Earlier this week, we launched Entourage 2008 for all mail2web.com Business Exchange Professional users. For those Mac users who are currently using Entourage 2004, now is the time to upgrade! The Entourage 2008 package can be downloaded from the mail2web.com Control Panel in the End User Management area, or through the OWA by clicking on Email Settings.

For those of you choosing to go ahead with Entourage 2008, we’d like to let you know that there is already an upgrade for Office 2008. Once you have finished installing Entourage 2008, we highly recommend that you install the upgrade. It is available directly from Microsoft. We also recommend running the Microsoft AutoUpdate and the Mac AutoUpdate periodically to keep all of your software as up-to-date as possible.

Although Entourage 2008 includes a lot of updates and new features, some of the enhancements we expected for Exchange did not materialize. The Exchange Account configuration for Entourage 2008 is virtually identical to Entourage 2004, and does not include any direct MAPI support as is available in Outlook 2007. But that doesn’t mean that there are no new Exchange features… some of the new features include:

• Out of Office Assistant
• Free/Busy info Pull-up
• Delegate Rights Management
• Interoperability with Outlook 2007

 To read more about these features and many other updated features, we invite you to read Part I and Part II of the Entourage 2008 New features blog posts by Amir.

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in mail2web.com ~ No Comments

Apple has been taking steps recently to get back into the mobile device market, especially with the launch of the iPhone. It’s possibly their most inspired product since the Apple Newton! The most recent product launch by Apple is the new MacBook Air. There has been a lot of discussion on whether the “world’s thinnest notebook” is also the world’s best thin notebook, but you have to applaud Apple for pushing the envelope of portable computing. With AppleTV, there were some significant improvements in the 2nd generation. Therefore I think we can look forward to even more from the MacBook Air version 2.

And whether you’re using a MacBook Air or a regular MacBook or MacBook Pro, you can still bring your mail2web.com Exchange account on the road with you. We spend a lot of time talking about Outlook and Windows Mobile devices, but don’t forget about Microsoft’s line of Mac Products including Entourage. Entourage allows Mac users to get much of the same functionality out of their Exchange account that Outlook users get. Just think of it as Microsoft Outlook for the Mac.

A free license for Microsoft Entourage 2004 comes included with each mail2web.com Exchange Professional Plan. And with the launch of Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 we hope to offer Entourage 2008 very soon.

So with your brand new MacBook Air, it’s never been easier to take your Microsoft Exchange account on the road.

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in mail2web.com ~ No Comments

It took a while but Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Microsoft Exchange 2007 is finally here. For some of you this launch won’t change much but for those of us that use the OWA (Outlook Web Access - http://ex7.mail2web.com/) the impact is very significant. When Exchange 2007 launched last year there were a few key features from OWA 2003 that were omitted in the OWA for 2007. Early adopters of the new Exchange offering came to realize that there were some short comings with the new OWA. In my line of work the release of SP1 was a blessing. Personally, I was getting tired of having to explain that the missing functionality would be restored as soon as Microsoft launched the service pack. Well it’s finally here and now Exchange 2007 is a proper replacement for Exchange 2003.With the installation of SP1 on our Exchange 2007 servers our customers now have the use of the following features that were previously unavailable in the OWA.

* Personal Distribution Lists
* S/MIME (for email encryption)
* Rules Management
* Monthly Calendar View
* Deleted Items Recovery
* Public Folder Access

These features were still available in Outlook. Only those of us who used the OWA to view their mail were impacted by these missing components. Microsoft had its reasons for leaving these features out of the OWA but later announced that they would be returning with the launch of SP1. To say that we were anxious for SP1 to arrive was a bit of an understatement. As soon as we received the Service Pack from Microsoft we began planning the upgrade for our system. Our customers that had moved over to Exchange 2007 were looking for the return of the missing features and we wanted to restore them as soon as possible. Within a few days of receiving SP1 it was installed.

In addition to the return of the features mentioned above the OWA now has spell checking support for Arabic and Korean. For those of you that would like to take a read of Microsoft’s official write up of what’s new for Exchange 2007 with the release of SP1 move your mouse cursor over the following link and click away.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676323(EXCHG.80).aspx

At the moment we are currently in the process of migrating our existing Exchange 2003 customers over to Exchange 2007. It’s nice to know that once we get everyone moved over that the features you were using on 2003 are now available in 2007. The move should be completed very shortly and if you haven’t received a notice from us about your account being migrated you will be very soon.  As an early “heads up” to those of you that use Outlook to check your mail you’ll need to edit your settings once you’ve been migrated over to Exchange 2007. If you’d like to get a head start you can make the changes now before the migration. Changing your settings early won’t cause any headaches as your account will continue to work as it always has and it will work after you’ve been migrated. The settings you’ll need can be found in your control panel (https://support.mail2web.com/)  or you can contact your friendly neighbourhood support team at support@mail2web.com and we’ll help you out.

Daryl Brown
Manager Customer Support
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in mail2web.com ~ No Comments

Social Networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are getting a lot of attention lately. Depending on where you work, these kinds of sites might not have a place in your corporate world. However its easy social networking concept can be utilized in a company environment.

The concept of connecting people with similar interests in social networking sites allows friends to connect and interact together with various common web applications, such as photo albums, blogs and forums. The same concept can be extended to employees within a company or organization, allowing them to connect co-workers working on various projects or goals and interact with each other online. But the most popular social networks aren’t necessarily the most appropriate places to share confidential corporate information. Windows SharePoint Services has been around for years, and can offer a number of the features you’ll find in these social networking tools as well as offering a more appropriate location to store sensitive company information.

You can create password protected sites with accounts for each employee. The employees can then customize their personal profile, organize themselves into groups, departments, workgroups, or project teams and then begin sharing. They can share and contribute using document libraries, blogs, forums, calendars, contact lists and even photo libraries. You can create sub-sites for specialized departments or teams with private versions of each application, customized for that group. There are even applications that allow you to create wikis, surveys and tasks. User and Group level permissions allow you to prevent access on various levels, ensuring that confidential information in one area is visible only to those who “need-to-know”.

And what about extending it further to customizable applications? There are some templates that have been pre-written, such as bug database, event planning, knowledge base, employee activities, new store opening, request for proposal, and even sports league. These are just a few examples, and this can be customized even further by the savvy administrator by creating a custom templates designed for a specific purpose, or even even custom web-parts and workflow elements within the template. You can also use SharePoint Designer to ever greater advantage of this powerful platform.

All of this can be especially useful if you have remote workers who you still want to contribute to or access to any of this information. And with a free 30 trial, why not try it out? All you need to get started are users that are ready to contribute.

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in mail2web.com ~ No Comments

Seasons Greetings,

At this festive time of year I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past year.  As the Winter Solstice, the longest night, approaches here in the Northern Hemisphere the days once again promise to grow longer. With the endless cycles of dark and light, decay and renewal, I am reminded that there is always hope and our dreams to guide us. 

I am also reminded of the Irish blessing;

“May you have the hindsight to know where you’ve been the foresight to know where you’re going and may you always find a light to guide you home.”

From all us here at mail2web.com thanks for your continued support and we hope you have a bright and happy New Year.

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in mail2web.com ~ No Comments

Greetings,

It has been more than a year since we introduced the Softcom corporate blog. In that time we have made many changes and improvements to our products and services for both mail2web.com and myhosting.com. The response to the blog has for the most part been very positive. That is why we have added two new blogs, one for each of our brands.

Under mail2web.com we offer both free and premium services. The main products we sell are Microsoft Hosted Exchange ® email and the business collaboration platform Windows SharePoint Services ® (WSS 3.0). The address for the blog is http://blog.mail2web.com/

The myhosting.com brand is our shared hosting platform. We offer hosting of both Microsoft Windows ® and Linux platforms as well as POP3/IMAP4 email hosting. The blog address for myhosting.com is http://blog.myhosting.com/

We will still continue to occasionally post to the Softcom blog about broad issues and things that are related to the company as a whole. We will for the most part post entries on the mail2web.com and myhosting.com blogs. If you are looking for details about how to subscribe by RSS I recommend you checkout Tim’s post here.

I hope you enjoy the new blogs.

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in mail2web.com ~ No Comments

With our launch of Exchange 2007 come a few changes relating to SPAM filtering. Unfortunately, Microsoft launched Exchange 2007 with changes to the way that Exchange accounts are activated and the way that rules are created. As a result we’re no longer able to automatically insert our adjustable SPAM Filtering rule for Business Exchange 2007 users. However, we’re expecting that some of the changes and updates with Exchange 2007 SP1 will allow us to reintroduce this feature.
 
