Scheduled Maintenance – Sept 13th – 19th
Below is the current maintenance schedule between September 13th – 19th.
- Monday 9/13/10 – 9/14/10 – Final testing on DELLA, the new EUROPE Exchange 2010 server
- Wednesday 9/15/10 11pm Eastern – Installation of Exchange 2010 SP1 on LOUIE. During the installation, Exchange services may be required to restart, however, clients connecting to cas.louie.exchangedefender.com should automatically switch between CAS servers in the event of a interruption during the install.
- Thursday 9/16/10 11pm Eastern – Installation of Exchange 2010 SP1 on LIVEARCHIVE.
- Friday 9/17/10 11pm Eastern – IP address change of Exchange 2003 server DONALD. Clients should not have to make any changes to automatically connect to the new IP address.
Sunday 9/19/10 5pm Eastern – Offline database defrag scheduled for SCROOGE. During the defrag, clients will be unable to connect to their mailboxes. The defrag is estimated to take up to 5 hours to complete, and is one of the final steps in the upgrades to Scrooge.
Update 9/15/10 4:00 PM: We have decided to push the offline defrag until October 9th-10th. We understand that September is one of the busiest months for our partners, so we’ve pushed back the maintenance until next month.
Shockey Monkey – 30 days later
Many of you first heard about Shockey Monkey when it launched about a month ago at CompTIA. Now nearly a month later, and well over 1,000 portals strong, Shockey Monkey has been an overwhelming success. It has consumed nearly all of our development resources as the delivery of Shockey Monkey and it’s deep integrations is critical to all of our partners success in the cloud.
We have done a great job with the feedback that you’ve given us and are on-schedule to deliver the Service Manager functionality next week. In fact, it will be the core subject of our townhall webcast next week, and it’s a great time to ask questions as the entire team will be present:
Shockey Monkey Townhall – Service Manager
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/656778440
We have already shipped the Import/Export Wizard and Email integration and we have committed to delivering full ExchangeDefender suite to each Shockey Monkey user – free or pro. With the portals generating an enormous amount of email, and our partners relying on them more and more, we simply had to make sure you would stay in business in case of a catastrophic data loss event. Let me repeat that – when you sign up for Shockey Monkey, your organization gets full ExchangeDefender free of charge.
Why?
I have been asked this question in a number of ways: Why do I need Shockey Monkey? Why do I need Autotask or ConnectWise if I can get Shockey Monkey? Why would I use this if I already have a PSA? Why would you develop this if you’ve already developed integrations to other PSA’s. Allow me to answer this in two parts.
1. Regardless of which PSA solution you have, you will have Shockey Monkey by the end of September. Our investment in Autotask and ConnectWise is not going away, but we have a huge need for services that we could not offer through third parties because of both legal and development (API) constraints. First, in order for our partners to win in the cloud their name and logo must be the first – the only – thing the client sees. Our partners spend an enormous amount of time building their brand and client trust & loyalty: so we must deliver a solution that makes it easy for our clients to manage their cloud solutions with a brand that is uniquely our partners. Everything from checkout to self management to documentation is Own Web Now’s responsibility to provide, and by integrating it with the rich experience we deliver in the Service Manager there is only one way to do it.
2. Let me say it again – our investment in Autotask and ConnectWise is not going away. Shockey Monkey does not compete with these solutions nor is it designed to replace them. However, the level of self-service and client management we deliver as a part of Shockey Monkey is not yet possible with the third parties, but we still expect you to count on them for support management, billing integration, executive reporting and service statistics.
To sum it up: We have designed Shockey Monkey for you, to help you build a better client-friendly cloud business. It’s free and it’s really all about you and your users. You need Shockey Monkey because your users need this feature set and these products. If you don’t provide it, someone else will and we’re here to help you win.
That said, I encourage you to go ahead, sign up, and check it out. And please make sure to register and tune in next Wednesday.
I will be discussing this today, live, around 1:05 at MSPU in Washingon DC: http://www.mspu.us/livebootcamp
Upgrades to our Exchange hosting network
We have been doing an amazing amount of work to bring more stability to our Exchange 2007 network. While the Exchange 2010 network has been far better performance & stability-wise than we expected, the Exchange 2007 side has been disappointing for both us and our clients. We have redesigned our mailbox role deployments and topology, which we will begin putting into production starting with this weekend.
