Compliance Archiving v2.0

We have some exciting news about the upcoming release of ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive v2.0!

Over this past month, we have purchased additional hardware and have been migrating existing accounts onto this new infrastructure. With the new infrastructure in place, it will allow us to perform faster searches and build reports on top of the information retained within ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive. Rest assured, due to the dynamic nature of our product we have been able to do this almost seamlessly and without disrupting service to any customers.

Compliance Archive was originally released almost 3 years ago and due to growth and time, we felt it was time to improve this product. While we have implemented an improved back-end system that will improve performance, we’ve also made several enhancements to the front end as well.

Enhancements

· Improved searching capabilities.

· Paging has been implemented. (No more 10 minute load times to view your mailbox.)

· Improved GUI, (cross browser support).

Hank Newman
VP, Development
hank@ownwebnow.com

Helping Customers Go Green

Many offices across the nation are putting in a concerted effort to make their offices more efficient or “green” if you will. This movement is lowering overall office maintenance costs, lowering utility bills, lowering office supply costs, and providing more revenue to the bottom line. IT companies that want to help their customers adopt an efficiency policy, should first adopt some simple practices in their office and provide a value added, example based guide of common practices or implemented improvements.

A number of simple and effective practices are:

Lights – Lights can have a huge impact on energy used and utility costs. Place stickers by all light switches to “turn off” when not in use. Make a policy that lights in common areas such as bathrooms, break rooms, and conference rooms, are always “off” unless being used. Make sure all lights are off before leaving the building at night to maximize energy efficiency.

Recycling – Recycling can be an easy way to make a difference. Add recycling bins in common areas to encourage employee participation, this minimal change can boost morale and make a noticeable difference to your green office.

Computers – Computers are a silent drain on energy, whether it is a CPU, laptop, or monitor, all add up to costly energy usage when on. It is often common practice for users to leave their computers powered on when leaving for the day. Implement a policy that all computers and monitors be powered down prior to leaving for the day. Make a visual check prior to leaving the office and place a note on the desk of any users that have left their machine on. “It is not a good idea to manually shut a computer off if left on, as the user may have been working on something that may be lost if shut down.”

Servers – Servers utilize an immense amount of power and energy, cooling costs, battery backup, and peripherals add to the inefficiency. Remove and consolidate any servers into virtual servers on a single machine if possible. Research available cloud solutions that may help eliminate internal servers and devices as well, to maximize your green efforts. Cloud solutions can help to effectively minimize your energy usage.

There are many more ways to make your office more efficient. By taking a few simple steps you can save money, add bottom line revenue, and add to your company culture. Once you have implemented a plan for your office, write up a short guide and provide it to your customers as a value add. A small effort can make a huge difference for you and your customers.

Frank Gurnee
VP, Channel Services, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x4777
frank@ownwebnow.com

Don’t Miss the first XD LiveOnline! Workshop

Time is running out…get registered for our very first XD LiveOnline! Workshop!!!

The XD LiveOnline! Workshop is a 4-part Business Training Workshop Series that will be held quarterly.  Each workshop will build off of each other and is designed to provide you with detailed and useful business and technology training to better run your business!

The best part about this first installment of the XD LiveOnline! Workshop Series is that it is completely FREE! We want to give everyone a little taste of what these workshops will be like.  We do however, want your feedback at the conclusion on the workshop so that we can continue to make it better and more beneficial for you and your employees.

The event will consist of 4core training area about 30 minutes each followed by a specific Q&A session after each training topic.  Then you will have a short break.  The last segment of the workshop will be a ‘How-To’ and application session to give “marching orders” on how you can use the information you learn in your business immediately! Also, after the close of the workshop you will be given a quiz to report the attention from attendees, collateral, additional resources, transcripts, PowerPoint’s of the topics that are presented, promotions, etc.

The XD LiveOnline! Workshop is being held TOMORROW, April 23rd @ 1pm-5pm EST immediately following our “ExchangeDefender Best of the Best” webinar.  If you have not yet registered, REGISTER NOW! 

