Massive Network Infrastructure Updates
Over the course of the next few days Own Web Now Corp will be undergoing massive upgrades to our network infrastructure across our Dallas and Los Angeles data centers. We will take every precaution to limit service interruptions and while all maintenance will be performed well outside of business hours, many users will not even notice any issues as upgrades are being made to redundant systems.
Even with the best plans and best intentions, there can be brief service interruptions as we go along. We will continue to communicate with all of our clients and partners here: http://www.exchangedefender.com/noc
Thursday, September 15th, 2011
9 PM EST – ExchangeDefender in Los Angeles will be receiving new processing clusters for mail logs, inbound and outbound mail as well as LiveArchive.
Friday, September 16th, 2011
Noon – ExchangeDefender in Los Angeles will receive a new redundant LiveArchive network to improve geographic redundancy of our business continuity systems.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Midnight EST – Power maintenance. We will be upgrading our power feeds, PDUs and UPS infrastructure across ExchangeDefender, hosting and more. We anticipate the work to be completed by 9AM EST.
Saturday Noon EST – ExchangeDefender inbound network upgrade. We are adding 25% more capacity to compensate for the growth in subscriber base.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
3 AM – 8 AM EST – ExchangeDefender will introduce geographic redundancy to our encryption, web file sharing and inbound mail routing capabilities.
All of these enhancements have been on the drawing board for months but were obviously reprioritized after the outage our Exchange 2010 network experienced in August. We moved extremely aggressively to make sure we provide a full geographically redundant network. Yes, experiencing one outage in 10 years related to power is not bad but we expect 100% uptime and this upgrade will help assure it.
To reiterate: We expect to minimize any issues and all maintenance will be done well outside of business hours. To stay informed stay tuned to http://www.exchangedefender.com/noc or @xdnoc
ExchangeDefender USA cloud outage incident report
Dear Own Web Now Partners & Clients,
At approximately noon yesterday the data center hosting the hub of our US operations suffered a major power failure that momentarily interrupted all network services. More redundant services resumed operations immediately (ExchangeDefender) while others started recovering through emergency systems around 5 PM EST. We are incredibly sorry for the impact this has made on your operations and promise not just to compensate you through service credits but also enhance service redundancy so that this never happens again.
On behalf of the whole ExchangeDefender team, I am sorry we put you into this situation. Much like you we’ve spent a part of yesterday in the dark with no clear ETA on when the services would be restored or how this failure could have happened in the first place.
The facility that our main US operations are in boasts N+2 redundancy, over 30 days of generator fuel and is one of the largest and most reliable in the world. As a matter of fact, we consolidated our central operations here due to the issues we had in California and Florida. The facility has had an incredible service record and has allowed us to provide the same level of service to you. Yesterday the facility experienced a failure in Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) equipment designed to switch the power feed from live utility power to the power generators in the event of power loss. This was the piece of equipment that was designed to keep power available and while it is also redundant with A/B feeds, the data center distribution routers were not connected to both power banks. While our equipment remained powered on, the network connectivity remained down. This was the technical root of the issue.
Thankfully spare ATS was available and the utility, data center and supporting vendors were all available on site within the hour and completed the replacement within 5 hours of the service interruption. We did our best to keep everyone informed of everything we knew every step of the way through our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/ExchangeDefender) and our Twitter @xdnoc and @ExchangDefender.
Our operating procedures also call for use of emergency failover systems should the primary systems be down for more than 4 hours. At roughly 3:30 we began restoring services to our web sites, redundant Exchange clusters and continued restoring services well into the night as the data center facility restored full operations.
ExchangeDefender inbound service was not affected by this incident as it’s massively redundant through multiple data centers. However, a disruption to the major central control in Dallas effectively flooded the failover sites and some of our partners reported email delays from minutes to even two hours. Worse, our Exchange hosting clients were impacted for 4-6 hours and with the lack of ExchangeDefender LiveArchive to back them up, it completely failed them. Again, we are sorry for this issue and will address it immediately.
