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MINNEAPOLIS, MN - February 1, 2005
I. CEO's Corner
II. New Services This Quarter
III. Digital North Technology Update
IV. Top 5 Email Support Issues
V. Customer Profile: Wire the Market
I. CEO'S CORNER
Digital North finished strong in 2004 and we charted steady growth from the
previous year. Our success was due to the support of our customers. The new year is
off to a great start! We just hung our 3rd consecutive plaque on the wall for being a top
web hosting firm based on The Business Journal's annual ranking. I was notified two weeks ago that
the Twin West Chamber of Commerce nominated me for "Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year". I hope to
make it as one of the finalists. It is an honor to be nominated by their committee regardless of the outcome.
Our newsletter contains information about some of the great services we are
rolling out in the next few months.
We have invested our time, energy, and capital on infrastructure upgrades to
improve our services. We highlight a great
company -- Wire the Market -- in our customer profile section of this newsletter.
I wish everyone the best in 2005.
Sincerely,
Mike Sowada
CEO
Digital North
msowada@digitalnorth.net
952-924-2450
II. New Services This Quarter
Digital North has been busy listening to customers and planning new services
for 2005. Our new services will
include shared Microsoft Exchange 2003 hosting, updated discount dedicated
server offerings, a new service control panel, and a web site builder tool
for simple websites.
Digital North is pleased to announce that our new shared Microsoft Exchange
2003 offering will go live in mid-February with over 250 accounts. Digital
North has been managing dedicated Exchange servers for several years. We
will have the
most robust shared Exchange service in the Minnesota. We invested in a level of
redundancy and reliability that our competitors cannot match. We will also
be the first regional provider to offer full Blackberry support on our
shared Exchange platform.
The list price for shared Exchange will be $14.95 per account per month. You
will receive: all associated licensing, hardware, upgrades, Virus and Spam
control, backups, 99.9+% Application Availability SLA, 24 x 7 support, and 100
MB of disk space per user. Additional storage space is available for $2.75/per 50
MB. The list price for Blackberry support is $14.95 per account per month.
For the first two months, we will have a special of $9.95 per account per
month with additional 50 MB of disk space at $2.00/user/month. If you
interested in shared Exchange or any other service please do not hesitate to
give us a call at 952-924-2450.
III. Digital North Technology Update
by Jason Baker, Director of Operations
While many of our customers were taking a break during the holiday season our techs were
hard at work preparing for important service upgrades during the new year.
We implemented a hardware refresh on our primary and secondary mailservers. Our new
primary and secondary mail servers have faster CPUs, more memory, and more disk than our previous systems.
Our customers should see faster email message retrieval times -- especially during periods of high load
during the business day.
We are currently in the process of upgrading our email spam and virus filtering service
to an architecture incorporating Barracuda Spam Firewall devices. Barracuda Networks makes a cutting-edge
spam filtering device that provides ten layers of spam and virus filtering protection. The new
architecture will increase the performance and accuracy of our spam filtering service and allow us to provide
customers with personalized spam fighting capabilities. We will transition most
of our customers to the new spam and virus filtering platform by mid February. The transition will not
disrupt email services and our customers will not need to change any of their email software settings.
During the second week of January we upgraded our entire network switching infrastructure
at the St. Paul datacenter to Dell 5324 gigabit ethernet switches. The new switch architecture positions
us for significant bandwidth growth in the future. We plan to upgrade the Minneapolis datacenter switch
architecture to gigabit switches this quarter.
We are pleased to announce the most significant data backup and restoration service upgrade of the past three years. We installed
a 1 Terabyte disk storage vault at our Minneapolis datacenter in late December. We are now backing up all
customer data directly to disk at the Minneapolis facility. We can store almost 2 Terabytes of compressed
data in the new storage vault. Customer data backup and data restoration times have improved significantly
as a result of this service upgrade. For example, a typical data restoration request that previously took more than
30 minutes can now be handled in only a couple minutes. We will roll out storage vaults to both of
the St. Paul datacenters by the end of February. We will continue to use Super DLT tape libraries for offsite backup storage.
IV. Top 5 Email Support Problems by Jason Baker, Director of Operations
I think if you asked most people the question: What could you live without -- your telephone or your email?
Many people would say their email. Email is such an important part of our everyday business practices that
we can hardly remember a time without it.
Once in a while email just doesn't seem to work like it should. Customers restart their email programs, look at the
email software settings, and even reboot their computers. Ultimately customers call Digital North for
email support. We enjoy talking to our customers. Email programs represent an overwhelming majority of our
customer support calls. The challenge is that 99% of the reported problems are not caused by our service.
