Earlier today Hank Newman and I presented our ConnectWise integration, you can download the video here.

I would like to thank Howard Cunningham of Macro LLC (MSP servicing Washington DC and Virginia) and Raymond Smith of EZ Network Systems (MSP Servicing Stockton, California) for all the help and ConnectWise insight in creating this integration to serve all of our partners.

The video covered about 50 minutes of exploring the ConnectWise integration value, business case and use scenarios, deployment, getting the buyin of the person deploying it, etc. It will give you some insight into all the areas of ConnectWise and Own Web Now.

A Favor

This effort now completes our integration efforts with ConnectWise and we have no further development plans on our roadmap. We have no ETA on our “hosted ConnectWise” integration of our ConnectWise on-premise billing as it’s not currently possible with ConnectWise cloud API’s and will not be possible in the foreseeable future. With that in mind, I have two requests:

1) If you wish to see an integration point with ConnectWise you need to voice that need to ConnectWise through their forums, user groups and management. You are a ConnectWise client and you simply have more pull than we do. To give the benefit of the doubt to ConnectWise, we are certain that integration points some of you are asking for do not exist because enough users aren’t requesting them and the software company has to allocate resources to the development of features that are most requested. If you want a level of integration that isn’t there, voice it with ConnectWise, not us.

2) If you wish to get more information from us, or our input on the ConnectWise, feel free to invite us to the forums, events, user groups, etc. ConnectWise does not allow vendors at user groups, we have absolutely no access to the ConnectWise University, we have no insight into how to use ConnectWise or a way to formally or informally pool ConnectWise users. We only have our users.

We have made an extraordinary effort at a great expense and a tremendous amount of dedication of a few of our partners. How far we take the ConnectWise integration is at this point up to you. It is easily the most sophisticated integration of support, billing and statistics available not just for a cloud services provider but also for offsite backups and SMTP filtering and hygiene in ConnectWise. It is also the only integration of two way agreement sync, only hosted exchange, web hosting, sharepoint and virtual server billing available for ConnectWise. We have really gone the distance for our partners to help you be competitive in the market.

Now it’s your turn.

Join us tomorrow at 11 AM for a full walkthrough of Own Web Now’s integration with ConnectWise: statistics, support, billing and agreements. We have the most sophisticated integration into ConnectWise of any cloud services or antispam vendor, guaranteeing you that your OWN services are properly billed, accounted and reported for.

You can download details and whitepapers here: www.ownwebnow.com/connectwise

The presentation will last approximately 30 minutes with some Q&A time as well.

Please register for the webcast here:

March 3rd, 11 AM EST:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/150003248

Look forward to seeing you there.

Thanks to your support and business over the years we’ve grown tremendously. We’ve also done our fair share to promote our partners and deliver the solutions that have made our clients grow exponentially – and now we’re all feeling the pain of training new staff, getting up to speed with the new technology and changes to the existing systems. It’s a wonderful problem to have and solving it will make all of us amazingly successful.

I want you to know that the Support Services are first and foremost in 2010. We can’t go forward if we do not have the foundation of our business rock solid: What we offer is very simple and you should be able to go from a novice to an expert within the hour. That’s our goal and here is how we are doing it:

OWN University is located at http://go.ownwebnow.com and is our process of delivering support training to our partners and clients. We’ve always had the Support Portal, the Help, the ExchangeDefender Video Library but we’ve never had a landing page that would help train our partners on the product from start to finish and link in all the relevant information.

We have received high praise for the amount of training and the quality of information presented by Own Web Now and it’s something we take pride in – but finding that specific information has not always been easy. Now, we have a single landing page to point you to and it’s accessible from every page at ownwebnow.com

What to Expect

We will be adding relevant content on a monthly basis and in a wide range of media. We have whitepapers and FAQ articles for those of you that want to quickly locate information. We also have long-form training videos as well as SPAM Show and Webcasts designed to be consumed on the go and give you the full range of information. Here are some examples:

Onboarding Video – This guide will give you a full walkthrough of all OWN systems for service orders, technical support, marketing collateral and service management.

Exchange + SharePoint Hosting – This guide will walk you through the order and provisioning process for our Exchange & SharePoint products. We will then walk you through the Microsoft Outlook configuration, importing old mail to the new profile and more.

Offsite Backups – In this guide we will show you how to order Offsite Backups, manage the quota, configure the offsite backup agent and get the backups started.

Web Hosting – This guide will show you our web hosting control panel, process of purchasing hosting, your options when provisioning the site, if you should choose .NET or PHP hosting and more.

All of our videos are complemented by a whitepaper with screenshots and best practices tips – and vice versa. This gives you the ability to copy the content to your web sites and allow your clients to benefit from the same training without exposing our trademarks or relationship.

Most importantly, this is an ongoing commitment to our clients and partners, we stand behind our products more so than any of our competitors. Not only are our solutions integrated into PSA’s that you use to manage your business but we also allow you to offload that labor to our engineers – so the cost of support to you is $0. By providing better training and on boarding we also hope to reduce the costs associated with the deployment and management of our solutions.

I hope you agree that 2010 is going to be fantastic for us all. As always, thank you for your business!

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

Welcome to the new year, new decade. Today is the day to start doing something great. Even if you don’t buy into the 1st of the year and resolutions, it is the first day of the new fiscal year and time for us to kick off our 2010 agenda.