On Sunday, August 22nd 9 PM Central through Monday, August 23rd 9 AM Central, we will be making significant updates to the Exchange 2007 storage systems behind our SCROOGE and HUEY networks. We believe these performance enhancements will significantly improve reliability, performance and our ability to scale with the client demand on these networks.
We will continue to evaluate the systems and perform upgrades to the additional networks.
I must admit that we have heard your frustration with the DEWEY servers, Exchange 2007 and Blackberry. I apologize for that. What I can tell you though is that we have been working at a completely new level on redesigning our platform and addressing the concerns that you have brought. Unfortunately the changes we need to implement can only be done gradually and are not possible for an overnight process.
We believe that the upgrades we are planning will deliver a new level of performance. In the meantime, the mailbox role changes we are planning for this Sunday evening will interrupt your access to your mailbox (even though the servers will appear to be online). While Sunday is our least busy day, we know that many of you work around the clock and even a scheduled maintenance interval can interrupt your business. If that is the case, please make sure you can access your LiveArchive account at https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com.
Pardon the sluggishness
Typically this type of post will be made on our Network Operations site, but since it will only affect Own Web Now corporate web sites we decided to make it here.
Over the next week you may experience some network sluggishness while accessing corporate web pages, forums and blogs that belong to Own Web Now Corp. We are rebalancing and re-routing some internal and external connections on the 65.99.192.x range in order to optimize and correctly prioritize traffic on our corporate network.
At times you may experience slow load times at www.ownwebnow.com and www.exchangedefender.com, including our support portal and our forums.
Big Changes In Support & Service
Today we are proud to announce the Own Web Now University series of business and technical training seminars. Through these weekly webinars we will deliver ongoing training and introduction to Own Web Now products and service, both for our new partners just joining the program and for existing partners that are hiring new staff.
Part of becoming an Own Web Now Partner (or becoming a profitable one) will now include free web seminars that you can take advantage of to save time, become more efficient and find the best practices behind our services. We hope you join us, we will be emailing invitations regularly from now on.
Little bit of background…
We used to be a small software company and everything we did was personal, direct and we worked with very smart people. As our products matured and grew in popularity quicker than our ability to handle the demand and the quality of the product support and billing, honestly, sucked. For the past 16 months we’ve worked extremely hard not just on our products and service, but on our support and management of the actual service delivery. We’re proud to say that today we have the most versatile products in the market, the most sophisticated billing, support and statistics integration with mainstream MSP management platforms (PSA) in the market and the solutions that help our partners compete even with the Fortune 500 solutions.
A lot can change in 16 months. Last time this year we were constantly criticized for our lack of documentation. We were told often and repeatedly that our support “sucked” and that we needed far better service notification and responsiveness. We have improved all of those areas. All of our core products have video training as well as extensive whitepaper and FAQ collection. We have created an OWN University site to help partners get on board. We have automated the process of getting OWN service and management of all the solutions we provide. We have posted countless webcasts with in-depth information on our services, should you care for the details. We’ve even opened forums to help our partners connect and work more closely with our developers and support teams on changes you want to see made. We’ve made a ton of progress and now we deal with a different problem.
Today, we are not receiving complaints about the lack of documentation, support or assistance – quite the opposite: there is too much of it. That is not subject to change, as a matter of fact you will see more OWN people and more OWN documentation and services in the coming year. It’s a matter of distinction and positioning, there are two kinds of clients:
- Those that have business continuity, regulatory compliance and security concerns.
- Those that don’t care about any of the above, they just want the basics to work.
More on #2 later; OWN is here to help our partners win business from #1. The kind of client that fits that profile is also the one that is willing to pay for excellent service and a comprehensive solution. The days of just selling spot products (spam filtering, web hosting) are over – with ExchangeDefender 5 changed the game by including everything in one low price. In late July, new versions of Encryption, Web Sharing and Web Filtering will be in beta and the complexity of delivering these services grows. Today, we receive different comments and criticism:
- We’re just not aware of all your offerings..
- We’re just not sure how to make money in the cloud..
- We’re trying to figure out how this fits into our model..
- We love it, we’ll send our senior tech to evaluate your product..
- We love everything about it, we just need to figure out how to sell it..
Let us ease your mind: We know how to sell it. We’ve made millions of dollars with our partners delivering these solutions for over a decade and we’re here to help you do it. We know the problems that you’ll eventually face because we’ve had to deal with them ourselves.