At approximately 10PM EST I held a webinar for all our partners to explain in detail what happened, how we responded, what we learned and what we intend to do to fix it going forward. You can watch the webinar here (requires GoToMeeting codec)
Going Forward
First of all, we will be providing service credits to everyone that was affected which includes our entire USA client base.
Second, we will begin deployment of redundant control systems for ExchangeDefender: placing additional admin servers across our failover sites, adding more capacity to the existing ones and most importantly providing geographic redundancy to ExchangeDefender LiveArchive.
Finally, we will be adding redundancy to our Exchange 2010 networks in USA.
Expect to see major changes this quarter. While this issue never occurred before and we don’t expect it to occur again, we have learned the hard way that we need to greatly improve certain areas of the product in particular LiveArchive.
Personally, I put my name and reputation on the product and on the service we deliver. I believe we are the best and the solutions that we offer in LiveArchive and ExchangeDefender feature-wise are without comparison. We will make sure that all of the features, not just the inbound mail processing, live up to the 100% uptime expectation you should have and we have maintained on our inbound service for the past decade.
My staff has worked tirelessly throughout the day and night to keep you informed and restore service as fast as possible. I want to personally thank you for your professionalism and the way you treated us during this difficult time. While it’s easy to lose composure and patience when services are down and there is limited visibility/ETA on resolution, almost universally the comments included “Well that sucks but I’m glad it’s you dealing with this and not me.” While I appreciate it, I do feel we failed you.
Our operations will remain in Dallas at the existing data center facility because simply put – they are the best. Even with the power incident which was the first one that we’ve experienced in nearly a decade of working with them, this is the kind of an issue Microsoft, Google and Amazon experience on a weekly basis. Cloud services are about providing an affordable IT solution through massively scalable equipment which is incredibly complex – it is not foolproof nor easy to fix when it goes down but the benefits are that you and your clients are not on the hook for a repair bill, equipment or the amount of manpower required to manage it all. Best of all, problems such as those experienced yesterday can be minimized and we will begin to work on that today.
Again, I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you and your clients. I know we are fortunate to earn your business and the trust you put in us and our features that are designed to keep you up and running when your systems are affected. I’m attaching some resources that you can pass on to your staff or your clients as you see fit. I look forward to talking to everyone that was affected by this and while I work my way through the messages, emails and callback requests I hope the videos and resources we provided so far offer some clarity as to what happened and what we intend to do next.
Thank you for your business.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO Own Web Now Corp
Resources:
ExchangeDefender NOC: http://www.ownwebnow.com/noc
XD Twitter Feed: http://www.twitter.com/xdnoc
ExchangeDefender Twitter Feed: http://www.twitter.com/exchangdefender
Partner Webinar about the incident: http://www.ownwebnow.com/media/Cloudpocalypse.wmv
July Update
We have so much new stuff ready to go this month that I just couldn’t wait for the newsletter to be published. I’m taking a moment away from all the craziness to update you on what we’ve been up to this month. For full details you will have to look at the newsletter and join us for the webcast:
New ExchangeDefender
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/275688153
August 4th, 2010 at noon EST
You really want to clear your schedule and attend this webcast, some of the stuff discussed during the show will not be in the recorded webinar, nor will be the offers that we’ll extend to our partners that are on top of it all. Plus you’ll get exclusive peak of all the new stuff joining the Shockey Monkey family!
New Office
Last weekend we moved into a beautiful new office on the 12th story of The Plaza in the heart of Downtown Orlando. We’ll soon have live webinars, webcams and other stuff to let you interact with the staff and keep an eye on us. If you’re ever in Orlando we’d love to have you stop by at 121 S Orange Ave.
New ComplianceArchive
We’ve spent a lot of time working on the new ComplianceArchive product. This effort was far too big to bundle in with the ExchangeDefender 7 launch and we’ve learned a lot about how different parts of our client base rely on archiving. On the high end, we have financial and regulated industries that need high end compliance for legal reasons. In SMB though, we have the packrat mentality, and archiving is done more for locating items quickly. Obviously there is a price difference between different solutions as they are built to a different spec for a different purpose.
