• Concentric Cloud Computing: New Managed Server
• Customer Profile—Widelity Uses Concentric Professional Services to Create a Reseller Portal and Ecommerce Tool
• CMS is All the Buzz– Why You Should Use One
• Microsoft^® Hosted Exchange – Productivity on Steroids
• Secure, Encrypted Business Instant Messaging – In Beta Now
• Unleash Your Communications

Concentric Currents delivers the latest information on product enhancements, user tips, and new products announcements. Concentric Currents - The easiest way to stay current in hosting and hosted IT services. To receive email alerts and special offers, login to the Concentric Center go to "Menu Map | My Profile", or select the tab "My Profile", and under Preferences select the "Yes" radio button next to "Receive Newsletter"

Concentric Cloud Computing: New Managed Server

Concentric Managed Server is a fault-tolerant, high availability, cloud computing infrastructure. Key benefits include:

• On-demand processing power and bandwidth
• High-availability , fast failover and redundancies
• Lower total cost-of-ownership
• No hardware obsolescence
• Fully managed - no data center visits
• Concentric Managed Server customers get full control of their Linux or Windows servers with administrative-level access: Install and run your own applications, i.e., Apache (web server), IIS (web server), Sendmail (mail server), Exchange (mail server), MySQL (database server), or MS SQL (database server)
• Host and manage your own Internet web sites, Intranets, and extranets (as many as you want)
• Control all your files and processes on the server

Concentric Managed Server is ideal for mission-critical applications, hosting custom web sites, and setting up a business continuity/disaster recovery solution that scales easily - without having to replicate the entire production environment.

Get started today - affordable, enterprise-class features and functionality without large, up-front capital expenses for hardware, software and IT infrastructure resources. Call us today at 866-500-9696 to find out how the Concentric Managed Server can serve the needs of your business.

Profile—Widelity Uses Concentric Professional Services to Create a Reseller Portal and an Ecommerce Tool

Widelity deploys mission-critical IT solutions and provides design, deployment, and operation services for communication networks, as well as integrated applications that improve productivity. Its client, Nextlink^™ Wireless is a provider of broadband services to both wireless and wire-line communications service markets. The company engaged Widelity to develop two critical online assets—its reseller portal and an ecommerce tool called LMDSXchange.

Nextlink had been using email, faxes and a WIKI to communicate with resellers but a fast-changing market required a more flexible, dedicated solution. The new reseller site had to be reliable, secure, manageable, and highly cost effective. Nextlink’s LMDSXchange (www.LMDSXchange.com) facilitated online transactions between LMDS (Local Multipoint Distribution Services) providers and potential licensors. The Web site manages a one-stop-shop for service providers and vendors for the 28GHz spectrum. Like the reseller portal, the new LMDSXchange had to be reliable, secure, and affordable. For both projects, maintenance would be initially outsourced but had to be simple enough to eventually be managed internally.

Widelity determined it needed a Web solution that would deliver Nextlink’s short-term go-to-market strategy and still meet long-term security and manageability business requirements. The LMDSXchange had to meet specific ecommerce requirements, collect information for FCC filings, and provide dynamic prequalification tools and services to verify potential LMDS point-to-point links. As a nationwide one-stop-shop for LMDS spectrum, it required the development of extensive services for a variety of organizations. In addition to scalability and reliability, the sites had to expand as the company and its market grew. The ultimate platform and service provider had to meet a complex, phased implementation strategy.

After extensive review of Web service providers, Widelity selected Concentric^® for the reseller and LMDSXchange sites because of its reputation, experienced development staff, and proven reliability and security of its platforms. Concentric’s Professional Web Services are specifically designed for small and medium businesses requiring a turnkey solution for building and maintaining a strong Web presence.

Widelity and Concentric then set about creating a custom portal that effectively show-cased Nextlink’s reseller program and successfully gave partners instant access to critical data such as collateral, training modules, invoices, and contracts. Working closely with Widelity and Nextlink, Concentric recommended numerous strategic and technical improvements that enhanced the user experience and kept the project on track and within budget. Proposing a platform based on the MODx Content Management Framework, Concentric provided a balanced suite of capabilities that included a Web application builder, a development environment, and a content management system. MODx is particularly adaptable to large sites that grow as needs expand with templates that are easy to create. In addition, its interface and management tools made the site easy to maintain and adapt over time.

“We have very high standards in delivering value and expertise to our clients,” said Michael Lasky, principal at Widelity. “Concentric met all our requirements and allowed us to quickly and affordably create a secure, reliable, and easy-to-manage Web presence for Nextlink in less than two week.”

Get your free no-obligation quote from Concentric Professional Web Services today. Whether you need help to design, deploy, and manage an ecommerce web site, or require custom CGI scripting, Professional Services can help. Call (866) 500-9696 or Request a Callback. The company’s proven experience spans a decade of services that let clients focus on their core competency. By leveraging Concentric’s Professional Web Services, SMBs gain the security and reliability needed to maintain a competitive advantage.

