ExchangeDefender, Dave Sobel, AutoTask, Resends

Since the ExchangeDefender 3.0 and 3.1 releases went smooth as ass on sandpaper and nails, we’ve made quite a few changes to the way its developed, tested, rolled out and managed. So, here is what I was working on today:

New Reports

Or should I say, new new reports. One of the biggest customer complaints has been the lack of the ability to suppress empty quarantines. Basically you would get a Daily and/or Intraday report but it would include all the email addresses even if they had nothing in them. If you have half a dozen email addresses it starts to look ugly, quickly.

One of my pet peeves has been the constant nagging about “customer did not receive report, investigate”

So, below is the new stuff that hopefully makes everyone happy and most importantly, makes the user more productive. First, me: the blue box you see on the right side is the stock advertising spot – as an MSP you can modify this box to say anything you want it to say. Got a yard sale – let your ExchangeDefender customers know it. By default, however, it serves a functional purpose of letting the user know that there are more messages waiting for them, in a much nicer environment that is searchable, intelligent and accessible in realtime – so no waiting for daily or intraday reports if you need something quick.

Now on to the customer complaints – “Stop telling me about SPAM I am not receiving.”

Ok, done. Both the user, the domain administrator and the MSP have the capacity to suppress quarantine reporting if those quarantines are empty. By default, we print quarantines for each email address and say if its empty – but if you change the setting you will only see the quarantines for the email addresses that actually have SPAM or SureSPAM trapped in them.

And the techies… this is going to save a lot of time:

You can now send a daily report to any managed email on your system – on demand. Gets generated within 60 seconds, out in a minute or so more. But… it gets better, scroll down.

Dave Sobel Feature

Dave was one of the first people I showed the beta of ExchangeDefender v3 MSP console. When it launched, Dave took exactly 15 seconds to nuke one of his domains accidentally. I am not sure how he did it, but it was a record nonetheless and I felt like an ass.

So, we now have what is called a Dave Sobel rule in the house. It’s that of validating any irreversible action in the system with a javascript popup. This little function took 8 lines of JavaScript code and took 45 minutes to write – no, I am not kidding, it was an ugly morning. Judy finally put me out of my misery by rewriting (adding 2 parameters to the call) the whole thing and saying “Bitch, now where my pink Inspiron at?’

Finally…

And I do mean…. fiiiiiiiiiiiinally. There are gonna be some fans in the House of Vlad next week:

Yep, you’re seeing that right – thats ExchangeDefender integrated into AutoTask! You can actually get the LiveLink right now, huge thanks to Steve Noel of AutoTask for hooking this up and to Kevin Baylor for specing it and pushing to get it done.

There are some other exciting things coming and I just wanted to show you how this thing is progressing. Next week the new ExchangeDefender web site launches too, along with the new Shockey Monkey and the public beta of Thieving Weasel… Crank that shocky stick baby, code monkey is on fire!