ExchangeDefender rolls out Client Software Suite

The official announcement is on our official blog. Please subscribe to that feed and join the other 8 people reading it on an annual basis. That’s the official story, however, in the interest of honesty to our partners I have to optimistically apologize for things taking to long to get to this point.

You see, as ExchangeDefender (and I) grew up, the product matured as well. I’ve always embraced the development cycle that primarily served 90% of our users, with lower priorities assigned to the needs of the admins, MSPs, IT royalty and power users. Why? Well, the ExchangeDefender service is first and foremost a protection mechanism for people that are not INFOSEC hobbyists. That’s the customer that spends the money on the service, that’s the person I need to secure and so long as I please them, we get to keep the client.

Always (always, always) take care of your customer first.

This is why ExchangeDefender has some of the highest retention rates around.

I think we failed to stay true to that mission in our objectives. Basically, we dictated some features for the sake of simplicity and cornered ourselves into a position where users have become so dependant on the logically broken process because they have conditioned to it, and will not consider something better.

The most hated (and most beloved, and most pleaded not to be removed) feature in ExchangeDefender are the daily reports. People loved this stuff in 2002! It provided archival data for the SPAM past 7 days, daily reminders and stats, ability to release SPAM if it ever gets in there, etc. Fast forward a few years and the report is stacked with some of the most vile stuff anyone has ever written. Laced with stuff that would trigger even the worst of antispam software. But users are conditioned to expect the report. They bitch when they don’t get it. Most don’t read it – it goes straight to trash.

It is in our (OWN) best interest for our users to better interact with the service because it can learn to protect them better. I think I said something in one of the interviews today regarding the value of client installed software for a pure off premise solution. We aren’t just fighting with external threats, we are fighting with our users stupidity and naivete. When stuff breaks the cost of the product skyrockets if everyone in the technology chain has to be involved in fishing or tracking the email through the system. We can do much better than that, but we need to offer something that lets the user take a chance on the new solutions.

So after months of hard work, ExchangeDefender Client Suite is out. We’ll add file sharing, web filtering and a few other things throughout 2009 because we are no longer able to protect the user with just the SMTP filtering alone. Much like we can’t offer them business continuity with only 5 days of retries – where LiveArchive thrives in the enterprise contracts and SMB shops alike.

I hope you enjoy it. And to the slimy ones in the audience, I hope you can make some profit off it. Differentiation demands premiums, pimp on!