AppRiver

Gretchen Clarke is AppRiver’s director of training and development, but she resists those half-hearted attempts to characterize what she actually does for the company.  Instead, she offers her own, more fitting description: “guidance counselor”.  She sees her role as helping Appers be all they can be, both on the job and off.

Clarke joined the AppRiver team almost two years ago, taking on a role that had not existed before – adding value to the company by making sure that its employees get the training and professional development opportunities they need to succeed.

By at least one measure, her efforts at the company have been a resounding success already.  As of now, approximately 35 percent of the employees hold some form of accredited technology certification, whereas few if any did before she arrived.

But for Clarke, the challenge is to do more than simply make sure Appers are technically competent.  She wants to create an environment where learning and growth, even beyond the technical skills, are built into the job.  For Clarke, this is the natural foundation for the “Phenomenal Customer Care” ethic that AppRiver has made its top priority.

“The training and other activities AppRiver provides helps employees feel more fulfilled at their jobs,” Clarke says.  “And happy employees lead to happy customers.”

Toward that end, Clarke and AppRiver have instituted some unique and creative programs that promote training and development, as well as incentives to keep them motivated in the process.

AppRiver University: App U doesn’t have a fight song or a football team (yet), but its four employee teams might well be mistaken for co-ed fraternities.  The “university” concept began as a way to formalize the company’s training process, both for current employees and new hires.  Its first major endeavor was a new-employee orientation program that featured a scavenger hunt to help new Appers learn who’s who and what’s where around the office.  It was so successful that it was included in a Florida Trend story and had other companies calling for tips on how to replicate it.

“The most common questions new employees have are ‘Where can I find this?’ or ‘Who do I see about that?,’” said Clarke.  “We like to help them learn in a way that’s fun and interactive.”

BrainTrain 2010: Each of App U’s four “fraternities” is engaged in an ongoing, quarterly competition in which points are awarded for internal or external training and community service activities.  Winners enjoy extra time in the company’s massage program, gift cards and other goodies.  Points are continually updated on a “leader board” in the App U classroom, so interoffice bragging rights also provide a strong incentive to participate. 

According to Clarke, adding the community service category was an eye-opener.  “I never realized just how many AppRiver employees are active and volunteer their time in the community.  Their good works are a positive reflection on our company and in the community.”

Health and Wealth:  Those Appers riding the “BrainTrain” also have opportunities to participate in free seminars about nutrition and personal finance, which might not be directly related to their jobs, but can improve their state of mind and their performance.  

To Clarke, the success of these programs is a direct reflection on the employees themselves because they are not mandatory.  Employees choose to participate or not.  However, she also credits the strong support from company founders Michael Murdoch and Joel Smith for building interest.

“AppRiver is fortunate to have selfless leaders who want to set employees up to succeed,” Clarke says.  “They have made it clear that they believe in training and that makes it easier to get everyone on board.”

In addition to providing training opportunities and the incentives to participate in them, Clarke also works with Appers one-on-one to help them determine what types of training or certification will be most beneficial – and, equally important, helping them overcome any barriers that stand in their way.

As a telling example, she discovered that there were some employees who lacked certification only because they were nervous about taking the tests.  Thus, Clarke arranged a field trip to the test site and helped them gain confidence. 

As AppRiver’s “guidance counselor,” Clarke recognizes that these individuals collectively represent AppRiver’s greatest asset – its talented team of professionals.  Taking care of the team means first looking after the people who comprise it.

“The specific needs are as diverse as the individuals,” she says.  “The bottom line is that I want to do whatever it takes to help our people reach their goals.”  

That’s a tough standard to meet, but it’s also the highest priority of AppRiver’s founders, Michael Murdoch and Joel Smith.  For them, taking care of customers isn’t just important to the business, it is the business.

Burda attributes that commitment to the entrepreneurial experience all three men share.  “When you’re starting out with only a handful of customers, every one of them is critical to your success, and you treat them that way,” he says.  “But even if you have thousands of customers, you still need to treat every one as though they are just that important – because they are.”

Smith agrees:  “Mike and I both saw companies that grew quickly and let customers become numbers.  When we started AppRiver, we were determined not to let that happen.”

Of course, the real question is: How does a company grow larger without growing complacent?  To Burda, the answer is as simple as another word in his title – care.  To illustrate this point to company employees, he offers a picture of a parent holding a baby.  That visual image symbolizes complete accountability for ensuring that the customers’ needs are met.

Burda adds, however, that simple isn’t the same as easy.  It’s one thing to talk about taking good care of a customer, but the real test is whether a company will actively choose better customer service when it carries a cost.  Here, Burda says, is where AppRiver distinguishes itself from competitors.

“(Chief operating officer) Scott Cutler has made it abundantly clear in staff meetings that customer care is our top priority, even if it means spending longer on support calls or working later to solve a problem.  As a result, all of our employees understand the value we place on taking care of the people who use our services.”

AppRiver’s emphasis on care goes beyond company policy, however.  With Burda’s help, the company has elevated Phenomenal Customer Care to product status, on par with SecureTide™, hosted Exchange and its other offerings.  The idea is to devote to the customers’ experience the same level of commitment and innovation as AppRiver does to its products.

“Some of our competitors have made giant sacrifices in customer service in order to gain a slight advantage in price,” Burda says.  “But when their customers realize that their only “support” means an expensive call to a foreign country, many of them make the switch to AppRiver.”

Even with a customer retention rate that is the envy of most software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, Burda says that AppRiver aims for continuous improvement.  As an example, he points to a new initiative, customer care callback phenomenal outreach, or “C3PO” as it is known internally. (Insert your own Star Wars-nerd jokes here.)

The name may be simple, but the idea behind it is serious: Double back with customers to make certain that their problems have truly been solved.  For Burda, the C3PO initiative represents an extra effort to close the loop, and that can make the difference between a merely satisfied customer and one who will recommend AppRiver to their friends.

“Some people wonder why we would make extra work for ourselves if we’ve already handled the problem,” Burda says.  “But he or she might have another problem or more questions.  We take the initiative and ask because we truly want to know – and because that’s what it means to be phenomenal.”

Once again we are seeing spammers launching new campaigns that are utilizing free web hosting sites. Over the past few days we have been seeing a particular campaign that abuses webstarts[dot]com and doodlekits[dot]com. Spammers have proven time and again that they will take advantage of any obfuscation technique possible, especially when it is a free to them. The above mentioned sites (along with others) both offer free web hosting to anyone who wants it. The main problem is that the registration process is wide open to abuse.  Anyone can go their site and create a free account without so much as even a valid email address. Nor does either of these sites utilize any type of challenge-response authentication and as I said before both are a free service.

It starts with an email that contains some random text as well as a link that takes you to either of these free hosting sites. On the free hosted web pages spammers have set up redirects that will immediately take the visitor to an entirely different domain were they have the actual content that they are intending to deliver to you (Pharmacy sites in this case).

This misapplication of services benefits spammers and malware distributors in several ways. Since many spam filters use some sort of URL blocking technology, spammers are able to provide themselves with fresh and unique stream of links that will increase their effectiveness against spam filters. In this case the URL’s are provided at no cost and setting them up is not at all resource intensive.  In addition to the increased probability of making it past spam filters spammers also benefit from a reduction in resources on the backend. Spammers normally have to register, host and maintain thousands of domains in order to maintain fresh domains which ordinarily act as the “landing page” as well. In this scenario they need only a handful of domains to act as the landing page since they are hidden until the end of the process. As usual our customers are currently protected from all know variants of these messages.

A new incarnation of ransomware has started to reek a bit of havoc in the former Soviet Union as of late. This form of an old classic is proving to be especially troublesome as it is targeting casual home users. Once the malware is on a host machine, it locks it down completely and instructs users to text a premium SMS number in order to receive a code to unlock it. The price of the text message is about $15 dollars. This attack is made possible by the fact that the premium SMS industry in many countries is very poorly regulated and it is completely possible for a person to register one of these numbers completely anonymously thereby thwarting what seems like an easy trackdown. The original infection can occur in a number of ways, by visiting a malicious website, or by executing a Trojan that may have been obtained through filesharing, etc. the attackers are trying not to leave any stone unturned. The telecommunications industries in countries such as the US, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand do have stronger regulations where setting up a service such as this would not be possible in an anonymous fashion, however this doesn’t prevent the attackers from using numbers set up in these poorly regulated countries in a possible domestic attack sometime in the future.

