SoftCom Corporate Blog

One of the first things I think about when starting a new website or blog is SEO. And although I’m not an expert, there are still a few things that I can do that should help my site…

Maybe I should start from the beginning. Some of you may be asking “What is SEO”? Simply put, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is the practice of improving your ranking on Search Engines and therefore increasing the overall traffic volume to your site. We live in a competitive society, and everyone wants to be #1 in Google, but you’d be surprised at the number of simple changes you can make to your site that will help you get there.

First you need to start by figuring out what keywords you want to be successful for. You want to be specific to your business or target audience. If you sell “blue widgets”, you don’t want to rank well for “yellow gizmos”. This is where Keyword Research comes in. Determine what keywords work for you, develop a list, then start building your content around it. You want to make sure you include these keywords in your content wherever possible - without overdoing it. The best policy is to use the keywords naturally on your site.

But, it’s more than just on-page content. Remember Meta Tags? Yep, they’re still here, and you should probably use them too. For starters, put your keywords into the ‘keyword’ attribute, and a natural sounding description that includes some of your keywords into the ‘description’ attribute. There are also some other things to think about, including sitemaps, the Title tags on each of your pages, and even the URLs themselves. Keywords count there too!

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, there are a ton of other things you can do. But it’s important to remember that none of it will ever matter if nobody ever links to your site. The big search engines give you “cred” based on the number of other sites that link to you, especially the sites that are more highly trusted. Now this doesn’t mean you should start a “links” page on your site or join one of those spammy link exchanges. If your content is good, people will link to it. You can also use some Link Building techniques to help get things started. Of course the best way to do this is to build links naturally. If you are doing anything fishy and the search engines find out, you’ll take a hit.

But you don’t have to do it alone. There are literally hundreds of SEO Tools out there that you can use. Even our own Tools including the Search Engine Power Pack include options for choosing keywords, generating titles and meta tags and improving raking.

But don’t take my word for it, get out there and give it a try.

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Greetings,

We get a lot of inquiries from prospective customers asking what the difference is between our Microsoft Exchange offering  and that of our competitors’.  A perfectly reasonable question given the fact that we are all selling the same core software, but how that software is packaged makes an enormous difference.

First, the obvious points:

• Price
• Provisioning - is your account created instantly?
• How much diskspace is provided - make sure to compare what is included + what is charged for additional space!
• What are the service levels like?
• What is the support like

I know we excel on all the above points but what’s often overlooked when looking for a hosted Exchange provider is the management interface. Essentially how easy is it to manage your account after you’ve paid and signed up?

Today, and over the next few weeks, I want to cover some of the things that we do that I feel are really unique in the market. Things that make our offering outstanding.

The first are some enhancements we’ve done to the OWA (Outlook Web Access) - the web-based option of Exchange for accessing your email, calendar, contacts and other personal information - that comes with all of our Exchange offerings.

Our customers can log into the OWA either by going to 

a. http://exchange.mail2web.com or
b. http://exchange.<yourdomainname>.ext ( an option for Business Exchange customers only).

Once you’ve logged in, you will see a stack of buttons on the left-hand navigation. We have added a button at the bottom of the stack, called “My Email Settings”. Click on this button and, while still within the OWA, you will now see a page that allows you to manage your account.

Rather than having to log into a separate control panel to access management functions, you can accomplish most tasks, like changing your password, display name or downloading your copy of Microsoft(r) Outlook(r), directly from the OWA with a single click.

mail2web.com Business Exchange customers even have the option of creating a unique OWA login page. The account administrator can even select from a variety of design templates, through the mail2web.com account control panel, to customize the OWA login page.

Check out mine: http://exchange.carthy.ca  

This is very handy if you are setting up an account for someone else and want to give them access to basic management features without exposing the mail2web.com brand (you may also want to customize the logo displayed in the upper, left-hand corner which can be quickly uploaded through the mail2web.com control panel).

We’ve made a ton of other improvements that we’ll continue to write about in the coming weeks.

And of course, if there is a particular feature you want to see, please leave a comment.