New International Numbers
ExchangeDefender 7 launch caught us by surprise – huge surprise. We haven’t been this busy in years and we’ve never seen a faster adoption of our product than in the past few months. As a result we have had to shuffle personnel around for training purposes and addressing the peak hours. Temporarily, we’ve been forced to reduce our phone support hours for Tier 2 from 24/7 to 4AM – 8PM EST and our support portal hours from 24/7 to 4AM – 1AM.
We have also had to evaluate a lot of negative feedback we’ve received about our phones. This was addressed in the move and I hope many of you can appreciate the difficulty in establishing a VoIP presence in multiple countries. So here are the new numbers we are currently testing:
Australia: 02 9037-4202
UK: 08435570373
New Hosted Exchange Pricing
The launch of Microsoft’s new Office 365 has caught many of our partners by surprise. Not to worry, we have a very competitive new pricing scheme that will be announced during the webinar. Keep in mind that we do not encourage pricing competition but you need to make alternatives – so consider www.CloudBlock.com as one.
Oh, the new Compliance Archiving…
We’ve pretty much rewritten everything.
· Written on top of .NET 4.0 Framework
· Supports Exchange 2007 SP1 & Exchange 2010
· Can be installed on any windows machine (XP, Windows 7, SBS, etc). (Does not have to be installed on the exchange server)
· Extreme validation and real time response validation.
· Service does NOT REQUIRE administrative login credentials, runs as local system.
· Allows management of an unlimited number of Hosted Exchange Servers for Compliance.
· Multithreaded service model, supports up to 10 running threads at one time.
· Start/Stop Service is handled gracefully to allow any pending threads to complete the step they are on then terminate.
· Archived mail is check for integrity, if an insert fails due to (bad connection, error in record, etc).. it will roll back any previous actions for that message.
· Attachments are now stored as individual records, this will allow attachment searching and direct download of attachments.
· Removed the DISK IO dependency from the program, messages are no longer written to disk. Everything is done in memory.
Looking forward to seeing you all in August and on behalf of the entire ExchangeDefender team, wishing you continued prosperity, our partners grew 21% in Q2!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender 7 Followup
As we mentioned previously in the ExchangeDefender 7 Bugfix update, the move to ExchangeDefender 7 has gone remarkably well. This is in no small part a tribute to our partners who have helped us beta test the solution. So thank you for making ExchangeDefender 7 a success for everyone.
Over the next two months we will be holding series of webinars to cover the new solutions that are part of ExchangeDefender 7. Past year has seen ExchangeDefender grow in both features as well as pricing points so we want to help explain how ExchangeDefender can help boost profits when it’s positioned, sold and implemented the right way.
This is where you can help us out. Email webinar@ownwebnow.com with questions or suggestions for content that would help you and your staff get more out of ExchangeDefender. We are currently planning webinars covering all aspects of the product sales, positioning, marketing and ongoing support. This is your opportunity to have us design educational material around the topics you have problems with.
July
ExchangeDefender will be at the Microsoft WPC 2011 in Los Angeles and CompTIA Breakaway in Washington DC. We look forward to meeting you in person.
Our new site, projecting the ExchangeDefender brand, will be launching later this month.
We are moving our headquarters to a brand new space in a beautiful building in Downtown Orlando.
The redesigned archiving product will be made available this month as well, we look forward to sharing it with you.
All in all, our July will be insane!
Documentation, Webinars & More
We’ve received a few inquiries about the ExchangeDefender guides for ExchangeDefender 7. Here they are. You can download the PDF and forward it along but if you wish to customize it and use your own logo, download the PPT.
ExchangeDefender Domain Admin Guide (pdf)
ExchangeDefender Domain Admin Guide (ppt – brandable)
ExchangeDefender Service Provider Guide (pdf)
Note: You probably do not want to distribute the Service Provider Guide but we’ve made it available just in case.