Personally, and on behalf of everyone at Own Web Now, we want your criticism with these seminars. I will be personally holding the first few and they will be small – we want to help you fit our services in your model and help you figure out how to make it more profitable. We want your feedback and your input.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Changes to OWN Support Coming Soon
Every year since the incorporation of Own Web Now we’ve strived to enhance the level of support and service available to our partners. Back in the day when I was the only one interacting with clients, the service was great but the flexibility and variety was not – now that there are a ton of OWN people working with partners we have a lot of resources and a lot of support options but awareness and connection take a hit. The evolution of IT, to the cloud, and the evolution of the partner IT solution providers is causing us to again revise how we offer support, how we communicate and how we train our partner base to be effective, competitive and comprehensive in the amount of service and solution you offer.
For us, service has been the cornerstone of the organization and I want to assure you that we are using all of our experience and expertise from working from truly the most successful people in the business to deliver the level of service that is required to be successful.
Throughout May and June we will be introducing some support changes and new partner programs to help you with our expanding service and solution portfolio. More forums. More integrations into third party solutions. More free training. More assistance. More marketing support and business development ideas.
All I ask is for your attention. Starting with May 2010, we will be removing “vanity” emails and inactive partner accounts from the portal. If we work with you we need to know your name and your phone number (so no more “IT Support”, support@ and –0000 phone numbers).
In turn, we will make the experience more personal and make sure you are armed with the resources before you even set any of the services up.
We are making a business investment to make you more successful at doing what you’re already doing. We’re spending the money you’re paying us to improve the level of service you get. It’s as simple and beautiful as it gets.
As always, thank you for your business!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Announcing OWN & ExchangeDefender Forums
You’ve asked, and now, we’ve delivered. Please say hello to OWN Forums.
These forums are a little unique in the way we’re positioning them and what we intend to use them for. Typically, software companies offer forums to allow users to help support one another. We wanted to make sure our technical support was rock solid, integrated with your PSA and most importantly free. We did not want to consider support as something separate from the product, that would not be officially delivered without a firm SLA. Products should always work, and company should stand behind them. Those are our values. When we ask our partners why they pick us, they repeat this paragraph.
We are spending a LOT of money on the next wave of products and we wanted to work closely with more people. You will see a lot of new stuff in ExchangeDefender in 2010 and the forums are an informal way of involving you in the development and beta testing process. We want to make sure that we get the most data and embrace the feedback and ideas that you wish to share with us in the open.
So hop on in and help us develop great solutions. http://www.ownwebnow.com/forums
P.S. Your forum credentials have been emailed to you, if you wish to add someone in your organization to them just add them as a contact in https://support.ownwebnow.com
Introducing Orangutime for Autotask
Allow me to introduce you to our 1-2 punch for Autotask users: Orangutime, a time and note tracking desktop application. Autotask develops a fantastic IT management solution and their UI feature set is quite impressive. But there is a need for a more rapid, responsive way to provide quick updates to support requests (notes, time) when there isn’t a lot of bandwidth or while we’re completely offline.
Own Web Now has developed a time and note tracking software and today we’re proud to introduce you to 1.0. Here are some highlights:
- Allows you to start and pause time as you work on your support requests.
- Allows you to provide notes that can be posted back to the support ticket along with the time.
- Resides on your desktop as a native Windows application (it’s fast!)
- Completely secure, uses Autotask API to post your data.
- Just download & login, no installation, deployment or management complexity. Or waiting for stuff to load
Here is how it works. Download the app and double click on it! (Link is available to beta testers, if you’re interested in it please open a support request at https://support.ownwebnow.com). Provide your credentials and login.
Add a ticket you want to work on.
Hit the play button and it will sit on your desktop in the background, tracking time as you work.
When you’re done with the task (or move on to the next one) just pause it. You can see all your current tickets and their time.
If you want to sync a ticket to Autotask, hit the blue arrow and it will upload the contents to the portal.
It’s that simple. It’s also that fast, and when it’s simple and seamless people tend to use it.
We’re looking forward to adding a ton of features to it and we want your help in making it simpler, easier, faster and more effective in helping you track your time and get paid for it.