Thanks,
John Carthy
V.P. of Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Hello,

mail2web.com offers a lot of things but our flagship product is a gateway to check your email. By entering your email address and password we allow you to see the contents of your inbox, send, receive and delete messages as well as a host of other features. We don’t save your password or share your information with any third-party.

That’s obvious to many users but not all. Here are some common questions we get:

Q: I need to change my password.

A: We can’t if we don’t host your email. For example, if you are using a hotmail address, gmail or an address provided by your cable company, you must contact them to do administrative tasks like changing your password (or sign up with myhosting.com and we’d be happy to help:-).

Q: You deleted all my email. Please restore it immediately!

A: Well this isn’t exactly a question but we try and be polite when we respond. We don’t delete email. We can’t as we don’t have the password. Typically this happens when someone (or someone in the office / household) opens their desktop email client and ‘POPs’ their inbox. At this point all email is downloaded to the client computer. When logging into mail2web.com we display what is on the server and in this case it’s empty.

Solution: see if your provider can get you what is called an IMAP4 email account. We offer it at myhosting.com and it stores all email on the server so this would never happen.

Q: How do I view email messages that I have sent?

A: Unfortunately we can’t provide that functionality with mail2web.com. Again, we are only accessing your account for the time you log in, and have no ability to keep track of messages you have sent.

Solution: get a free account with mail2web.com LIVE. This is a feature rich, browser-based email account with calendars, tasks, contacts and more. And yes, it will keep track of your sent emails and even send email to a mobile device that supports ActiveSync.

When mail2web.com started our slogan was ‘It’s all about checking your email anywhere’ and to a large degree, that is still true. However, then ‘everywhere’ meant kiosks, internet cafe’s and anywhere you could access a web-browser (even through a PDA via http://mail2web.com/PDA).

Now, ‘Anywhere’ truly means anywhere your mobile device has access. And it’s not just email people want to access but all their PIM data (Personal Information Manager) like appointments, contacts, notes, journals, tasks.

To address the variety of mobile devices in the market we provide Blackberry, ActiveSync and even RoadSync options with our messaging solutions, but mail2web.com is constantly looking for new mobile technology to offer to our customers. If you are a vendor of a Mobile, ‘Push email’ technology, we’d love to hear from you.

And yes, that wasn’t 10 questions but I hope you got the point.

Thanks,
John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Greetings,

In the past couple weeks, our customers on mail2web.com LIVE and mail2web.com Personal Exchange plans have experienced some service interruptions. I want to take the opportunity to discuss these problems and try to explain what we have done to remedy these issues.

From the initial onset of these issues, our Engineering team has been working closely with product engineers from Microsoft to analyze our environment. Following the analysis of the system data, we were able to identify specific issues in the Microsoft Exchange Product code that caused the service lapse. At the time of this post, these issues have been fixed and proper service has been resumed.

In addition, we have deployed additional Exchange server capacity and we have been migrating affected mailboxes in the off-hours. With these actions, we have further diversified our system resources on our Exchange platform to minimize the chance that these Exchange code bugs will reoccur.

mail2web.com Business Exchange customers were not affected by this issue so if you are experiencing any problem, please contact our support team and we will investigate your specific case.

I apologize for the inconvenience and want to assure you that we have taken every effort to provide our customers with highest quality of service. Again, if you would like to discuss about your specific case or provide us your valuable feedback on your personal experience of our service, please feel free to contact us through our support team (support@mail2web.com).

Thank you,
Kaan Bora Soran
Chief Operating Officer.

Now that I have your attention, I am excited to tell you about some changes we have made to our Affiliate Program. We have made it even easier for you to make money.

We launched the program a few months ago and it has been a great success with over 250 Affiliates already in the program. Now we have made the program even better with higher payouts, more payment options and a lower payout thresholds.

We have also made these changes retroactive to start of our Affiliate Program. So if you are already a member you will be able to take advantage of this right away.

We have tried to make this program as straightforward as possible. The idea is simple; you refer customers to our services and in exchange we send you money.

Here are the basics of the program:

• The program is free to join.
• We provide you with an online tools to manage your account and access the resources you need.
• Payouts are based on the schedule below. As a rough guideline they are approximately equal to three months fees for the service.
• After a referred customer signs up they must stay with that service for a minimum of 90 days and their account must be in good standing.
• Payments options are by check, PayPal or Account credit (for existing customers).
• The minimum payout will be $50.00 US.
• Payments are made once a month for qualified sales.

