Own Web Now Corp and Scorpion Software are teaming up on an exciting new service that helps your passwords more secure and less likely to be compromised, guessed or sniffed by hackers. Using token-based (keychain) one time passwords improves the security of the organization by allowing remote and mobile workers to provide one time passwords when they login remotely from a less secure location.

How does it work?

Logging into an organization requires a username and a password, but if you are using a shared connection, computer that may have keylogger installed, system compromised by spyware those credentials can be stolen. The token that you are issued as a part of our service has a password that changes every 60 seconds. When you attempt to login to your organization you will be asked for the password currently displayed on the device. Only the server and the token know the correct password at that time so even if your password should happen to be compromised and stolen hackers will not be able to use your password alone to gain access to your organization.

Offer Details

AuthAnvil tokens will be available with full service and support for $20 per user per month. There are no minimums, you can sign up a single user. Shipping is free as is the ongoing support, setup and service. We have worked very hard to deliver a solution that is the most flexible, affordable and meaningful for the SMB market and we look forward to offering you more ways to trust that your information stored in the cloud can only be accessed by you.

Due to heavy demand by our ever increasing mobile customer base, Own Web Now proudly announces immediate availability of BlackBerry Enterprise Server. BlackBerry users can now use fully featured synchronization between their mobile BlackBerry devices and Own Web Now hosted Exchange 2007 services. BES service is available at a low monthly fee as an addon to our hosting services. BlackBerry is the #1 selling smartphone in North America and among the most demanded business communication devices by our customer base and we are glad to finally offer you this option.

In addition to BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Own Web Now fully supports Blackberry, Windows Mobile, iPhone 2.0 as well as every POP3/IMAP based device that can communicate with Exchange over SSL.

SBS Show, famous online podcast originally recorded over the past two years by Vlad Mazek and Chris Rue is back. Joining Vlad as the cohost is Dave Sobel, of Evolve Technologies serving the greater Washington DC / Virginia metro area. Since 2005, SBS Show has built a large audience and many of the older recordings are still used as some of the best references on best practices and growing an SMB technology firm.

SBS Show has grown over the years to build a large audience and a partner-based social network, all designed to help partners discover solutions together and network for greater profit. Vlad and Dave will also be changing the format slightly to compensate for the change in the marketplace and interest among the audience - the show will have more business content and the technical discussions will be at a higher level discussing the more interesting parts of technology and its implementation.

Additionally, the SBS Show now comes with the new “extended cut” subscription with the longer discussion of the subject, available for those who are looking for more details and a more formal training discussion. Further details on this are available at the SBS Show’s new home: http://www.SMBBuddy.com

Take a listen to the show today, in SBS Show #26.5 Vlad and Dave talk about the recent events in the SMB technology field, changes needed to the business in the current economy, growth pains as well as expectations and mission at the Microsoft WPC.

You can listen to the latest new show #26.5 directly from our web site at http://www.ownwebnow.com

. . .

In addition to sponsoring the SMB Buddy we are also proudly announcing a podcast series covering the partner and solution space around Own Web Now services and people and technologies we work with every day. Join us this week to hear from our partners attending the Microsoft WPC 2008.

One day after our UK launch we are taking another giant step in our mission to level the world of hosted business services. Today we proudly announce the launch of our Australian line of business, with Exchange 2007, SharePoint v3, Virtual Hosting with the same features, higher storage limits and most importantly, the same price as in United States and Europe.

We would like to again thank our partners in Australia for making this possible with the help of Equinix, SuperMicro and Microsoft. Our partners from Australia and New Zealand have made ExchangeDefender and ShockeyMonkey into a huge regional success and we are doing our part to help our partners from down under add more services to their portfolios. We believe that making these services affordable will open up a lot of opportunities for our partners to provide additional services on top of Exchange and SharePoint that would otherwise not be possible for customers that are not interested or in a position to design servers and reliable network infrastructure required to support their business.

All services will be branded and centrally managed through the upcoming OWN Service Manager portals that will extend the partners brand over services and solutions delivered from our two data centers in Sydney. Portion of profits will be used to help support the local ITPRO communities across Australia.

