Since December 15th we have been testing a new ExchangeDefender antispam engine that has gone into production last night, January 5th. The new engine improves SPAM filtering efficiency by nearly 800% and shows about 5% less false positives than the current engine. This new system has been running in the background transparently simultaneously with our previous engine and did not impact operations. We have started to notice new trends in SPAM lately and have moved to improve filtering of the items that have not been accurately picked up by the network. We want to thank you for submitting SPAM through our ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 agent as that has been critical in our ability to better protect you from junk. If you have not yet deployed the new ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 plugin, or the new ExchangeDefender Desktop please do so today. They are available for download on the homepage at www.exchangedefender.com Enjoy your new, cleaner mailbox!
Dear Friends, Clients, Partners, Happy New Year! Thank you for a fantastic 2008. Not only have we seen our service deployments and contracts grow at a tremendous rate but we have also undertaken a record expansion in our Global Network Services platform offering Exchange, SharePoint, Enteprise Offsite Backups, Virtual Hosting and more from the European Union (United Kingdom, Nethrelands, France and Germany), Canada as well as Australia. Our flagship product, ExchangeDefender, grew from a pure security service to one that also plays a key part in the business continuity and disaster recovery. We look forward to an incredible 2009. With key hires and services delivery platform built for speed and value we believe that our solutions will be a great answer to what may be a tough economic cycle. We will be introducing several new products in 2009. We will also be making some interesting changes to the support of the existing offerings. Happy New Year and best wishes for 2009!
It’s no secret that we’ve had a phenomenal year at Own Web Now, thanks to the thousands of our partners that support, guide and deploy our products worldwide. Today is the day after Thanksgiving in United States, also known as Black Friday where frugal shoppers wake up early to get the best deals and save a lot of money. As a small business, we know a lot about saving money. And as a small business that was built on top of really hard work and dedication to the mission, we want to do something special for the people that work as hard as we do - while most are taking a day off. We want to do something we’ve never done before. We’re going to hold our own Black Friday special sale today and today only. If you are currently an active partner (meaning you have some paid services with us) you can buy the following to run your own business:
Valid from right now till midnight, Friday, November 28th, 2008. No rainchecks, not for resale (your own company only), not crippled/limited (full OWA, Outlook/MAPI) not a promotional offer. Please place the request through the Services > Buy Services and mention this offer in the notes. Due to the expected demand there may be a 48 hour delay in activating your service. Offer valid only for partners with active/paying services on record prior to this posting. SE
This subject has been heard and seen all over our support portal today as our global customers pause in wonder that we are working during Thanksgiving. Yes, yes, yes, we are always open. No, we never close. As a global company doing business with partners in over 150 countries over 5 continents, we never take a break from working for you. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and every fourth we put in one more. To all our partners around the world showing the same level of dedication you show to your clients, we wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving and thank you for your business!
Dear Partners, Clients and friends of Own Web Now, Thank you for your loyalty. Due to the unprecedented growth in our product portfolio that was built on the feedback and testing of our awesome partner base, the success of the new wave of OWN products from ExchangeDefender to Shockey Monkey, from Offsite Backups to SharePoint + Exchange and ongoing growth in the cloud services…. we’ve grown, again! Starting yesterday we have added three new support teams already trained in everything we do across all platforms. This means better support for our products, ability to launch the new products and extend more commercial support for upcoming announcements (stay tuned) You read that right. In this down economy we have invested in our future and doubled our support staff to keep you ahead of the curve. I hope this makes up for the recent support issues some have experienced, nearly all of my available support staff has been in training and training the new folks to make sure the support is perfect from day one. This is our mission, this is our promise: As we grow, we will improve our service and deliver more value. Thank you for making this possible and for your continued business. To thank you for bringing your business and helping OWN grow I want you to keep an eye on the new pricing to be announced on this blog tomorrow. Pricing will go up (across product lines, some significantly) but current clients and providers will be paying even less in certain cases and will have the pricing tiers grandfathered for all future orders. How is that for the true partnership? Again, thank you all! Sincerely,
Happy Monday! Over the weekend a ton of ExchangeDefender 4 bugfix requests went online and so far the support requests for the issues have all but disappeared. Here they are, in order of magnitude: ExchangeDefender Email SPAM Reports Late last week new ExchangeDefender SQL cluster for email report management went online to compensate for the growth in network capacity. Because it usually takes six to eight hours for replication to complete some reports over the weekend were generated with 0’s for SPAM totals, an error that has since been fixed. Going forward, SPAM reports will be remain to be available but we are moving the feature to the “legacy” mode meaning we do not recommend them as the primary point of access to SPAM. By default, new accounts will have their email reports turned off unless they explicitly request the email reporting to be turned on. There will be no change to the current users and as noted above there will be far more capacity to provide current users with the reports and those that choose them forward. Email reports have been a dark eye on the face of ExchangeDefender. Over 83% of ExchangeDefender clients have never even opened an ExchangeDefender SPAM report, and nearly 99% have never released a single piece of SPAM from them. We track these releases and have even noted that majority of the releases are forged SPAM itself. This is why we have developed better tools to surround ExchangeDefender with - the new ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 Addin for Microsoft Outlook 2007, the ExchangeDefender Desktop Alerts for XP and Vista as well as the realtime web portal which is scheduled for 4.0 release this fall. ExchangeDefender Password Resends ExchangeDefender password resend request used to lead you to a blank screen and no email. This has been fixed, passwords are being sent now without issue. ExchangeDefender Activation Optimizations ExchangeDefender activations now take mere seconds (it used to take about 1 second to provision a single account) which globally meant it could take approximately an hour for the address to be fully provisioned. That has been throttled down to allowing over 5,000 user activations per minute. ExchangeDefender LiveArchive Sync Problems with ExchangeDefender LiveArchive settings sync have been addressed and syncronization is now up-to-the minute. If you’re ever stuck waiting more than 60 seconds for a password change or a setting change you might want to close your browser and retry. More exciting changes are on their way, to be announced tomorrow.
ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 Addin has been released and is available for immediate download at www.exchangedefender.com. We have designed this new software to help you interact with the ExchangeDefender security service without leaving the comfort of your Microsoft Outlook 2007 interface. No more waiting for reports, no more trying to guess the ExchangeDefender portal password, no more hunting for statistics or forwarding SPAM - we have simplified the whole process of interacting with the service that keeps your mailbox clean.
Of course, every aspect of the software is brandable to reflect your corporate image, we’ve even included documentation templates that you can use to inform your users of this new solution that is provided at no additional cost!
Our network operations center is staffed 24/7/365 and today is no exception. We are staffed better than usual for the Saturday’s 2nd and 3rd shift to monitor and manage any unusual events that may come as a result of Hurricane Ike. We do not expect significant network or wind damage as the data centers we operate from are standalone structures with poured cement and among the most element-proof buildings available. What we are curious to find out is the state of flooding and power. Below is the map of our neighborhood.
The areas in blue represent our data centers and the big blue block in the center is our global network operations center at 1950 N Stemmons Frwy, also known as Infomart. All our data centers are well above the ground and can easily sustain several feet of water without impacting network operations. Our primary concern is with the proximity of the Trinity River which is one of the largest public works in the history of Dallas and also the main flood protection solution for the Dallas-Fort Worth area. All the green “rivers” you see on the picture above are part of the Trinity River Corridor Project designed to take excess rainwater and guide it away from the sensitive downtown Dallas area. This system has never been tested by as large of a hurricane as Ike and we anxiously await to see how everything plays out. None of the diesel generators or operations are even close to the ground, and the lowest point of entry is some 8′ feet off the ground. We are also anxious to see the performance of the new electrical grid monitoring service recently deployed in Dallas. You can read more about this system at The Dallas Morning News:
We look forward to the test of Managed Power As A Service.
Sincerely, Samantha Ellison Chief of Operations, Own Web Now Corp
It gives me great pleasure to announce that we have completed the upgrades to our global offsite backup network this weekend and that all the new features are now online. Make sure to take a moment and download the latest agents to take advantage of all the new awesome things our systems are able to do for you. Continuous Data Protection
Why is this absolutely phenomenal for you? Because it ope s up a profitability margin in the solution that nobody else can compete with you. For example, one of our competitors in this space requires you to purchase expensive hardware to do CDP, to pay for it up front and to pay for offsite backup quota as well. Not with Own Web Now - there is just one monthly fee, allowing you to choose your own hardware, even the affordable network-enabled USB hard drives from Western Digital MyBook Series (750GB market price around $200). Another one of our competitors in the SMB space has a requirement ratio, so you have to buy far more offsite backup space than you actually need. Offsite backups are for critical documents, but what about a competitive advantage of having more robust, local backups? Well, that doesn’t make sense for them because they don’t make money. With Own Web Now there are no offsite/onsite ratios, you can start with our lowest plan (10GB offsite, $16/month) and install the agent software on all the office PCs and create local backups with CDP for every workstation in the company. We are absolutely thrilled with this new feature! Seeding
So let’s say goodbye to all those problems. Here is how this works. When you order the offsite backup let us know that you want to send us a backup on a hard drive. We will UPS you a hard drive to plug into your server/workstation and save a backup on the hard drive. Put the USB drive into the included envelope and give it to your UPS guy. It will arrive at Own Web Now Dallas or Los Angeles NOC in a day or two, we’ll restore it and from that point it’s just your daily changes being pushed over the Internet. Brand New Interface The interface in the new agent is stunning, on par with the competitive backup solutions. I think you will really enjoy it. Advertising Support
I sincerely hope that the new agent gives many of you not just a more remarkable offsite and onsite backup solution, but also provides you with the profitability margin that nobody can compete with you on.
Effective tomorrow, August 14th, 2008, we will no longer offer competitive transfer promotions for service providers who switched their accounts from Postini/Google, MX Logic or Message Labs to ExchangeDefender. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