The malware doesn’t damage the system or encrypt files as some pieces of ransomware have done in the past; instead it simply locks it up. A more advanced user could possibly remove the threat in this instance; however this is beyond the scope of the average computer user thus making this ransomware run quite profitable for the attackers.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization attacks are nothing new, but the frequency of this type of attack has increased rather rapidly. SEO poisoning usually happens when an attacker inserts common search terms in iframes along with scripts that send victims to malicious sites where they become infected. When a large event occurs in the news hackers waste no time to begin compromising related web pages with these hidden iframes. It is not uncommon most recently during peak times after a breaking story comes out for nine out of the top ten search results to be malicious web pages. The trick is to flood these malicious pages with terms that people will likely be searching for in order to raise the popularity of the pages and have them appear higher up in search results. This is a common marketing strategy whose technique has been bastardized by the bad guys. Some of the most recent real life events that have spurred these SEO Poisoning attacks have been: The earthquake in Haiti, The Olympics, and then the Olympic luger who died in practice, Mardi Gras, and most recently the disgruntled software engineer who flew his plane into the Austin Texas IRS building.

Malware authors are constantly reinventing themselves when it comes to social engineering tactics that will give them a greater possibility of infecting your computer.  A large part of their infections come via email-borne viruses which morph constantly. We often see old themes repeated and new techniques arise. The past 3 days has been no different with a high level of malicious spam attempting to infect millions of users. Over the past 72 hours we have blocked 2.3 million emails trying to fool unsuspecting Facebook users into infecting their own machines. These messages appear to be from the “Facebook Team”. They inform the user that there have been policy changes requiring an update account agreement to prevent user access from being restricted. The message contains a file named agreement.zip along with instructions for running the malicious code contained therein. The file attachment contains Malware that belongs to the Bredo family of Trojans. As of 10am (CST) 31 of 41 or 75.6% of major Anti-Virus providers were NOT recognizing the attachment as a virus.  Here is a look at the message:

We saw delivery attempts decline sharply over night but have started to ramp back up slightly in the past hour.

Facebook has been a common angle in the realm of social trickery in the past. While these emails are hitting spam filters around the clock, the "Koobface" virus is also spreading through Facebook directly. Koobface is spread via links in a person’s Facebook Wall or on their profile page. Once a user is infected, the link is automatically sent to everyone on that person’s friend list. While there is a variation in the distribution methods of these two threats, they both have the same goal: to steal your money. With so many threats abound it is important to take a multilayered security approach and at the very least, know what you are clicking on.

One senior smart phone specialist at AppRiver who helps make this possible is Chuck Sandz.  Known throughout the company as “Chuckberry” (Chuck+Blackberry, get it?), Sandz is one man who makes sure your latest high-tech device will allow you to tweet, blog, photograph and play Tetris, all without sacrificing your hosted Exchange services.

For almost three years now, Sandz has worked to stay on top of the ever-evolving world of Blackberries, iPhones, Droids and all of the other devices hitting the market.  As you might suspect, it isn’t an easy gig.  For example, this year alone Sandz expects RIM to introduce 16 new and upgraded models to the Blackberry line-up.  The company’s competitors likely will follow suit with fresh new products of their own.  

With each of the latest offerings come new and unique issues for Sandz to resolve.  But don’t get the idea that there are special training classes or instruction manuals to guide smart-phone enthusiasts in the process.  For many smart-phone-related issues, AppRiver’s staff will be among the first people ever called on to address them.  It’s like on-the-job training – except the job hasn’t been invented yet!  For the most part, the only reference source is thousands of job tickets AppRiver has handled.  But for Sandz, the tickets are welcome since they are a stored record of solved problems that helps him avoid “re-creating the wheel.”

Sandz does bring to the job a strong background in technical support, having worked with Fortune 500 companies and other large businesses.  But that’s not his most important qualification.  “I just like to figure things out,” he says.  “It all boils down to solving a puzzle for the customer, and then moving on to the next one.”

What is the most common problem users face?  According to Sandz, it’s the users’ own data plans.  In a lot of cases, administrators will change plans in order to save money or streamline services with their carriers.  Users may not find out until they experience problems.  Sandz says Blackberry has been quick to recognize the problems this causes for Exchange hosting companies like AppRiver and has developed an easy-to-use tool for diagnosing the issue. 

Still, given the sheer number of AppRiver customers – and the ever-growing line of new products – there is an almost infinite list of potential issues that can arise at any time.  Luckily for us, there’s an “App-er” for that – and they call him Chuckberry.

