Are Your Exchange Servers Experiencing Delays?
Imagine it’s 4:00 PM, you’re getting ready to close for the day and your cell phone starts ringing off the hook; it is your biggest clients’ CFO and he is very upset. The incoming caller complains that “email is slow” and “it is taking forever to do xyz”, but any attempt to get more information is greeted with either hostility or an abrupt “I don’t know”.
Does that sound familiar?
Almost every single request that has very little detail from the client in terms of what is “slow” magically gets fixed and then the client is convinced that the issue is Exchange…how do you fight back? How do you know for sure that a server / network out of your control is performing up to par. How do you know that your hosting vendor is keeping redundancy healthy and performing backups? For the most part you can’t… or can you?
One of the most common inquiries that we receive from partners is “Is XYZ server experiencing delays today?” after the partner gets alerted by their client that things seem to be “slow”. Our staff then tries to qualify the phrase “slow”…is it email? Is it Outlook response? How about OWA? After we have an idea of what the client is reporting as slow then we have to dig through logs and statistics files for performance data to provide back to the client…this process takes forever.
What if we could automate it? What if we could provide partners with an “at a glance” view of the server’s health and their client’s statistics? What if we could provide you with a list of available backup dates so you can choose what date you’d like to restore from? What if we could provide you the number of messages in queue for Exchange or overall latency for clients and response times?
What if we could provide you with up to the minute stats of the CAS server your user is on, the CPU percentage used by the client, the amount of latency experienced by the client.
We can, and we will…
As far as I know this level of information and statistics has never been provided by a service provider before…
Below is the draft version of the User Monitor that will be adding to our Staff control panel and will more than likely find it’s way into service manager.
Travis Sheldon
VP, Network Operations, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x757
travis@ownwebnow.com
Utilizing the 4 P’s of Marketing in your Business
If you want to develop a sound and successful marketing plan for your business or simply just want to perfect your strategy, you must first start at the beginning.
A marketing campaign to draw in clients starts with a full understanding of what your company has to offer and how all of your products and services can help your target market. In other words, you are marketing not only your services and products to prospective clients but also your company as a whole.
Marketing is loosely defined as “The performance of business activities that directly impact the flow of goods and services from the producer to the consumer or user.” This seems like it should be a simple task yet there is so much “clutter” in the world that makes marketing your products and services, at times, difficult. I have written previously in another post about the importance of marketing your services as a solution to a problem or need that your clients currently have. A great way to really narrow in on this is to analyze your marketing efforts and outline your company’s 4 P’s. For those not familiar with the marketing phrase “The 4 P’s” or “The Marketing Mix” it stands for: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion.
To explain how this strategy can be implemented I will use us, ExchangeDefender, as an example. In other words, to develop a successful service offerings marketing plan, there must be a product or service (Product = ExchangeDefender) available to the consumer at a place (Place = Available online through our Partner Portal) for an acceptable and outstanding price (Price = Partner pricing available in the Partner Guide) with proper promotion (Promotion = advertisement in various forms: Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Newsletters, Websites, Promotions and offers) so the consumer is aware of the product (ExchangeDefender) and its advantages.
The actual task of marketing your services is getting out in the market place. Since there are many offerings of all types, sizes, and benefits from your competition, it quickly becomes evident that success is unlikely without some planning and actual implementation of the 4 P’s. Without a plan, the service or product that you are trying to promote stands little chance of successfully marketing its benefits and solutions to your target market. By using variations of these four components you have the ability to reach multiple consumers within your target market.
In addition to that, creating a successful marketing mix that will increase results often takes experimenting with what “works” with your target market. The key is to not always depend on “one” mix, but you should explore other avenues and also use different mixes with depending on what a client needs. The combination and coordination of these elements will be more effective than depending on just one. It is important that you coordinate all elements so that the prospective consumer is not being sent mixed messages that can cause confusion – Make things simple! When things are simple, the buying decision is much easier for the client to make.
In summary, be sure that you cater to a niche market and that your product is geared towards the need of that market. Be sure that your price is within the budget of that market, and that you are distributing your product or service where it will be seen by that market and be easily accessible and attainable. Lastly, steer your promotion to solve the problems that clients are experiencing.
