The Ultimate Triple Threat: ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey, and You
Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010, the ExchangeDefender security suite, our offsite backup solution, and other products from ExchangeDefender are remarkably easy to manage – the Service Manager enables even completely non-technical users on your team to provision and manage our full suite of services in a clean, simple web-based interface.
The simplicity of this solution and ease of management is one of the reasons that ExchangeDefender has been successful since 1997. We want to make your business more profitable, and we’re always working on incremental improvements.
One of the biggest projects that the ExchangeDefender team has been involved with recently has been the launch of Shockey Monkey 2.0, “Reloaded.” Shockey Monkey is a free business management platform which was developed in-house by ExchangeDefender team. Shockey Monkey delivers support board and ticket management, client relationship management, project management, invoicing and billing, tasks and scheduling, sales pipeline and opportunity management, and the most unique feature, the client portal. Clients can open and view Support Requests, adjust their settings and preferences, access the Service Manager to provision and manage their own ExchangeDefender services, and more.
By combining the power of the Service Manager with the Shockey Monkey Client Portal feature, you can deliver a self-serve portal, allowing clients to manage their own ExchangeDefender service accounts, that not only helps you focus your valuable time and resources on more valuable functions, but also helps your clients see you as an important component in their technology management strategy.
The Shockey Monkey Client Portal is completely brand-able and customizable, down to the specific price points for ExchangeDefender products that appear in the Service Manager, ensuring that you’ll always promote your own brand and that you’ll be able to mark up and turn a profit on the services.
With all that said, here are a couple of important thoughts regarding the powerful combination of ExchangeDefender Service Manager and Shockey Monkey Client Portal:
First, it’s optional. You have the ability in your Service Provider portal to completely disable the Service Manager feature so clients cannot see it when they log in to their portals.
Second, it’s just not right for everyone. In some cases, a key part of the value you’re adding to your relationship with the client is alleviating the burden of managing and administering technology services. It may not make sense for you to offer clients the ability to do this themselves.
Third, however, many find that it does make sense, as it can be a huge time saver, efficiency builder, and profit booster for your business. Imagine not getting those calls about adding aliases or turning off the email accounts of terminated employees – how much time would your team have to dedicate to more important projects and client issues? What could the impact be on the bottom line if that time was available?
Fourth and finally, full documentation on the ExchangeDefender Service Manager is available at www.exchangedefender.com, and detailed training on the Shockey Monkey Client Portal is at www.shockeymonkey.com.
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.
Sincerely,
Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777
Exchange Identity Switcher
One of the most common questions that our support team receives with Hosted Exchange is “How can my client choose which email address I want to send as?” and many partners are shocked to hear the answer “You can’t”.
The above limitation has always existed in Exchange as you can only have one “outgoing” address. Sure, you can create another profile in Outlook and send via SMTP or create a distribution group and add send-as rights..but what do you do if you’re on hosted exchange and you don’t have the freedom to control addresses and configurations at will or find it rather rudimentary?
*Drum roll*
Now you can…
For the first time (as far as I can tell for any hosting provider) partners/clients will have the ability to control their outgoing address in our Hosted Exchange.
Utilizing our API and a brand new API designed by the ExchangeDefender team for direct client Exchange interaction we now can extend the ability for clients to control their outgoing address on the fly.
The current beta product is a windows based application and will soon be converted to an Outlook 2010 plugin.
If you or your clients are interested in test driving this software please reach out to me directly: travis@ownwebnow.com.
Note: This only applies to rockerduck.
Travis Sheldon
VP, Network Operations, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x757
travis@ownwebnow.com
XDSYNC & Password Sync–Coming This Week!
This past week we have revisited a piece of software that was originally written over two years ago. Since our initial launch of XDSYNC back in 2009, it has become a widely used application among our partners. For those who may not be familiar with XDSYNC and what it does, let me explain.
XDSYNC is a service that you install on your local Exchange Server for accounts you wish to have protected by ExchangeDefender. The application monitors the structure of Active Directory & Mail Users and automatically provisions existing and newly created accounts into the backend system of ExchangeDefender. This allows an almost hands free experience for our partners when it comes to managing additions and removals inside of an organization.
