logo XD
logo Antler

ExchangeDefender Blog

Archiving

First podcast update in over a month and we’ve certainly been busy… so our typical 5 minute podcast ballooned to 17 minutes. Either way, you take a few minutes and listen to it because we cover a lot of ground on a lot of new developments that we’ll be pursuing through 2012. Some things that you’ve been asking for years are finally shipped! So download and hear us discuss how everything is falling into it’s place:

 

DPodDownload ExchangeDefender Executive Podcast #4 (mp3, 16mb)

Here is a brief summary of what we talked about:

Products
Exchange 2010 Identity Switcher
Exchange 2010 SP2 (OWA Failover)
Shockey Monkey Videos & Docs
Shockey Monkey Pro Upgrade Process
ExchangeDefender XDSync (AD<->ExchangeDefender)
ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency
2012 Roadmap Discussion

Year is going amazingly well and we’re extremely busy – but if there is anything I can do to help please let me know!

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x500
(407) 536-VLAD

ExchangeDefender

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.

ca

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?

lcIf 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

ExchangeDefender

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

General

Over the weekend of 01/27/12 – 01/29/12 our team successfully deployed Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 to our ROCKERDUCK cluster. Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 brings a whole slew of fixes and new features but three were a primary reason for expediting approval of SP2.

Cross Site OWA Redirect: In the event of a data center failure prior to SP2 any OWA clients that attempted to login into an OWA site under maintenance would be redirected to the CAS servers in the secondary data center would have to login again. With SP2 users will silently be redirected and logged into the secondary site CAS servers

OWA Mobile: Quick and efficient mobile version of OWA that is used by clients who do not have rich smart phones

Address book policies: With address book policies we will now be able to support customers that have multiple ‘entities’ or organizations that need to be “separated” but still allow certain sharing functions like address books.

While we do currently provide GAL segregation, Address book policies will allow us to provide clients with a granular level control address lists for users in the organization.

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

General

To continue to elaborate on the value of Emergency’s feature set to keep your customer’s moving. Remember that the POP3 and IMAP deployments can be applied to any mobile device of your choice or any email client of your choice. POP3 and IMAP4 function on the standard ports for both SSL and Non SSL traffic. The only feature set needed by you to keep them fully functional during an outage and beyond the web client (which provides FULL functionality), would be to furnish them with an SMTP server to relay through.

The Mail Client/Mobile device should be set up to the following ports at emergency.exchangedefender.com. Everything requires authentication and they’re set to be the same as our current ExchangeDefender Essentials primary email address and password.

POP3
   *110
   *995

IMAP
   *143
   *993

Next week I’ll follow up with screen by screen set ups for iOS, Android, and other popular desktop browsers, in case you’re not familiar enough with the URL and port assignments in the settings for these clients. If you have any questions about the features discussed here feel free to shoot me an email and I’ll try to help you out as best I can.

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

General

e3-white backExchangeDefender Essentials has been released out of beta. Everyone is running the 2.0 suite in production as of earlier this week. This is not news – both Vlad Mazek, our CEO, and Carlos Lascano, VP of Support Services and R&D, have blogged this week about the release. The biggest noteworthy item with the release is the inclusion of a new piece – ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency (E3). I’ll leave you to the other blogs to read about the details of E3, but to sum up, it’s a scaled-down business continuity solution that we felt it necessary to include in order to make Essentials worthy of the ExchangeDefender name. And it’s free, built into ExchangeDefender Essentials for every user.

You may be wondering, why do we keep releasing more versions of our products? Aren’t the ones we have already supposed to meet the needs of our small and medium sized business clients? And why do we keep making things free?

Let’s take these separately.

Why do we keep releasing more versions of our products? Aren’t the ones we have already supposed to meet the needs of our clients?

It’s all about price points, people.

Sometimes ExchangeDefender, the full flagship suite will make sense. The ExchangeDefender suite was designed to fully protect users with LiveArchive, Encryption, Web Filtering, Secure Web File Sharing, and much more. Thing is, this complete solution is just $2 per month per user.

