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.
Rolling back ExchangeDefender Spooling Interval
If your mail server ever goes down, ExchangeDefender automatically spools messages for it and delivers them when the server connection is restored. Because the delivery is staggered (we don’t fire a thousand connections to your server the moment it boots up) it can take over an hour to deliver spooled messages that have been stored due to an outage that lasted over an hour.
By default, we keep these messages for an interval of five (5) days, but since we are based in the southern United States and prone to hurricanes, flash floods, tornados and other inclement weather (one DC even got hit by a earthquake this year) we tend to extend the spooling period on ExchangeDefender from June through November of each year to 14 days. Last year, in light of many of our customers in the northwest suffering from ice/snow storms, we extended this period through January.
This is a notice that our mail spooling will revert back to 5 day interval on February 1st, 2008 and we will extend it back to 14 days starting June 1st, 2008. Email spooling is an automatic low-level process, that has since been supplemented by the free ExchangeDefender LiveArchive service. The two are meant to be used in conjunction to provide full business continuity and guard against less-than-reliable Internet connections.
As usual, thank you for your business.
Wishing you a happy and prosperous 2008
Dear Clients, Partners and Friends,
On behalf of the entire team at Own Web Now Corp, from 18 data centers around the globe, I wish you the happy and prosperous 2008. January is the month in which we announce our new products and services for the calendar year and this time we have a little surprise for you!
Thank you for your business and your continued support.
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp