Efficiency IS a Product Feature

October 4, 2012 by 6 Comments

image courtesy of Webio.pl

If you pay attention to the release notes that accompany every major or minor release of SmarterMail – and let’s be honest, who doesn’t – then you probably notice EFFICIENCY tags scattered amongst the FIXED, CHANGED, ADDED and REMOVED tags. This is because improving how SmarterMail performs is just as important to SmarterTools as adding new features.  In fact, it could be argued that improving product performance release-over-release is even more important than adding in new features.

Often people think that the best way to improve a product is by adding in a bunch of shiny new features. However, this can lead to having a ton of new things that look nice but that don’t add any real value to the product. A smarter approach is to continually refine a product, adding in incremental improvements from version to version, with new features added in to support the refinements rather than having new features as the primary focus.

If you need an example of this approach, look no further than Apple’s recent announcement of the iPhone 5. To many people it was a disappointment because there was “nothing new” – no NFC, no wireless charging, etc. To those of us who develop products and services, we saw something different. We saw a company with a keen eye towards improving an already incredible device. Apart from the larger screen, they didn’t really focus on any new feature, they just improved what they had and focused on how they improved it. A recent article by Mat Honan in Wired, titled “The iPhone 5 is Completely Amazing and Utterly Boring”, states this perfectly:

“…Apple never just casually moves on to the next thing. It doesn’t Sony-up and release new products for the sake of releasing them. Instead, it keeps its product line focused, and meticulously refines it year after year, making everything a little bit better. Which means by four or five generations in, especially when it comes to industrial design, Apple’s products tend to hit a sweet spot, where changing them isn’t going to improve them. It might even make them worse.”

If you need an example from the software side of things, take a look at M.G. Sigler’s post about the latest version of Chrome for OS X. The big takeaway here is that “[i]t seems like Google is adding stuff to Chrome just to add it. It’s as if they feel like they can’t do nothing feature-wise, so they come up with junk to shove in there, slowing Chrome down in the process.” Again, blinky/shiny new features that provide little end user enlightenment.

So, this leads us back to the SmarterMail release notes with the EFFICIENCY tags and how we view those efficiency changes as actual product features. Looking at the last two minor releases of SmarterMail, you’ll see the following:

  • EFFICIENCY: CPU and network responsiveness greatly improved by changes to performance counter logging.
  • EFFICIENCY: CPU usage reduced for all protocols.
  • EFFICIENCY: Improved efficiency of IMAP commands using sequence-set arguments such as FETCH and STORE.
  • EFFICIENCY: Email grid generation and scrolling in webmail have been made considerably faster.
  • EFFICIENCY: IMAP performance and CPU usage has been improved.
  • EFFICIENCY: Improved the efficiency of retrieving unread and recent message counts for a mail folder resulting in faster webmail and IMAP performance.
  • EFFICIENCY: Optimized loading of the web interface.
  • EFFICIENCY: Webmail interface is now significantly faster on accounts with many folders.

You’ll notice in these notes usage of words like “optimize”, “faster”, “improved”, “reduced” and others. We do our best to not add in something that users don’t see value in. By constantly looking to improve our products, we’re guaranteed to provide value with the release, even if there’s nothing “new”, per se, added.

In terms of how these efficiency features increase the value of SmarterMail, take the case of Webio.pl. They are a hosting company in Poland that uses SmarterMail for their shared hosting customers. The image at the top of this post is a before and after snapshot of the CPU and memory usage of their server, where the dip at the beginning of September corresponds to when they upgraded to a minor version with some significant CPU usage efficiency changes. As you can see, increasing the efficiency of the product led to a huge decrease in the amount of CPU SmarterMail was using. As a large hosting company, that decrease means less strain on their servers, on their network, on their support teams and on their customers. The removal of that extra stress of customers constantly calling because their mail service is slow is a feature in and of itself for Webio.

So what do you think? Is an “efficiency” release worth the cost of upgrading and does an increase in efficiency, and therefore a decrease in issues and headaches, pay for itself with increased productivity? We’re curious to know your thoughts.

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterTools

Two Days of DMARC

July 23, 2012 by

I recently attended a two-day event at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, CA.  The event was to test interoperability of various implementations of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC). As SmarterMail supports DMARC, the appeal of this conference meant that we would be able to interact with service providers who are actively working on the DMARC specification and to ensure that our implementation was on track.