Training videos will be available today as well at www.exchangedefender.com
ExchangeDefender 7 Bugfix Update
It’s been nearly four days since the launch of ExchangeDefender 7 and we wanted to offer you an update on how things were going. In a word: astonishing! This is the best launch we’ve ever had by a country mile and for the first time ever we’re not receiving complaints about the UI, mostly thanks to the marketing and client facing documentation being delivered well in advance. We’ve been receiving glowing compliments on the new UI and we’ve worked extremely hard on the QA process.
Gabriel Gonzales has been in charge of the QA followup process for ExchangeDefender so if you’ve found an issue with it, you’ve spoken to Gabriel or Frankie. We wanted to make sure that all management levels were available to you with a clear development schedule so we can fix problems right away. The average turnaround time on bugs to fixes has been under an hour.
Good news: Great feedback, lots of excitement about the new product and happy clients.
Bad news: It’s not perfect. Lot’s of performance enhancements in the works, new marketing in the plans and the ExchangeDefender Gold program coming soon.. but in the meantime, here is the list of fixed bugs just in case you’re asked about them by your clients – the bugs have been fixed.
Encrypted Email New Account Enrollment Not Working
After properly inputting all the required information into the New Account Enrollment form the end user would click on the “Enroll” button but it would not create the account or move on to the next screen. Status: Fixed
ED7 Branding locked up
When trying to set up the Branding for the through the ED7 configuration portal the “Default Footer” text box is greyed out and does not allow any changes. Status: Fixed
ED7 Cannot delete Domain account through SP portal
When trying to delete a domain account through the SP level ED admin portal client receives the following error:
“ Account Not Deleted
Could not delete [domain] because it does not belong to you.” Status: Fixed
ED7 Change Configuration drop down at the SP level coming up blank
After selecting the change configuration from the drop down menu next to a domain at the SP level the resulting page comes up blank and any changes cannot be submitted unless everything is filled in. Status: Fixed
Encrypted Email attachments not opening
End user cannot open an attachment from an encrypted email that has spaces or any special characters in them.
For example: P60 Year End Certificate.pdf Status: Fixed
ED7 Compliance Archive
When the end user tries to click on a message stored in the ComplianceArchive they are unable to view the message. Status: Fixed
ED7 WebShare e-mail link Not Working
Recipients receive an “Error – Page Not Found” when clicking the link in the email from Web Share. Status: Fixed
ED7 WebShare unable to Upload and Download documents
End User receives a “File cannot be Downloaded” error from the WebShare portal. Status: Fixed
ED7 Mail Logs not Displaying correctly
Trying to search the mail logs for an Outbound message and instead of displaying the result as “from” their client “to” the outside recipients the “Search Result” comes back as if it was an Inbound message. Status: Fixed
ED7 Empty Blacklist After Migrating from ED5
During the transition from ED5 to ED7 the contents of the blacklist from ED5 do not show up on ED7. Status: Fixed
On behalf of my entire team, thank you! Thank you so much for working with us and being amazing partners in development and launch of our flagship product. We couldn’t ask for more. Thank you!
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender 7 Upgrade
In a few moments we will begin the upgrade of our network to ExchangeDefender 7. The process will be seamless to our users and we don’t expect any issues. We are prepared for the unexpected issues and here are some suggestions:
1. Sign up for the Network Operations Blog updates (http://www.ownwebnow.com/noc)
2. If you don’t like web / RSS feeds, check out our Twitter feed (http://www.twitter.com/XDNOC)
3. Make sure you have distributed the User Guides to your end users so they can navigate the new User Interface. Link to end user collateral is here.
During The Upgrade
Check the NOC first (web / @xdnoc). We will be posting updates there and to the Twitter feed as soon as we identify and document a bug.
If you see an issue that has not been addressed, open a support request at https://support.ownwebnow.com
Call us at +1 (407) 209-3276 if the issue is urgent. Note: This number will be discontinued after the launch on June 1, 2011.
