November New Features Webinar Reminder + SM Update
We’re trying something new, because we’re launching a new product.
We’re enormously proud (and a bit nervous) to introduce our partners and clients to a brand new product category from ExchangeDefender: focused on business process management, optimization and accountability. We’ve learned a thing or two about information management and security by handling Microsoft Exchange for businesses for over two decades and the new product that we’re going to announce on Thursday will help complement it.
We would like to extend an invitation to our partners (*** This webinar is live, there will be no recording ***; style this prominently) to take a look at what we’ve built, what has managed our business for years, and to collect feedback and suggestions on what more we can to do help you count on our new product as a profitable way to help businesses gain some accountability.
The webinar itself will be more of a town hall meeting than our typical death by PowerPoint.
The primary goal is to explain what has been working for us and see what more we can do so it can work for you as well. We will be going over our roadmap, our implementation, our business model and where/how this new thing works. Aside from some cool swag and custom marketing collateral, you’ll also be the first one to get access to the beta version that you can use for free and see how it can manage your business and where you may have a sales opportunity.
(10/17) Webinar: ExchangeDefender launches New Features
A new webinar for October 17th at noon has been scheduled! We’ve been working around the clock to provide our partners, and their clients new features that make all of our work process easier, and more effective. Cool things that are happening as of today, October 1st :
Exchange 2016, Finally
The new exchange 2016 comes with a lot of new features. We’re particularly excited about the ability to create shared mailboxes, and manage password and lockout policies.
Corporate Encryption
You can now reset your recipients accounts (PIN+Password) in Corporate Encryption.
SPAM Reporting
New ExchangeDefender SPAM Email Reports are launching on October 1st 2018 and we’ve made several significant changes to the look and feel based on user feedback.
Friendly Names
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.
Watch ExchangeDefender’s CEO, Vlad Mazek discuss newsworthy topics to be discussed during the upcoming webinar on the 17th at noon. Stay tuned as we share key advancements of our products and within the company. Reserve for the webinar now!
ExchangeDefender’s Billing Compliance Enforcement Notice
Billing Compliance Enforcement
September marks another huge month in which we’re cleaning up some of our old “small business ways and means” and replacing them with industry standards, in every facet of our business. But before we get into that, as the changes are both service related and product related, we would again like to remind you to sign up for the big webinar we have on September 5th:
ExchangeDefender New Stuff Webinar
Wednesday, September 5th. Noon EST
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1810967512151336450
“I cannot urge you enough to attend the webinar and see the changes and improvements that are coming to our products and services. You truly need to understand the structure and the vision behind it because we’re doing the same thing we’ve always done: respond to client requests and how the marketplace dictates what people will pay for and how. So I urge you to please attend the webinar and hear directly from me what we’re up to and how you can run into fewer issues and make more money with us.”
-Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
Billing Policies
None of the following policies are new or designed to impact our clients in good standing.
Our billing policy has not changed in 20+ years, but we’ve never enforced it fully, and we believe it won’t be an issue for anyone. So for the record:
– We need a 30 day notice on any services you wish to remove from ExchangeDefender (and any of our products, sites and services). We tend to be fairly flexible with this and will continue to do so.
– Any services cancelled within the last 2-3 business days of the 1st of the month will be billed on the 1st and there will be no refunds. See the 30 day policy above.
– Service cancellations will be disabled within the last 12 hours of the month. Our staff will not be able to process them via phone/tickets, they will be locked out as well.
The reason we are suddenly enforcing this policy is because we’ve noticed a significant amount of fraud related to people gaming first/last of the month (where you cancel the service on the last of the month, skip the billing cycle that runs on the 1st, then setup the new service on the 1st and get a free month). If our enforcement of our billing policies seems unfair please keep in mind that we do give you free service from the moment you sign up for the service until the 1st of the month. The other reason is that we cannot process changes and update invoices within hours of the amounts being submitted to the credit card processor.