Let me know if you have any questions!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com

Tips & Tricks

Quite frequently, I receive emails or phone calls from our clients that have suggestions for our products and services. The majority of the time, the requested feature is already in place, but the partner didn’t know it was even available. To that extent, I am going to start a category of this blog called Tips and Tricks.

A feature request I heard this morning dealt with the Service Manager in the Own Web Now support portal (https://support.ownwebnow.com). A partner, who has quite a bit of hosted mailboxes, wanted a way to group the mailboxes by domain. He stated that browsing through the many address listed to make a change to one account was daunting. He allowed me to perform a join.me session so I could be clear as to what he was referring to. I patiently listened and watched as he scrolled thru all his hosted Exchange mailboxes to demonstrate his frustration over the issue. He then said, “So you can see now, that grouping the mailboxes by their domains would be such an easier process. Is this something you guys could develop—the grouping of mailboxes by domain?”

“Absolutely,” I responded, knowing the solution already existed. “Would you mind if I fixed that for you right now? I just give me access to this join.me session?”

A little taken aback about the immediate fix, he gave me permission of his mouse and I proceeded to:

*Click on the My Profile tab inside your Support Portal;

*Scroll down to the very bottom of the page and locate the Service Manager section;

*Click the down-down menu and choose:

       *Group accounts by domain – to group all your hosted mailboxes by domain; or

        *Show all accounts on one page – to show all your hosted mailboxes on one page.

*Click the Update button.

Depending on the option you chose to display, the next time you access your Service Manager to view your Hosted Exchange (or Essentials) mailboxes, that chose will reflect your new view. Needless to say, the partner was thoroughly impressed with this tip! “You guys should document this stuff! This is great!” Wish granted—again.

Michael D. Alligood
Partner Sales & Support, ExchangeDefender & Shockey Monkey
michael@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x707

Reporting, Reporting, Reporting!

Check out what Shockey Monkey is up to when it comes to Reporting…

Over the years reporting has always been a highly requested feature inside of Shockey Monkey. The biggest issue that we have faced with reporting has been trying to please everyone. While one user may absolutely love everything about the pre-defined reports, other users consider them useless. Well we believe that we have come up with a solution to fix that issue. Dynamic Reporting – we let you pick the information that is critical to you and your company, and then generate a report based on top of that template. Unfortunately, this feature is not quite ready yet, we are hoping to have it live in a few weeks.

However, let’s go over the basics of how this works.

1. You pick a type, (Ticket, Contact, Company, etc.)

2. Based on that choice optional fields will populate under [Report Filter].

3. Create the report.

4. Run the report.

5. Some reports will take a long time to generate, based on the type and filters.

6. View the generated report after is has finished, (instantly).

We also understand that this Dynamic Engine will not be able to produce every single (detailed) report that may exceed outside of the scope of dynamic generation. So we will also have (revamped) pre-defined reports, that may be executed on the fly.

Employee – Billable Ticket Summary is the first report that we’ve added to the system and is CURRENTLY AVAILABLE. This report generates an overview of your Employees billable time inside and across all tickets within the provided date range. You can see from the screenshot below how this looks, across several employees.

Hank Newman
VP, Development
hank@ownwebnow.com

Are Your Customer QBR’s Happening?

A QBR or Quarterly Business Review is a scheduled quarterly meeting with your managed customers to provide an overview of their business technology health, to assess any current issues, as well as plan for any future expenditures or needs. The biggest problem for many MSP practices is that QBR’s are just not happening.

There are a number of reasons that a QBR doesn’t happen and things you can do to make sure they do:

Customer is unavailable

Try scheduling the meetings in advance, for instance at the end of the previous meeting, schedule the next one on the spot with the customer and send a meeting invite assuring it is in both calendars. Though this is not a guarantee that the meeting will occur there is higher likelihood of availability.