ExchangeDefender 7 User Collateral
ExchangeDefender 7 is officially less than two weeks from going live and you need to prepare your clients for it. While the new user interface is more intuitive than ever before, faster and simpler, people hate and resist change. Take a moment to download the user guides and send them along to your clients. We have ExchangeDefender branded PDFs that are ready to go:
Download ExchangeDefender Branded PDF Guides:
ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007/2010 Agent Guide
ExchangeDefender Email Reports
ExchangeDefender Web File Sharing Guide
If you have some time we recommend that you customize these guides for your client base. Below are PowerPoint 2007/2010 versions of the documents listed above. Make sure you replace “ExchangeDefender” with your product name and “your IT Solution Provider” with your company name.
Download Brandable PowerPoint Guides:
ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007/2010 Agent Guide
ExchangeDefender Email Reports
ExchangeDefender Web File Sharing Guide
Please make sure your clients are aware of the changes and familiarize them with the new look and feel of the site. This is the largest UI change we’ve had in the past 8 years and from prior experience, giving your users a heads up will make all the difference in the world when it comes to product and service satisfaction.
Thank you for all your support and your business, we’re counting down the days till May 30/31 when the new product officially goes live!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender 7, Kaseya & Shockey Monkey, Looks Cloudy
Earlier today we sent a newsletter announcing the launch of ExchangeDefender 7, the integration between Shockey Monkey and Kaseya as well as the educational content that we’re creating for everyone looking to get to the cloud.
Unfortunately, one line caught the eye of many of you:
“Over the past month and a half we have been working with so many of our partners on ExchangeDefender 7 that I’m really sad this will be the final newsletter as Own Web Now Corp.”
Apparently, some of you stopped reading at that point 
Allow me to explain: Over the past 2 years we spent significant resources into promoting and marketing ExchangeDefender. It is the backbone of our communications infrastructure, business continuity as well as our biggest and most popular product. Everyone we talk to knows about ExchangeDefender, nobody knows about Own Web Now Corp.
So we’re rebranding and retiring Own Web Now Corp and going forward will consolidate our brands and sites under ExchangeDefender. This has been announced at a number of blog posts and previous newsletters so I feel silly having to state it here again but for the record, we’re not going out of business.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender 7 Beta Launch
On Wednesday we held our largest webcast ever and the amount of praise we have gotten from you is astonishing – not surprising though, considering that all but 3 features you requested made it into the product. We want to make sure we meet the expectations and make the product as perfect as possible – so we’d like to invite you to test drive it and tell us what needs to be fixed.
We are less than a month away from the launch of ExchangeDefender 7, the largest product and the largest upgrade in the company history. With ExchangeDefender 5 we changed the way you think about communications security and we made it affordable for everyone. With ExchangeDefender 6 we upgraded the entire backend of the network to sustain your growth and the emerging threats and market demands. With ExchangeDefender 7 we are introducing a brand new, unified, user experience.
So, are you ready? Here you go, URLs and instructions are in the document:
http://www.ownwebnow.com/blog/media/ExchangeDefender7Beta.pdf
Sincerely,
Vladimir Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender Chief Software Architect
ExchangeDefender 7 Beta Launch Webinar
This Wednesday we will be holding a webinar to introduce you to the ExchangeDefender 7 beta launch. The one hour show will be recorded but you really should attend the live event as we’ll be answering questions after the show:
Please click below to register:
Wednesday, April 6th, 1PM – 2PM EST
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/120736520
The first part of the event should be attended by the business decision makers, sales and marketing personnel. We will be discussing the new business model behind ExchangeDefender 7 and the key changes that will make the new product a lot more profitable for your existing sales. We are making a lot of changes based on feedback and market demands.
The second part of the event should be attended by the technical employees that will be a part of the product deployment.
Important: The only way to gain access to the beta sites is to attend the live webinar or watch the recording. Future sales of ExchangeDefender will only be supported through companies that go through the free product training and going through the beta process will allow you to skip some of the required training.