For all the details you can check out our website: http://softcom.biz/Affiliates/

Sign up for our Affiliate Program and start making money now!

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

**Exchange payout is per domain with at least one active professional seat

Hello,

Just a quick update to let customers on our Windows hosting plans know that we now provide support for ASP.NET AJAX.  Formerly known as ATLAS, this is a free framework for building rich, interactive, cross-browser web applications. This Microsoft technology integrates cross-browser client script libraries with the ASP.NET 2.0 framework.

This is mainly a development tool for advanced web designers and developers and will have no effect on our existing customer’s web sites. If you do want to use this technology, please make sure you have .NET 2.0 enabled on your account.

With all our Windows accounts we offer the option of running ASP.NET 1.1 or ASP.NET 2.0. By default your account will run ASP.NET 1.1 but you can update that instantly through your account control panel by going to Site Management > Site Settings > ASP.NET Version.

ASP.NET AJAX makes it possible to take advantage of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) techniques to create ASP.NET pages with rich user interfaces. ASP.NET AJAX allows for the creation of web applications in ASP.NET 2.0 which can update data on a web page without a complete reload of the page.

Check out these examples of what some people are doing with AJAX.

I still don’t know what Web 2.0 is. In a recent speech, Andrew Schroepfer from Tier 1 Research said it is the version after Web 1.0 and before Web 3.0. However, without having to assign some meaningless label to this phase of the web, I know this technology is introducing a whole new class of website development.

John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

One of the key ingredients of a Shared Hosting account is the domain name. Without a domain name, it’s either difficult or even impossible for your visitors to reach your website. Which is why it’s so important to make sure your domain name is renewed every year at its expiration date.

There are a few different states a domain name passes through after it has expired. Of course, these rules don’t apply to all domain names, including most country-level domains, are operated by different registries with unique rules. However these guidelines generally apply for the big 5; .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO and .BIZ. Once your domain name expires, it enters a “Grace Period” where you have approximately 40 days to renew your domain name at the same renewal rate. On the 45th day after expiration, the domain name enters what is called the “Redemption Period”. During the redemption period it is still possible to renew your domain name, but the redemption fee is quite costly and does not even include the renewal fee. The redemption period lasts approximately 30 days, after which it’s no longer possible to renew. The domain will be deleted within 5 days from the end of the redemption period.

So you can see how it’s possible to go from a fully functioning domain name to a completely expired and deleted domain name in 80 days — less than 3 months. And the moment your domain name is deleted, there’s always the possibility that someone will snatch it up for their own use. Even if your domain name is only 1 day into expiration and you renew it, it can still take a day or two before its working again. This is why it’s so important to make sure your domain name is renewed before it expires, not to mention that you can avoid all the confusion and potentially complicated procedures to get your web site back on track.

There are a couple ways you can make sure you don’t miss the expiration date. Some people simply choose to renew their domain name for as long as possible in one shot, which is 10 years at a time. This way you don’t have to worry about it for quite a while. But that’s not all that helpful if you’re not sure how long you’ll need your domain name for, or if you simply can’t afford the 10 year renewal fee. This is where our auto-renewal feature comes in handy. For all domain names registered through myhosting.com and mail2web.com we will by default process an automatic renewal for your domain name 10 days prior to the expiration date. So all you have to do is make sure your account remains active and has up-to-date billing information, and we’ll take care of the rest. Of course, we also recommend keeping your contact information and email address up to date, since we do send renewal reminder emails regardless of whether you use the auto-renew feature or not. In addition, make a habit of logging into your control panel at myhosting.com or mail2web.com periodically to look for alerts and updates.

For those of you who have hosting services with myhosting.com or mail2web.com but don’t have your domain name registered with us, it’s not too late! If you want to make use of our renewal system or auto-renew feature, you can transfer your domain name by contacting our Customer Support Department for more information.

