One of the new processes we adopted in the recent Own Web Now fixup that I documented here in a fairly public way is something that Microsoft has been doing for years: Monthly “we suck” festivals. Every month Marie McFadden pulls together an awesome newsletter highlighting the most frequently asked questions that the newsgroup engineers answer. Lucky for them, they have documentation. We suck there too.

But, we’re trying to improve so here is what we did: Every week we plow through the helpdesk and identify the questions that we get asked over and over again. Those questions end up in the OWN Documentation portal with the hope that people will eventually read it before asking us for support. (we’re dreamers, I know) However, the more important aspect to our success going forward will be consultative selling, anotherwords, explaining to you what you bought and hopefully selling you on using the given application in a more meaningful, secure, productive, effective manner.

Here is an example – lately we have been getting a lot of flak in the support portal over the ISPs blocking port 25 access. Obviously, since I answer the phone it’s my problem, not the ISP’s problem. After all, it works with Google! (f’n Google, everything always works with Google). Now, common sense dictates that if port 25 is blocked, you just hop on to the alternate port. Or you use SSL. Both of which we support, both of which are common sense – assuming someone actually bothered to inform you! (rewind to “we suck” comment)

Now here is the real kicker – that applies to everyone reading this email: “Ok, great, next.”; Folks tend to ignore stuff like this, rightfully so, it is not an immediate problem. But when it does become a big enough problem you will have 10,000 other things on your plate and lets face it, you’re likely not an expert at Windows Mail configuration. Even if you are, do you want to spend 30 minutes playing around with it and making sure it works, or would you rather scroll down a 5 page whitepaper and do it the way we suggest, test and know it works (or more importantly, the way we say you do it and if it breaks we’ll help you fix it). See the sales bit in all this yet?

Anyhow, here is the blog post. Our first micro-whitepaper is titled “Advanced Mail Server Settings Options for Shared Hosting Clients” and in the nutshell it explains how to securely configure your mail client to transmit and receive mail via SSL/TLS to and from Own Web Now mail servers as well as how to say goodbye to the ISP filtering port 25 access to remote networks.

Check it out: Advanced Mail Server Settings Options for Shared Hosting Clients

So yes, we still suck, but we’re really trying to improve and I hope little things like this keep on going toward making this a decent partnership because not only does it give you some time savings, it gives the next person you hire a complete footprint on how to work with us. No guessing.

Oh, and by the way…

It’s a mighty cold day in hell. Big thanks to Susan Bradley for taking the screenshots of Microsoft Entourage on her Macintosh. Susan taking Mac screenshots, Vlad writing documentation for Mac users… yep, we’re doomed.

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