ExchangeDefender–Making IT Simple

This is my last week with ExchangeDefender. I’m very sad to be leaving, but excited to move on to new opportunities. As I reflect on my experience working with our partners to resell ExchangeDefender solutions, one singular idea prevails, and is worthy of this final installment in my weekly business development blog:

ExchangeDefender solutions are all about making it simple for you and your clients to succeed.

Hosted email can be very simple – pay one flat price per month per mailbox for a set of great services that meets all the client’s needs. Yet some providers choose to make it very complicated – just determining what the per-mailbox cost will be can seem like solving an algebra problem. Hidden add-ons and fees abound, and add up very quickly to costs much higher than anticipated. When anything changes, like storage needs or mailboxes or additional services, account changes can be complicated, may affect the price dramatically (which wreaks havoc on your profitability), and can be difficult to manage.

At ExchangeDefender, our Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 service makes it very simple. For one flat, all-inclusive rate per mailbox per month, you can offer your clients a hosted messaging solution that is flexible enough for their varying needs today and tomorrow, and robust enough to enable you to turn a profit on every mailbox every month.

“Under promise and over deliver”

Let’s say your client, like so many small businesses, indicates in the sales conversations that they “just need a basic email solution” that will work and keep them safe and secure. Well what if you could offer that to them, at a great price, with all the features that they could ever want to “add on” later built right in and ready to go when that time comes?

ExchangeDefender Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 solution comes with full ExchangeDefender protection, an Outlook desktop license, Live Archive service, web filtering, web file sharing, and even more great features built right in. If your clients don’t need or want any of them, you can simply disable them. You can deliver that fully-customized functionality with just the click of a button in your management portal. There’s no migration, no additional provisioning or payments, no updates. It’s just that simple, for you and your clients.

We offer ExchangeDefender Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 to our partners for $10 per mailbox per month, with additional discounts available based on volume. You get to mark this up and charge your client at your discretion. We typically see the service being resold for $15-20 per mailbox per month, providing a nice healthy margin to the MSP partner. And the price includes everything, with no fine print or hidden catches. $15 a month for a full-scale, customizable Microsoft Exchange email service sounds very appealing.

It’s easy to manage, so you’ll spend a little less time managing each client’s changing email and messaging needs, which adds up to big impact on the bottom line. Remember that when the fee is fixed, the goal is to minimize your internal costs for managing and delivering each service to each account, to be most profitable.

Do you find this information useful?

If you’d like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it affects you and your clients, visit Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB, conduct live webcasts and podcasts with industry leaders and more.

Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777

LOUIE Upgrades

During the first half of March we will be performing upgrades to the LOUIE network which include adding mailbox servers, phasing out older servers, upgrading Exchange to SP2, and most importantly, DAG redesign.

On the first week (March 5^th – 9^th 2012) we will add two new mailbox servers for LOUIE (one intended to phase out LOUIEMBOX1).

On the second week (March 12^th – 16^th 2012) we will create a new DAG for LOUIE and add two new mailbox databases into the DAG. Throughout the week users hosted on LOUIEMBOX1 will be moved to the new databases in the DAG. Finally once all users are moved from LOUIEMBOX1 we will begin replicating public folder content to the new mailbox servers.

All changes are intended to be transparent to users and should not interrupt service access.

Travis Sheldon
VP, Network Operations, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x757
travis@ownwebnow.com

Compliance Archiving–Fixes

This week at ExchangeDefender the development team has been split across two areas of focus. We have been working hard on finishing the new Essentials platforms and attempting to smooth out the registration process. However, most of the work this week has been put into existing products and resolving several bugs that surfaced last week.

The product that received the most code corrections/enhancements this week was Compliance Archive.

We’ve addressed two issues with Compliance Archive this week and the code changes have been working without any issues. The first issue was relatively simple and was discovered because of extensive growth of mailbox storage sizes. To resolve this, we implemented a few methods on the front end to allow mailboxes with over 10k messages to render correctly. The second issue was directly related to improper use of the Compliance Archive system and the message retrieval process.

First let me explain how the system is supposed to work, and then I’ll explain the problematic area we found.

How It Works

Compliance Archive works by processing mail that is captured inside of a Journal Mailbox. A Journal Mailbox is essentially a rule based mailbox that will retain an instanced copy of all messages sent/received globally across the desired domain or accounts. These archived messages contain very basic information and retain the attached “original” message file. This allows our software to analyze this information, process the message and store the original message file inside of our database.

 

What Was Happening?

After checking into a few accounts that had complaints of mail not getting archived, we noticed something… They had a handful of legitimate message, but they also had a lot of invalid messages. What had happened was, these individuals were treating the journal accounts like regular mailboxes and sending messages to them directly. In many cases they had even configured them as Catchall accounts or added them to several Distribution Groups. By sending the messages to the journal account in this manner was causing the Compliance Archive operations to fail, because the messages had an incorrect structure.

 

Solution

Since these messages were injected into the mailboxes through an improper method, they are NOT messages that yield the validation to be archived. So we implemented methods to compare the structure types and simply remove these invalid messages from the system. After implementing these changes it allowed the archiving process to resume normal operation. Within a couple hours archive queues that were over 20k, were completely caught up within a few hours.

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com

Mail Flow Reloaded

I have covered this topic here before. However, since my contribution in this blog is centered around repetitive support issues we’ll take another stab at it again since it seems that the gap in understand shows up every time we get a new batch of partners. Please feel free to print this or link this to your support staff because it’s pretty fail safe and it will save your team time as well as safe face in looking borderline incompetent when confronted with such an issue to your end users.

My client has reported to me that they have not received any email today (random interval of time they expected to receive mail and have not):

1. Always and foremost check the MX record. If this is pointed at anything other than or in addition to inbound30.exchangedefender.com, you’ve found your problem.
You can use a site like www.mxtoolbox.com to search this or if you’re savvy in windows cmd promp or linux there are commands to do this.

2. You’ve checked the MX records and the only thing that exists is inbound30.exchangedefender.com, what do I check next?
ExchangeDefender requires 1 hour to propagate across all inbound and outbound server (2 hours during peak which is defined by 8-6 EST)

You access a computer’s command prompt and attempt the following steps:

telnet inbound30.exchangedefender.com 25 <enter> (Wait for Welcome banner before proceeding)

ehlo yoursendingdomain.com <enter> (Use your actual test send domain, and wait for reply from server)

mail from: yourtest@domain.com <enter> (Use your actual test send address, and wait for reply from server)

rcpt to: yourclient@domain.com <enter> (Use your actual client address, and wait for reply from server)

DATA <enter>

Subject: Test <enter>

Testing please ignore. <enter>

. <enter> (The sole period indicates end of transmission).

 

Now you should have received a message ID if your test was successful. If you received such an ID the issue is not within ExchangeDefender. If you receive a relaying denied message you have not given the system enough time to populate the routing changes for your new or changed domain delivery point.

3. Log into https://admin.exchangedefender.com with your Service Provider ID (Hint: It’s not a domain nor an email address). If you need this and are unsure open a support request and we’ll provide you the credentials. Unfortunately, we cannot provide this type of information over the phone if you call in looking for this you’ll be directed as such.

Once you log in, click on Mail Log at the top then search for your test message.

If you see the status as Deferred 9 times out of 10 its either the ISP or a firewall not allowing our subnets to deliver the message, the last 1 out of 10 is the IP restrictions weren’t set in Exchange. For an updated list of our ranges please visit:

http://www.exchangedefender.com/ExchangeDefender_Deployment_Guide.php

Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737