And a word of warning to all domain owners - there are some unscrupulous companies who try to take advantage of the domain name renewal and transfer process by sending unsolicited snail mail to domain name owners, trying to get them to renew their domain name at inflated prices. Beware of these unsolited mail campaigns. If you receive this kind of mail and the sender doesn’t look familiar to you, check with your domain name registrar first so you don’t fall into the trap!

Regards,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

We recently partnered up with DataViz to provide our customers with RoadSync, an easy-to-use application that provides wireless ‘direct push’ synchronization of mail2web.com’s exchange email, as well as calendar items, contacts, attachments and more, to a broad base of mobile devices. Direct push refers to the technology that delivers content to your mobile in real-time as it’s being received on the server and keeps all your data perfectly synchronized.

Similar to how the BlackBerry works or ActiveSync works with Pocket PCs and Smartphones, the RoadSync application provides the same functionality for Palm Treo owners (with the Palm OS), many popular Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Sony, HP and Nokia devices – to name a few – who can now get all their PIM data delivered in real-time to their mobile device.

Click here for a list of supported devices (click on the ‘devices’ tab for a complete list)

Unlike the BlackBerry service, there is only a one-time fee with no recurring subscription fees (cost varies depending on your device) and there is even a 30-day trial available.

Of course for this to work you must subscribe to an Exchange email plan first (the RoadSync technology is based on ActiveSync). All of our mail2web.com Exchange plans are compatible with this application and come with a free 30-day trial. You can also test this with our mail2web.com LIVE service which will provide you with a free Exchange account.

If you haven’t noticed yet, we love mobile devices at SoftCom and we are always looking for new technologies that extend our messaging platform to the mobile user. If you are a vendor with a mobile solution you think we could use, please leave a comment and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

If you have any mobile related questions, please leave a comment. We have a number of mobile experts on staff armed with almost every mobile device on the planet. Chances are, if you have an obscure question, we have the answer.

John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Daylight Saving Time gives us the opportunity to enjoy sunny summer evenings by moving our clocks an hour forward in the spring.

Yet the implementation of Daylight Saving Time has been fraught with controversy since Benjamin Franklin first conceived of the idea. Even today, regions and countries routinely change their approaches to Daylight Saving Time.

On August 8, 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This Act changed the time change dates for Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the U.S. Beginning in 2007, DST will begin on the second Sunday in March and end the first Sunday in November. Canada has also decided to adopt these changes.

For the U.S. and its territories, Daylight Saving Time is NOT observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Arizona. The Navajo Nation participates in the Daylight Saving Time policy, even in Arizona, due to its large size and location in three states.

In the European Union, Summer Time begins and ends at 1:00 a.m. Universal Time (Greenwich Mean Time). It begins the last Sunday in March and ends the last Sunday in October. In the EU, all time zones change at the same moment.

Source: http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/index.html

How this may affect our customers

Whether you live, work or do business with people in North America, these changes may affect your Outlook and Calendar data. We have been following this change for sometime and have made sure that all of our servers have been updated with the relevant patches. If you are a mail2web.com exchange email customer, particularly using a mobile device with your account, please refer to the information below:

According to Microsoft’s website:

If you use Windows Vista or have Automatic Updates turned on, you may not be affected by the change in daylight saving time. If you want to confirm, follow the steps in the Daylight Saving Time Update Guide on the Microsoft website.

For Windows Mobile-powered devices Users

Congress has changed the dates for Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the United States starting in 2007. Canada has adopted similar DST dates. These changes could cause clocks and Microsoft Outlook calendar appointments on Windows Mobile-powered devices to display incorrect times for March 11 – April 1, 2007 and October 28 – November 4, 2007 and again in subsequent years. You can find more information about the exact dates and potential impact in the Changes in DST section.

You can prevent these problems by installing three Microsoft files on your device and/or PC:

• Microsoft Windows Operating Systems Update
• Daylight Saving Time 2007 Update Tool
• Outlook Time Zone Update Tool

For all the details click here

For BlackBerry Users

The standard dates for North American Daylight Saving Time (DST) change in March 2007. The device clocks in your BlackBerry® device will NOT update automatically when the DST date changes. Click here to learn more and to update your device now.