What is DMARC?

For those unfamiliar with it, DMARC is a specification that builds upon SPF and DKIM allowing the domain owner control of what happens to messages purporting to be sent from that domain but failing either of those authentication mechanisms. The main piece that differentiates DMARC from anything that has come before it is the reporting aspect.  The receiving mail servers report back on a regular interval to domains implementing DMARC policies.  The reports contain information on the affect those policies are having on delivery of messages from that domain to the reporting server.  This allows the domain owner to make informed decisions on what changes to make to their policy.

The Event Itself

I haven’t been to an event like this previously so I wasn’t sure what to expect.  The attendees were mostly very large mail services including AOL, Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn, CloudMark and Facebook of course.  Interestingly, Microsoft was not there.  What I found more interesting, however, was that SmarterTools was the only company in attendance, at least that I am aware of, that offers a mail server (not as a service).  I would estimate the attendance around 25 people, so it was a small gathering.

The actual event consisted of two days of working on DMARC implementations.  As boring as that may sound, the specification is a work in progress with the hopes of going through IETF for standardization as an RFC.  Therefore, being able to work with it on this level – before it is actually adopted – and to sit in a room with the people responsible for its development and interact with them was a great and enlightening experience. The specification seems fairly complete at this point although there were a couple conversations that could affect some small changes to it.  I came away from the event with a few improvements to our DMARC implementation as well as some homework for a couple more.  These changes will all be part of our SmarterMail 10.1 release on August 2nd.

Work Fast and Break Things

Since the event was held at Facebook, I’m sure there are people wondering what Facebook life is like. Unfortunately, my exposure was very limited.  It consisted of the main building where I received a temporary guest badge and was then chaperoned to the building where we worked for the remainder of the day.  We did not get a tour of the campus.  Walking out the back of the main “check in” building did give me the impression that I was in “Facebookland”, with lots of young people wearing Facebook shirts walking this way and that and with two rows of identical buildings framing the activity.  So while I didn’t get to see a large portion of what Facebook is about, the feeling I took from what I did see was a very young and energetic company.

The first floor of the building where we worked was a very large dining hall where we ate breakfast and lunch courtesy of Facebook.  Two thumbs up on the quality of the food.  A Facebook employee explained that they have another dining hall of equal size on the other side of the campus and each one serves a different theme each day, so if you don’t like what is being served at one you just hike over to the other one.  They also have a barbecue option that is available every day.

On the second floor where we worked I saw a couple signs that said things like “work fast” and “be bold” which I figured were motivational signs but then I realized those were actually the names of the rooms.  We were in “be bold”.  On the night I arrived at the hotel in Palo Alto, I watched a program on Facebook and one of their mottoes was “work fast and break things”.  I did not see the “break things” room, but I imagine it with chairs and tables bolted to the floor and lots of rubberized, rounded corners.

All in all, the conference was a great experience. I was very surprised that some of our competitors weren’t there and that SmarterTools was the only mail server developer who attended. Then again, we do try and stay as up-to-date as possible on the latest technologies being developed that affect the email industry. Being able to sit in a room and listen to, and participate in, a discussion about a new specification was a great experience. It not only gave me greater insight into the whole approval process but also will improve how SmarterMail integrates DMARC moving forward. Then, there was the food and the whole Facebook part of it. Not a bad way to spend a couple of days, if you ask me.

This post was written by Bryon Grosz, the development manager for SmarterMail, SmarterTools’ Microsoft Exchange replacement mail and collaboration software. If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the SmarterTools Blog so you don’t miss an update.

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterTools Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

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

Microsoft’s Problem(s)

April 17, 2012 by 15 Comments

Everyone knows Microsoft has lost its vision and direction in the consumer market and is years behind most industry leaders, with the Xbox as the possible exception.  But few know that Microsoft is facing the same loss of vision and direction with its server and enterprise business.

