SmarterMail 10.x BETA Now Available

May 29, 2012 by 25 Comments

We’re excited to announce the BETA of the next version of our popular Windows mail server: SmarterMail 10.x. This version of SmarterMail brings several new features and functionality that end-users have requested as well as other improvements throughout, and even incorporates a new, faster Web interface. While we couldn’t incorporate everyone’s ideas into this release, we prioritized our users’ wants to create a new version of SmarterMail that we think you’ll really like.

So let’s take a look at what’s new…

SmarterMail failover

Protection from downtime with failover

A very long-awaited feature for SmarterMail has been failover. Since mail servers have become the hub of all communication and collaboration within a company, any interruption in service can significantly impact an individual’s, not to mention an entire company’s, productivity. Protect your mail server from experiencing such an outage by having a second server as a hot standby. SmarterMail Enterprise licensing and the EULA will now include the ability to have a secondary mail server in standby mode at no additional cost.

SmarterMail mobile interface

Mobile interface for smartphones

While it’s true that you can use your phone’s email client or calendar app to view your inbox and check you daily schedule, there are times when that’s not always possible. For example, you’re at lunch with a friend and don’t have your phone and you need to check your schedule to make sure you’re not late for any appointments. To solve this problem, we’ve created a simple, yet effective, mobile interface just for smartphone users. Managing email, contacts, calendars, tasks and notes on Android, iPhone and Windows Phones via the mobile interface is hassle-free and easier than ever.

Multiple contact email addresses

SmarterMail 10.x expands its contact management to include support for friends, family and business associates who have more than one email address. For example, include both a work and a personal address so that you can keep your personal emails separate from their work emails, and vice versa. You can even sync these multiple contact addresses across multiple devices using technologies such as SyncML, Microsoft ActiveSync, SharepointSync, Exchange Web Services and others.

Simple set up with auto-discovery

With SmarterMail 10.x, we’re making every effort to reduce the amount of time necessary to configure clients on both desktop and mobile devices using IMAP, SMTP, POP, Exchange ActiveSync or Exchange Web Services. With auto-discovery, only the email address and password are necessary on most clients and all other configuration information is automatically configured. Auto-discovery will make life much easier for users setting up their own accounts and will dramatically decrease the amount of administration and support needed from a company’s IT Department.

Outlook availability checking

Availability checking in Outlook for Mac

Users who sync their mailboxes with Outlook 2011 for Mac via Exchange Web Services (and who eventually move to the next versions of Outlook for Windows that will support EWS) can now check the availability of meeting attendees right from within the Outlook interface. Using the Scheduling Assistant from within Outlook means that you will never double-book appointments again and that you’ll always be able to see who’s available when you need them.

Conference room scheduling in SmarterMail

Conference Room Scheduling

An important feature in Microsoft Exchange is the ability to schedule time in conference rooms, and many customers have asked for this feature to be included in SmarterMail. We’re pleased to announce that SmarterMail 10.x now includes this functionality and eliminates the need to manage separate documents or calendars for conference room availability.

Lost a Phone? Worried about personal data? Remotely Wipe!

Mobile devices are used for nearly all aspects of our personal and professional lives so they end up storing vast amounts of critical information: contacts, bank account information and even personal or business documents. Now more than ever the ability to remotelywipe a lost or stolen mobile device is critical to prevent your personal data falling into someone else’s hands. SmarterMail 10.x now provides this functionality so that system administrators can now quickly, easily and securely wipe a mobile device from anywhere, at any time, using the SmarterMail 10.x Web interface. Best of all, while the mobile device will be set to factory defaults, all personal information with still be in SmarterMail and can be re-synced to the recovered or even a new device.

Is that it?

Of course not! SmarterMail 10.x has more features and improvements. You’ll find them in the release notes we’ll post in the SmarterMail 10.x BETA forum, but here are a few more that might be of interest:

  • 8-bit MIME support.
  • Support for ActiveSync 14.1 which includes the ability to determine if a message has been replied to or forwarded from your mobile device.
  • SRS support so forwarded emails are not erroneously marked as spam.
  • A system-level event to notify administrators when disk space is low on the server.
  • A blocked recipient list for outgoing SMTP messages.
  • Multiple interface changes to increase the speed and responsiveness on both desktops and tablets.
  • Various other fixes and improvements to the overall performance and reliability of SmarterMail.