In addition to the influx of spam relating to the topic, web based attackers are also using a new round of SEO based malware distribution to exploit the tragedy in Haiti. Unfortunately, cybercriminals will stoop to incredible lows to serve their own interests. Many individuals jumping online today to make a donation in relief of the disaster in Haiti may find themselves getting a bit more than they bargained for. Searching the Web for terms such as “Haiti Earthquake” is returning multiple compromised websites that are serving Scareware. This has become a common occurrence lately, as cybercriminals can elevate their malicious web pages using SEO manipulation.  Here is a look at a handful of the malicious web pages showing up in top search results:

If you are going online to donate, please exercise extreme caution.
 

The longest day of Scott Cutler’s life may have been the day he explained to me how AppRiver employs Akamai’s internet optimization technology to improve the company’s email delivery speeds.  As the Chief Operating Officer at AppRiver, I’m pretty sure he had better things to do.  Even so, he spent a good two hours simplifying, analogizing and diagramming to make sure I understood the basic points.  (Picture Beethoven teaching piano to a tone-deaf third-grader and you’ll have an idea of what he was up against.)  

To Scott’s enduring credit, I came away with a decent, layman’s understanding of how it works.

Apparently it’s sorcery.

Just kidding.  Only parts of it involve the dark arts.  The rest is merely incredibly complex technology.  So, instead of looking under the hood, let’s focus on the concepts that Akamai employs to improve performance.

The first concept is redundancy.  Akamai’s servers clone each packet of information into three identical messages that are then sent via different routes to the same destination.  It’s a race in which the winning packet gets to be seen by the recipient and the losers disappear into the ether.  (Life’s cheap when you’re a datum.)  In the event of a delay or outage along the pathway, messages can be re-routed and in many cases delayed.  With Akamai, however, there are two “sibling” messages still racing to your inbox – probably calling each other names as they go.

The other advantage Akamai offers is continuous monitoring.  Akamai’s servers constantly test the vast network of connections that comprise the internet, looking for problem areas and identifying the most efficient routes from point to point.  Also, any delays like the one mentioned above are recorded and that path is avoided until the problem is resolved.

The bottom line for AppRiver’s Exchange Hosting customers is the certainty that email messages are delivered quickly and reliably.  

That is especially important now that more and more of those customers are relying on wireless devices like Blackberries and iPhones.  These face a common challenge in limited bandwidth from the cell tower to the user.  However, Akamai’s optimization can radically improve the service to that point and thus improve the user’s experience.

AppRiver is in the process of documenting this improvement with an ongoing test that pits an Akamai-enabled mobile phone against a non-optimized phone to see which offers the best speed and most reliability.  The test simulates internet users logging in, connecting to an internet site and looking at a few pages.  The phones, connections and pages are exactly the same, so the only variable is the Akamai component. Appriver plans to unveil the results of that testing within the next few days, but I expect they will show that Akamai produces a significant increase in speed and reliability.

THIS JUST IN: See the test results here: http://www.appriver.com/exchange/akamai-gomez_jan2010.html

I’ll admit that Akamai’s technology is still largely beyond my grasp.  But I don’t have to be a painter to appreciate the work of Monet -- and I don’t have to be a programmer to love the performance of Akamai.

With so many applications to access email; mobile and installable client there is always a chance for things to go wrong. Two of the main problems I see are data duplication and data purges of calendar and contact items. Using built-in Deleted Item Retention of Microsoft Exchange you can recover those lost items with ease using a Microsoft Outlook client. Prior to Outlook 2010 you could add a registry key to your computer to enable the use of Recover Deleted Items from any folder in your mailbox, including non-mail items folders. However if your using Outlook 2010 you will not find the Recover Deleted Items button when you click on a non-mail items folder, whether you have the registry key or not. Using the instructions below you can add the Recover Deleted Items icon to the Folder section of your Ribbon for all folders regardless of the data they contain.

The Recover Deleted Items icon is in the Folder section when you are in a mail item folder.

When you are viewing a non-mail item folder (calendar, contacts, etc…) the Recover Deleted Items icon is no longer available. If the contact “Mr. John J Doe” was Shift-Deleted or purged by your mobile client (I have seen it more times than I can count) how would you get it back?

With Outlook 2010 open click the File Ribbon tab then click the Options button.

On the right-hand side add a New Group under the Folder main tab. You can rename it after it is created.



Change the “Choose commands from:” to All Commands. Scroll down and select the “Recover Deleted Items…” option then click the “Add > >” button to add this option to your newly created custom group.

You will now see your new group and the Recover Deleted Items icon in the Folder tab on all folders.

If you were to click the button you will see that you have access to any purged/shift-deleted items from that folder.

If you use the recover option you will see that your item has now been returned.