Customer Tunes Out

Often times when a meeting occurs it is difficult to keep the customer focused or engaged. This is generally contributed to the format of the QBR itself. Many MSP’s utilize long, data driven reports in an attempt to show value to the customer. Some MSP’s just read this information page by page to the customer, providing no interaction or interest. Though it is a good idea to have a deliverable, instead create an agenda to go over and highlight concerns, specific accomplishments, and future needs/budget.

You Don’t Have Time

This is probably the one we hear most often and usually just means you don’t want to. It is more than important to create and maintain your customer relationships and a QBR is a great way to do that. It may not be necessary to have these meetings quarterly with every customer but making sure there is a recurring meeting is necessary. Make the time!

Always Bring a Token of Gratitude

Going to a customer’s office with a small token of appreciation like donuts, coffee, smoothies, or lunch can create an event that the entire office looks forward to. This can help to build the relationship as well as assure a customer’s availability. If calling to set a meeting, mention that you would like to bring the office one of these tokens and come by for your quarterly sit down. Mentioning this can also help to gain the meeting.

It is easy for MSP’s to get comfortable once they have a contract or long term agreement. The reality is they should always be working to build the relationship, maintain the agreement, and build customer loyalty. By providing regular QBR’s all of these can be accomplished and so much more!

Frank Gurnee
VP, Channel Services, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x4777
frank@ownwebnow.com

The Cloud is Flexible!

At ExchangeDefender, the Cloud is Flexible!

Many clients are sometimes reluctant to commit to contracts and quotas because there is uncertainty about where their business may be headed in the months and years to come. Will their business grow and need more employees and thus more licenses, or will they go through hard times and need to reduce their number of employees, thus needing fewer licenses?

An advantage to the cloud and hosting with ExchangeDefender is that we are extremely flexible with you and your clients’ needs. As your client grows, new accounts can be added, and if your accounts were to shrink, old accounts can be deleted without any hassles. This helps to minimize the risk of wasted resources on both parties and also takes away large upfront costs or charges along the way. A great benefit of working with ExchangeDefender is that we offer partners to add accounts with no minimums or quotas to fill. Also, there are no contracts to sign or hoops to jump thorough in order to get your services up and running, just a flat month-to-month service which frees up you, the partner, and also your client, the end user. Another benefit to the partner is that we offer volume discounts so that you have more leverage in working with your clients to get them the very best service at the very best price and making you the most profits!

Make Your Clients Think!

“Knowledge is in the eye of the beholder.” “Seek and you shall find!” There is so much truth in these popular quotes. People can find out a lot by actually looking for answers by asking questions. So, you need to ask the right questions!

You, the MSP, need to help your client understand the cloud and how it can benefit them. Our job at ExchangeDefender is to help you provide world-class cloud solutions to your clients. You can help your clients understand the questions that they need to ask and advise them on how to think of the cloud from a management standpoint to feature benefits, SLA’s to security, migration to deployment, etc. Take time to ask the right questions and start talking about the cloud with your clients.

As always, please let us know if there is anything that we can do to help!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com

If It’s Not Written Down, It Never Happened…

Over the past week, I have been in documentation mode. Recently, we released a major update to Shockey Monkey. On top of that, over the past two weeks we have been debugging the entire platform. With all the updates and changes, it was time to revise the all the documentation associated with the entire platform. This included Help Guides, How-To documents, White Papers, etc. Not to mention, we felt it was time to reorganize all this literature. So needless to say, it has been a busy two weeks. This got me thinking about when I ran my businesses and how it was vital to document everything within them. Hopefully, you are doing the same in your business.

In Customer Service and Support, documentation couldn’t be more important. Keeping up with your clients is a vital part of letting them know that you care about their business. Detailed documentation of support issues not only helps you remember who the issue was remedied, but it will help others that work with and for you. There is no sense in trying to remember a fix or when the last time you called a client to check on them. Half the time, we leave the house every morning forgetting something at home.

