wild wild west of technology and rogue nature of introducing mobile solutions into environments must be done now. Waiting for a breach or security issue to inform customers of readily available solutions may inadvertently cause downtime, high risks, or worse yet cost business revenues.
For this reason it is important to thoroughly study the types of issues that are facing medium sized companies, as well as creating awareness around solutions that can overcome any potential issue today. With tablets, mobile, and alternative devices connecting to networks everyday, the influxes of unknowns are overwhelming to network managers, so education becomes the key. Utilize your ExchangeDefender team to help point you in the right direction and feel free to ask questions if there is something you don’t understand.
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.
Large Scale Migration
The most important aspect of a large scale migration is communication. This can make a migration that either turns you into a trusted company relationship or the most recent “IT guy” that was fired by that company. There is a delicate balance that you must preserve between the needs of the technology and the needs of the business owner. The best way to do that is to be as meticulous as possible with your communication process.
Prep work, communicate.
The first thing you must do is map out an initial time line and start testing the process. This time line will start solely based on the IT departments recommendations. These recommendations are generally based on the hardware or support life cycles and the length of time to complete it. Once you have that sorted out, you probably want to add another two weeks to a month of notice and relay that information to the decision makers at the affected company.
Test, communicate.
Once you’ve received a response, you make adjustments as necessary to your schedule and begin a live test where permissible. We also see excellent guides on the internet on how to do any migration imaginable; the most important point to consider is that no two are alike. So you found a frame work to use on the internet, so you have to take the next step. What we typically do is use test mailboxes, we migrate them individually, and then we move them as batches, repeatedly. The bottom line is this; the more work you do before the migration the less likely you will have to pay overtime for a botched migration.
Execute, communicate, then communicate again
Once you’re satisfied, you reach out to your clients again and confirm that you’re ready to start as you previously agreed. This is where the process will vary when dealing with end users versus an IT partner. We can get away with the following notices: an announcement, a reminder, a start, a mid-point, a completion and a couple of follow-ups. We are about to do this due to the fact that we’re dealing with top notch technology professionals. However, with end users you have to have a more controlling approach, depending on the size of the business, you may opt to have everyone come into the office and leave their mobile devices with you for the migration, or you can do appointments. The most important thing in the process is to check as often as your staffing will allow it, that everything is going smoothly and that the expectations you set are being met. I would even advise a follow up call at 1 week and 2 weeks out to pick up the “slow to report issue” folks.
Taming Your Email
If I ever opened Outlook in the mornings and saw a slew of emails (unread or read) in my inbox, I’d get depressed. Seriously, how can one not feel anxious when seeing (1,323) unread messages sitting in their inbox? If you need a full searchable, secured, and compliance archive solution; then take a look at our long-term Compliance Archive service. Otherwise, take a look below at some of the things I do to prevent email from taking over my life:
• Operate a Zero-Sum email policy. If an email arrives in your inbox, address it, file it, or delete it. In simpler terms, my inbox is not a storage folder–it’s an inbox.
• Never use your Deleted/Trash folder as a storage folder. If you need to file that piece of mail somewhere other than your inbox, then create a folder for that specific purpose. Your deleted folder should be empty most of the time. In fact, you can configure most email applications to remove all contents in the Deleted/Trash folder when you exit the application. Those still reading this probably just laughed at me for suggesting that an email application is ever closed. Which brings me to my next suggestion…
• Close your email application when you are finished working. Trust me when I tell you that your email is still flowing. The brain operates on triggers. By closing down your email application at the end of the day, or when you are not using it tricks your mind into relaxing a bit. Granted, it will probably take your brain a few days to stop freaking out that the email application has been closed; but you will thank me later. We have conditioned our brains to a pavlovian response: Tingle Dingle, check email, tingle dingle, check email, tingle dingle, check email. Get the picture? Your brain is on high alert, waiting for that sound. Close down the app, place your device on silent, and relax.
• Unsubscribe. Most SPAM really isn’t SPAM at all, it’s BACN (pronounced Bacon). If you are unfamiliar with this term, BACN is email that has been subscribed to, but most likely never gets read–think newsletters, sales ads, etc. Now, why they call this BACN is a mystery. Personally if I ask for bacon, I eat the bacon; but I digress. If an email that appears to be BACN arrives into your inbox and you have no desire to ever read these types of emails again from this particular business; unsubscribe. If you received an obviously suspicious piece of email from someone you do not recognize, do not unsubscribe – report it as SPAM. Many spammers use recognizable names to embed their advertising but the unsubscribe link on the bottom just takes you to their site that confirms your email address as valid. Soon after you click it you’ll see an exponential increase in SPAM.
Needless to say, ExchangeDefender is a great solution to keep the email overload from impacting your productivity. Through use of web file sharing to send important documents, compliance archiving to keep 10 years of email and locate anything you need instantaneously, encryption to protect and secure data, we are continuously looking at how we waste time in our Inbox and we fix it with ExchangeDefender.
Michael Alligood
Partner Account Manager
michael@ownwebnow.com
877-546-0316 x707
Competing with Office 365
Almost on a daily basis I get the question: how do you compare to Office 365? Microsoft’s $6.00 offering is making it hard for a lot of MSP’s to compete, or provide something other than 365, but that shouldn’t be the way it works. As always we are here to help, so I have compiled a list of top three selling points for why ExchangeDefender is the best choice. Use these and you will close the sale with ExchangeDefender, not Office 365.