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
Shockey Monkey – Service Manager Updates
This week has been focused towards the cleanup and redesign of the Service Manager. It’s a very large module built inside of Shockey Monkey and required a lot of special attention to assure the new code did not interfere with any existing interface mechanics. Everything has gone very smoothly and today we will be finishing the last few sections, before publishing the changes to the remote portals. With the new publish, everything should look a lot cleaner and loading times have been reduced dramatically.
Next week we have a few focus points that have been requests for quite a while. First on the list will be SLA management. We have been notified of several issues with the current SLA system and will be working towards resolving those problems. Next, as several of you have noticed the “Projects” section has not been updated to match the look and feel of Shockey Monkey v2.0 yet. We also have several back-end enhancements we will be implementing into the code base over the course of the week.
We’ve delayed the updates to these sections on purpose. We didn’t want to simply re-theme these areas, but transform them into something more powerful! We originally designed these sections a few years back and the scope of implementation was limited. Now that we integrate with several platforms and have a more advanced understanding of how everything works and plays together, we hope to make these sections something amazing!
Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com
How to Position Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 So That Anyone Will Want to Buy it
You may be saying “Wait, this sounds impossible” or “It is too good to be true.” That would be because it really is.
It is not possible to honestly position any one email product so that absolutely everyone will see real value in it – there are just too many varying sets of needs and requirements out there. But you can quickly and easily get a few pieces of information that you can use to show your clients how they can take advantage of the wealth of value within Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 from ExchangeDefender.
Your first task when you begin the sales conversation with any new client or prospect is to find out what Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 can do for them. How do you do that? By focusing NOT on the hosted exchange product or service, but rather on the client himself (or herself) and asking them the right questions, the right way.
In this questioning process you will find out what email service they are currently using, what issues they have with that service at that time, and how those issues are affecting them. The implications, or how their issues with their email service affect them, are the real meat that you are looking for.
What can Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 from ExchangeDefender do for them? Chances are good that once you understand the issues and how they are affecting the client’s business, you can very easily illustrate how Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 will alleviate those affects by eliminating the issues.
For example, if you hear from a small business client running someone else’s web-based email that the limited support is extending downtime and costing the client business, then you know that a brief mention of the quick and effective 24×7 support available through ExchangeDefender might be highly enlightening to them, and may serve to enhance your value proposition significantly.
Remember, positioning any product is all about building value proposition and painting a picture. Our CEO, Vlad Mazek, calls it “Selling the Dream” – help the client see exactly how much better their lives and business will be with Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 from ExchangeDefender and closing the sale becomes the natural, easy result of the conversation.
Do you find this information useful?
If you would 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
Rockerduck: What Will My Client See During an Outage?
In my previous blog entry I overviewed the failover procedure for Rockerduck and what ‘technically’ goes on in the background during a failover. This blog entry will focus more on the client experience during and after an outage.
Imagine that Jim and Kelly are both a part of “ABC Company LLC”. Jim is very hip with his new Apple laptop using Office 2011 and his iPhone 4s. Kelly still uses Windows along with Outlook 2007 and when she is out of the office she uses her Blackberry Torch connected through Blackberry Enterprise Server.
Currently, everything is working properly and all systems are operational.
If MBOX2 was to go offline, MBOX1 would take over actively hosting DB2 (Which was hosted by MBOX2). This type of failure is an inter-site failure and results in an immediate switch to the passive copies. Customers will see no downtime as long as there is a good copy of the database available.
What happens if Dallas goes offline?
As described in my previous blog entry, disastrous failures are not automatically failed over. At this point, both clients would be offline from their mailbox and unable to access, create or modify items.
However, in following my previous blog entry we would be able to activate our fail over procedure.
After 15 minutes of electing to activate our fail over procedure clients should receive the update DNS records for cas.rockerduck.exchangedefender.com to point to Los Angeles. All clients would then be able to reconnect to their mailboxes and service should resume as normal out of Los Angeles with the exception of Blackberry Enterprise Server which cannot be setup for fault tolerance in our network design.
After repairing/resolving any issues in Dallas, we would then begin to resynchronize the databases from Los Angeles to Dallas. Once all database copies are up to date we would then reconfigure DNS to point to Dallas and resume service as normal. All in all with a disastrous failure we would be able to recover from the event in 15 minutes once the recovery process is executed.
Travis Sheldon
VP, Network Operations, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x757
travis@ownwebnow.com
Rules…Rules…Rules…
I’ll take this week to discuss one of the more recent patterns that seemed to snowball in the past few weeks. We’ve received an influx of feedback regarding messages getting picked off by the filter that weren’t SPAM. Fortunately, I was able to find a couple of partners that were able to have the time to cooperate with us beyond the original complaint. Thanks to these folks I was able to find a couple of patterns and thus rules that needed tweaking.