CMS is All the Buzz– Why You Should Use One

Tired of updating your static web pages writing HTML code in numerous places just to modify your web site content? Are you fed up with calling the “Web Guys” to make simple modifications? Stuck using out-dated software such as FrontPage^® Maybe it’s time to consider migrating to a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is a web-based application in which your web site resides. You can use a CMS to edit, create, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. This makes it easy to manage your web site and does not require any third party software.

After testing CMS options, Concentric Professional Services has found the perfect CMS solution. It’s called MODx. It’s flexible, easy-to-use, and user friendly. This type of CMS requires no knowledge of HTML, PHP, or other complicated computer language. MODx is simple, straight forward, and it works very well.

MODx allows you to create standard based XHTML/CSS web sites. This means that your web site will be accessible, lightweight, and most importantly, search-engine friendly. MODx has features such as self-updating navigation and site maps. Want to add a new page to your web site? With static sites, this can be a challenge; you need to make changes to every single page of your site so the new page is included in the navigation structure.

However, if you use MODx you simply login to the manager interface, create a new document, put in your content, and save your changes. MODx does the rest for you. It updates your site map, the navigation on every page, and the content you entered is wrapped in your web site’s template. It’s so simple. And, unlike third party software, you aren’t tied to a specific computer. MODx is completely web based, so you can manage your web site anywhere you have an Internet connection. You can even publish content on your web site while you’re at the game. Call Professional Services at 866-500-8696 and let us show you how you can get your site moved over to a CMS today.

Check out the Professional Services portfolio, - built in MODx

Microsoft^® Hosted Exchange – Productivity on Steroids

Just for Starters, Easily Schedule Team Meetings. Wish meetings were easier to schedule? Wish you had anywhere, anytime, access to your calendar, email, and contacts even when you are away from your computer? Get all of this and more with Microsoft^® Hosted Exchange from Concentric, which can be easily and affordably added to your existing account.

Microsoft Exchange has been used in large organizations for years because of its business-class mail and productivity enhancing features such as:

• The ability for your employees to schedule meetings, events, and resources by viewing everyone else’s current schedule and commitments
• Outlook^® Web Access where your Outlook email, calendars, contacts, and more are synchronized with the server and available securely through any web browser
• Support for shared address lists that all of your employees can view and edit, regardless of location
• BlackBerry^® and Microsoft^® ActiveSync^® mobile solutions that enable your employees to access not just mail, but calendars, contacts, and tasks wherever they are.

Concentric basic email services do not offer these capabilities; but Concentric Hosted Microsoft Exchange does. Best of all, you do not have to commit any technical resources to run an Exchange server, which means you can focus on your core business while our experts handle administration and support.

Because it is a hosted solution, your employees will benefit from advanced information sharing and teamwork features wherever they work – at the office, at home, at a client site, or on the road. The service is priced at just $9.95/user/month with no upfront investment or on-going maintenance or upgrade fees. Included in the service is a Microsoft^® Outlook^® 2007 or Entourage software license for every user to unleash the full messaging potential of business-class email.

Is your email truly enabling your business to be more productive and efficient every day? With a business-class e-mail solution from Concentric it can. Enable Hosted Microsoft Exchange through the Concentric Help Center | Contact Customer Care inside the Gateway or call our sales team at 866-500-9696 and they can enable it on your account for you. Find out more about Concentric Hosted Microsoft Exchange at http://www.concentric.com/hosted_exchange.php.

Secure, Encrypted Business Instant Messaging – Now in Beta

Communicate more efficiently using real-time secure Business Messenger. Unlike public chat services, Business Messenger communication can be restricted to the people in your organization keeping your organization secure and private. And, all communications are SSL encrypted giving you security comparable to online banking.

Whether you are at the office or on the go, there are a variety of ways to stay connected with Business Messenger. Access Business Messenger securely from any web browser or download and install the easy-to-use Business Messenger chat client on your desktop. Need even more flexibility? Business Messenger is based on the open standard XMPP for compatibility with a wide variety of chat clients.

Features Include:

• Business class, real-time messaging
• Ability to restrict chat access to account users only for privacy and security
• SSL encrypted chat
• Customizable presence indicator
• Multi-person chat
• Secure chat rooms
• Persistent chat rooms
• Contact groups
• Contact profiles
• Web-based chat client
• Desktop chat client
• Support for XMPP compliant chat clients

Business Messenger is free during Beta. After Beta, it will be included at no additional charge for Hosted Microsoft^® Exchange or Groupware Collaborative users. For all other users, it’s just $1 per month per user.

Try the Business Messenger free during beta, by selecting Messenger | Configure from the Menu Map.

Unleash your Communications

Tied down by old, expensive phone and fax equipment? Concentric has partnered with RingCentral to help you instantly unify and intelligently manage all your phone, mobile and fax communications from just one place–the new RingCentral Hosted Business Phone Service. With plans starting as low as $9.99, you get all of the power and functionality of an enterprise phone system in one easy-to-use, affordable package.

