Conference Call Tonight, Wednesday Jan 16
Please remember that our monthly conference call, one of many this year, is taking place tonight, Wednesday, January 16th at 4 PM EST (22:00 GMT, 2 PM PST, Jan 17 9:00 AM EDT/Sydney). We have found from previous conference calls that this time slot is the most attended compromise of time zones across our global client base and we will make every effort to record the conference call and post it for your listening pleasure if you are unable to attend.
The purpose of the call is to take feature requests for the upcoming Own Web Now Service Manager extension of Own Web Now Portal (Shockey Monkey) to streamline ordering, provisioning and initial support of our growing product lines. We will quickly discuss the features that we have already put into the product and would like to see what else might be helpful in the software to reduce the cost and time required to purchase and provision Own Web Now Products.
The conference call number is in the monthly Own Web Now News newsletter sent on January 5th. If you are unable to attend but still have a question or comment that you would like us to discuss, please email confcall@ownwebnow.com and we will consider adding it to the presentation. If you do not have the newsletter handy, you can get the dialin phone number from our support portal (on the front page announcements)
Note: This conference call is meant specifically for the discussion of the service manager feature set, we will not be able to answer questions or offer guidance regarding the schedules or features of our other products.
Questions regarding rollouts of ExchangeDefender SPAM Monitor
Several questions have come up in our support portal regarding automatic software rollout of ExchangeDefender SPAM Monitor we released earlier today.
The simplest way to roll out ExchangeDefender SPAM Monitor on a managed network is through Active Directory technology called IntelliMirror, standard in Windows XP, Windows Server 2000-2008 and Windows Vista. The following page describes the basics of the Windows Installer service that can be used to roll out the software package. The process of automatically rolling software out is a complex one and is beyond this article, please contact a trained professional if this is the route you choose. We hope you can understand that we cannot support you on the basics of network management from both legal and confidentiality aspects.
There are several ways to automatically configure the ExchangeDefender SPAM Monitor service for your users, as well as update the configuration from a central location. ExchangeDefender SPAM Monitor uses the following registry hive:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\OWN\ED
There are three string keys: email, password and suspended. Suspended can be set to True or False, in order for the software to function completely the value should be set to False. Software can be automatically configured without users knowledge by including the .reg file with the cab files mentioned above and the appropriate values for the email and password keys.
ExchangeDefender SPAM Monitor 1.0.2
ExchangeDefender SPAM Monitor 1.0.2 is an optional upgrade for the customers that encountered instability issues with the original release. The original software did not handle 404 errors very elegantly, leading the monitor software to crash if the Internet connection was not available or wifi software launched after the monitoring service did. If you are affected by this issue, ExchangeDefender SPAM Monitor 1.0.2 is for you, if the current release is running without problems the other minor bugfixes may not be worth the download (major fix for multiple email accounts):
ExchangeDefender SPAM Monitor 1.0.2
Note: Due to popular demand we have also released .cab/.msi files as a part of the package for automatic deployment via Active Directory, Kaseya and other popular management tools.
New Antispam Engine Launches on Tuesday
Our new antispam engine will be launching on Tuesday, January 15th. We have been investigating a number of SPAM patterns over the past few weeks and really building up the techology to fight what we believe is becoming the dominant strain of junk that bypasses virtually all SPAM gateways.
We don’t expect any issues with the new engine as it has been under beta test with our larger clients since Jan 1st.
How do we decide what goes on the /noc page?
The other day someone asked how do we decide what goes on the Network Operations page, which is due for a big overhaul in the month of March based on everything we have learned so far. How do we figure out if something is important enough to put something there you ask? Very simple:
If an issue is affecting more than 10 customers, or more than one server, it gets posted.
If an issue is likely to affect more than 10 customers, or more than one server, it gets posted.
Simple enough. We are a partner company, we are an extension of their business that provides essential Internet services. As that extention, our duty is to communicate to our partners and our clients when things are different than usual. We have found that it is more effective in terms of providing timely support, that it is far easier for the clients to be aware of what may be going on so when they are asked for support they can be fully informed of any service issues.
The site has been very successful, it has contributed to a huge decrease in support requests and consequently savings for everyone involved because we are all that much more efficient. There has been only one negative comment so far, “I want all my information on one page, I don’t want to have to look at three pages to find all my Own Web Now information!” While we can understand the concern, this is a problem that technology has already fixed, people no longer surf the Internet. People subscribe to the data feeds that go on their desktop, portal, SharePoint, you name it. If you are actively seeking out information, instead of letting information come to you in the fastest and most efficient way possible, it’s time to learn about blog aggregators.