Just the same, in some cases the client won’t want or need all those security features, and will be looking for ways to reduce costs and simplify. As Vlad Mazek, our CEO, said in his recent post about the launch of Exchange Essentials Emergency (E3), “I cannot advise you on the level of risk you or your clients are capable of taking on, or guess what your tolerance level for downtime and performance killing issues may be. All I can do is offer the best product at the best price point and let you pick what fits your budget.”

This is where ExchangeDefender Essentials comes in.

In the great compromise between features and price, the classic Goldilocks question, there is no one absolute right answer. But with the version 1 beta launch of Essentials we learned that the reality of small business outages was such that some kind of business continuity was so often needed that we simply couldn’t reconcile delivering a solution branded under our name without it.

But again, in the compromise between features and price, we ended up building this into the offering for free. While we haven’t formally released the new pricing structure for Essentials 2.0 just yet (it’ll be out February 1, we are more than comfortable announcing that E3 will definitely be free. Which just begs the next question.

Why do we keep making things free?

This is where E3 becomes really important. As far as we know, none of our competitors or quasi-competitors is offering anything like this. We are giving away business continuity because we believe in value, and we believe in our partners. We believe in giving our partners a competitive advantage where and when we can, because ultimately that is a competitive advantage for us, too. ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency is free because we want you to have it, and deploy it with your clients.

We know it will help you sell more solutions and more Exchange 2010 hosting and support services and training services and then some and address all the needs of your clients of all shapes and sizes.

Do you find this information useful?

lcIf 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

ExchangeDefender Marketing

As the world gets more and more socially in tune and connected, it is vital for marketing to change in order to effectively reach those social networks. As I explained in my last blog post, the traditional 4 P’s of marketing are essential to effectively market your products and services. That is still true; however, there is also a new theory or approach of marketing that has been outlined by a few sources as the new wave of marketing. This change is due mainly to the way that the world communicates and the way that the world engages in doing business has changed.

The strategy of the 4 P’s of marketing has been in use and referred to since the early 1960’s. Obviously, a lot has changed in the business world since that time. Marketers and businesses set the stage and controlled the markets as a whole. There were not a lot of differences or features associated with products and services. Nowadays, the marketing world is completely different!!! Now, the client/customer is in control, most markets have separated or fragmented into multiple ones making it harder to reach groups. Also, there are so many alternatives, choices, and competition when it comes to products and services. Social media and the way that people communicate have been major players in the change of how successful marketing is done.

As with anything, especially in business, as trends change, you must adapt if you want to stay ahead of the curve and be successful with your business. To apply that way of thinking into marketing, here is a new idea for a fresh marketing framework, replace the 4 P’s with the 4 E’s:

Product > Experience 

Place > Everywhere

Price > Exchange

Promotion > Excitement

Product > Experience

In the old model, the first “P” was “Product”, which is about highlighting a single product or service. Now, products change constantly, features are added, the design changes, etc. By switching the first element to an E for Experience, you can stop focusing on just the product and start thinking about the overall experience for your target market. A great way to start doing this is to discover the process that a customer goes through when looking for something to purchase. To help to pinpoint your customer’s experience with your product or service, start asking yourself questions: How do customers shop for their products and services?, When do purchases occur?, Who or what influences buying decisions?, What happens after something is purchased?, Do they buy again? If you aren’t asking yourself these types of questions it will be hard to understand the customer experience, thus being able to better market your offerings to them. This is important because when you focus your marketing efforts to revolve around the experience rather than just the product you can really tap into what is most important for your customers.

Place > Everywhere

In the old model, the second “P” was “Place”, but now it is not about bringing customers to a certain place it is about being where the customers are. Start by switching the second element to “Everywhere”, because everywhere your clients are, you can be! Now to grab attention you don’t have to interrupt and pester, you have to intercept and capture consumers in their time and meeting them on their terms. A great way to take advantage of this is to advertise and market where your clients are. Use social media; take advantage of Facebook and Twitter, etc. Social media is a great avenue to announce changes, promotions, offers, etc., because customers don’t have to search for things, it is brought to their attention while they are engaging in their normal everyday habits; thus, making the process easier for them, and also making buying decisions easier for them.