The nature of the first tweak, we removed a rule that took into account certain special characters in the header information. This rule “used” to work well but as more MTAs have begun using and customizing header information it’s becoming more common practice than not, so that rule basically got the boot period. The rate that it was showing up in false positives was climbing to an unacceptable level.
The second tweak, this one was a bit more peculiar but this rule has an excellent hit rate on Money natured SPAM. So it picks off anything from the Nigerian prince, to ancient treasure, to someone’s grandma needing money for surgery SPAM. What we found was at the end of the year a lot of folks were sending proposal type emails that included large amount of currency that were legit that were getting picked off by this rule. On this particular rule we just toned down the scoring, the logic behind it being that if the email possesses any other “SPAMMY” qualities we’re going to go ahead and tag it as such.
We’ve seen a huge decrease on the false positives since we enacted these changes 2 weeks ago and we have not seen an increase in the SPAM flow going through because of it. So as the lesson behind this fable I’d recommend that if you ever have false positive of SPAM issues, please always attach the .msg file of the original messages to your tickets. If you provide 5 or more it increases our chances for effective resolution.
Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737
Marketing is All About Planning!
Here is a quick Marketing tip about the importance of planning! The objective of great marketing is creating something today that will bring you success in the future. The key to that is good PLANNING!
Marketing is the glitz and glamour and creative side of business, right? Most of the time, yes, but other times it is what sets a company up for future success or failure. Let me give you an example, let’s say that there is a new book written about how to use current Social networking sites: Facebook , Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. The marketing campaign for the new book could have been amazing, book signings, billboards, commercials, you name it… However, with the public becoming more and more technically savvy, social networking sites and communities are changing almost daily. Once a book is written and published it is stagnant. The information contained within its’ covers is in the past and cannot be updated. Therefore, the sales of a book like this will likely be terrible. No one wants to read something that will no longer be true next week.
Take this lesson of poor planning and put it into your business. Business owners that don’t plan ahead are constantly playing catch-up with their competitors that are better prepared and proactive. Stop that from happening to you. You can be the leader!
Devote some valuable time really planning ahead exactly what you want your business to look like and the message that you send out to your prospective clients. Set aside some time to plan out what you want to achieve, sales goals, new products or services, etc., and build marketing campaigns around those goals and you will see that you are much more efficient and proactive. Goals set guidelines and guidelines provide structure. It is so much easier to be organized and stay on point when structure is in place. However, leave some room for creativity!!! Don’t just plan for next week or next month, but strive to look on a grander scale to a year and beyond.
Remember, success is about setting goals and having a plan and strategy to get there! Good luck!
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
LiveArchive from ExchangeDefender
Whatever your clients’ needs are, you can get your foot in the door and start building a strong relationship (or deepen an existing one) with the powerful combination of Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 Essentials from ExchangeDefender. Now you can offer your clients an attractive combination of rich features, affordability, security and flexibility on our globally-redundant infrastructure that even most large enterprises cannot build in-house.
One of the most powerful – and least understood – features in the ExchangeDefender suite is the Live Archive service. If the possibility of an occasional bout of downtime isn’t the end of the world to the client, and they really just need a secure email-and-only-email solution, then Exchange Essentials 2010 is probably the right fit. With a cost difference of a mere $4 per mailbox per month, though, it can be quite easy to upsell the Live Archive feature of Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 to those clients whose bottom line is threatened by email downtime.
The LiveArchive service is always on to ensure that no matter what, whether your email server crashes or the power goes out in the office, users will always be able to access critical email and stay productive in case of anything. Using ExchangeDefender’s secure standby servers, up to a year’s worth of inbound and outbound email is available and actionable through Outlook Web Access at all times.
LiveArchive is one of the industry’s best-kept-secret Awesome Deals. It’s always on, powered by Exchange 2010 across two data centers, archives sent and received mail, and users never have to deal with training, management, maintenance, or software installation. Why is it a best-kept-secret Awesome Deal? Because LiveArchive – and the ability for users to resume work right where they left off no matter what happens – is included with every ExchangeDefender account. It’s astonishing to realize that other email providers charge as much as $49 per user just to be able to keep working in the event of a technical glitch or outage.