White Label:
Everything we do is completely white label, you can brand ExchangeDefender and make it your own. For branding in the admin panel simply login using your SP credentials, click on the configuration tab, then branding. You can brand the portal with your logo, tagline, and even your customized name for the product.
In addition to all of our services being white label, we also offer free brandable marketing collateral. For free collateral just visit http://www.exchangedefender.com/marketing_xd.php and click on the product you wish to brand. Just click on the download button and you can add your logo, your colors and anything you wish to make this truly a part of your overall solution.
Remember: Your client or prospect is talking to you for a reason – your products and solutions need to reflect your key advantages, not someone elses. After all, if you are just going to resell the same solution anyone can buy at any time then why should anyone do business with you or consider your expertise?
24/7 Support through us
Small businesses are always concerned about the cost. Many business owners are very price conscious and want to find the best bang for their buck. Microsoft charges your client on a per request basis, so each time they call in they’re charged a support fee. I think this is a very important factor to stress, because the end user goes with the notion that they will not experience any problems or it will be tiny enough they won’t have to pay an arm and a leg, or they think it will still be cheaper in the long run, but bad news for them, it won’t be. Depending on your business model, you either include so many hour of support, or you bill in additional blocks of time, this way the customer has more control and the rates are a lot less than what Microsoft would charge. The customer needs to know that in the long run they will end up paying out more to Microsoft for support than what they’re saving on the monthly fee.
In addition to saving money on support, you will also save time. With Microsoft the client must call their support department directly which can create headaches and completely waste all of the end users time. As the servicing partner you can open a ticket with us or speak to our support staff directly, this leads to a quicker resolution time and a more satisfied customers.
Everyone goes into the cloud expecting the best case scenario. Truth is, all technology is susceptible to failure and the bottom line is that you have a plan for how to deal with things like outages, DDoS attacks and communicate effectively with your clients about their service. When you’re “just a reseller” you get none of the profit and all the blame.
Personal Relationships
At ExchangeDefender we make it our priority to build personal relationships with each and every one of our partners. We are always available, someone will be here to answer your questions. Speaking from the business side I know many of our partners and speak with them on a regular basis to make sure that everything is going smoothly and to offer any help that I can. As far as the support staff goes, they’re readily available through the portal 24/7 and by phone from 4 am EST to 7:30 pm EST. Over time you will become familiar with them the more you speak with them on the phone or deal with them directly in the portal. With Microsoft you are unable to have this personal relationship, every time you call you speak to someone different. Not to mention you’re lucky if your previous issue was documented or that the person you’re speaking to has the level of knowledge to resolve your issue.
So the next time you’re in a situation where you’re against Office 365, just remember these key points and you’ll be able to close the sale with ExchangeDefender!
As the cloud solutions emerge and mature quickly it is important to know who you work with, know that you can count on them and expect them to work with you not against you. These are just the top 3 of our competitive advantages of why you should consider us, next week I will write about the top three reasons your client should chose your ExchangeDefender Hosted Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync offering instead of Microsoft.
Anastasia Wiggins
Partner Account Manager
anastasia@ownwebnow.com
877-546-0316 x739
Motivate Employees By Posting Performance Graphs
The health and performance of a company is a measurable and dynamically changing set of information, which can be easily created and viewed by management. Many MSP’s have already found that posting call performance, ticket handling times, and managed services metrics, helps to give employees an insight into how they are performing from a technical aspect; but what about the general revenue trend and health of the company?
People by nature are competitive. This is why sales organizations, or departments often post large boards with information labeling the sales leaders and their numbers. These boards are meant to motivate individuals to strive to be at the top and spark the competitive nature of individuals to strive to be better. You see this in almost every industry, even retail and food service industries post motivators like, top sales and employee of the month boards in their respective break rooms or employee common areas.
Though sales and technical performance is commonly shared with employees, most SMB businesses rarely share overall company revenues, growth, or health with the employees that help to make up the business. Since, every person in an organization has a vested interest in seeing a company succeed, sharing this information may help to motivate employees as a team, much like the individual sales and technical motivators do.
The biggest concern that most business owners and managers have for not sharing vital company information is potential animosity. It may be thought that if a company is doing well and employees gain insight into numbers, they may be more likely to expect larger salaries or increased pay for their work. Though this may be an initial thought if this information is posted, it will not be the norm after it is part of normal routine. This means that once you are posting information regularly, it just becomes second nature.
This information becomes significantly important to employees especially if there is a downward trend in the business. This new insight can help to explain management decisions, cut backs in hours, as well as hiring freezes, or any other things that may affect their day-to-day job based on a slow down in business. It also becomes a motivator and visual proof that everyone needs to step it up to increase efficiencies, sales, and revenues.
The easiest way to implement and post this information is by creating a visual graph that can be hung up in employee common areas. Most spreadsheet and word processor programs allow easy creation of these graphs, which can be printed out and posted. Some companies choose to post this information monthly, where others choose to post quarterly. This becomes an internal decision, but note that monthly provides better motivation.
It is recommended to include overall revenues along with the graph, though again this is an internal decision. This can provide indicators and trends as well as insights; providing employees with information that would have only previously come as management hearsay or owner propaganda. It is not recommended however to send this information via email. In email form, the information is less likely to have an impact or be read, and will not be visually represented daily for all to see and discuss.
By providing company performance information to employees, not only are you making them an accountable asset to the business, but you are also running the business like an enterprise. Corporate public companies must divulge all of their numbers and performance publically, giving everyone deep visibility into the health of the company. Your employees will find motivation in the information, camaraderie, and be proud to help the business grow.