Hosted Services

Friendly Names, Finally.

You’ve only been waiting 20 years for this feature and we’re happy to finally deliver it: ExchangeDefender will now show friendly display names and email addresses, giving you a better idea of who the email sender is.

This is a slightly technical pragraph that we encourage you to skip. Every email you receive has two From: addresses. One is a “friendly from” or “header from” address that prints the name of the sender as the user configured it inside their mail software such as Outlook or Gmail. The other is an “envelope from” or “mail from / return path from” address that is used for mailer/postmaster reasons to bounce and process messages. As an email security solution, ExchangeDefender only looks at and reports envelope addressing as the friendly from can easily be spoofed and faked and generally has no impact on the underlying SPAM filtering technology, message routing, SPF/DKIM, and a myriad of other technical reasons. Two decades ago, when ExchangeDefender was first and foremost meant to be a front line defense on the edge/perimeter before allowing traffic to get to the firewall, envelope from was what I went with.

What made sense two decades ago, which is centuries in IT terms, doesn’t make sense in 2018. Today ExchangeDefender is no longer primarily an edge security service, it is prime real estate in which end users and business employees spend a considerable amount of their time managing their mail, sending documents, sending encrypted attachments, assuring compliance, collaborating, and as such the design and the content needs to show something relevant to the user (not the IT administrator power user that is likely managing things through our powerful Domain Administrator section).

Oh, and by the way, it’s also going to show up like this in our updated SPAM Reports starting in October for our ExchangeDefender Pro subscribers:

P.S. Please tune into our new feature webinar on Wednesday, October 17th, 2018 at noon EST. Lot’s of new features are coming in ExchangeDefender as we transform the product to better serve the compliance and security needs of our clients. Register Now!

 

As you may have noticed from the huge banner in our support portal, our new Service Manager user interface is live! I just recorded a webinar that will walk you through all the “behind the scenes” stuff you should know about the new portal and I encourage you to watch, but I want to sum it up for you in case you don’t have the 20 minutes:

ExchangeDefender is rebranding into a secure communications platform: We are the application that our clients use to securely communicate with clients and vendors. With all the new regulatory requirements, daily hacking/exploit nightmare news stories, lack of trust in social media platforms and data being used for commercial/ad gain – businesses require and demand better than a “consumer” solution to a business problem.

In order for companies to become more efficient (and for our partners to make money in the cloud) we are embedding our support and services into the actual product: so when there is an issue, it’s already being handled. No more middlemen, no more escalations or different vendors fighting over who broke things: It’s our product, our network – we will do the work for you.

How that is accomplished is in the video below:

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Click here to download the video.

Click here to download the user manual.

We are very excited to announce the launch of the new XD Service Manager that will allow our partners and their clients a much friendlier way to manage their Exchange services. This is a complete rewrite of the code – frontend and backend – and we’ve taken all the feedback and made the beast much friendlier both for smaller accounts as well as for enterprise clients with tons of users to manage directly. The goal was to entirely remove the IT department and “the PowerShell guy” from the equation and put power user tools at your disposal to quickly and effectively make changes on the mass scale.

But first, the frontend – full rewrite – with new responsive UI and controls. Previous jQuery UI that has been hacked, tweaked and kicked along for years is being replaced by this UI that will work as well on the desktop as it does on any mobile device:

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Navigation is in line with typical modern design you’ve seen in many other web applications with ability to filter, scope, search and quickly apply changes to multiple accounts.

Actions are context-based, meaning you will not be refreshing the entire page in order to get search results or do quick changes on multiple accounts. We’ve fully extended the Exchange feature set in the new UI giving you the ability to centrally manage all aspects of your Exchange service without having to go back and forth between different screens or modules (so in that regard, it’s even easier to deal with than an Exchange management console)

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Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the new service is very end-user friendly. While 90% of the feature requests for the new service manager came from our power users that expressed a lot of frustration with the speed and accessibility of the portal, we needed to recognize the reality of who manages IT in 2018 – it’s no longer the IT guy or the IT department – users want to be able to take control of their public folders, distribution groups, forwarding, password resets and so on – so our design had to take that into account as well:

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As you can tell, the new Service Manager is far friendlier and uses the same wizard approach in the end-user mode that they are likely very familiar with. Because we’ve done very strict implementation on the backend (with all the regulations we are now responsible for), it’s virtually impossible for them to make a mistake. Unfortunately for some of our unskilled IT folks this means no more “Password1” or “NoSPAM” or “Princess1!” as a password going forward but everyone will be experiencing far fewer problems as a result of it.

Better reporting as well – you’ll be able to get the full overview of configuration, who uses what, where they are at and so on.

The new Service Manager goes into Beta next week (last week of March 2018) and will run in parallel with the existing Service Manager (on the same site as https://support.ownwebnow.com) as we get more feedback from our entire user base – so don’t worry about this springing up on you as a surprise. You will see the new link on the Dashboard and will have the ability to access the new infrastructure from there. Both will continue to work for at least a month.