Unless patches are applied for impacted BlackBerry software and third party software (eg: for Microsoft® Windows click here) BlackBerry device clocks will not update to the new time zones when DST dates change. As a result, your BlackBerry device may not display correct time zone information

• Between the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in April (for example, 11 March 2007 to 1 April 2007)
• Between the last Sunday in October and the first Sunday in November (for example, 28 October 2007 to 4 November 2007)

For Calendar Users

The events in your calendar may also need to be updated for this change.

Calendar items are created in Outlook by using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) format. UTC is an international standard 24-hour timekeeping system. Time zone information for Outlook is obtained from the Windows operating system in which the calendar items are created and is obtained at the time that the calendar items are created.

For example, an 8:00 A.M. appointment on March 1, 2007 in Redmond, Washington is stored in Outlook as UTC 4:00 P.M. In this case, DST has not yet started, and Redmond time is eight hours behind UTC.

When an update is applied to the Windows operating system to accommodate the new DST definitions, the computer’s local time is changed to the extended DST time. However, the UTC is not adjusted when the local time on the computer is adjusted. Therefore, calendar items that are added to Outlook during the extended DST period are off by one hour.

For Outlook users there is a Time Zone Update tool to assist you with correcting the time of your appointments. For more information about Outlook and the changes to DST click here.

How to manually update calendar items

The Time Zone Data Update Tool is intended to automate the update process. However, users do not have to run the tool in order to update their calendar items. You can manually correct the times on these items during the extended DST period. This may be a good strategy for users who meet these specific requirements:

• The users have recurring items that have exceptions before the extended DST period, and the past exceptions must be saved.
• The users have many items in the extended DST period that were created by using DST 2006 rules, and have other items that were created by using DST 2007 rules.
• The users want to maintain complete control over every item that must be changed in the extended DST period.
• The users have run the Time Zone Data Update Tool. However, the tool did not update a given item that the users now want to update manually.
• This also applies to users who only access there calendar from the OWA such as mail2web LIVE and Personal users.

To manually change your calendar, follow these steps:

1. Print a copy of your calendar during the extended DST period for reference.
2. Manually move meetings that you organized to the correct time.
3. Send an update for the meeting that you moved to all attendees so that the attendees’ calendar reflects the correct time.
4. Manually move all single-instance appointments.
5. Manually move all recurring appointments within the extended DST period. If you are prompted, move only the occurrence(s) that fall in the extended DST period. The instances that occur before and after the DST period should already reflect the correct time.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Microsoft has released the next group of Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The latest group are different from those released at the end of last month. The new templates offer additional functionality and can still be used to create a sub site. For more background on what templates are you can read my earlier post.

What makes this update more important is that we have added the option to select the template solution that is applied to the main site. Because the template needs to be applied as part of site creation it cannot be changed later. I think this will make our On Demand Business Solutions a more useful application for our customers. For example you can now create a site like blog.mydomain.com and choose the blog template for the main site. Or you can signup for a Project Tracking Workspace and with Outlook 2007 you can access the Calendar, Tasks and Documents offline. 

Here are the new templates that are now available for site creation:

Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management
Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects
Bug Database
Call Center
Change Request Management
Compliance Process Support Site
Contacts Management
Document Library and Review
Event Planning
Expense Reimbursement and Approval
Help Desk
IT Team Workspace
Job Requisition and Interview Management
Knowledge Base
Physical Asset Tracking and Management
Project Tracking Workspace

The following built in templates are also available for site creation:

Team Work Site
Blank Site
Document Workspace Site
Wiki Site
Blog Site
Basic Meeting
Blank Meeting
Decision Meeting
Social Meeting
Multipage Meeting

Microsoft has said that they may introduce additional templates in the future. There is also some plans to offer mail2web.com custom templates.

MIPS Technologies Inc. president and CEO John Bourgoin summed it up perfectly: It’s not about the next killer app, he said, it’s about the next “killer experience.”

People want a killer experience on demand, any time, any place. That is what we aim to offer with our On Demand Business Solutions. Built on the latest Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services platform to provide a secure, integrated solution that can be deployed, managed and accessed directly and quickly. We add the service to the software with on demand account creation and 24/7 support.

But like I said last time, don’t take my word for it check it out for yourself. Signup for a free 30 day trial account and find out what the buzz is about.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.