OWN and Scorpion Software team up for an affordable password protection
Own Web Now Corp and Scorpion Software are teaming up on an exciting new service that helps your passwords more secure and less likely to be compromised, guessed or sniffed by hackers. Using token-based (keychain) one time passwords improves the security of the organization by allowing remote and mobile workers to provide one time passwords when they login remotely from a less secure location.
How does it work?
Logging into an organization requires a username and a password, but if you are using a shared connection, computer that may have keylogger installed, system compromised by spyware those credentials can be stolen. The token that you are issued as a part of our service has a password that changes every 60 seconds. When you attempt to login to your organization you will be asked for the password currently displayed on the device. Only the server and the token know the correct password at that time so even if your password should happen to be compromised and stolen hackers will not be able to use your password alone to gain access to your organization.
Offer Details
AuthAnvil tokens will be available with full service and support for $20 per user per month. There are no minimums, you can sign up a single user. Shipping is free as is the ongoing support, setup and service. We have worked very hard to deliver a solution that is the most flexible, affordable and meaningful for the SMB market and we look forward to offering you more ways to trust that your information stored in the cloud can only be accessed by you.
Announcing BlackBerry Support
Due to heavy demand by our ever increasing mobile customer base, Own Web Now proudly announces immediate availability of BlackBerry Enterprise Server. BlackBerry users can now use fully featured synchronization between their mobile BlackBerry devices and Own Web Now hosted Exchange 2007 services. BES service is available at a low monthly fee as an addon to our hosting services. BlackBerry is the #1 selling smartphone in North America and among the most demanded business communication devices by our customer base and we are glad to finally offer you this option.
In addition to BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Own Web Now fully supports Blackberry, Windows Mobile, iPhone 2.0 as well as every POP3/IMAP based device that can communicate with Exchange over SSL.
Support request response delays July 10-14
Over the past few days we have missed our SLA on a number of support requests in the support queue, order queue and maintenance queues. An upgrade to the support portal on July 10th included a new algorithm for privacy control and support request routing, meant to allow for different types of support requests to be entered into the system but not visible to the entire staff. Accounting would see accounting requests, Support would see support requests, Executives would see executive requests and so on. In process of enabling the SLA against the requests we improperly routed a number of requests to the executive queue which was not monitored from Friday until today. We have addressed and corrected the issue and are moving the tickets and responding to them as fast as possible.
If you experienced an issue that was reported through our support system and was not answered in a timely manner we apologize and promise to have all support requests addressed today. Thank you for your patience.
SBS Show is back in town..
SBS Show, famous online podcast originally recorded over the past two years by Vlad Mazek and Chris Rue is back. Joining Vlad as the cohost is Dave Sobel, of Evolve Technologies serving the greater Washington DC / Virginia metro area. Since 2005, SBS Show has built a large audience and many of the older recordings are still used as some of the best references on best practices and growing an SMB technology firm.
SBS Show has grown over the years to build a large audience and a partner-based social network, all designed to help partners discover solutions together and network for greater profit. Vlad and Dave will also be changing the format slightly to compensate for the change in the marketplace and interest among the audience – the show will have more business content and the technical discussions will be at a higher level discussing the more interesting parts of technology and its implementation.
Additionally, the SBS Show now comes with the new “extended cut” subscription with the longer discussion of the subject, available for those who are looking for more details and a more formal training discussion. Further details on this are available at the SBS Show’s new home: http://www.SMBBuddy.com
Take a listen to the show today, in SBS Show #26.5 Vlad and Dave talk about the recent events in the SMB technology field, changes needed to the business in the current economy, growth pains as well as expectations and mission at the Microsoft WPC.
You can listen to the latest new show #26.5 directly from our web site at http://www.ownwebnow.com
. . .
In addition to sponsoring the SMB Buddy we are also proudly announcing a podcast series covering the partner and solution space around Own Web Now services and people and technologies we work with every day. Join us this week to hear from our partners attending the Microsoft WPC 2008.
PHP upgraded to 5.1.6
We have completed the rollout of PHP 5.1.6 scripting language on our clustered web hosting platform. PHP 5.1.6 is our first upgrade from PHP 4.x and opens up a new world of possibilities for our partners and customers to utilize many open source and commercial web applications free of charge on top of their web hosting accounts.
Shockey Monkey 2 Beta Launched
Shockey Monkey 2.0 Beta (build 1.9.21) was upgraded on all portals last night and is fully supported by Own Web Now Corp as mentioned last week. We anticipate this beta interval to last roughly one month with most attention being paid to the sensible integration of all the Shockey Monkey features.