Late Fees
Late fees will also affect a small but persistent contingent of our client base that is trying to game and hide from what are fair business practices of paying the vendor. Because we’ve never charged late fees we have a few dozen clients that hide, provide fake credit card numbers or otherwise try to get as much free service as possible. Payment for all services is due on the 1st. If the invoice isn’t paid by the 5th (12:01 AM) invoice will automatically get a $39 late fee. If the invoice remains unpaid by the 15th (12:01 AM) the services will be suspended and subject to other legal remedies, along with an additional $69 re-connection fee.
These policies have not been enforced as a matter of personal courtesy we extended to our partners during the economic collapse of 2006-2009. Today, they require personal interaction and activity by a member of our staff, and every unpaid invoice and billing ticket about not cancelling the service in a timely manner is costing us (and our partners) which isn’t fair.
As mentioned above, these policies will not be an issue for anyone but a small handful that has been abusing the system. As a security company we are constantly being audited and leaving open invoices, not charging, late fees, policies that aren’t being enforced and so on are constantly flagged by our accounting, legal and even compliance auditors so we’re being forced to get a grip on everything. Thankfully, it won’t be much of an issue and we look forward to using freed up resources to deliver a better service to all of our clients.
September Webinar: New ExchangeDefender Projects
Development and service improvement around ExchangeDefender is really in a different gear now and we have a huge webinar to discuss all the new stuff that you will start seeing in September:
– New Shockey Monkey Service Manager UI (for private portals)
– Exchange 2016 rollout for SMB clients
– Upgrades to IoT for CAN-SPAM tracking/issues
– Allowing threaded conversations in Web File Sharing
– Allowing file exchange through Corporate Encryption
– ExchangeDefender Pro UI changes
– and much more.
It’s a LOT of stuff with HUGE improvements all around so if you work with us you’ll really want to attend:
ExchangeDefender New Stuff Webinar
Wednesday, September 5th. Noon EST
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1810967512151336450
Since February of 2017 we’ve been working on core infrastructure updates to address major weaknesses in the previous infrastructure model and have embraced rapid development, regulatory compliance requirements, different laws and regulations impacting our clients all over the world, and major needs our clients expressed that required development at a different scale. This again puts us (and you) ahead of the competition and we look forward to helping you gain more business.
Tune in!
We have something new to show you
It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a year since we launched our ExchangeDefender Migration Service. Thanks to many partners and clients who trusted us with their email we’ve been able to hear many compliments and even more suggestions about true problems employees face with email every day.
We’ve been in the lab for the past few months looking at how we can help and what we can do to eliminate those issues, improve productivity and create a more accountable email infrastructure that so much business gets done on. So we have something to show you and I hope you will join us for a webinar that covers it all:
Thu, Nov 6, 2014 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
Software
The biggest complaint we’ve received from end users is the overwhelming amount of non-human email that makes it’s way into the Inbox and at times simply overwhelms any actual communication that needs to be taking place. While there are third party solutions to address this trend they all retail for 5x more than even the reseller cost of ExchangeDefender! We’ve built it into ExchangeDefender Pro free of charge.
Needless to say, we look forward to showing you how it works and how much more your clients will love you for it!
Service
Migrations was just the tip of the iceberg of dealing with email problems. The part that can’t be seen – and often gets ignored as a consequence – is the mounting cost and issue of archiving, encrypting, protecting, securing and auditing all the data that lives in employees Inbox.
While we’ve been selling encryption and archiving products and services for years, we found that implementation was often incomplete and did not get the constant tweaking and adjustment it needs to meet the requirements of the organization in the first place. We’re stepping up both the education and the “Service & Audit” controls as a part of an effort to enhance the value of our security solutions.
In closing.. as email becomes more critical, more scrutinized by the employer and regulatory bodies alike, grows in size and in importance to daily business – the old way of set it and forget it implementations is being challenged. At ExchangeDefender we look forward to leading both in education and actual feet on the ground, helping you with as much or as little client interaction as you need. As we have proven with a year of migrations, we can help our partners grow and now we also look forward to helping you expand the consulting portfolio.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO
ExchangeDefender
P.S. Yes, the webinar will be recorded and available for download shortly after the event.