Rolling back ExchangeDefender Spooling Interval
If your mail server ever goes down, ExchangeDefender automatically spools messages for it and delivers them when the server connection is restored. Because the delivery is staggered (we don’t fire a thousand connections to your server the moment it boots up) it can take over an hour to deliver spooled messages that have been stored due to an outage that lasted over an hour.
By default, we keep these messages for an interval of five (5) days, but since we are based in the southern United States and prone to hurricanes, flash floods, tornados and other inclement weather (one DC even got hit by a earthquake this year) we tend to extend the spooling period on ExchangeDefender from June through November of each year to 14 days. Last year, in light of many of our customers in the northwest suffering from ice/snow storms, we extended this period through January.
This is a notice that our mail spooling will revert back to 5 day interval on February 1st, 2008 and we will extend it back to 14 days starting June 1st, 2008. Email spooling is an automatic low-level process, that has since been supplemented by the free ExchangeDefender LiveArchive service. The two are meant to be used in conjunction to provide full business continuity and guard against less-than-reliable Internet connections.
As usual, thank you for your business.
If you have important email to send save it for tomorrow
January 2nd, when it falls on a weekday, is the worst day of the year to send email on. From business perspective, it’s the first day of the calendar year so everyone is back and probably from more than just a few days off, some even two weeks off. From the technical side, this is also the first day of the year that IT admins come back to work, doing the tasks they do to keep the systems working, usually catching up on a few days of missed maintenance tasks.
Every year the SPAM problem gets worse. On January 2nd not only are you going to be fighting maintenance intervals that didn’t take place but also people coming back from work and catching up to days of piled up emails, where catching up means sending out even more mail. Most email servers out there are overloaded with just the SPAM problem alone, compounding a few days of email correspondence on top of it will make today the least likely day for your email message to be delivered and read.
So if you have a newsletter, a really important note, a critical deadline to meet or an important contact that you absolutely have to reach… email is not your friend on January 2nd.
Of note, ExchangeDefender is currently performing at 43% capacity (10 AM EST, -5:00 GMT)
Free Urgent Support Requests Today (VoIP Issue)
The following was posted on the NOC group site this morning:
Our VoIP provider (IAX-PSTN termination service) is performing routine maintenance on our accounts in order to port some of our numbers from third party services and telcos. We have been advised to expect outages throughout the day as their proxy servers are updated to route new numbers to us, after which we will be programming the proper DID routes in our system.
As a result, our phone systems may not be the most reliable way to reach us today, January 2nd, 2008. If you have an urgent issue, or even an issue that you would like human followup on, please post a support request at https://support.ownwebnow.com.
I understand this may be inconvenient for some of you that need to speak to us, NOW, so to bridge the gap we’ll waive charges on all Urgent cases opened in the system today only, January 2nd, 2008. If you need a callback right away open an urgent ticket with your phone number and extension we can reach you at and we will contact you promptly.
Thank you,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Wishing you a happy and prosperous 2008
Dear Clients, Partners and Friends,
On behalf of the entire team at Own Web Now Corp, from 18 data centers around the globe, I wish you the happy and prosperous 2008. January is the month in which we announce our new products and services for the calendar year and this time we have a little surprise for you!
Thank you for your business and your continued support.
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender Desktop Agent (Spam Monitor)
Today we proudy introduce yet another way for users to conveniently get rid of Junk Mail and still have it all stored just a mouse click away, on a network far far away. ExchangeDefender Spam Monitor is a piece of .NET 2.0 software that runs on your computer and pops up a small bubble notification letting you know how much SPAM is waiting for you. If you ignore it, it goes away in seconds, if you click on it the browser pops up and logs you right into your account so you can quickly review your SPAM and go about your day.
SPAM Monitor runs as a standalone application and consumes just 74kb of memory. Double clicking on the icon brings up the configuration window that allows you to enter your ExchangeDefender email address and password. Right clicking on the icon gives you an option to suspend the agent or View Spam. Suspending the agent stops it from checking the web site and displaying hourly message counts while View Spam menu option launches the browser and gives the user access to their account.
The agent was designed to assist users that needed a realtime, accountable way to get to their SPAM without waiting for email reports, but who didn’t want to create desktop shortcuts. We also hope this allows our resellers to support their customers in a more efficient way – “Do you see the orange box with the X on it in the lower right hand corner? Right click and select View SPAM.”
We hope this makes Howard Cunningham happy 