This is also the new UI framework for Shockey Monkey: which we have been working on for a year now. The same infrastructure, MVC, UI and upgraded backend are going to be driving ExchangeDefender, SM, XD and all other services which means that you’ll very soon be managing everything from the same look and feel that will be extended to your site as well. What it ultimately means is that the new UI will follow your branding and your color schemes and no matter where in the ExchangeDefender universe your client ends up, they will be dealing directly with your brand.

And we’ll be there in a live chat to provide support and help them out with every service.

Thereby ultimately managing the entire communications, collaboration and business management platform end-to-end. Very exciting times ahead!

-Vlad

CEO, ExchangeDefender

Attachment download: New Service Manager Partner Guide (pdf).

We live in interesting times. With over 1.4 billion compromised accounts and users relying on the same password for every site, it’s nearly impossible to secure users that don’t want to set strong passwords. Nevertheless, that’s what you pay us for and we’re doing our best.

Until the new Service Manager is in and automatic service policies with full compliance are added in, we’ve been forced to institute lockouts on accounts that are being compromised or have suspicious activity. Unfortunately, when an attack on a mailbox is launched it doesn’t come from one IP address, it comes from hundreds, and blocking them is impossible.

But locking the account and making the client change the password to something that isn’t on the dark web.. that’s simpler. This is something that absolutely has to get done, if the account is used for spamming purposes it can blacklist that address, domain or worse.

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If your account gets locked out due to a security compromise, you can now unlock them and restore service automatically.

Just go to the Service Manager, find the user, reset the password and you should be all set.

P.S. In the event that you aren’t regularly changing your clients passwords, or you have ridiculously simple ones, we need to talk. Part of the issue is that your clients, regardless of size location or industry, are just SPAM zombies waiting to happen if you don’t set long and complex passwords that aren’t used anywhere else. If you don’t want to do that, we need to talk about two factor authentication. ExchangeDefender network has never been compromised – but individual accounts get popped all the time and it’s generally with a password that is well known and available in a simple Google search.

ExchangeDefender is excited to announce a redesigned Exchange Hosting Essentials service aimed at entry level market. By providing an affordable and hassle-free way to purchase, provision and budget Exchange services we are hoping to give our partners a better way to design solutions for small business email problems.

. . .

When we first introduced Exchange Essentials a few years ago, we created an offering with cost reduction in mind, by allowing the users to compromise on support, redundancy and features in order to get the product that fit their budget. What we found out with the product matrix is that interest is primarily polar – client either demands the lowest price or the highest set of features for the buck but nothing in between. In numerous discussions with our most successful partners we’ve come up with a better plan that more closely matches the way service providers offer Exchange services within their plans.

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This old matrix is now history.

We agreed with our partners that the model needs to be simpler – to budget, to position and to customize with clients specific needs in mind.

We’re starting off with the low entry level price of $3.99 per user, billable monthly with no contract, commitment, minimum or maximum and a powerful Exchange platform to run their business on. This gives our partners a competitive pricing point to offer an entry level service and keep them under their control, brand, management and centralized billing.

We’re making additional features simple and easy to add on as well. As each client has unique demands and requirements, we’ve made each functionality easy to add on as necessary giving them predictable costs that are easy to budget as the business grows and needs more sophisticated solutions. Don’t want to deal with SPAM or want to keep vulgar content out? That’s just $1. Business continuity in the event of an outage? Just another $1 more. Compliance Archiving? Encryption? As the business demands grow these additional features can be added and removed as necessary giving our partners unprecedented control.

NewExchangeEssentials. . .

Our agenda is simple: We want to deliver the most affordable, most flexible way to get businesses running on Exchange in the cloud. We have a lot of partners that are still managing their own on-premise Exchange deployments that will need massive upgrades with low ROI and we believe that many will take advantage of this affordable way to get into the cloud while maintaining the profit margin and client control. We believe that many of our partners serve small business clients on older infrastructure that may have hesitated pulling the trigger on the cloud migration because of upgrade requirements, long contracts and commitments.

With our announcement today, ExchangeDefender is making a tremendous offer – come to the cloud and we’ll pay for the first year. No minimums, contracts, commitments or prepayments. The faster you act, the more you’ll save.  

Get in touch with your account manager today and let’s come up with a plan to get your clients to the cloud you own.

 

Link: Webinar: New Exchange Essentials 2017

Come celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with our promotion going on, starting March 17th and ending April 17th. We are offering $3.00 off Full Hosted Exchange with an order of 5 mailboxes or more. Just use the code: XDLUCKY16 when ordering your mailboxes. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free emailing us at partners@exchangedefender.com or calling us at (877) 546-0316.

Platform Upgrade

If you follow our NOC you’ll notice that earlier this week we had a hardware upgrade to our Windows Web Hosting platform. Our team put in extra hours to minimize the amount of down time you and your clients would experience. The key components of the upgrade were RAM and CPU. This resulted in better performance for you and your clients.

Do I as the partner need to do anything?