ExchangeDefender & Exchange 2013 Essentials Changes
ExchangeDefender Essentials and Exchange 2010 Essentials have been some of the most popular products in our portfolio for the past year or so. Originally designed as a compromise between “Enterprise” and “Essential”, the products were designed with IKEA principle in mind: “We started with the price… and built a product around it.”; Due to the products popularity and demand we have redesigned 2013 network from the ground up and would like to share the details of the changes that are coming up in April:
ExchangeDefender & Exchange 2013 Essentials
Wed, Mar 26, 2014 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/896377176
On the original 2007 network we ran pricing specials as we reached capacity on our large scale clusters where we could fit a few hundred mailboxes before building another mailbox cluster. With 2010 we had an Essentials system that was identical to our Business setup but without data center redundancy and business continuity – something many could easily live without until they had an issue or their needs grew. During this time we were presented with many usage scenarios in which Essentials simply made a lot of sense.
With 2013 we are expanding the Essentials portfolio to present both new solutions as well as new pricing points to give our partners working in home and micro-business settings a way to create a solution that fits these new concerns. While the focus is clearly on paying only for the essentials, the business model will allow the client to compromise only in the areas they desire to based on the environment they manage – we have made many of the product features optional, adjusted the SLA, adjusted support and business continuity offerings, and a lot more that will be discussed on March 26th.
Please take a moment to register for the webinar and we look forward to sharing the new product suite with you!
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
vlad@ExchangeDefender.com
ExchangeDefender 2014 Strategy Webinar
It’s important for our partners to understand what we are doing, how and why. We put more priority than most other companies mostly because we are small and the only way we succeed is if our partners do as well. With the MSP and IT marketplace wondering which vendors are going to make it through the year all you have to ask yourself is if you will – because if you do so will we. Everything we are doing at ExchangeDefender (and Shockey Monkey) is about helping our partners grow faster. To hear about it in detail please download the webinar we recorded yesterday:
ExchangeDefender 2014 Strategy Webinar
http://www.ExchangeDefender.com/media/XD2014Strategy.wmv
Growth
Every partner I talk to is focused on growing their revenues. Unfortunately growth, as predicted years ago, is coming at a more expensive rate than it did years ago. Not only is there a smaller pool of customers to pick from but the talent is scarce as well – so you will spend more on marketing and more on staffing.
By taking care of migrations, customer service, billing and even marketing assistance ExchangeDefender can help partners acquire more business and deliver more solutions faster. While that sounds like middle management lingo the truth is that you can grow faster if you can deliver more because you aren’t doing all the work yourself.
This is why we are doing what we are doing – our partners look to us to take care of the time consuming, schedule inconvenient, error prone and delicate parts of managing email and cloud solutions. They look to ExchangeDefender to create accounts, move email, configure Outlook clients – all simple and trivial activities that are remarkably time consuming and take lucrative projects into barely breakeven business. If ExchangeDefender can do it for you for free, why would you want to do it yourself?
Limited Time Opportunity
SBS is dead. Microsoft has priced out the rest of it’s solution stack way out of the typical IT budget of a small or medium sized business and when you layer on the cost of management and the cost of IT talent you see why the change is so significant. Even sophisticated IT providers are looking at the onsite infrastructure as a pain point because talent to manage those devices and servers is so expensive and so difficult to replace, combined with the incessant marketing for the cloud it is a losing proposition on multiple levels.
Don’t misunderstand what we are saying – the “move to the cloud” is not something that will go on for years. Last massively deployed SBS version launched in 2008 and those servers are well out of warranty by now. Over the next 2-3 years most of those customers will make it to the cloud and past that point the “move” will no longer have a significant amount of clients to make it worth while holding 6 figure Exchange and SharePoint specialists on staff.
This is why we are doing what we are doing – providing migration and support assistance to help you get your clients to the cloud is our embrace of the marketing and the pressing need in the marketplace. At the time that everyone is demanding it. If you aren’t talking to your clients about the cloud someone else is and the time to move them is now – but should you hire people just for a short term project to get this done? We feel like we can help there as well.