Getting started with the BETA

If you’re interested in getting your hands on the BETA, please visit the SmarterMail 10.x BETA forum, where you’ll see how to:

  • Sign up for the BETA
  • Get a special BETA license key
  • Download the latest BETA release (we update it regularly)
  • Communicate with other BETA testers and the SmarterTools development team
  • Stay up-to-date on the latest release note and BETA news

Sign up for the BETA

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterTools

The Importance of SEO Friendly Help Documentation

May 21, 2012 by

When was the last time you went to a manufacturer’s website to search for answers to a question about a particular product? If you’re like most people, you don’t. Instead, you head to Google and type in your question, then start clicking on results. If you’re lucky – or, more likely, if the manufacturer is lucky – one of the top results is from the maker of whatever product you have the question about. Otherwise, you see results from forums and blogs, and maybe Google+, Facebook and Twitter feeds, which address the same, or similar, question you have.

When people use other outlets than your own to find answers to questions about your products or services, that’s traffic, not to mention authority, that you’re missing out on. So, how can you keep your site and your company at the top of organic search results when people have questions about your products? The answer is really pretty simple.

Make sure your helpdesk offers SEO friendly tools

You put a lot of time and effort into creating website content that is keyword rich and that will draw you tons of organic traffic. Make sure your helpdesk offers the same opportunity. Many knowledge base systems on the market don’t offer things like:

  • Article content that can actually be searched by search engines
  • The ability to tag articles with valued keywords
  • The ability to create summaries of articles that are keyword-rich
  • The ability to create keyword rich article titles
  • The ability to generate URLS based off your keyword rich titles
  • The ability to create HTML content so you can add keyword-rich ALT and TITLE tags for images, create keyword-rich links to your website and more.
  • Sharing of knowledge base articles across a variety of social networks, including Twitter, Facebook and even Digg.

If your helpdesk can’t give you these essential tools for creating search engine friendly content, then you’re in danger of losing valuable traffic to sources that aren’t as authoritative as your own. Worse, you could be sending traffic to your competitors.

View and react to customer search history

Your ability to craft valuable knowledge base content is only as good as your ability to tell whether you’re answering your customers’ questions. That’s where being able to see what your customers are searching for in your knowledge base comes in handy. Even better is the ability to see what search queries return no relevant articles. Maybe a query returns articles, but those articles have few, if any, views relative to the number of searches.

If your customers are looking for information that can’t be found, that’s a huge problem. If you can’t bridge that gap then you’re losing traffic, and you may even be losing customers, especially if information they’re seeking can be found on a competitor’s website.

Search for yourself to find areas of improvement

While it’s best to follow what your customers are searching for when you craft helpdesk content, it’s also a good idea to do your own reconnaissance. That means diving into your helpdesk and performing your own searches and seeing what comes up. Follow customer searches to see what articles, if any, show up. If an article is relevant for a particular search term, but it has no views, see if you can figure out why.

You may even want to perform the same search on Google and see what comes up and analyze the results, then use that information to craft your own articles. Heck, see how competitors address similar questions in their own help systems and follow their lead – but only if they’re returning relevant results. You’ll be amazed at what you find by getting your hands a little dirty.

Use relevant keywords whenever and wherever possible

This is pretty much a no brainer but it’s worth mentioning anyway. You need to make sure you hit relevant keyword content in all of your articles, even if it’s simply in the article summary and tags. You don’t need to have them all over an article or its title, but if you’re answering a question there’s no reason you can’t include relevant, related keywords in an article’s summary or in the tags associated with the article. The more important point is to address the issue. Keyword content is a close second, though.

Allow users to share your most important articles with their friends

The rise of social media always reminds me of that famous Faberge Organics shampoo commercial. Since social media is all about being social, about sharing information and links – as well as videos of cats – with a network of friends and associates, you need to make sure your users are able to share your key articles across whatever social network they want: Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Reddit and others. The ability to share your information not only allows for social interaction of your brand with the friends of your users, but also gives some added SEO power to your information.

Of course all of this is only possible if you have a helpdesk that supports it all. If Google or Bing can’t access your helpdesk content, including any news items or RSS feeds, then it’s time for a new helpdesk. Remember: your helpdesk is a huge repository of information about your product or service and it’s just as important to the success of your company as your primary website. A helpdesk can easily double the amount of relevant and searchable content about your company, so it’s imperative that you have that resource in your hands. You can bet your competitors do.

Filed under SmarterTools, SmarterTrack, SmarterTrack.com Tagged with , , , , ,

How Google Drive beats Dropbox and SkyDrive

May 10, 2012 by 5 Comments

As your company grows, so does the necessity to better manage company documents and files. Like many companies, SmarterTools utilized file servers at our data center and created shares for various departments. This was, of course, a decent solution, but one that required a bit of maintenance by our IT staff and required our employees to use VPN in order to access the server, and this wasn’t a good solution for the up and coming tablets. So, in 2010 we decided to evaluate “cloud based storage” solutions. We looked at Box.net, Dropbox, SugarSync and a few others and eventually settled on Dropbox. We have been a long time customer and supporter of Dropbox and we’ve used them through thick and thin, like their security mishaps and some terms of service issues. We weathered these storms because the service is robust, it’s reliable and its sharing and team features keep the management of our documents and files simple and secure. However, the recent updates and rebranding of both Microsoft SkyDrive and Google Drive has made us re-evaluate the functionality and pricing of Dropbox. Through this re-evaluation we discovered that we can decrease our file storage costs approximately $3700.00! You read that right – a $3700.00 savings!

