This Week in Development…

This week the development team here at ExchangeDefender has been working towards internal fixes and upgrades across several platforms. The next few months are going to be jammed packed with a lot of exciting additions, which will help us assist you and your clients more efficiently. We’ve also made several additions and corrections inside of the Shockey Monkey service manager module.

A few areas we addressed internally were in regards to account creation and error handling when it comes to provisioning Hosted Exchange accounts. We have addressed the rare instances where an account(s) would get stuck in the “pending” state upon attempting to create a new mailbox. We were also receiving reports of several issues with the service manager when using “Internet Explorer”; we have corrected these issues as well. Essentially we’ve been trying to smooth the entire ordering process out and help make new account creations and modifications a more pleasant experience.

In regards to new features inside of the service manager, users now have the ability to add or remove distribution group account aliases. What this feature does is allow the distribution group to receive email from more than one address and still distribute the message as if it was sent to the primary email. We decided to implement this feature now because it became a request that kept growing and growing as more and more partners were creating distribution groups for their clients.

I’m looking forward to discussing the future products and changes that will occur within the next few months and helping shed light on the technical aspect of how these new products will function throughout you every day routines.

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com

How Buzzwords and Jargon Get in the Way of Selling Compliance Archive

ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive is a secure, long term storage, recovery and eDiscovery system that ensures compliance with regulatory requirements established by IRS, HIPAA, SOX and SEC. ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive functionality is provided free – we only charge for the cost of storage. ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive uses the latest Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server technology to archive, index and replicate messages safely and securely. All data is further encrypted and backed up offsite to ensure ultimate resiliency in case of a disaster.

Makes perfect sense, right? The problem is, when you say something like this to many small business owners, it makes them feel very uncomfortable, even if meeting a compliance requirement is really important to them. And as we all should know, uncomfortable clients tend to keep their wallets closed.

The key to selling Compliance Archive to the small business is very simple: lose the buzzwords and jargon. Think about it this way: those small business owners are experts at some line of business that is NOT technology, and are choosing both to trust in and to pay for someone else’s knowledge and expertise in their chosen line of business, which IS technology.

Certainly, small business clients usually need some education, particularly during the sales process. That’s a part of your job as the technology expert, too. Rather than deliver your message in jargon and acronym-laden tech and compliance speak, though, the better way to win is to highlight the benefits of compliance email archiving beyond just actual compliance itself. It’s as if we are losing something by leaving our clients to “translate” for themselves, and it makes it harder to sell compliance archiving services.

It turns out that may be exactly what it is. We’ve learned from our partners that small business clients rarely care about all the regulatory compliance acronyms and regulation language or details – they just want the peace of mind of knowing they meet the requirements. Business decision makers also don’t like the idea of paying for “regulatory compliance,” but they love the idea of being able to find any email they sent or received over the past 10 years without having to buy extra servers, more software or deal with cumbersome MS Outlook. Even better, most everyone understands and is comfortable with a flat per-user storage fee (just $3.99 per month) that isn’t dependent on any measured unit of storage.

When you address the real problems and speak in a language of true benefits that people want, you’ll find there are far fewer objections over price and questions about features they don’t understand, and that deals close more quickly and more smoothly.

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

Core Stability & API Extensions

These past few weeks the development team has been focused on improving internal core processes across our Shockey Monkey and ExchangeDefender products. The goal was to encompass all of the changes and issues reported throughout last year and implement solutions going forward. We’ve also been working on developing the foundation for many exciting additions that will premiere at various times throughout this year!

One of the core implementations that happened last week was a revision to our Hosted Exchange account automation software. This component is responsible for handling the ordering process for Hosted Exchange, Public Folders, Distribution Groups, and External Contacts. What this translates into is a “faster & more accurate” ordering process for our partners and their clients. We’ve also implemented a more intelligent logging system that will allow us troubleshoot and possibly script automatic corrections when an issue does occur within our software.

We’ve also been making several additions to the public API as we speak with more and more partners who are interested in having a viable integration into our software. We recently added the ability to limit results based on a ‘lastupdate’ timestamp and implemented several invoice methods to retrieve information from the accounting module. We are still working on and exploring the possibilities of enhancing the current Restful API and implementing a SOAP counterpart.

So in summary, we have finished our January goals and have completed the majority of the core framework for our future projects. I can’t discuss these projects yet, but once they get closer to release I will provide a technical overview of how they work and what to expect when using these applications.

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com