There is absolutely nothing that you need to do on your end.  The upgrade took place on the server side and no changes need to be made on your end. It was a seamless transition and everything from data to host IP addresses remain the same. You and your clients can use the same great product as you always have.

Additional Perks

An additional perk is on the backend of things. The new hardware allows us to perform backups and recoveries more efficiently than what was previously available. This means less down time for you and your clients in the event of a disaster.

Moving Forward

The hardware upgrade was smooth transition. Over the past few days we have seen increased performance. In addition to performance enhancements we now have a more efficient way of backing up your data. As technology is always changing we look forward to making more improvements for you across all of our platforms!

Here at ExchangeDefender we have a wide range of products and service offerings. With close to seven years with ExchangeDefender, I’ve designed and written a majority of the software that is offered as a part of continuously growing platform. This includes several of our key systems such as: Encryption, Compliance Archive, Web Sharing, LocalCloud and even our service ordering & account provisioning! The only areas that I don’t touch directly are mobile applications, we have additional developers who designs and tackles any issues that may arise on our mobile platforms.

Throughout the course of the day I find myself working on various bugs and communicating with our team to ensure that bugs and new feature requests are considered and placed within our internal development pipeline. Recently I’ve been going through our old documentation and working on updating that with fresh information detailing step, by step how to use our products.

Keep in mind that it takes a while to develop and test fixes to assure they don’t introduce other problems. There are no quick fixes or features, everything we implement needs to work well across web, desktop and mobile devices and our support staff needs to be trained and alerted of these upcoming features.  So if you have a bug or feature request that is absolutely something that we must fix and/or implement, we would love to hear about it! However, due to my schedule and workload I’m typically a very hard person to reach. So first open a ticket in our portal, our highly trained technicians will review your ticket and possibly collect further information. After which, they will then escalate the ticket into a bug or feature request. Once in this section, it will be reviewed every Friday to see just how we can make our services even better!

Here at ExchangeDefender we want to help you fill your services portfolio with everything your client needs to operate their business successfully. We strive every day to be the absolute best for all of your service needs. So please (I cannot stress this enough) if you think we are falling short due to a software glitch or missing feature, let us know!

Hello partners, Vlad here, bringing you the latest news about the most anticipated launch we’ve had all year: Exchange Essentials. If you haven’t seen the webinar about the new service(s) please click here to watch it:

Exchange Essentials Relaunch

In short, we found that lots of people were using our Exchange Essentials to serve the segments of the market that we didn’t think would find Microsoft Exchange appealing. We were surprised both on the low end (for part time businesses, MSPs that were tired of supporting POP3/IMAP) and on the high end (bigger companies that wanted to save costs and didn’t need or want the full enterprise look and feel). So we decided to redo the product around our core strengths and help you put out a solution that made a lot more sense. With that, we feel like there are three core values that we bring above and beyond our competitors:

1. You will never go down. Exchange is Exchange, it will go down – when it does, you’ll still have Emergency and LiveArchive to send and receive mail.

2. You won’t have to compete with us. Service is only available through our partners, no direct sales.

3. You are getting the best regardless of how much you pay. There is no difference in terms of the infrastructure that is holding your data, you won’t be stuck on slow servers or old versions just because you didn’t pay for the top tier.

So we now have Exchange tiers that are priced below Microsoft and Google Apps and in our opinion offer a far better designed-for-business service. And we did not want to compromise on the solution – which complicates things a little with contracts, prepayments, commitments and different features coming at different price points. So I wanted to give you an idea of what will happen the next time you attempt to order Exchange Essentials from us.

I want to sign up my client for Exchange Essentials..

If you attempt to do so through the portal or over the phone, you will get a message that someone from our management needs to speak with you. I’m not going to sugar coat this: Reality is that we can only make money on these services if we all do our part. Consider the call as a part of presale consulting – we want to make sure you know exactly what the product differences are, how to market them, how to sell them, how to price and them and how to profit from it all.

How are we going to do that? Well, shortly after speaking with one of us you’ll get a welcome packet. Here is what’s in it:

Brandable Marketing Collateral – We’ve built client-facing marketing collateral that just needs your name and your logo (or change it up completely if you wish)

Pricing Guide – Detailed pricing, contracts, requirements and pricing breaks in an easy to understand guide.

ExchangeDefender Essentials Question Based Sales Guide – Sample questionnaire, question sequence and open ended questions that you can ask your prospects in order to determine the best solution for them.

Sample Proposal, Contract and Invoice – Proposal language, sample contracts and item descriptions for your invoice.

Web Site Collateral – Cut and paste info into your web site.

PowerPoint Presentation – Presentation covering Exchange services that can be delivered in under 3 minutes to a non-techie audience, just apply your company colors and logo.

Yes, that’s a lot of stuff but the more we can do to help you the less time you’ll have to spend trying to figure out how to describe this product on your web site or create from scratch.

It’s as simple as that. Exchange Essentials is already available for order in United States and Essentials service with mailbox servers in Australia and Europe will be available starting with June ‘14.

Let’s talk! If you aren’t profiting from the cloud you’re missing out.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender