Windows 8 Notables (For Email Providers)

I wanted to take a break from the usual, “hey guys if you don’t have mail flow, check your MX records and the mail logs and you’ll resolve the issue in 5 minutes.” And I’m sure you’re tired of reading it, so we’ll take this week off from that.

Yesterday the Windows Team blog posted the different Windows 8 Editions and their feature listings. Also, Looks Cloudy posted their spin. I decided to take a quick look at it and point out some interesting things for us in the email game. The first thing that jumps out at me is the use of ActiveSync built into their Mail “App”. The Windows Store caught my eye, but I’ll stay focused. So now there’ll be ActiveSync on desktops as well as mobile devices, this CAN be good if you’re into device policies.

The other quick item that jumped right out to me as we get a few folks that are a little more hands off with their MSP practice, is the native ISO/VHD mount. Mainly the ISO portion, we’ve gotten a handful well literally 2 guys in the last 5 years complain about or not understand how to use an ISO to install Outlook. Well looks like those 2 guys won’t have an axe to grind and their users will be the better off for it.

I’ll be interested to see how they upsell from the built in Mail and Calendar apps to Outlook in the smaller businesses.

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

IP Restrictions and You

Odds are the folks looking at this probably don’t do the bulk of the deployments for their companies. But in the odd chance that they are or have direct access to them, I’m going to touch on a very important aspect of ExchangeDefender deployment: IP restrictions. First we’ll start with a nice bright list of what the ranges are:

· 65.99.255.0/24

· 206.125.40.0/24

Now here’s why you need to first off add them for your client’s mail flow. Remember that in order for us to deliver mail on behalf of the original sender you have accept mail anonymously. This is very easy to do (it’s just the next tab on the receive connector GUI. The downside to allowing anonymous delivery WITHOUT the restrictions is that you’re one step away from being an “Open Relay”. If you’re an open relay, that will surely get your connection blacklisted on RBLs, it may get your access to our network revoked for a period of time based on the severity of the outbreak. So the cons of not setting these correctly are pretty huge:

· Interrupted/Inconsistent inbound mail flow

· Outbound mail flow restrictions

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

LOUIE DAG and Public Folder Upgrades

Over the weekend of March 30th-31st we will be performing upgrades to the LOUIE DAG (Mailboxes) and Public Folder databases. The changes that will begin during this maintenance cycle will improve the native automatic redundancy for LOUIE mailboxes and bring an overall greater experience for users. Due to the number of users and the size of data on LOUIE, the only way to complete the migration with the overall least amount of service interruption is to dismount the public folder database on Friday evening, and leaving it dismounted until Saturday afternoon.

Taking the public folder database offline will prevent ALL access to public folder data housed on LOUIEMBOX1, including mail enabled public folders between Friday evening until Saturday afternoon.

All public folders are replicated between multiple databases, however, unlike DAG protection, Public Folder databases work off a referral based system for locating copies and is highly unreliable for automated continuity.

Any users/partners who are concerned about the availability of their public folder data can open a support ticket and request that our team ensures their public folder data has an active, local replica.

We do not anticipate any interruption in the service of actual mail delivery or mailbox access on LOUIE.

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

Repeat Issues

I’d like to recommend that this blog should be a required read for your support staff as soon as possible and have them subscribe to this blog. I know generally the folks that have the time to read this blog are probably not the same folks that handle the support, my posts focus solely on making things easier for your staff. I’m going to broach the topic of mail flow questions again, because regardless of how much faster it would be if folks familiarize themselves with the troubleshooting process, we still get the same question from the same people. So here we go again, let’s get into a couple of repeat issues:

If a domain is not getting mail please follow this guide:

http://www.exchangedefender.com/blog/2011/12/where-is-my-mail-flow/

Another popular question that keeps coming up is regarding the XDSYNC password sync feature. Remember guys, the password syncs DOWN from the Cloud (ExchangeDefender) to the AD tree(s). If you make to the last sentence Hank does explain the flow.

http://www.exchangedefender.com/blog/2012/01/xdsync-v2a-technical-overview/

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

Rockerduck CAS Addition and Exchange 2010 SP2 RU1

This week I bring exciting news for users on ROCKERDUCK and to all of our Exchange 2010 clients.

Over the past week ROCKERDUCK has experienced a growth of 15% of our user base in a week. Fifteen percent may not seem like much, but roughly equates to about 230 new mailboxes in less than a week. Although ROCKERDUCK was designed and scaled to handle the number of mailboxes, we’ve noticed larger RPC response times for users. Upon investigation, it was determined that the slower response time was due to the increased processing load on the CAS servers for PST uploads and a larger amount of Mac Outlook users.

To resolve the issue, we’ve added an additional CAS server to ROCKERDUCK, RDCAS4. Currently RDCAS4 is undergoing a stress test to ensure it has been properly configured and can handle the load that it is expected to carry.

RDCAS4 is expected to be placed into production by 3/22/12.

Finally, we’ve approved the installation of Exchange 2010 SP2 RU1 across our Exchange 2010 USA clusters. Primarily, Exchange 2010 SP2 RU1 includes bug fixes for iOS users and reoccurring calendar events. We anticipate installation of Exchange 2010 SP2 RU1 in the following order:

3/26/12 Monday: LOUIE

3/27/12 Monday: ROCKERDUCK

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

SLA Impact March 28th–31st

During the last week of this quarter (March 28th-31st) we will be holding a company-wide training event across all departments. While we will continue to be available on the phone, web and support and while we will continue to meet the support requests within the SLA, the responses may not be immediate.

Over the years we have improved our service significantly to the point that your calls and support requests are answered instantly and this will not be the case while we conduct extremely important staff training for the new services that are coming from ExchangeDefender.

When the training sessions begin we will put up alerts in Shockey Monkey advising our availability and followup times.

Thank you for your patience!

-Vlad 

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

Hosted Exchange and Exchange Essentials 2010 by Domain

I just got great news from Hank (our VP of Development) and his guys. They have completed the Service Manager enhancement that will allow our partners and Shockey Monkey users’ clients to view Hosted Exchange/Exchange Essentials 2010 mailboxes by domain.

Doing our quarterly feedback outreach last quarter we found that this one of the big pain points in managing items on our infrastructure and we’ve been able to address it. I’ll take this opportunity to walk you through how to enable it for yourself (this is a per user setting, and the user must have “Client Admin” or higher permissions).

Once you have logged into our support portal or your Shockey Monkey portal click on “Options”.

Once on the “Options” page scroll all the way to the bottom and select “group accounts by domain”.

Now you are set to go back to the Service Manager and see your changes. You will be presented with a collapsed drop down that contains all of your domains hosted with us in our two Exchange environments. If you are missing a domain please submit a support request letting us know and we will get you squared away.

I hope you guys enjoy this change, as I know it was a fairly common request.

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

St. Patrick’s Day Promotion!

It’s sunshine and rainbows here at ExchangeDefender! So yes,  we are running another promotion for the St. Patrick’s holiday!!!

Check your mailbox for a special postcard about the promotion!

We really value our partners and want to give you ways to have a more profitable and successful partnership with ExchangeDefender.

The St. Patrick’s Day promotional offer is for our Offsite Backup solution.  Our offsite backup solution is offered in 10 GB increments.  The promotion is $1/GB and we are waiving the agent fee – that means NO agent fee for the rest of the year! This is a great promotion to take advantage of.  Our Offsite Backup solution comes with:

*Global Redundancy

*Continuous Data Protection

*Built-In Retention Policies

*Seeding & Bandwidth Throttling Options

*All-Inclusive Agents

*Reporting, Access, and Reliability

*And so much more!

The promotion will be running from March 17th through April 17th, and will only be valid on any new Offsite Backup accounts that are signed up during that promotional period.  Also, the assigned coupon code must be used at the time of ordering for the promotional pricing to be applied to your order.

For more information about ExchangeDefender’s Offsite Backup solution click here, http://exchangedefender.com/offsite_backups.php, also, for more information on this promotion click here, http://www.exchangedefender.com/promotions.php, or as always feel free to contact us with any questions that you may have!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com

Shockey Monkey Email Connector

Today I am going to cross over into the Shockey Monkey realm to clarify some things that we didn’t document in as much detail based on a few assumptions. And we all know what happens when you assume.

We assumed that nobody would point their MX record to ExchangeDefender without signing up for ExchangeDefender. And this is why I’m blogging about it on the XD space, because it ends up as a support issue within in ExchangeDefender.

I just signed up for Shockey Monkey in what order should I go about employing the email to ticket gateway?

First you need to sign up for ExchangeDefender for Service Providers (It’s Free!) and it will allow you to deploy ExchangeDefender for your portal’s desired email domain. Remember you must add your domain to ExchangeDefender for ExchangeDefender to process your email. The following guide walks you through the entire ordering process and deployment process. My personal piece of advice, don’t touch the Exchange portion until your domain has propagated through ExchangeDefender.

http://www.exchangedefender.com/ExchangeDefender_Deployment_Guide.php

So don’t make any DNS changes nor any Exchange side changes until the work in admin.exchangedefender.com is complete and has been propagated.

 

Can I test this before I make changes?

Absolutely, you can do manual SMTP tests for both by telneting on port 25. But here’s a full walk through:

http://www.exchangedefender.com/blog/2012/02/mail-flow-reloaded/

Once you have confirmed we are accepting mail on your behalf, then you can go back into the top link here and finish the DNS changes and Exchange side changes.

Finishing Touches

The smallest thus easiest thing to overlook is the vanity address forward. If you intend to use something that’s NOT yourportal@rafiki.shockeymonkey.com as your email to ticket address, then you must set up a forward on your exchange or pop server to forward from (as an example) example@superawesomemsp.com to yourportal@rafiki.shockeymonkey.com.

NOW, you’re all set.

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