Success Beyond Traditional IT
I am always asked by partners and IT folks what I would do if I were in their shoes right now. What would I focus on?
I, Vlad Mazek, would focus on building up a larger revenue stream. The more money you have coming in and the more profitable you become the more bets you can make. I don’t sit in your shoes and I don’t know which specific terrific opportunities you may have in your local region – but I know that the only way you can take advantage of them is if you have the funds to market yourself and the time (read: employees) to convert the opportunity into cash.
This is why we are doing what we are doing – our smartest and biggest partners realize that the bottom of the traditional IT is going to fall out from the profitability chain and will no longer drive value. However, if you hold on to your clients and help them with the mobile, cloud, devices and so on there is a way to sustain margins and move on up.
Tune in, join up
Download the webinar and hear us out – it’s remarkably easy to get into the cloud with ExchangeDefender and so many people are already marketing the solution to your customers that the sales and value proposition is already clear to them: They just need to know how you’re going to help them do it.
We are at the greatest point of SMB IT – you’ve never been able to build a more sophisticated IT environment for less – and many small businesses are jumping on the opportunity. This is your chance to be a part of it without having to do a lot of work, without having to hire a ton of people, without having to work weekends and most importantly: Without having to lose your clients to a third party or pricing power.
We believe that the opportunity in SMB IT has never been bigger than it is now: It should be evident by the fact that we are providing these services without any additional costs. We are literally putting our money where our mouth is: We want to reward our partners for years of loyalty and give you an advantage in the marketplace. Eventually we will start charging for the migration services as bigger and bigger projects show up but right now you have nothing to lose and lots of new business to gain. Call us and let’s get this started.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
ExchangeDefender Q1 Meeting
ExchangeDefender is off to a fantastic start and we wanted you, our clients and partners, to benefit from the developments we have under way. We’re strongest and most profitable when we work together and the opportunities we are identifying now will not be open for a very long time so tune in and hear what we’re doing in 2014:
Thursday, January 23, 2014 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/164640976
ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey are taking on new challenges in 2014, the problems businesses face with cloud and mobile services are drastically different than they were in the traditional office client-server-LAN model. As a partner-only company we want you to be on the same page and understand how we can help you grow going forward.
Webinar will be recorded and available on Thursday in our recorded webinars section of the Social tab.
Brief Agenda
Our Q1 meeting will cover the business and technical developments on Q1 and Q2 agenda. Namely, we are doubling down on what works and cutting what doesn’t. Here is the webinar schedule:
Migration Sales Conversation – Role play of MSP and CIO conversation, how to effectively position the migration service in the language that a business owner can undertand. We’ll go over how to explain the process, describe the new service, inform them of the events that will take place during the process and how the problems will be addressed.
Shockey Monkey Update – Brief discussion on the Shockey Monkey strategy and implementation of new integrations with ExchangeDefender, iPhone, Android, internationalization (new languages), wider release of the Unicorn and direct partner model for Shockey Monkey sales to any small business that could use it.
ExchangeDefender Compliance Strategy – Update about the changes to ExchangeDefender Pro and our suite of compliance, failover, backup and file sharing/sync services. We will discuss the way ExchangeDefender creates a platform for secure and compliant communications.
This will be an event for both your techies and your business staff, the opportunity we have to help our partners to get into the cloud the right way and keep the clients protected and compliant with regulatory requirements is a lucrative one – and we are putting all our resources behind you.
See ya on the webinar!
-Vlad
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, ExchangeDefender
ExchangeDefender Q4 Call Summary
Last week we held our latest partner call for the year and announced a number of solutions that you have been asking for. We have two new products that our partners have been very successful with and we’re now opening them to our entire partner base. I encourage you to download and listen to the webinar because we go over quite a bit, as we will on the blog in the coming days:
ExchangeDefender Q4 Partner Briefing
http://www.ExchangeDefender.com/media/ExchangeDefenderQ4.wmv
11:13 Exchange Essentials 2013
16:54 Exchange for Business
24:52 Exchange Defender Android & iOS
30:10 2014 For Us
34:01 2014 For You: Threats
37:37 2014 For You: Opportunities
That said, here is a brief summary:
Exchange Essentials 2013 – We are launching an affordable Exchange 2013 offering to help you compete with inferior Exchange hosting solutions. There is no pretty way to put this – some people don’t think they need data center redundancy, full ExchangeDefender, SharePoint/Lync, compliance or business continuity. We have been offering Exchange 2010 Essentials for years and now we’re adding 2013 to that portfolio at $7.99/mbox: easy, redundant clustered infrastructure, ExchangeDefender Essentials and our 24/7 support.