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
ExchangeDefender Essentials with LiveArchive?
Most of our partners are very familiar with our LiveArchive product which is the core of our offering:
LiveArchive is an enterprise-grade business continuity platform that lets you resume work right where you left off if the Internet connection was interrupted or other technical glitches got in the way of getting things done. Powered by Microsoft Exchange 2010 in multiple data centers, LiveArchive delivers a robust and redundant solution that is secure, reliable and free! The best part of all is that LiveArchive is always on, constantly archiving your sent and received mail, so there is no maintenance or management to worry about in case of an outage.
LiveArchive is of course powered by Microsoft Exchange 2010 and has a fully redundant infrastructure spread across two different data centers for ultimate reliability. It also holds a year worth of email, making it… extremely expensive.
ExchangeDefender Essentials
ExchangeDefender Essentials was built with almost the exact opposite goal from ExchangeDefender. It was designed to be affordable, to be a core of what every business needed to protect, secure email and assure business continuity. To make it affordable, ExchangeDefender Essentials does not come with LiveArchive. Or Encryption. Or Web File Sharing. Or Web Filtering.
Of all those awesome components that should be a basic requirement of any Exchange deployment, LiveArchive is the most valuable one but the reality of small business is that budgets are tight and sometimes you have to make a sacrifice.
It explains why ExchangeDefender Essentials has been one of our best selling products in 2011.
ExchangeDefender Essentials Changes
Earlier this fall we announced that we intend to turn ExchangeDefender Essentials into a market leader.
We will do so with a massive cut to the price.
Why? Because the antispam world has standardized it’s basic offerings around $1/month and we can do much better than that.
But is price enough to make the switch? We didn’t think so.
So we built an affordable business continuity product for ExchangeDefender Essentials.
I would like to invite you to participate in the beta of this new product. If you currently have a client on ExchangeDefender Essentials please email vlad.beta@exchangedefender.com and provide the domain name that is currently running on ExchangeDefender Essentials. We’ll enable the new archiving product for them.
ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency – e^3
We’re currently calling this product ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency or E^3 (e-cubed).
The idea is, once your mail server or your access to email is interrupted, you can continue to work elsewhere – through the emergency system! (We realize it’s corny, it’s the best we could come up with on a short notice, if you’ve got a better name let us know). Here are some specs:
– Access to past 5 days of email (goal 14)
– Secure Web and IMAP access
– Access to all inbound mail
– Ability to send mail via Web
– Powered by Linux
– Mobile access… nothing to install or configure, works automatically via MX replication even while your server is down (unlike snapshot server agents or WebDav/API connections) so it works on Exchange, GroupWise, Google Apps, BPOS, anything you can modify the MX record for.
Initially we will offer this product with five (5) days of mail and hopefully increase to two weeks (14 days) over time.
We realize that the major objection is that the product is not based on Microsoft Exchange 2010, that it doesn’t have data center redundancy, that it’s not available for a year, etc – all of which are fair arguments – but they hold true as criticisms of all of our competitors. Most of which will not include this feature free of charge.
We will.
We also believe this is something that will make our partners far more competitive in the marketplace and finally give many of you a good reason to move from our competitors to us or give something to those more budget conscious clients.
We look forward to having another great year and hope this gets you fired up about 2012. If you’d like the details about the price cut coming to all ExchangeDefender Essentials clients please feel free to ping me privately (NDA required; in a nutshell: You’re going to love it)
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Shockey Monkey–Accounting Module
This past week the main focus on the development side was to bring the accounting module up to standards with the new version of Shockey Monkey. This was no easy task and required a lot of code revisions and new implementation methods. In total: 20,000 lines of code had to be “reviewed” and modifications/additions made where found necessary.
The first thing you will notice is that the GUI has been brought up to standards to match the current look, feel and flow of the 2.0 design. The next things that we addressed were outstanding bugs within the system and new bugs that were created as a result of the upgrade. I won’t go into details here, but you can read about the bugs that we fixed here. Finally the last thing many of you will notice is the ability to set your “currency” within the Shockey Monkey Portal.
You can modify the currency displayed inside your portal on a Global level by going into your branding settings. Here you will notice a new section called “Regional Settings”.
Next week our continued focus will be on improvements to the core and Service Manager enhancements, while we continue to fix bug reported by our Partners within the scope of Shockey Monkey.
Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com