Microsoft is losing the battle of the Web

Microsoft's IIS is in red

Lets start with a little shock value: At the start of 2009, Microsoft’s IIS software was responsible for hosting about 35% of the websites on the Web. As of March 2012, Microsoft is now at approximately 13.5%. This is a 62% drop in the last 3 years and has had, and will continue to have, a significant impact on Microsoft’s future. This drop is even more dramatic when you consider the history of the Web and Microsoft IIS. As a former hosting provider myself, I remember starting my hosting business back in 1995 running Windows NT 3.51. It’s true that over the last 17 years, IIS suffered a number of issues. Today, however, it is a VERY solid and stable Web server platform. So why is Microsoft becoming as obsolete in the hosting industry as it has in the mobile phone and tablet industry? (Yes, Windows 8 shows some promise for tablets, but when it is released it will still be years behind iOS and Android in terms of availability and adoption – those are years it can’t make up). Microsoft has done a number of things to make Microsoft a viable platform and has overcome a lot of obstacles. However, in many cases each change for the better seems to precipitate a change for the worse.

Changes for better and worse

  • While Microsoft was slow to adopt open source development technologies such as PHP and Perl, they DID adopt them into the IIS/Windows realm, which is something you can’t say of the open source community with relation to Microsoft technologies like .NET.  (The MonoProject does exist but has not been well supported).
  • They introduced the Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA), which made all hosting and service providers pay monthly royalties versus one-time expenditures. SPLA itself isn’t bad but there were some pricing blunders, like one in 2009 that could have doubled the costs for hosting providers (anyone remember the authenticated/non authenticated license fiasco?), that really put the fear of God into many Microsoft hosting partners. Some proposed upcoming changes may have an even greater effect on the viability of hosting Windows products, like changing SQL Server 2012 SPLA pricing to be based on the number of processor cores a server has versus the number of physical processors.
  • They had security vulnerabilities that made it difficult to isolate many customers on one web server for shared hosting. Over the last several years they have solidified the Windows server OS through the ability to set .NET permissions on app pools and made it easier to manage multiple single app pools sites on a a single server as well as mange resources by site, thereby increasing security and performance in higher density environments.
  • They were initially slow to respond to hosting companies and the hosting model. They tried to force their own ideal of Windows hosting onto the community without listening to existing Windows hosts. For a few years, however, they actually made an effort to start a conversation with Windows hosts. Nevertheless, I get the impression from talking to partners that his conversation is, once again, turning a bit one-sided.
  • And more recently, they started competing against their hosting partners with Office Live, Azure, Office365 and more. Microsoft always had a semi-contentious relationship with hosting partners. On the one hand they did what they could to make it easier on hosting providers but, all the while, many providers knew that Microsoft was going to benefit most from whatever changes were made. Whatever positive change Microsoft made for partners was closely followed by some other announcement, like when they announced that with every Office Live sign up users received a free website and free hosting for it, that was in direct competition to what partners were offering.

Many of these obstacles still exist but what Microsoft really seems to lack is a hosting division that really wants to commit to winning the “website count” battle. At one time the hosting division at Microsoft was VERY focused on this goal and we were often told that was how funding for the division was determined. I get the impression that this is no longer the case.

Hosting as a channel to the SMB

The hosting industry is an important channel for Microsoft as it allows them to access small and medium sized businesses, web developers and designers, and a number of enterprise customers. With a continued drop off in website count there will be a transition from not only IIS-based web servers but also many other server roles that are crucial to the hosting industry. This includes things like mail servers, application servers, cloud servers, virtualization servers and more. With the drop off, the impact on revenue for Exchange Server, .NET and Visual Studio, Hyper-V and Windows Server is clear but, bigger than that, will be the lack of a channel to reach the small and medium sized businesses and the design and development community, which is huge.

And I don’t think that Microsoft can make up for this loss by transitioning their focus to services like Office365. Microsoft is having an incredibly difficult time reaching small and medium sized businesses through their online services. Many SMB’s like the ability to have choice and go to hosting companies that may be local and close to their offices (or at least in their same city), that speak their language, that offer professional services beyond just hosting a website, that offer live and accessible customer service and support, and more. These are areas that Microsoft can’t compete. By focusing on the hosting market and by focusing on their hosting partners, Microsoft was spreading their technology and not only securing and increasing revenues on the server end, but they were also protecting their phone, tablet and desktop prospects.

What happened to “developers, developers, developers“?

