Shockey Monkey RMM User Interface Contest!!

Shockey Monkey is looking to offer the BEST RMM User Interface and to do that we need your help!

We are now holding a contest to find the best, most user-friendly and appealing layout for the dashboard (for the IT department) and printed report (for the end user) for the Shockey Monkey RMM User Interface. Every submission is welcome! In order to enter, we would like you to create and design an interface that would show you what you need to know, what you need to present and demonstrate to your clients. We want to know the best way to design an RMM dashboard with the best strategy and best look and feel! We’re not looking for a Picasso appeal or the accuracy of a CAD design – just the general layout, presentation style and scale.

The overall goal of this contest is to figure out a way to present all of the information below, into something that the end user, business owner, decision maker, etc., can look at and understand the value you deliver and IT problems they face.

Hard drives

Patches applied

Operating System

Event Logs

Critical Issues

Availability

RAM

Optical Drives

Serial Number

# of Monitors

External Drives

Here are some of our current screenshots of the RMM:

This is the current Dashboard that shows uptime and downtime and recent event history:

This view currently shows the system information and a lit of installed applications:

This view currently shows all the event logs and details regarding each entry:

There are CASH (American Dollars) prizes with our contest! There will be four cash prizes given away: $1,000 to the winner of the contest, (2) $250 to the runner-ups, and $100 for the honorable mention.

Put your creativity cap on and help us make the Shockey Monkey RMM look awesome!

To submit your entry, simply send us an email at contest@shockeymonkey.com. Thank you and we look forward to seeing your ideas!

Not so legalease: By entering this contest you are granting Own Web Now Corp exclusive right to use, distribute and modify your design at will regardless of whether or not you win any of the 4 prizes. You agree not to send in any copyrighted works or works of other individuals or companies and we in turn agree not tell the copyright owner where you live in exchange for a candy bar.

Moving on up…

Today marks a very special day for the ExchangeDefender Hosted Exchange team: today we put our newest 2010 cluster for Hosted Exchange Essentials: DARKWING.

For many of our client who jumped on the offer of Hosted Exchange 2010 Essentials, the biggest selling feature was the price. Partners were able to finally compete head to head with BPOS / Office365 by using our Hosted Exchange Essentials.

Unfortunately, there was one drawback: All Essentials clients were placed into an already existing server infrastructure used by our full Hosted Exchange clients. At the time of release/announcement of essentials, the projected demand for the solution did not call for a dedicated infrastructure environment. Hosted Exchange Essentials has now grown to the point where we felt it would be best to separate the load of users of Essentials and Full Exchange between unique networks, but technically segregated.

After careful planning, we’ve designed a way to marginalize the impact of the migration to DARKWING for existing Hosted Exchange Essential mailbox. While we will offer the ability to stay on ROCKERDUCK (we certain conditions), we highly recommend Exchange 2010 Essentials users migrate to DARKWING as there are certain feature sets (Such as Address Book Policies), which are currently not available in our other networks currently. All new accounts for Essentials  are currently being provisioned DARKWING and all existing users will be automatically migrated. Prior to the start of any work the ExchangeDefender team will reach out to the partner who controls the account to coordinate changes.

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

Join Us for our Quarterly Meeting!

Trust us, you won’t want to miss this webinar!!!

With Q1 in the books we are ready to announce everything we have been working on to make your life easier and business more profitable. There will be several BIG announcements that will be made during the webinar so please attend live to ask questions. It will be recorded so you can watch it later at your convenience. To register simply click the link below:

Tuesday, April 24th, Noon EST

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/652380192

Topics that are going to be announced:

Announcing: Managed Messaging

Changes to ExchangeDefender Support

Shockey Monkey Web Site Extender

Shockey Monkey RMM Update

ExchangeDefender 2012 Roadmap

Shockey Monkey 2012 Roadmap

Sign up for the Webinar NOW!!!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com

Two Years Later…

This week marks the two year anniversary of LiveArchive being put into production for client consumption. Two years later and we’re now processing over 1.5 million messages a day and currently storing over 30TB of data (Only a year of data is retained in mailboxes). Along with the celebrating anniversary we’ve also added two new mailbox servers to the mix for an additional 14TB of data storage capabilities.

We also had issues where delivery delay notifications from LiveArchive Los Angeles EDGE node #4 were delivered to clients when mail was only being queued for a database that was offline for repair. We’d like to inform everyone that we’ve rewritten our Transport Agent and we not expect to another flood of notifications from LiveArchive to be delivered to clients.

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

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