There are two threads activated specifically for build related bugfixes and feature requests. Simply login to https://support.ownwebnow.com and paste either shortcut to join the active development of the PSA system designed specifically for the needs of the small business specialists.
Roadmap: Once the beta is completed in late May, Shockey Monkey signup forms will be available on the homepage. In the meantime, Shockey Monkey is in a closed beta and only available to our valued partners that make it possible for us to build these solutions.
So join in on the fun and help us design something uniquely suited to your business. OWN is a dedicated partner company.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Shockey Monkey 2 Official Support
Starting May 1, 2008, Own Web Now Corp will officially support Shockey Monkey 2.0 beta and further releases over the phone during business hours and over the web 24/7/365 as with all our other products. The support will be free and unlimited, a PSA first, and will not require extended support contracts that are a norm for this type of an application. We are also offering a 24 hour SLA, meaning your case will be assigned, processed and worked on within 24 hours of opening the case.
Scope of Support
Technical support will be limited to the use of the product as documented, installation and configuration, third party software integration and basic configuration troubleshooting. Any bugs or feature requests are not covered under the scope of support as they require development, testing, analysis, documentation and deployment management and will be handled by teams other than support. Should you encounter a bug or can think of a great feature, click on the Development tab in our system and provide a bug or a feature. If you create a support request that is a bug or a feature request we will move the support request to the feature request or bug sections of our portal on your behalf.
For support, https://support.ownwebnow.com
Want to hear what we are up to?
Join Vlad Mazek, Own Web Now Corp CEO for a chat with Karl Palachuk of KP Enterprises at about noon today (Eastern -5:00 GMT) for a discussion about SMB technology and where OWN solutions fit in it as well as the road ahead:
Wednesday, March 26th
9:00 AM Pacific Time Zone, Noon EST
– Dial (319) 279-1000 (U.S. phone number)
– Your participant passcode is 1024518.
– This call is limited to the first 300 attendees.
ORDB no longer exists
Generally we reserve network events and alerts for our Network Operations site but the volume of support regarding this single issue has prompted us to post it here. I hope you are not offended by the technical information regarding a third party service that may not affect you.
In the old, dark ages of Internet when ExchangeDefender grew out of the primordial stew, people used connection-based filtering to blindly reject content using nothing but faith in the independent listing service. One of the popular realtime blacklists (RBL) was ORDB and it was a database of mail servers that were open relays. These servers could be used by anyone, without authentication of any sort, to send SPAM content all over the Internet.
In December of 2006, ORDB went offline.
On the morning of March 25, 2008 relays.ordb.org came back online, blacklisting everything. How, why, when and so on are not important, the only relevant task here is to stop using this RBL. If you receive the following context error, the remote server is still using ORDB to detect SPAM and it is dropping all your inbound mail:
The e-mail system was unable to deliver the message, but did not report a specific reason. Check the address and try again. If it still fails, contact your system administrator.
< outbound.exchangedefender.com #5.0.0 SMTP; 530 Recipient refused. Open relay found, refer to http://www.ordb.org/lookup/?host=65.99.192.91>”
If you use Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 you can quickly remove ORDB from your RBL query list by opening up Exchange System Manager, navigating to Global Settings, right clicking on Message Delivery and selecting properties. On the Connection Filtering tab you will find the RBLs you currently query. If you are protected by ExchangeDefender, this list should be blank. If you use a mail server other than Exchange consult your vendor.
I hope you have a wonderful day and thank you for letting us manage your SPAM so you don’t have to deal with the above every day 🙂 Thank you for your business.
Vlad Mazek
How do we decide what goes on the /noc page?
The other day someone asked how do we decide what goes on the Network Operations page, which is due for a big overhaul in the month of March based on everything we have learned so far. How do we figure out if something is important enough to put something there you ask? Very simple:
If an issue is affecting more than 10 customers, or more than one server, it gets posted.
If an issue is likely to affect more than 10 customers, or more than one server, it gets posted.
Simple enough. We are a partner company, we are an extension of their business that provides essential Internet services. As that extention, our duty is to communicate to our partners and our clients when things are different than usual. We have found that it is more effective in terms of providing timely support, that it is far easier for the clients to be aware of what may be going on so when they are asked for support they can be fully informed of any service issues.
The site has been very successful, it has contributed to a huge decrease in support requests and consequently savings for everyone involved because we are all that much more efficient. There has been only one negative comment so far, “I want all my information on one page, I don’t want to have to look at three pages to find all my Own Web Now information!” While we can understand the concern, this is a problem that technology has already fixed, people no longer surf the Internet. People subscribe to the data feeds that go on their desktop, portal, SharePoint, you name it. If you are actively seeking out information, instead of letting information come to you in the fastest and most efficient way possible, it’s time to learn about blog aggregators.