Price > Exchange

In the old model, the third “P” was for “Price”. Literally meaning, we provide you a product and you give us money to pay for the product, period. By switching the third element to “Exchange”, you can highlight the value of the product. In this part of the equation you should ask yourself: What is my client paying for?, What does my client want in our products or services?, What are we willing to offer them? These questions will help you to determine the exchange that will happen when something is purchased. There will not only be a monetary exchange, but also an exchange of value. You will provide value to your clients because your products and services give them a solution to their problems or needs.

Promotion > Excitement

In the old model the fourth “P” was for “Promotion”. With the new model, in essence, it hasn’t changed because there will always be a promotion or offering with marketing, however, now that focus has shifted to the “Excitement” that surrounds the promotion. The key ingredient to reach people is to target what matters to them, hitting on emotions, needs, etc. When you can generate energy and passion in what you are selling to your market, excitement is born. When there is excitement about a product or service people talk about it! This is where the new wave of communication takes over. Coupled together, word-of-mouth and social networking take that excitement and create a buzz about your products and services.


How is ExchangeDefender Utilizing the New 4 E’s of Marketing?

Experience: We understand the “Customer Experience” in working with ExchangeDefender. We want to make the experience great for our partners and very simple. We make all of our solutions very user-friendly and easy to use. We provide training materials, whitepapers, support documentation, videos, and marketing collateral to make it easy and beneficial to have a partnership with us.

Everywhere: We go where our market is! We attend and sponsor the same tradeshows and conferences that our partners and target markets attend. We know that you are looking for solutions and partners that will help you to more effectively service your clients and offer them valuable products and services that will help to better run your businesses. We also stay plugged in with social networking, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and post blogs to keep you updated on what we are doing and how we can help you be successful.

Exchange: With all of our offerings there is a lot more than just an exchange of money for services. We offer our partners value! All of our offerings are all-inclusive – we don’t nickel and dime for advanced features. We believe in an all-you-can-eat strategy, which in turn provides value for you. We also provide free support, training, and best practices to our partners.

Excitement: We provide excitement with our products and services by catering to what the channel and our partners are looking for. We listen to word-of-mouth, social networking hype, and the needs of our partners and strive to fulfill those needs with our solutions. Also, we create excitement around our company because we are very passionate about our offerings and our partners and truly believe that we provide great solutions to our partner base. 

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com

General

As you may have already figured out from Carlos Lascano’s post (“ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency”), the beta period for ExchangeDefender Essentials 2 suite has concluded and everyone is currently running the suite in production. I wanted to offer you a bit of executive perspective as well as the success this product has had so you can position it appropriately in your solution stack and sales management.

First of all, ExchangeDefender suite is the king and product that should be the leader in the solution stack when it comes to email management. We know it will help you sell more solutions and more Exchange 2010 hosting and support services and training services and then some because it addresses all the needs businesses of all sizes have when it comes to email. And for just $2 it’s hard to find a business that would pass on it with LiveArchive, Encryption, Web Filering, Web File Sharing and so on built in at no cost.

Sometimes.. businesses have tight budgets and are willing to make compromises. For them, we offer ExchangeDefender Essentials. Sometimes both the businesses and their IT Solution Providers (you) are willing to make extreme compromises, so we offer CloudBlock.

I cannot advise you on the level of risk you or your clients are capable of taking on, or guess what your tollerance level for downtime and performance killing issues may be. All I can do is offer the best product at the best price point and let you pick what fits your budget. It’s your choice.

ExchangeDefender Essentials was born out of the compromise between features and price. Philosophy of our flagship ExchangeDefender product is security and features without compromise. Unfortunately this is not the philosophy we share with the majority of our competitors and our partners were at the disadvantage when trying to position our service against the marketplace that starts with basic SPAM & Virus filtering but charges for everything else that we consider bare minimums for an email solution. We compromised and offered ExchangeDefender Essentials – but with the 1.0 one compromise that we could not sleep with is the fact that it had no independent business continuity built in (your mail wouldn’t bounce but you wouldn’t be able to access it until your service was restored). ExchangeDefender Essentials 2.0 addresses this problem and goes well beyond the call of duty as it’s most popular in small business.

Reality of Small Business Outages

ExchangeDefender protects businesses and organizations of all sizes. This is what made LiveArchive an undisputed champion of business continuity for companies with redundant Internet connections, large maintenance windows and an all-Microsoft network infrastructure.