The developer also plays a huge role in this. Microsoft has always done a great job creating opportunity for developers to build businesses around extending Windows and its overall platform. As Microsoft dwindles in its popularity the desire to work with Visual Studio, .NET and Windows in general will also decrease. As it is, many developers want to make the shift to OSX and want to avoid having to code to multiple machines and platforms. By moving to open source technologies such as Ruby, PHP, Perl, etc. they have this flexibility.

What does this all mean for Microsoft? Well, they are losing from all angles. Although their enterprise division is reporting growth, these “website count” issues will start to impact that business over time. In addition, it will impact the development division and eventually their desktop and consumer divisions will feel the pinch. As it stands, Microsoft’s own online services are years away from replacing their hosting partners and the personal and customizable services that hosting providers offer to small and medium sized businesses.

That’s my take, anyway. What are your thoughts? What does Microsoft have to do to start regaining market share in the hosting business and avoid becoming obsolete?

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterStats, SmarterTools, SmarterTrack, Technology Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,

SmarterTools 2012 Conference Meetups

January 24, 2012 by

Photo courtesy of the HostingCon Flickr feed.

As many of you know, the SmarterTools ownership team came from the Web hosting industry where we provided services to almost 100,000 businesses worldwide. In those days, it was difficult to find solutions that provided the features that small and medium sized businesses required while offering the high availability, security and ease of maintenance that our fairly large-scale enterprises required.

For example, the mail server options available were expensive and incredibly unstable and often resulted in daily downtime. In fact, at one point we had employees whose sole responsibility was pushing messages through our mail server spools.

As for help desks, we couldn’t find any that were able to handle the amount of data we pushed through them and besides, they only offered a single function – we had to have different solutions for call tracking, email tickets and internal tasks.

Plus, there weren’t any stable and reliable options for providing customers with analytics on how their online businesses were running. The products that were available provided very limited information. There was no single product that offered features like data mining, search engine optimization and analysis and limited server health reporting.

As a result of all this, SmarterTools was born. We decided to build our own applications that provided small to medium sized businesses with the tools they needed for business communication and analytics, but that also had the ability to be provided through hosting and service providers. Over the years, the products we created have grown to offer a variety of features that are important to enterprise organizations while keeping with our focus on the small and medium business. In addition, our philosophy of being able to install and set up any of our products within minutes and keeping management/administration of our products simple and convenient remains intact and is a key component of our success.

Photo courtesy of WorldHostingDays.

Although we are no longer in the hosting business, we are firmly embedded in the small and medium sized business community. We use every one of our own applications and continue to enhance them based on our needs, to solve problems we see in the SMB market and to address the needs of thousands and thousands of customers. We continue to communicate directly with our customers through social outlets such as our community forums, our Facebook page and our Twitter account, as well as via various focus groups. We also enjoy meeting face-to-face with customers at conferences and local industry events.

This leads me to the point of this blog post. In 2012, SmarterTools is making a concerted effort to make ourselves available to you — our partners, customers and potential customers across all industries, including hosting companies, service providers and small businesses. To this end, we’ve compiled a list of the conferences we’re attending this year, along with information on where they are and the dates we’ll be in the area. We’d like to set up face-to-face meetings with as many of you as possible, whether it’s at the conference or even at your place of business.

So don’t be surprised if you receive an email asking if you’d be interested in sitting down with SmarterTools CEO Tim Uzzanti, our Manager of Internal Development, Grady Werner, our Manager of SmarterMail Development, Bryon Grosz, or even me, Derek Curtis, the Vice President of Marketing and Communications, and other SmarterTools development staff. We’d love to talk about your business, your goals and how SmarterTools can help get you to where you want to be. If you’d rather not wait for us to contact you, simply send us an email at sales@smartertools.com and we’ll set up a place and time to talk.

We look forward to meeting you all and hope to see you at one of the following events:

Parallels Summit – February 14 – 16
Gaylord Palms, Orlando, FL
http://www.parallels.com/summit/2012/

WorldHostingDays – March 20 – 23
Europa Park, Rust, Germany
http://www.worldhostingdays.com/eng/index.php

FutureInsights Live – April 30 – March 3
MGM Grand Hotel, Las Vegas, NV
http://www.futureinsightslive.com/

Microsoft TechEd – June 11 – 14
Orlando, FL
http://northamerica.teched.com

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterStats, SmarterTools, SmarterTrack Tagged with , , , ,

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