But just because we can’t automatically insert the rule for you, doesn’t mean we aren’t doing anything. All incoming email is still scored against our Anti-Spam system, and assigned a SPAM score from 0 to 10. The score that the email receives is inserted in the header of the email, and you can create a rule in Outlook or in any Email Client to take advantage of this. For example, you can create a rule which filters email with a score of 5 or higher by searching for the following header text:

X-Spam-Level: *****

Then move those emails to your SPAM or Junk Mail folder. Notice the 5 asterisks, which correspond to a score of 5 or higher. If you find that the rule is filtering too much non-SPAM, you can reduce the number of asterisks in the rule. If you find it isn’t filtering enough SPAM, you can increase the number of asterisks.
 
Further, both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 include Junk Mail filtering options. In Outlook 2007 these options are available from the Tools menu by selecting Options, choosing the Preferences tab and clicking on the Junk E-mail button. As you’ll see, you have the option to choose 1 of 4 levels of junk email protection (either No Filtering, Low, High, or Safe Lists Only). You have the option of deleting suspected junk mail automatically, disabling links as well as adding warnings and postmarks. You can also create a Safe Senders list, a Safe Recipients List and a Block Senders list. You can even filter email based on the language it is encoded in, or the type of domain name it is sent from.

Using either or both of these options should help you keep your Inbox relatively free from SPAM. And we’ll continue to do our best to help keep you SPAM-free!

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

We recently announced the launch of Exchange 2007 that has led to some question about our email road map. So I want to lay things out for everyone.

• Currently all NEW customers signing up for Business Exchange Hosting will have their account provisioned on Exchange 2007.
• For existing Business Exchange Hosting customer, we are finalizing a migration strategy. We want to ensure that the transition to Exchange 2007 is completed with limited down time and with as little inconvenience to our customer as possible. We will be contacting customers directly with more details shortly.
• For customers with Personal Exchange and mail2web.com LIVE accounts the move to Exchange 2007 will take a little longer. Microsoft’s licensing model for Exchange 2007 including the ActiveSync component is different than the one for Exchange 2003. Additionally, HMC 4.0, Microsoft’s provisioning platform for Hosted Exchange 2007  has some technical limitations when it comes to our Personal and mail2web.com LIVE products. We are working our way through these administrative and technical details. Currently we are exploring the possibility for extending our offering of these products with Exchange 2007. In the meantime, we will continue to provide and support both under Exchange 2003.

I hope this answers some of the questions that are out there about our email solutions and Exchange 2007.
 

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

Today we have launched Exchange 2007 for all new Business Exchange Email customers.

Exchange 2007 is the latest version of Microsoft Exchange, the industry’s leading solution for e-mail, calendaring, and unified messaging. mail2web.com Business Exchange provides built-in protection to help keep your e-mail system up and running and insulated from outside threats while allowing employees to work virtually anywhere, using clients such as Microsoft Office Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Web Access, and mobile devices.

One of the biggest improvements with the release of Exchange 2007 is the web interface. Outlook Web Access, (OWA) provides a rich, Outlook like experience in a browser.

New features in Outlook Web Access 2007 enable users to:

• Schedule Out of Office messages and send to internal and/or external recipients
• Use the Scheduling Assistant to efficiently book meetings
• Use WebReady Document Viewing to read attachments in HTML even if the application that created the document is not installed locally
• Access RSS subscriptions
• Search the Global Address List

Our Hosted Exchange model provides customers with competitive and predictable pricing as well as the security and features of more expensive in house email solutions. We offer even more flexibility with no minimum up front commitments, single seat pricing plans and 30 day free trial. This platform and model will allow us to remain as the leading email solution provider for Small and Medium Businesses word wide.

Existing Exchange 2003 customers with Business Professional Accounts will still be able to add and manage users on the 2003 platform. A migration plan is being finalized for business plan customers to move to Exchange 2007. More details will be announced shortly.

For more details about mail2web.com Business Exchange 2007 plans click here.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

About a week-and-a-half ago, we launched a new feature in both of our Control Panels.  Some customers may have already noticed and started taking advantage of this feature. This new feature allows you to view all of your past and current Customer Support cases. This includes all email correspondence, chat correspondence, and even telephone correspondence with our Customer Support department.

What is the advantage to you as a customer?

• You’ll always have access to all the Customer Support history linked with your account.  If you’ve forgotten what the solution to a given problem, go back at any time and have a look.
• If you’re away from your email but still want to check the status of a Support case, now you can.
• If for some reason you didn’t receive our reply email, you can view everything and even reply from your Control Panel.

We hope that you’ll find this feature useful, and if you haven’t already… try it out now!

• mail2web.com Control Panel
• myhosting.com Control Panel

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 1 Comment