Small business outages and service interruptions tend to be different. There is only one Internet connection. Only one server. Standardization is not frequent – some folks are on Outlook, some are on Thunderbird on a netbook, others may only work on their Blackberry or iPad. It depends.

ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency (e3) was built to solve this technology challenge by using open standards. While you can access ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency via the web securely (https://emergency.exchangedefender.com, you can also setup a POP3 account on any device, even without commercial software (Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail) across multiple software platforms and set it in a dormant/inactive state. When it’s needed it can be enabled and the client is back in business.

One more thing, ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency it’s free.

As for one final thing.. the pricing will be revealed in February and all subscribers to Essentials will automatically have their pricing lowered to the new rate. By popular demand we will also allow direct purchases of ExchangeDefender Essentials for partners who would rather not be involved in the billing activity for smaller accounts.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
(407) 536-VLAD

ExchangeDefender Hosted Services Support

Last quarter we launched a slimmed down version of ExchangeDefender to be packaged with Exchange Essentials 2010 and as a standalone product. This product was launched to provide a similar price point and feature set as some less robust Spam & Security solutions out in the channel. However, we were never comfortable with not offering a bundled-in business continuity solution. Enter… ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency.

Emergency is the business continuity solution that is now bundled in with ExchangeDefender Essentials. It will capture a copy of all incoming email in similar fashion, but only inbound mail with a retention policy of 5 days for all items. This email is accessible via web portal and POP3/IMAP4 (although currently we are limiting the ability on the POP/IMAP to just download messages (to avoid open relay situations). So your clients will be able to continue to do business with the ability to receive, reply to, and create new emails from their real email address during an outage. Remember, that our 7 day spooling/mail bagging system is still in place so a combination of the two should minimize your client’s inconvenience.

The web portal is available at:

https://emergency.exchangedefender.com

Credentials:

Your primary user email address with ExchangeDefender (you cannot log in with an alias address) and your current ExchangeDefender password.

 

 

Once you log in all of your email will be available, with your identity pre-configured for use. There is no additional set up required. You can start reading and firing off emails as quickly as you can type.

Setting up Outlook (remember Read/DL message access only currently)

Fill out the information as below:

 

 

Your email address and user name are the same as your primary address in ExchangeDefender. The POP3/IMAP4 server is emergency.exchangedefender.com. Everything is on the standard ports for both SSL and non.

 

 

Our CEO, Vlad Mazek, will be providing a broader overview on emergency and its feature set when we officially roll it out in the next 2 weeks.

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

ExchangeDefender

This week we have been going through the final stages of our XDSYNC v2.0 deployment. Everything has performed great and has been operating as intended inside of our test environments. We are still on schedule and should have this published later today. There are a few key points I would like to cover before we release this new distribution for download.

How does XDSYNC work?

XDSYNC works by establishing a connection to our servers and running a series of checks against the provided domain information. You authenticate by providing the primary Domain and Password for the accounts. The software will then translate this and examine all sub domains for the population process.

The sync process is unidirectional and will pull the existing structure from your Exchange Server. It will then take that structure and mirror it inside of ExchangeDefender. This is important to pay close attention to and understand! Once you enable XDSYNC, you should do ALL of your account creations on the Exchange Server. You should no longer manually create accounts inside of ExchangeDefender.

The sync process allows you to pull all mail addresses associated with (Mailboxes, Distribution Groups and Public Folders). When we pull in addresses from (Public Folders & Distribution Groups), we flag these addresses on the backend as being non-mail accounts. This allows us to exclude these addresses from the billing cycle and also limit certain functionality due to these being non-mailbox accounts.

What about the Password Sync Component?

I mentioned this briefly in my last blog post and essentially everything is the same. Starting today any user account that has the password changed, it will be flagged in the back-end. If enabled XDSYNC will pick up these requests and reset the user’s password on the active directory level.

That is the basic logic of how XDSYNC operates and what you should expect if you choose to install this application. If used correctly, it will make your IT management life a lot easier and help reduce the mundane tasks of adding users to both systems. It will also enable your clients to have control of their password management, while you maintain the higher level management of the servers.

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com