Announcing free Email-to-Autotask gateway powered by ExchangeDefender
Autotask, The World’s #1 Hosted PSA Solution, is also Own Web Now’s preferred PSA platform. We have more clients using Autotask to manage their IT business than anything else out there and we have the richest integration into the product not just in the antispam space but across the cloud. Autotask has promoted us a ton so a year after our huge launch at Autotask 2009 conference we’re glad to provide a bit of a payback and reward all the Autotask and ExchangeDefender clients for working with us.
Announcing the first free, secure, email-to-Autotask ticket gateway.
Here are some highlights:
- Automatically converts inbound and outbound mail to Autotask tickets.
- Supports attachments and HTML messages.
- Designed using secure Autotask Web Services / API
- Allows for default rule and custom rule sets depending on sender email address
- Allows customized Queue, Priority and Account mappings
- Works in the cloud, no server or client installation or configuration required
- Did we mention that it’s free?
So how do you get started? Well, make sure you’re in our portal and using ExchangeDefender. Click here to get started. Login to ExchangeDefender and go to Configuration, Autotask. Just provide your Autotask credentials and we’ll pull down your priority titles, queues and contacts.
Then pick the email address to serve as a default gateway. This address will still get all the inbound messages, a copy of it will automatically create tickets with the default priority, queue and contact information you provide here.
For even more flexibility, you can create custom policies based on who the ticket is coming from. This is fantastic if you have appliances or solutions that don’t have direct Autotask integration but need to be managed anyhow – just point those reports to the appropriate queue. If you have a VIP client that always gets priority treatment, you can accomdate it here as well.
Business-wise, this will save you thousands of dollars compared to whats on the market. It will make you more efficient and it will give you a single place to look for new support requests – EVERYTHING now automagically ends up in Autotask!
Tune in tomorrow for another announcement with our preferred PSA platform and check out Autotask and ExchangeDefender if you aren’t using us already. 😉
Reducing the cost of ExchangeDefender
I have a privilege of presenting and attending many of the industry events that we sponsor through ExchangeDefender / Own Web Now and I am always confronted with a question: “Well, company X does it for Y cents less but they don’t do or Z”; I then go on talking about our PSA integrations, about how our billing sync keeps multiple platforms from charging the clients improperly – most people tune out during this – because service providers are typically not concerned with the soft costs but only the hard cost of the feature set.
Over the past 6 months we’ve dedicated a lot of time at Own Web Now to prove that is the wrong way to think about reselling services. Why? Because everyone with the solid reporting can tell you just how expensive the process of supporting and billing clients properly is – often magnitudes more than the service itself! We’ve already covered the billing and PSA integrations extensively, part of ExchangeDefender (“7”) is bringing the business concepts and integrating the products closer to your overall goals: being more profitable by offering users self-training.
Training
Published under our white-label-brand are several videos that highlight the most frequent questions answered by our partners support. You’re welcome to download all of these and upload them directly to your web site, or link to them directly at our white brand site. The videos are shot in high resolution, are easy to understand and are very, very short.
Video: Changing Settings
Guide to accessing the admin portal, changing passwords, time zone, what happens to SPAM and SureSPAM.Video: Encryption
Guide to sending encrypted mail, general security & business etiquette, etc.Video: Sharing Large Files
Guide to sending large files, setting security & notification alerts, using document libraries in mailing lists.Video: LiveArchive Business Continuity
Guide to continuing to work and send/receive email when the Internet connectivity goes down.Video: Managing Whitelists and Trusted Senders
Guide to accessing quarantined SPAM, reviewing junk mail for false positives, managing whitelists and adding trusted senders.
All of the videos are available for download in a zip file (trainingvideos.zip, 12 Mb) and we recommend making them available prominently on your web site – your staff will be pointing your clients to them frequently.
My personal thoughts on the changing service provider landscape are no secret and I’ve been very vocal about the need to focus on features as well as bottom line expense of delivering those features on my personal blog. It is something we firmly all of us believe at Own Web Now and we’re committed to helping you become more profitable with our products in more ways than one.
Thank you for your continued support and working with us. Efforts like this would not be possible without enormous support from our partners and we’d like to extend our thanks to Jacee Dobbs (@Anchor Network Solutions) for helping us with the content suggestions. Got something you’d like to see in our products? Let us know.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
P.S. If you’re interested in the links to our private label site please open a support request. For obvious reasons we don’t want to have links from Own Web Now / ExchangeDefender.