The email problems are usually caused by an incorrect software setting, a corrupted email program, or
a computer networking problem at the customer's office.
While every support call is somewhat unique we have encountered some common email support issues over the
years. I'm happy to share with you the Top 5 Email Problems and Solutions.
(1) Customer report: I can receive email messages but I cannot send email messages!
Answer: Your email software settings are incorrect. Generally this problem is caused by an incorrect
email login setting, an incorrect email password setting, or the "Use SMTP Authentication" setting is not
checked in your email software.
(2) Customer report: I can access my email from my office but when I take my laptop home or on the
road I cannot send email messages!
Answer: You are probably using an ISP like AOL, Excite, or any one of dozens of other national providers
that block you from sending email through 3rd-party email servers. You can only send out email messages if
you use your ISP's email server. Yeah, this is really inconvenient. These ISPs put special security
measures in place to decrease spam. The solution is to change your email software settings to use your
ISPs mailservers to send outgoing email messages. An alternative solution is to access your email using
our webmail interface. Accessing your email from a website is not as convenient as something like Outlook
but at least you don't have to fiddle with your email software settings.
(3) Customer report: When people try to send me email messages they receive a message back saying that the
quota on my account was exceeded!
Answer: Your email box can hold a certain amount of email messages. Our basic email accounts hold at
least 30MB of email messages. That's enough storage for around 5,000 typical email messages. But once
in a while you probably receive larger email attachments. These file attachments can consume much of your
email storage space over time. The solution is to store the email attachments on your computer system and
delete from from the mail server. Every month you should review older email messages and delete the
messages you no longer need. You can also order additional storage space from Digital North for a small
monthly fee.
(4) Customer report: My email was working perfectly yesterday and today it is no longer working!
Answer: Gremlins hacked into your computer and changed all of your email settings last night just to annoy you.
Okay, maybe it wasn't actually gremlins but it was probably something similar. Software updates can
change your email software settings. If I had a dollar for every time a software update
or antivirus update changed a customer's email software settings I would own a private island in the
Pacific (and of course everyone would be invited to come hang out with me). The Windows XP Service Pack 2 update
packs a serious punch. It can break all kinds of software programs due to the firewall security it puts
in place. Antivirus software updates are notorious for changing email software settings. These software
updates are important and I don't want to discourage anyone from updating their computer. But recognize
that in some cases there is a connection between recent software updates and your email software not working.
(5) Customer report: We just hired a new employee or someone just left the company. How do I setup a
new email account or remove an existing account?
Answer: You can manage all of your email accounts via a simple email administration website. We provide
full email management capabilities to all of our customers. You can add, update, and remove email accounts,
setup custom message rules, email autoresponders, email forwarding accounts, and much more. Please see
the Digital North Help! website at http://help.digitalnorth.net for more details about accessing these
web management features.
V. Customer Profile: Wire the Market
http://www.wirethemarket.com
We love talking to happy customers -- especially since they have great things to say
about us! We spoke with Adrian Kruschke from Wire the Market this past week.
Digital North: Adrian, what is your official title and role?
Adrian: Technology Director
Digital North: What is Wire the Market? What are Wire the Market's capabilities?
Adrian: Wire The Market is a boutique business development and market research
firm that specializes in helping clients with complex, high-value solutions gain entrée to senior
executive decision makers in Fortune 2000 accounts.
Digital North: What type of company is a perfect customer for Wire the Market?
Adrian: A technology-oriented B2B firm (software, hardware, or services) that
uses a direct sales force to market and sell complex, high-value solutions to larger Fortune 2000
companies.
Digital North: How does the Internet fit into Wire the Market's business? How
has the Internet changed your business?
Adrian: We leverage a wide range of information sources in our research efforts.
We also use the Internet to deliver our content to a wide range of geographically dispersed client users.
The caliber of research we deliver would be impossible without the breadth of information available
through our internet sources, and the speed at which we can deliver it using our website and other
technologies available to us.
Digital North: What new internet technologies do companies need to consider
implementing over the next three years?
Adrian: Blogs will become an ever more important way for companies to market
themselves and their offerings. Handheld wireless mediums will become a defacto medium for accessing
Internet based services over the next three years.
Digital North: Why did you select Digital North as a hosting partner?
Adrian: After meeting with several local firms, I felt that Digital North best
offered the capabilities and level of service that we required, at a very reasonable cost.
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