We would also like to extend special thanks to several individuals that made these moves possible: Dean Calvert of Calvert Technologies, Wayne Small of Correct Solutions, Robbie Upcroft of Microsoft Corp, Jared Hirst of Equinix as well as thousands of partners across Australia and New Zealand that have done business with us throughout the years and demanded these solutions in their country to help serve the emerging market in need of technology business management beyond network infrastructure design and upkeep.

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

We are very proud to announce the launch of the European division of Own Web Now Corp. After years of global success with ExchangeDefender and a large growth in our other lines of business in UK, Ireland, Germany, Greece, France, Italy and Spain the demand for an European line of business, and a native European network, made the following moves possible.

Effective July 1st, Own Web Now Corp is proud to start offering all our hosting services in Europe, starting with the following:

Exchange 2007 with 10 Gb Mailboxes by default, OwnWebNow Offsite Backups, SharePoint 3.0, Virtual hosting services for Web (Linux or Windows), SQL, FTP and email.

All services will be priced at identical levels to their United States counterparts but due to the further commoditization of server infrastructure solutions we are able to offer more storage better performance with services spread across the continent: United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Germany.

To comply with the new EU privacy laws, and avoid United States Patriot Act concerns, the European infrastructure is managed and located completely within the EU geographic limits.

With this move we are also establishing funding for IT community support in Europe. Stay tuned for details, further global expansion, new product announcements, centralized management and branding announcements and more over the next few days.

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.

Over the weekend we completed our communications overhaul with an upgrade to the core of our network based around Exchange 2007 and Asterisk VoIP. We have upgraded our infrastructure to Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1, Asterisk (Trixbox) to the latest stable edition and we have also added the following components: Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft Responsepoint and Microsoft Livemeeting. We are also still in process of finalizing the SIP/IAX2 connectivity as we have brought another provider into the mix.

The above upgrade to our major communication systems was in order to help us connect better with you. These solutions will allow us to provide more personal and direct support, become more responsive and efficient. I hope you can be patient with us over the next day or two while the new phone numbers are programmed in and we get all our voicemails and voice prompts together.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

When stuff breaks (or when we intend to break stuff) you’ll hear about it first at our new NOC site:

http://www.ownwebnow.com/noc/

There are feeds, categories, upcoming graphs and charts and all sorts of helpful stuff that will help you work with us and stay on the same page. We had to publish this site ahead of schedule so there are many features that we will be introducing over the coming months but for the time being, OWN NOC is the best place to find out what’s going on. 

For the past eight months we have been testing our new support portal at https://support.ownwebnow.com and have had a lot of success in making sure support issues do not “fall off the table” as they tend to via email. Going forward, this will be the only way we will provide support, purchasing, cancellations and other account management.

Any mail sent to our previous support aliases will yield this automatic response:

*************************************
This is an automated message
*************************************

The address you sent an email to is not a monitored email address, your reply was destroyed.

Own Web Now Corp only provides support via our support portal at:
https://support.ownwebnow.com

If you have a support request or would like to update a support request please login to our support portal and create/update the support request directly. Doing so allows us to provide you with an SLA, guaranteed support request tracking, escalation and more.

Sincerely,
Own Web Now Corp Support Team
https://support.ownwebnow.com

Check out our blog:
http://www.ownwebnow.com/blog

There are several reasons we chose to eliminate the email support completely:

• We have no tracking of when/if a support request was emailed
• If the message is delayed because the support request was required to address a mail server issue we would get it far too late
• Clients would forget to provide updates
• Clients would keep the message thread going for support requests that were solved and were looking to address other issues
• E-mail is an insecure way of conducting e-commerce
• “Did you get my email?” <that they probably never sent>

There are far more reasons to drop email support but at the end of the day we needed a structured and fixed process of requesting support. At the moment there is only one way to get support, https://support.ownwebnow.com and we stand behind it with our SLA.

Thank you for doing business with us and I hope this change makes your support experience more enjoyable.

4:35 AM EST Update - Network shutdown proceeded as planned. The network recovery process is beginning. Please stand by as all the services are restored. Please be aware that we will not be able to work any Urgent or High priority cases while the maintenance cycle is active. We will resume regular SLA at noon EST. Please keep an eye on the blog as we update it throughout the morning.

10:51 AM EST Update - Powergrid maintenance complete, network maintenance complete, cage “shuffles” complete. Moving on to application layer testing.

1:21 AM EST, The day after update – All services, networks, systems and operations back to normal. We will provide additional details later, we’re also lobbying for a day off