Our resolution is that 2010 is the year of our partners: We have never been more involved in the building of our partners businesses and the way our marketing and support teams will push our partners in 2010 will surprise you.

First things first, let’s find out where you are at this moment: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FTZF3BT

The survey above will give us an idea of how/if you work with us and what we can do to immediately improve in January. For us, 2009 was a year to retool, rebuild and revise all that we’ve build through the years. Our core products have been immensely popular through the years and we experienced some growing pains – but now we’re ready, with bandwidth and experience to take you to the next level.

Start by filling out the survey, whether you work with us or not: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FTZF3BT

Thank you and Happy New Year!

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

P.S. Remember, in 2010 I am here for you. You can reach me directly on my cell (407) 536-VLAD

The downturn in the economy has affected many of our partners, between downturn in business, longer collection periods, tighter credit market and more have made the reoccuring billing business a lot more difficult.

As the CEO of Own Web Now, I am here to tell you that we stand by our partners and we are willing to work with anyone that may be going through a tough time collecting money from clients. We’re in on this together.

However, in the interest of fairness, if we cannot contact you we cannot assume the collections expense that goes with avoiding calls and emails – we are simply not in that business. With the launch of new ExchangeDefender, new Shockey Monkey, new systems for our entire hosting platform we simply must turn our focus to the software and professional services our partners demand.

Today, we have had to say goodbye to a number of our partners that have had a poor payment track record (6+ months declines/delinquencies of 10+ days or more). In plain terms that means that we’ve had partners who have missed a payment every other month and that raises the fees for everyone which is simply not fair. Our partners and clients expect us to spend every dollar on R&D and enhancements, not collections.

I wanted to offer you our billing collections process so that you’re aware of our attempts:

1st of the month: If the transaction has been declined, retry transaction and document.

2nd of the month: Open support request in our portal (https://support.ownwebnow.com) about the past due invoice, retry transaction.

5th of the month: Retry transaction. If it still fails a phone call is made to the billing contact on record, if they were not contacted directly (secretary, voicemail) support request is updated.

8th of the month: Retry transaction. If it still fails a phone call is made with the 2nd notice, support request is updated.

10th of the month: Final retry and suspension notice is given in the portal. Partner is given 24 hours to provide valid billing information.

11th of the month: If the new billing information is not provided, all services are suspended.

We are not heartless, we are more than willing to work with companies that are affected by the economic downturn. Unfortunately, if we cannot contact you on the phone, if the support portal is ignored and over a week passes with repeated notices, we have no choice but to move on.

Today we have permanently suspended companies that have abused our kindness and had a consistently poor payment track record. It is within our right to suspend services within 3 days, charge reconnection fees, etc: We usually do not. However, when our company is clearly abused we have no choice but to reconsider whether it’s fair to other partners to let a small group of companies abuse the billing concessions we have made.

So to recap: Collections are expensive and we’re a software company; that meant that we’ve had to remove a number of partners that abused our billing grace periods. We know it’s tough out there, reach out to us and we will bend backwards to help you.

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek

CEO, Own Web Now Corp.

After many months of development, feedback and suggestions we are happy to announce the Autotask integration with Own Web Now. We are the first vendor to offer full support request syncronization, allowing Own Web Now to handle full support of all it’s products through the Autotask API – free of charge! No more double ticket entry, no more searching two portals, no more running around – everything is in Autotask.

Additionally, we have eliminated one of the most consuming administrative tasks regarding ExchangeDefender: Mailbox counts. With Autotask, this process is automated. Own Web Now will submit mailbox counts to Autotask and keep them in sync so they can be billed automatically, making sure you are paid for all the services you are paying for – automatically!

Finally, while the integration whitepaper and process is free, many partners indicated that they would rather have us handle the integration and support for them. We are offering this service for $199 one-time fee during the launch to make sure you hit the ground running. In addition to saving you some time and making sure everything is perfect, this package also gives you actual support for the integration should things change or you ever experience any issues.

We are proud to also start a new training series featuring whitepapers, webcasts and podcasts covering the way some of the best in business use the Autotask integration with Own Web Now to be more efficient and profitable. This is included at no additional charge with the Support Package mentioned above.

To get started, check out http://www.ownwebnow.com/autotask

Have a great day!

As noted previously (and discussed in our portal, conference call and newsletters) the enhanced SMTP security policies are now in place. Going forward, all SMTP traffic on our networks (inbound and outbound) will have to pass through ExchangeDefender in order to reach it’s target server. This network change affects all servers and all networks controlled by Own Web Now Corp.

If you have a requirement for plain SMTP connectivity for mail relay please either consider establishing a VPN directly to your server (if you are a dedicated/virtual customer) or upgrade to Microsoft Outlook and use RPC-over-HTTPS proxy available for our hosting customers. If you require SMTP for your client needs (Thunderbird, Outlook Express) please use SMTP-over-SSL (TLS) in your setup.

Despite enhancements in the security products and reduced cost of antivirus products, SMTP based attacks have continued to rise through 2009. We are committed to protecting our customers and limiting exposure that comes with an open SMTP port.

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:

Up to 5 Hosted Exchange 2007 mailboxes

20 GB Mailbox limit

20 GB SharePoint v3 DB limit

ExchangeDefender MSP Branding

$1 / month / mailbox (each)

Optional: $99 BES (setup), $0/month.

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

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,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp