How to position and sell Exchange messaging
Have you considered adding hosted Exchange or other cloud messaging solutions to your portfolio? If not, you’re already behind Microsoft, Google, IBM and many others. Even if you have considered it, the marketplace is getting flooded with cloud marketing and you need to be savvy to get your solution front and center and not get displaced by he competition. Here is how!
Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 Essentials: while they’re only two simple, reliable solutions, they pack a powerful punch that solves a wide variety of small business messaging and collaboration challenges. When we surveyed our partners, 90% of them told us that Hosted Exchange is their single best “foot in the door” or relationship builder product. This is because small businesses are becoming more and more dependent on their messaging technology, while the cost of deploying and managing it continues to skyrocket. They need affordable, reliable messaging technology to support their unique businesses – and Hosted Exchange + SharePoint and Exchange 2010 Essentials from ExchangeDefender offers small businesses of all kinds an attractive combination of rich features, affordability, security and flexibility.
Differentiation
Our small business clients certainly have options when it comes to cloud-based messaging solutions – Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps for Business are two major alternatives with which many small business clients may be familiar. Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 Essentials from ExchangeDefender are fundamentally different, offering users the familiar Microsoft Outlook user experience at an unbeatable value with the flexibility to deploy just the right tools that the business needs.
Some SMB clients don’t want or need a full-featured messaging and collaboration solution and want to minimize their costs of maintaining basic functionality. While Google Apps for Business offers an attractive price point with “pared down” messaging features, its unfamiliar interface may turn off folks who are comfortable with the Microsoft user experience. Exchange 2010 Essentials delivers the best of both worlds – minimal complexity using Outlook Web Access protected by ExchangeDefender Essentials along with the ever-popular Public Folders and Distribution Groups at a competitive price point, just $6 per month per mailbox. Clients can even integrate with their existing copies of Outlook to get that fat client experience they know and love.
Feature/Benefit Discussion
Some SMB clients will require more advanced features like message encryption or archiving for regulatory compliance, and may find the messaging features included in Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps for Business lacking – security, encryption, and archiving aren’t included in Google Apps for Business, and while Microsoft Forefront protects Office 365 email users, archiving, encryption, and e-discovery aren’t included. Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 delivers the full Microsoft Outlook experience with SharePoint’s powerful online portal and groupware functionality, including ExchangeDefender protection and our Live Archive service. Integrate with Blackberry Enterprise Server, split domains, brand the portal experience and leverage the “tried and true” Public Folders feature if desired, as well, all for only $10 per month per mailbox.
Whatever your clients’ needs are, you can get your foot in the door and start building a strong relationship (or deepen an existing one) with the powerful combination of Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 Essentials from ExchangeDefender. Now you can offer your clients an attractive combination of rich features, affordability, security and flexibility on our globally-redundant infrastructure that even most large enterprises cannot build in-house.
Do you find this information useful?
If you’d like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it impacts your clients join at Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB along with numerous webcasts, podcast with industry leaders and more.
Sincerely,
Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777
Shockey Monkey & Keeping It Clean
You’ve asked for it – and it’s my pleasure to say that we’ve delivered. Shockey Monkey now chats, has a desktop client, mobile HTML5 app for your iPhone and Android and plays nicely with Quotewerks, Kaseya, LPI, nAble, GFI Max, Quickbooks and more.
Over the past few months we’ve been focusing on integration between our partners and even improving the network communication in our own software. One of the biggest challenges in the software industry is foresight and being able to determine what comes next. If you have ever written a piece of software and then had to make a change to that software (even something small), maybe 1, 3, 6, 12 months later. You can probably understand how important it is to think ahead. Sure, you can rush software and have to rewrite the same code everyday several times. If you’re like me and don’t like to create (unnecessary) extra work, you can think about what functions & methods you may need for future revisions and implement at least a template that is extensible.
Truly Open API and Fat Client API Demo
That’s the approach we’ve been taking for that last year and it’s really starting to show now. We are able to (design, code & implement and actually sleep) software changes & additions a lot quicker and a lot cleaner. One of the ways we achieved this was to take all of the code that we use all over the place and centralize it into a single location. This is how we got our first API version and we started to build on top of that structure. Since we designed the API, one of our biggest concerns was SECURITY SECURITY SECURITY. We thought: You know what, one day our clients/partners will want to use this API. So when that time came and we were ready to allow the API to become public, we literally flipped one switch and it was all lights go!
A lot of people want access to an API and access to it is usually the first request. However, not a lot of clients/partners will utilize that API, until you show them what’s possible! That’s when it starts to get fun interesting! So, we released the Shockey Monkey Fat Client BETA! It takes advantage of our API and demonstrates the possibilities. Yes, it really is possible to create something useful from these publicly available resources. It’s the first release, so right now we kept it simple. It will allow you to view/update (tickets, contacts & companies). It even comes with a ticket dashboard, which shows you the status and urgency of all your open tickets.
Integrations
On the other side of the office our Shockey Monkey team has been working on integrations with other Software vendors and helping to bridge that gap in resources. They’ve just finished integrations with (Level Platforms, N-able, GFI MAX). There are still a few others they are trying to complete very soon.
We literally completed these integrations within a week of actively working on them. What made it so simple was the initial template design we created when we made our first Integration point with Kaseya. It allowed all additional Integrations to be designed in a module structure allowing for easy design and implementation. We’ve moved away from the model of “Let’s just get it to work”, we created a few integrations like that in the past. They work great… until the method, you used to obtained information, has now been changed and no longer works.
Our current integration portfolio:
1. Email Gateway – Any device or service that can generate an email can automatically create a ticket in our system. Remember that this is free to you with ExchangeDefender so use it!
2. RMM – Kaseya, LPI, nAble, GFI Max (Labtech in development). We’re currently working with a number of companies that are interested as well as Shockey Monkey’s own built-in lightweight WMI/VNC tool.
3. Accounting – Quickbooks. Exports to xls, csv and data feeds for other ERP. We’re exploring adding more integrations here as requested but we’re spending even more effort into bringing the transaction processing and reporting capabilities into Shockey Monkey. We find that most partners don’t have a very formal accounting backend, especially for tracking cloud subscriptions, and ShockeyMonkey already supports Authorize.net as a payment gateway so look for a development there.
4. Business – Quotewerks. This is currently one of the best integrations out there because it was developed by Quotewrks and is tightly integrated in their software.
We’ve learned a lot from all of these integrations and have amazing ideas for future releases. One of the first things we want to implement is a SOAP version of our API. Currently, they are all written in XML/RPC and that has served us rather well. However, in the future we are envisioning an even more rapid development environment for Shockey Monkey. It’s always nice when most of the data translation is done for you. So we are thinking that SOAP and Shockey Monkey are going to get to know each other very well over the next few months!
Finally, I manage all the development projects and products at ExchangeDefender, including all our integrations, PSA/RMM and our automation infrastructure. I work with many partners but at the end of the day I’m just one guy. So here is how to plug in with the whole team and make sure your requests are being taken care of:
1. Use the portal bug/feature tracking. Located at https://support.ownwebnow.com under the Development tab there are Features and Bugs. We use this as the central storage for all our features and requests. You can see public stuff that was reported by our clients and even some stuff that our internal teams are tracking.
2. Get in touch with someone. Our support team is fantastic and they often bring the issues you are facing to me directly. Sometimes in the office but mostly at meetings and our weekly staff bar crawl where we do our best to complain about everything that isn’t perfect. If you can get someone to hear you out, you can rest assured it will get taken care of faster.
3. Make a compelling, detailed case. There are lots of great ideas. Unfortunately, time is very limited to build them all. If there is a problem that affects a lot of people or a feature that would benefit a lot of people, tell us about it in as many details as possible and recommend suggestions and ideas. You’ve clearly spent more time dealing with it than we do so you have a unique opportunity to make a good argument over why we should work on problem #9881 instead of feature #810. The more perspective and benefits/pitfalls the better.
Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com
Introducing Geographic Redundancy to ExchangeDefender Services
As you may be aware, we had our first network-wide outage in our primary data center (Dallas) back in August and our redundancy plan did not deliver on the promise that we should expect. Our CEO went over the details of the outage and during his webinar, we made a promise to revamp our network and infrastructure to prevent the impact this had on our partners moving forward. Once all services were restored, we began playing the outage backwards to figure exactly what went wrong and how we can eliminate the possibility of it ever happening again.
The items that floated to the top were LiveArchive’s failure and an unforeseen level of reliance on Dallas by our Los Angeles ExchangeDefender network. Our Exchange Architect and lead engineer, Travis Sheldon, outlines the changes made to our LiveArchive structure to ensure that if Dallas goes lights out, LiveArchive can keep on to ticking without missing a beat.
That leaves changes to our mail processing. Once the outage happened, our ExchangeDefender NOC team was overseeing the mail flow going to Los Angeles, however, the failure point was the processing speed. The processing speed delay basically blew out all of our disaster recovery metrics that showed us that LA could handle the load on its own. The team’s task quickly became finding the delay within the process. In this case, our transparency became our worst enemy. The fact that we log everything to make it accessible to our partners for their clients was causing the delay. Our Los Angeles nodes were attempting to write data back to an unresponsive database. Think about that for a second, every step of the way for every email we process, was now attempting to update data to an unresponsive network. Needless to say this delay in processing caused all of our queues to grow explosively, thus causing massive delays in delivery.
The other major part of the outage was our outbound network. At the time, our multihomed smart host cluster was at the time housed primarily in Dallas, with standby nodes in Los Angeles. Here’s the problem, since these nodes weren’t in production they did not have active access tables, which basically rendered them useless. So now we had our trail of blood and tears of how and why we failed, but we also had a blue print on how to ensure history didn’t repeat itself. Here is what LiveArchive side of LA looks like now:
So in addition to the new LiveArchive Exchange 2010 cluster in Los Angeles, here’s what we did:
1. We increased the hardware and bandwidth capacity by 80% in Los Angeles. This brought it on par with our Dallas network, which has in the past and with ease handled the load during peak on its own without delays. In addition, we also increased our capacity in Dallas an additional 20%, this is accommodate future growth without having to experience any processing delays.
2. We deployed master to master replication of all of our core processing databases. So now our ExchangeDefender Los Angeles nodes do not rely on any Dallas resources for mail processing. This means two big gaps were closed, if there were a Dallas outage, processing speed would not suffer and that our logging would not need to be sacrificed in the name of processing speed.
3. We doubled our outbound capacity in Los Angeles and they’re live servers instead of standby. This way if an outage occurs, all routing/access/archiving/encrypting rules are already up to date and ready to go. As an added benefit this expansion increased our outbound processing speed and capacity by 80%.
The lessons we learned from this event will only allow us to provide you with better and faster service, so you can in turn deliver the same to your clients. We’ve already successfully stress tested our new infrastructure on multiple occasions with great success and we’re confident about the future of our solutions.
I have worked with many of our partners through the years and, if you don’t mind, I wanted to share some resources that I find most of our partners are not aware of. As the person that oversees all of our support services I can tell you that frustration is a part of the game and we can extend a much better service when you’re plugged into everything that the support side of ExchangeDefender as an organization offers. Here are some tips:
1. Make sure all of your employees are reading our NOC site. http://www.exchangedefender.com/noc While the NOC alerts sync up with Twitter, Facebook and our support portals, our NOC site provides a lot of useful information about how to explain the problems that happen. Our clients are aware things will go down from time to time so keeping them in the loop is critical.
