OWN: Fixed

As promised, this is the first public showcase of what we’ve been up to for the past two weeks and what we are doing to improve communications, relationships and documentation over at Own Web Now. I’m the CEO so you get to hear it directly from me, first. It is not quite as simple as a single blog post so I will take the rest of the week to explain the changes in detail because for every person you please you’re bound to piss off another. I am not necessarily concerned with wheter you like me, but at the very least I hope you understand where I am coming from and at that point its your call whether you become/quit/stay our partner.

The big picture: The goal at Own Web Now Corp, over the past year and over the coming months, is working to further the global network presence, both in terms of hardware and its partners. We will do this by making significant improvements to our systems, centralized management consoles and both partner and end user training.

In terms of infrastructure, we’re there. 14 data centers, full staff, products and services in R&D. We’re moving forward in a very big way. Three weeks ago a number of things became very apparent as huge problems, something we have moved very quickly to address and fix. Broken is broken, we picked up and glued back a lot of pieces.

So, here are the improvements, in a nutshell, I will break them down over the course of the week:

Communications: Corporate Blog: Corporate blog will be the main information site for the OWN business in terms of product announcements, major service items, opportunities, etc.

Communications: Network Operations: Network operations blog focused on the service aspect of Own Web Now: What we are doing, who we are doing it with, what the problem is, what the resolution is, etc. Your day-to-day OWN operational problems.

Documentation: ExchangeDefender Web Site: Our flagship products first update in over two years and two major releases. It brings the long demanded “trial signups”, documentation, feature descriptions to explain benefits of the service to customers, etc. Most importantly (and in highest demand) this site makes it easy to get started with us.

Documentation: OWN Documentation Center: New wiki that we will be brining most frequently asked questions to. Nearly all of our products behave just as you would imagine and as the documentation indicates – but whenever there is something left to the interpretation we will throw it up on the wiki.

Business: Updated Partner Guide: For close to a year we did not have an updated Partner Sales guide, which resulted to a lot of people asking for a resend, current information, etc. Now the most up to date partner guide will always be available online, on demand, in our support portal under Services.

Business: Price List: Also embedded under our partner portal under Services is the Pricing List that you can use when putting together quotes. These are the latest, most up to date prices on our key products.

Almost last, but definitely not the least:

Business: SUICIDAL?: Public feedback: Every now and then you’ve got something to say but you don’t want to say it out loud and have it associated with your own name. While your best friends will always level with you and give it to you exactly how it is, most people are not comfortable with that level of intimidation. So, we have a public feedback link. I am not posting the public side of it here (will be emailed to you in the newsletter) but you can see the public results of the feedback here. Any submissions to the public site are reflected on the private support portal side in realtime, we do not block anything, even if you’re filthy. We have a 72 hour response time guarantee on every piece of feedback left, so hopefully it will give us better insight for the problems as they happen as they affect you, not six months down the road when its too late. The feedback is totally anonymous, we do not even collect the IP address, just subject, feedback and product category. We stole this from NewEgg.

Finally,

Newsletter – Emailed, every month, every third or so. I will be mailing the first issue this week.

So as you can tell, we’ve been busy.

Let me repeat – OWN is not a bunch of bored hobbyists who got tired of the VAR game and decided to branch out into services, we have a decade of infrastructure knowhow, the funding, flexibility and one of the largest partner networks in the world. So yeah, you can bet that I will personally do whatever it takes to make our partners better, our clients more informed, listen to that feedback and make you better off. There are thousands of people making a living off of what we do, have done for a decade and will do so for decades to come. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and will do it bigger, better and uncut….

This, however, is just the first step. Look at the above, and watch it grow.

P.S. More details on all this over the coming week.