Over the years one of the biggest requests has been for two additional components to this software. The first request was to have the ability to restrict/block an account on the server from being included in the automatic provision list. The second request was to implement a way to synchronize passwords between ExchangeDefender and the remote Exchange server. These requests have finally come to surface in our newest release of XDSYNC!
Exclusion List
The exclusion list is very straight forward. Upon configuration of XDSYNC you will notice an additional tab within the software. This tab will be populated with the current list of mail users on the Exchange Server. You simply check any accounts you wish for the software to ignore from the processing component and they will not be sent to Exchange Defender.
Password Sync
This process is currently being designed in a single direction due to limitations within the Windows environment. Initially it will not touch any existing users that existed before installation. The password change event will be triggered upon a password change request within ExchangeDefender.
For Example:
· Either an admin or users changes the password on “test@yourdomain.com”.
· This account is now flagged for “Password Sync”, if enabled.
· The next time XDSYNC pings for changes, it will be included on the list.
· The change gets processed and the password is updated on the Exchange server.
You may also notice from the screenshot we have included a “Notifications” section. This will allow you to enable and configure a recipient to be notified each time an account is either added/removed from ExchangeDefender via XDSYNC.
We are very excited to release this new version as it takes advantage of many code advancements and should operate at much higher level of performance than the previous version. Good news is that the new version is currently undergoing testing and should be released Friday of this week!
Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com
Encrypted Attachment Issues
Over the past couple of weeks we have been researching some reports regarding encryption not handling attachments correctly. During the process, the error that kept printing on the back end processing was ““Content-Type: application/ms-tnef; name=”winmail.dat” Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64””. If Outlook sends a message using the RTF format (which is not very common outside Outlook) for bold text and other text enhancements, it includes the formatting commands in the winmail.dat file. Receiving email clients that do not understand the code therein display it as a stale attachment. To make matters worse, Outlook may also pack other, regular file attachments in the winmail.dat file. That’s the bad news, the good news is that fix is a piece of cake.
In Outlook 2010 you go through File, then Options and check the box below:
In Outlook 2007 you go through Tools, then Options:
1. Go to the Mail Format tab.
2. Under Compose in this message format:, make sure either HTML or Plain Text is selected.
3. Click Internet Format.
4. Make sure either Convert to Plain Text format or Convert to HTML format is selected under When sending Outlook Rich Text messages to Internet recipients, use this format:
5. Ok to submit.
Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737
Business Continuity and ExchangeDefender
It’s winter! And winter is a GREAT time to talk about business continuity with your clients. For most of us, in the continental US at least, the winter months bring the highest likelihood of weather-related business disruptions. Where I live, we spend about a quarter of the year under the constant threat of snow storms that will cripple transportation and make it impossible for anyone to travel anywhere safely.
Business continuity is the ability of an organization to continue to function after some kind of event that could hinder its operation. These events need not be those highly unlikely natural disasters, or terrorist attacks, or national emergencies. Events that affect business’ ability to operate can be seen every day—snow storms, simple hardware failure, network security breach, power outage…the things that can get in the way of a business that depends on IT are many and one needn’t far to find them.
Business continuity is all about planning how to keep the business up and running in the face of any of those things that can try to slow or halt operations.
Frankly, business continuity planning can be an intense and complex process, but it’s worth undertaking because there’s no way to short cut the kind of risk assessments and SWOT analysis that you’ll need to make the appropriate decisions for protecting the business. It can also be relatively simple in many cases, particularly for smaller businesses. There’s not enough space in this blog for a full discussion of the business continuity planning process with clients, though it’s important to note that we have a wealth of resources available to our partners that deliver in-depth explanations and step by step instructions, available at www.exchangedefender.com/XDUniversity.php .
In a world where so much communication happens digitally, and our dependence continues to grow, delivering continual access to messaging can be one of the most important elements of business continuity planning. A particularly powerful and unique tool that accomplishes this within the Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 solution from ExchangeDefender is LiveArchive.
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. Neither you nor your client has to actively manage this service in any way – the LiveArchive service is always on to ensure that no matter what, whether the power goes out in the office or the office team gets snowed in or anything else, users will always be able to access critical email and stay productive.
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
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