2. Make sure all your employees are in the support portal and that the information is correct. Have you ever had the frustrating experience of opening a ticket only to be asked for more information? We find that most tickets that aren’t addressed by us immediately (and our average response time is a topic for a different blog) can drag on and a quick call can often resolve it. We’re in support, we won’t call you to sell you stuff. But if we have a number to call we can figure things out very rapidly.
3. Rely on the portal. https://support.ownwebnow.com is where we live. All of our communications, alerts, NOC, service monitoring and staff have this open whenever they are at their desk. Monitors around the office show how many issues are being worked on, what everyone is up to, which changes are being made. While we love to talk to our partners we have to take your security into account so make sure that everything goes through there. Yes, we do escalate stuff to Vlad from time to time.
4. Most importantly: Save the info below.
I have been with Own Web Now for years and I often like to tell people that I’ve known Vlad Mazek before he knew how to speak English. If there is anything on the support side that I can help with please feel free to contact me. So much for the introductions, look forward to with you all.
Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737
Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 vs. Exchange 2010 Essentials
What is the difference? What do I get? How does it measure up? What are the compromises? How much does it cost?
A lot of our partners are intrigued with the new addition to our cloud solutions portfolio, Exchange 2010 Essentials, but you are also asking a lot of questions. The objective of our Exchange 2010 offering has always been to provide an easy to use, simple and reliable communications medium; and that is something that has not been compromised in either solution. Currently, we are the only Exchange provider that delivers service on local systems, public folders, free 1 year of archiving, redundant failover, and the product under your brand – and now we even give you pricing flexibility with different options.
My goal is to introduce you to the two solutions in a conversational manner. This way you can practice the discussion around these offerings with your clients and be better prepared to explain the difference between the two solutions.
Unique Competitive Advantage
Exchange 2010 Essentials at its core is the same as Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 with a unique advantage – price! Businesses of all shapes and sizes can now have the additional option to rely on Exchange 2010 Essentials just without the additional services such as LiveArchive, SharePoint, copy of Outlook 2010, and so on – Just the best email communication platform at the best possible price. We decided to offer Exchange 2010 Essentials because our partners needed to be able to offer a more affordable solution that is the same great product but with a price that is cost competitive therefore allowing them to compete with some bigger players in the industry. However, something that we see as a sacrifice when going down the Exchange 2010 Essentials path is that it is only backed by ExchangeDefender Essentials – meaning that you will not receive all of the great features that come with the full ExchangeDefender platform like: LiveArchive, Encryption, Web File Sharing, Web Filtering, and Compliance Archiving. Although, if these features are not needed by your clients and you need to compete on price, then Exchange 2010 Essentials is your answer. Also, it is very lucrative because it will lead to you making more money than selling a higher priced solution.
In comparison, of course, we recommend our Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 product because of its business appeal. You can truly leverage the Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 suite and apply it to your business to increase not only your operational efficiency and increase revenues, but to also lower your costs through the deployment of a completely brandable email hosting solution. Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 comes fully equipped with ExchangeDefender and all of the additional features. One major differentiator and value-added feature with Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 is LiveArchive. It is important to remember that there is no such thing as 100% uptime, and that is where our new and improved LiveArchive comes into play. With LiveArchive you are always connected and can continue working if an outage were ever to take place. There are also many business benefits beyond just service interruptions with LiveArchive. LiveArchive allows for users to remain connected during maintenance periods and even while traveling through Outlook Web App. Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 is truly a turnkey solution that will be reliable for you and your clients as a complete email communication system.
Pricing Power
As far as pricing goes, if you just need email, and reliable email at that, think of us and the Exchange 2010 Essentials product, it is priced at $5.99/user/month. If this is what you want to offer, you now have another option that is fully supported by us and we always stand behind our products 100%. On the other hand, if you want a full communication and secure platform you can get Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 which is priced at $9.99/user/month. The extra per user cost for paying for the higher quality Exchange 2010 solution is made up with the true value in the offering. Some clients will see the value of having Outlook, SharePoint, and a Business Continuity solution in place, that they will be willing to pay the extra cost to have those features for convenience and also when they need them. The cost difference is miniscule when you think of the value that those features and additions actually add to the value of that product as a whole. If you position this product properly it almost always yields to getting a higher profit out of it.