Why use a cloud storage solution versus a file server?

Apart from the savings we see from an IT standpoint, there are some personal and technical savings as well. SmarterTools employees need access to documents and files whether they’re online or offline.  We work all hours of the day and from anywhere; some of us travel, some work better at night, some work better from home and several are responsible for 24 x 7 x 365 emergency support incidents. In addition, we use many different mobile and desk-based devices. While everyone is provided a laptop, that laptop may be Windows or Mac. We use tablets such as iPads or Asus Transformers and use a variety of mobile phones as well, including Windows-, iOS-, and Android-based devices. With an internal file server, in order to get to a file we’d have to deal with all of these personal, geographic and technical variables and use a number of different methods, applications and protocols to reach our company documents and files. Sometimes that became a huge hassle. For example, many tablets and phones don’t support VPN well and that’s a critical component for reaching a networked server. IN addition, some devices, like the iPad, aren’t file based.

Ultimately, we ended up with Dropbox because every situation, platform, location and device mentioned above is fully supported and we’ve found that everything synchronizes quickly and completely, and while we were paying close to $4000.00 a year to use the service, the price was worth it considering how it made things so much easier on the entire team.

So, why move to another provider? One of the things that makes SmarterTools a successful business is that we are never really content with how things run or with how we do things. We always look for improvements. With the recent announcements from Microsoft about SkyDrive and the rebranding and added features of Google Drive, we felt it would be worth our time to evaluate these new developments. I have to say, we’re pleasantly surprised with the results.

Doom for Dropbox?

First things first: Dropbox is a wonderful service. Even though they’ve had their share of adversity and public brow beating, we were very happy with the service they provided. The unfortunate thing for Dropbox is that their Team feature, which is what we had to use in order to be able to share department-level access across multiple users, secure access to folders and files, etc. requires adding additional “users” to the team account, and this can be very pricey. The pricing for our Dropbox usage is as follows: $795.00 for Team sharing, which includes 1TB of space and 5 users.  Additional users are $125.00 each, so for 25 more users we pay an additional $3125.00. All together, that’s $3,920.00. In addition to the cost, when using the Team features of Dropbox, each users’ Dropbox account is converted into your Team account. So, when an employee leaves, you must email Dropbox support and have their user turned into standard account. Otherwise, users wouldn’t have access to any files they’ve put into their personal Dropbox space.

Looking at Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive, their services are based solely on space. That means that only a main, corporate account needs a paid plan. Accounts that have shared access to folders on the primary account can be free! Using SmarterTools as an example, we only need one account that has 200GB of storage. We want to share this 200GB of content so our employees can sign up for a free Google Drive or Microsoft SkyDrive account and then accept invitations to the shared resources that are created on the primary account. As of now, accepting a shared resource on a free account does not impact the 5GB or 7GB allotments that Google and Microsoft respectively provide. That is a huge cost saving advantage! In addition, when an employee leaves the company, all that needs to be done is that the main SmarterTools account needs to remove that individual’s access to any shared resources. For Google Drive, those files and directories on the users’ machines are then automatically, and instantly, removed.

Let’s look at a pricing comparison for Google Drive and SkyDrive. Again, with 30 accounts on Google Drive we’d need a primary account and pay $120.00 per year for 200GB of storage. The additional 29 users would be free accounts. With SkyDrive the cost is $100.00 per year for a primary account with 200gb of storage, and the additional 29 accounts would be free! Compare either of these to the $3,290.00 cost at Dropbox for users and and the $795 Team feature and you see the overall savings!

How do we protect our documents and files from a cloud storage disaster?

When you’re in the software and services business, you understand the risks associated with having tired programmers and network administrators. No matter how many policies or procedures you put in place, something can happen. Because of this, we don’t rely solely on the cloud storage company for backups. Even though Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive support file revisions there is still the possibility of file loss. To alleviate some of that concern we also have a server configured with an account which pulls down all documents and files. This server is then backed up in our datacenter as all our other servers are and can be used in case of a cloud storage disaster. Now this isn’t a “file server” per se, so we’re not accessing the server for access to files, etc. It’s a server that we use for other things that also acts as our backup server. Therefore, the maintenance and other costs associated with a standalone file server are not issues.

Ultimately, we chose Google Drive because…

So the question is why did we decided to go with Google Drive versus SkyDrive? The answer is really simple: just like Dropbox, Google Drive’s clients for Mac and Windows desktops download shared files to machines. As of today, Microsoft SkyDrive clients do not work like this. The shares are available in the SkyDrive Web interface, but their desktop clients and tablet/phone clients does not support shared folders and files which is a necessity.

Taking all of this into account, things are looking a little grim for Dropbox. Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive are incredible offerings at incredible prices. Apart from the cost savings, the effort both Google and Microsoft are putting into cloud storage gives us a great deal of confidence in their offerings, in the progress they’re making and that any issues we’re currently seeing will be quickly resolved. On the other hand, Dropbox seems to be screwed!

Filed under SmarterTools, Technology Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Microsoft building an ecosystem with Barnes and Noble investment

May 1, 2012 by 2 Comments

Microsoft is one of the largest players in the next generation of platforms and operating systems but it’s the only one with out an ecosystem. That is, it’s the only one without revenue generating services that can help power and guide those platforms

In a previous blog post, “Windows 8 will succeed, but Microsoft could still fail“, I talked about Windows 8 and the impact it could have on the antiquated business model Microsoft has for their Windows Division. Specifically, I talk about how their business model is in trouble due to pressures on providing free upgrades like Apple and Google do for the iOS and Android platforms. I further propose that, without additional revenue generating services, Microsoft is going to have a difficult time competing in the platform space moving forward. In order for Windows to succeed in the Post-PC era, Microsoft needs to build an ecosystem that provides their main source or revenue in the consumer space.

Oddly enough, it seems Microsoft understands this and its recent injection of money into Barnes and Noble is proof.

It’s no great secret that Microsoft is years behind Apple, Amazon, and Google in providing online services. In addition, Microsoft will not be able to build these services in a reasonable amount of time and, to be honest, their track record has proven they aren’t necessarily very good at it. They have attempted multiple music services, either through building it themselves or via partnership, and none were very successful. In addition, their implementation had a long lasting impact on users because they took down DRM servers making some music no longer able to be played.  Bing has been somewhat of a bomb and continues to cost Microsoft money.

The “funding” of a new Barnes and Noble digital and educational company is brilliant. This allows Microsoft to complete against all three major e-book players on a fairly level playing field very quickly. Without Barnes and Noble, Microsoft would be in a world of hurt, plus they have added another piece to their ecosystem.  Microsoft is already planning to come out with an App Store for Metro, which will provide some decent revenue opportunities, but having access to the Barnes and Noble customer base and providing their e-reader on all Windows 8 versions is a step in the right direction.

Now the question is, where is Microsoft going to get video?

A friend of mine, Jeff Hardy, sent me an email and suggested, albeit sarcastically, that Microsoft buy Netflix. The funny thing is, I agree 100% with the idea.  Netflix is in trouble. They don’t have enough money to get enough content and they’re stuck.  Companies such as NBC, CBS, FOX, Showtime, HBO, etc. don’t like the Netflix model. Plus, Netflix has another issue: their model works great for older content but you can’t sell customers on older content. New and ever-changing content drives revenue. That’s why CBS, NBC, et. al. have their own apps and websites for customers to consume “new” content.

Microsoft has the perfect opportunity to get into the TV and movie service, immediately and across ALL platforms.  Microsoft could go from zero ecosystem to a complete ecosystem, across every device and platform available, practically overnight. Once Microsoft has their new media service (i.e., post-Netflix), they will have the money and the leverage to bargain with the NBC, CBS, HBO and other media companies. Microsoft will now own the platforms – Windows Mobile and Windows for desktops and tablet – and will have the ability to extend Netflix into a rental service as well, just as Apple has with iTunes and Amazon with their Prime service. The Amazon model is really the one everyone needs to move to. What’s holding Amazon back is that their video can only be played on limited devices and the service is very dependent on Flash.

So that leaves Microsoft with a need for a music service, and it sounds like they’re going to try to develop their own solution again. This time it should be simpler both because they’ve tried it before, and this time there are a few good models to use moving forward.

Investors, and even politicians, are giving Microsoft a lot of heat for sitting on nearly $60 billion in cash. This might have been a very smart decision and will give Microsoft a lot of flexibility in their direction and development of online services as there are some very well established companies that can make Microsoft very relevant very quickly, for the right price.

It would be a pleasant surprise if Microsoft could erase their consumer failures over the last 5 years. Apple’s iOS has had the same look and feel for the last few years and I don’t think Apple has felt pressure from Google and Android from a “user experience” standpoint. Microsoft, especially with there Metro interface, might be the nudge that Apple needs to evolve their very functional, but somewhat boring, mobile platform.

After all is said and done, what do you think of a Microsoft acquisition of Netflix? Does it make sense? Do you think Microsoft has what it takes to build a comparable ecosystem to Apple, Amazon and Google?

Filed under SmarterTools, Technology Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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