Exchange for Business – The exact opposite of Exchange Essentials, this is the full suite with our best failover, business continuity, business tools like Compliance Archiving & Encryption. But there is more: this is a concierge deployed service – we will migrate your clients data and their configuration if you’d like but we’ll definitely take care of setting up all the services for you and confirm everything is setup as it should be. We find it that some of the larger accounts don’t quite cross their t’s and dot their i’s so we will make sure we have someone here to manage this rollout end to end and make sure it’s deployed right. Since it’s going to save us some support costs and time we’re knocking off $1/month off what it would cost you to put these products together separately. Keep in mind that competitive solutions for archiving start at $10 by themselves so charging less than $25-35/month for this $16.99 offering would be considered a pretty big Christmas present on your part.
ExchangeDefender Mobile for Android and iPhone – And now on to something free: ExchangeDefender is coming to mobile in a big way and our iPhone and Android apps will be on your devices in time for the holiday break (depending on the Apple store approval). We are bringing quarantine access, SPAM management and previews, LiveArchive and other stuff to the app to give your clients a better handle on email. We are looking for ideas and suggestions but we already have plans to integrate LocalCloud, Compliance Archiving search and more right in the app so all of your information is always at hand. There are no plans for Blackberry or Windows Phone versions at this time due to each platform making up less than 1% of our current mobile user base.
Brief note on availability: We will be open during the last week of the year but we will be working on a skeleton crew while everyone will be in training December 30th – January 3rd. During this time most of the sales staff will only be available for an hour or two on the phone and executives might only be available after hours. It is important for us to get 2014 started right so these days of training and planning will take precedence over regular operations.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, ExchangeDefender
vlad@ownwebnow.com
ExchangeDefender Q4 Partner Webinar
Thank you for your business and another fantastic year. We want to help you close out the quarter and 2013 strong – so we would like to invite you to a webinar that will cover a lot of ground in terms of development, service implementations, new service launch and some marketing information.
Thursday, December 5th Noon-1PM EST
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/922075737
We know things tend to slow down in December as folks close books, work from home, plan the new year and so on – so if you can’t make it, it will be available for download same day. If you can make it to the live webinar we have some surplus swag so come help us give away the last few tablets we have laying around.
On the side..
I had a chance to attend the ConnectWise conference earlier this month and talk to some of our larger partners that were surprised with everything that we do at ExchangeDefender and how much more business we can help drive through our solutions. These best practices, the experience from the field, the partner input and feedback is how we build this company and how we channel it to help our partners grow and win.
Thing is, very few partners actually leverage everything we put together and the long tail at ExchangeDefender is indeed very long. We do our best to blog, present webinars, attend conferences and produce content that is available all over the place. But in order for it to be effective in your organization there needs to be a level of discipline in reviewing and aligning these solutions with your business. We have the benefit of tons of partners that work with us and help us fine tune our products and features – and we spend a lot to make sure it gets to you.
Which brings me to my point – I know that time is scarce and that you can’t track all your vendors at once or go over quarters worth of information all the time. We have staff whose sole job is to create specialty presentations and webinars, meet with your technical and sales staff, help with custom solutions and presale consulting as well as with your end users. As your partner, not competitor, we are here to help you win, but if you’re interested you gotta let us know.
We’re doing all we can to reach you and I’d like to ask a favor: If we aren’t reaching you please let me know why. If we aren’t getting you the info you need through our blogs, newsletters, partner emails, custom webinars, web site, support portal, Facebook, Twitter, community events, seminars and so on I’d love to hear what else we could be doing.