February 21, 2012
Last week we launched ExchangeDefender Essentials to our partner base and unveiled the new products, the new pricing, the new business model behind it (and the ability to sell it directly) as well as a lot more details. This is a private preview for our partners and the official press release will follow on March 1st.. but for now you can check out the video and be ahead of the curve.
 Download ExchangeDefender Essentials Launch Video
Or you can order it today in the Service Manager and be way ahead of the game. The feedback so far – on the price alone – has been tremendous. We look forward to adding you to the ExchangeDefender family and giving you yet another way to compete in the marketplace and earn more business.
Don’t give your clients any reason to say no!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x500
(407) 536-VLAD
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February 8, 2012
Please join us next Thursday, February 16th, at noon EST for the launch of ExchangeDefender Essentials suite.
Click here to register now, limited capacity:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/130425112
We have blogged a lot about ExchangeDefender Essentials, E^3, Emergency and we’re officially launching it next week. This is our biggest competitive product launch so please make sure you tune in for special pricing offer that will be extended only during the webinar (you can lock it in, no purchase necessary).
Talk to you next Thursday!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x500
(407) 536-VLAD
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February 3, 2012
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
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January 26, 2012
 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
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January 23, 2012
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
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January 20, 2012
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
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January 16, 2012
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
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January 12, 2012
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
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December 28, 2011
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
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December 8, 2011
Value is a word that carries many meanings among many people. According to dictionary.com value is defined as:
“Monetary worth, importance, the worth of something in terms of the amount of other things for which it can be exchanged or in terms of some medium of exchange.”
However, “value” in a marketing sense is expressing the benefit in your offering and you should strive for value to be the number one goal for your business to get across to your potential clients. This quick marketing tip can help you produce amazing results on an ongoing basis.
At ExchangeDefender, we are adamant about the importance of pumping as much value into your products or services as possible. The marketplace is fed up with always seeing the normal or average products and services. Thus, when a product or service comes along that exudes great value; they LOVE it and feel as if they got to HAVE it.
This also goes along with a statement that is important to remember: “There is no business on the earth that will buy a solution for a problem that they don’t have.” Yet, most marketers and businesses jump right into features without taking the time to fully understand if the people that they are trying to market to believe that they even have a problem to begin with. Thus, the marketing challenge at hand turns into a whole new task: “sell the problem”.
This creates an interesting oxymoron. Most people aren’t willing to acknowledge that they even have a problem unless they also believe that there is a solution to the problem. So a huge part of selling a problem is hinting that there’s a solution that others are using. The key part about that is letting them know that the solution they will ultimately need or be looking for is YOU! This is accomplished by marketing the VALUE and benefits of your solution and presenting it in a manner that allows them to see the solutions to the problem at hand.
How to Add Value to Your Offering?
One way you can increase the value of your offering, is to lower your prices or fees associated with your product of service. While this method can be effective, it can also drag you down into a price war. Another reason to stay away from this option is that many people that are attracted solely to low prices, are the most likely to leave and change providers as soon as another company beats your price; and that is exactly what you are trying to stay away from. In my opinion, it’s far better to find ways to pack a ton of value into your product and sell your offering for a great “value for the money” price, rather than to offer an average product and sell it cheap.
How ExchangeDefender Offers YOU Value
At ExchangeDefender we help our partners to offer VALUE in the most simplistic ways. For example:
· All of our products and services are all-inclusive. This packaging structure makes it easy for you to offer your clients services that contain a lot of VALUE to them, but yet you are not being nickel and dimed for every feature. This way you can focus on what is most important to your clients and be able to offer it to them, thus becoming the solution to their problem without the additional cost associated with it.
· There are no minimums with our services, no contracts, no additional fees. Whether you have 1 or 100 users, you can use our solutions. This allows us to cater to businesses of all shapes and sizes to offer them solutions that can help to make them profitable.
· We offer marketing collateral and proven best practices. We believe and know for a fact that you are busy! As are we, so we make marketing collateral available for partners to use for their clients so that they can focus on the business rather that how to sell it. This creates value because it is one less thing that you have to do. Also, we have a wealth of knowledge that has been documented from our partners success with offering ExchangeDefender’s services. These profitability best practices are great ways to get ideas on how to market services to your clients and maintain profitable relationships with them with the help of us here at ExchangeDefender.
· We don’t compete with you. We work with you to make a sale by offering you a solution set that will be of value to your clients and provide support of those services.
· We are available 24×7x365! We have support via the phone and through are ticketing system to be here to support you and make our partnership successful.
There are many more examples of the value that we offer our partners and help them to embrace the cloud.
Ultimately, the marketplace is attracted to VALUE – The bigger the value, the more attracted a customer will become. By making your product offering as valuable as possible, you will never have to rely solely on selling based on price again!
If there is anything that we can help you with, please feel free to let me know!
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
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