With both Exchange 2010 offerings you have complete control of the client, the branding, and the billing. Your brand, your name, your image, your price, your billing, your solution!
What should you lead with: Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 or Essentials?
Having both solutions on the table will deliver multiple revenue streams, and also really differentiate yourself from others in the channel. Many resellers lead with one and only solution – and ultimatum – and having multiple options will convert more prospects and leads into long term subscribers. In addition, it adds to your set of tools that you have access to. If you only have one offering in your solution set when you are going to clients you are not offering them a solution, in essence, you are only offering them an ultimatum because that is your only option. Clients will tend to choose the solution that fits their needs but yet is the cheapest and most affordable for them. Therefore, it is very important for you to have a variety of solutions to offer so that your prospective client can really see the value in what you are offering to them. It is also a great idea to keep both Exchange offerings in your solution set because possibly at some point an Essentials client will need LiveArchive or Web File Sharing and you will be able to then provide that service for them and yet again yield a higher profit margin from the product.
Remember that price is not everything. But what we often hear from our partners is that decision makers frequently don’t understand or truly appreciate what all the features they really need can do for their business and focus on the price alone. By offering the alternative with essentials you can take the price off the table as the discussion point and simply ask: “Should the cheapest solution go down and you’re cut off from your email for a few hours, is $4/month really worth the savings?” Remember that nobody talks about worst case scenarios in sales and when those are not considered the lowest price always wins. Cloud solutions are extremely affordable – give your clients a chance to pick the right one for them.
Action Plan
We are confident that your clients will get hooked on our Exchange 2010 offerings because they will truly receive unparalleled support and a phenomenal product that will fit all of their needs. So whether you are choosing Exchange 2010 Essentials or Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 you can be sure that you are providing your clients with a product and service that you can both trust and rely on!
So what now?
1. If you are not in our Partner Program, join now.
2. Contact us (877-546-0316) for a free demo and get answers to any questions you may have.
3. Let us customize and brand the marketing collateral for the two solutions.
4. Start talking to your clients.
Finally, consider the solutions head-to-head (pdf). We’ll be bringing you these articles on a weekly basis so tune in and let me know what you’d like to hear about. I spend a lot of my time at trade shows and working directly with partners on their marketing agenda including running our own so feel free to email me or give me a call and I’ll do everything I can to help.
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735
New Bloggers Better Communication
Happy Monday folks, Vlad here with something very exciting to share with you regarding this blog. As some of you may know, I run an extremely successful personal blog on which I cover topics relevant to the industry, technology and day-to-day joys of owning a business. Far more people follow that blog than this one and even internally, it is followed to see which products are coming out, what we’re working on and what different sides of ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey, Looks Cloudy and so on are up to.
The exciting news today involves the announcement that we’re aggressively expanding this blog to include ExchangeDefender VP’s that actually work on the products, services and you!
The subject areas will include support, technical development, product updates, marketing, community and even business development advice.
One of the main reasons my blog is so successful is because it connects the dots. Even when we look at our most successful partners we find that they are plugged into our support NOC blogs, that they integrate Shockey Monkey with their PSA, that they rely on our marketing collateral and that they communicate with us as they build their business. Why are they successful? Because we build our business model around things that make sense. So as our partners perfect their model using our services, we perfect our services using our partners feedback. It’s a progressive cycle and we all win.
It’s my sincerest hope that you tune into this blog and follow it.
Send your employees to http://www.exchangedefender.com/blog and tell them to put it on their list.
We will soon add a podcast to sum it all up.
Honestly – I know what you’re thinking. It seems like it’s a huge time commitment. It is. But I can tell you with 14 years of company history as evidence that the returns are much higher than the investment.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, ExchangeDefender
(407) 536-VLAD
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