There is a saying around the office: If it’s not documented, it never happened. At this point, I am not concerned with how you are documenting, so long as you are documenting. Get into the habit of writing or typing in detailed information about your support fixes or customer touches. After that, work on a way to organize those notes. There are no less than two-dozen books on the very subject of organization. However, if you are looking for a free customer service and support management platform to help you out, call me up. I know a guy!

Michael D. Alligood
Partner Sales & Support, ExchangeDefender & Shockey Monkey
michael@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x707

Bug Squashing–Developer’s Journal

Over the course of the last few months we have published a significant amount of new features into Shockey Monkey. However, these last few weeks we have been focused on fixing some outstanding bugs within our software. With the introduction of our guided setup coming soon, we are trying to assure that we eliminate all of the bugs that have a huge impact on your ability to run your business.

Here are some of the bugs that were addressed over the last few weeks:

Administrators cannot approve/deny time sheets or time off requests.

This has been fixed – Not only can administrator’s change the status on these requests, but employees can now see that status when they view their request.

Employees were able to see the Corporate tab, when they did not have administrative privileges.

This has been fixed – While they could see the tab, they did not have the ability to view/edit any information contained within this section. However, we have fixed the issue that was allowed them to view this section.

When creating an employee for the first time the access level was not being applied to the account. It would require an edit/save, for the access level to take place.

This has been fixed – Now when an employee is created, the access level is applied instantly.

Within the contact/company section when trying to use the lookup feature you would be presented with a 404 popup.

This has been resolved.

Multiple issues with the Documents section within the portal.

We have fixed these issues and made some visual improvements to this section.

Issues with Settings > Experimental Features, which would not allow clients to close a ticket.

This has been resolved.

Links have been added back to the dashboard.

The agreement section had several issues, which have been addressed.

Administrators/Employees can no longer remove themselves from the system.

This fixes an issue where users would remove the last administrator from the portal “themselves”, thus locking themselves out of their portal.

The SLA System, has received a major rewrite and now functions as intended.

The project section had several bugs, which were limiting the functionality of this section.

This section is due for an update both visually and functionality wise, look forward to this in an upcoming release.

Upon having a ticket assigned to an employee, they would receive an empty email.

This has been resolved; information is now contained within these emails.

There was a bug that would cause ticket rendering to become jumbled, upon adding an internal note.

This has been resolved.

Next week, we should have a very exciting addition to Shockey Monkey! Make sure to check back next week, you don’t want to miss this new feature. I will say that it is something that has been requested for quite some time now.

Hank Newman
VP, Development
hank@ownwebnow.com

Is Your Business on Autopilot?

The notion of a self sustaining, self running business is a goal for many business owners. Hiring the right staff, delegating responsibilities, and putting processes in to place can often times allow businesses to achieve this goal. However, though this goal is obtainable, a business on autopilot is just going through the motions, and though it may be able to maintain and land, it surely will not be able to take off.

The job of the business owner or CEO is an important one. It is a leadership role and is a position of authority, inspiration, and motivation. Great leaders inspire their staff and those around them. This comes in always innovating, bringing new solutions to the company, and a relentless passion for the business.

Of course there is a fine line between a dictator and a democratic leader. The key to drawing this line is to take all of those features in an autopilot business; hiring the right staff, delegating responsibilities, and putting processes in to place, and combine them with the leadership qualities mentioned above for the business owner.

This combination is what makes a great company and can allow for growth in the business. For some this is the hardest part. Business owners can have a hard time delegating responsibilities. Often times stating that they have been “burned” by a past employee or saying “it won’t get done the way they want it to.” This mindset of course limits growth and puts an immense amount of pressure on the business owner.

An IT business is not one that will allow a CEO or business owner to run the business on autopilot. It is important to take time off, enjoy life, and be there for your family. But, as the leader of an organization, it is just as important to stay on top of trends, continue industry education, inspire and motivate employees, and continue to drive the business forward.

Frank Gurnee
VP, Channel Services, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x4777
frank@ownwebnow.com