Advanced RingCentral Call Management Features include:

• Toll Free or Local Numbers – Get an 800 or local number or transfer existing local or toll free numbers to RingCentral.
• Internet Fax - No Fax Machine Required! Send and receive faxes by email.
• Auto-Receptionist - An auto-receptionist offers multiple extensions (“Press 1 for sales, 2 for support or 3 for a company directory…”) that make any company sound larger. Forward all extensions to the same number and even a one-person business can sound big!
• Voicemail – Voicemail can be sent to email or you can call in to retrieve your messages.
• Fax from any Microsoft^® Windows^® Application – Simply click “RingCentral Fax” from the application toolbar.
• FindMe/FollowMe – When customers call, the system will try to reach you at sequential—or simultaneous—office, mobile and home numbers. Numbers can also be changed based on time of day.
• Advanced Call Screening – After identifying the call, the auto- receptionist displays the number or caller’s name. It can also ask callers to state their name.
• Secure Faxing - Outgoing faxes are transmitted over an encrypted connection, while incoming faxes are stored in a password-protected online account.
• Edit and Sign Faxes Electronically - Preview and print faxes, design custom cover sheets, annotate and sign faxes electronically.

RingCentral DigitalLine™ VoIP is a cost-effective alternative to existing landlines. This innovative service routes calls through a high-speed Internet connection using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology. RingCentral DigitalLine is a great way to leverage VoIP over an existing Internet service for up to five lines. Companies looking for Internet access combined with VoIP for five or more phone lines should consider VoIP services provided by XO.

Start your 30-Day Free Trial of RingCentral Hosted Business Phone Service Today

• Concentric Hosted Microsoft^® Exchange Now Available!
• Sign up Now for the Managed Server Beta Program
• Supercharge your Telecommunications
• Gear Up for the Holidays

Concentric Currents delivers the latest information on new products, enhancements, market data, and important how-to tips in an easy-to-use format. If you’d like to receive email alerts about new products and updates, login to the Concentric Center, go to "Menu Map | My Profile" or select the tab "My Profile" and under Preferences, select "Yes" next to "Receive Newsletter".

It’s the easiest way to stay current.

Concentric Hosted Microsoft^® Exchange is now Available

We’re pleased to announce Hosted Microsoft^® Exchange for business customers.

Concentric Hosted Exchange provides superior email, calendar, and collaboration software through Microsoft^® Exchange 2007 with a free copy of Outlook^® 2003 or 2007 for Windows or Entourage^® for Mac OS. Concentric Hosted Exchange comes with junk mail and virus filtering, shared folders, and many other productivity-enhancing features.

World-class Email, Calendar and Collaboration

No matter the size of your company, Concentric Hosted Exchange delivers the email, calendaring, collaboration, and mobility capabilities used by Fortune 500 companies around the world. With Concentric Hosted Exchange you get:

Collaboration

• Group Calendaring and Scheduling

• Public Email Folders

• Shared Contacts, Calendars, and Folders

• Tasks and Task Delegation

Microsoft Exchange 2007 Email

• Outlook Web Access (OWA)

• Secure mailbox access via Outlook

• Optional mobile device access for BlackBerry^®, Windows Mobile, and iPhone

Microsoft Outlook 2007

• Email, Calendar, Contacts

• Tasks, Notes, Journal

Microsoft Active Directory

• Global Address List (GAL)

• Offline Address Book (OAB)

Anytime, Anywhere Access

Customers can access Concentric Hosted Exchange anytime, anywhere, on any device and get Outlook Web Access (OWA) at no additional cost. Wireless access on RIM BlackBerry^®, iPhone™, or Windows Mobile^® devices is also available.

Real Savings

Concentric Hosted Exchange costs significantly less than in-house email servers. In addition to eliminating server hardware and software licenses, it drastically reduces hardware maintenance, power, cooling and battery backups, and software support. Concentric Hosted Exchange scales to your business without software updates and patches and disruptive upgrades. The increasingly complex infrastructure required to support email, calendar, and collaboration products are managed for you.

True Reliability & Security

Concentric Hosted Exchange includes junk mail, virus filtering, daily, weekly, and monthly backups and much more. From our world-class data center, our clustered Exchange servers and storage area network (SAN) have fast, reliable, redundant backbone network connections, redundant power grid connections, and uninterruptible power supplies and backup generators with no single point-of-failure.

The Concentric Hosted Exchange data center employs a dedicated professional security staff, multiple layers of hard-line physical security, electronically controlled access, biometric scanners, and video surveillance with digital storage. Our network security uses the best available firewalls, restricted physical network access, and strict security policies.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is optimized for hosted environments. With Remote Procedure Call (RPC) over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), Concentric Hosted Exchange is as secure as online banking. The service is managed by experts who apply Microsoft recommended patches monthly.

Get More for Less With different types of mailboxes Concentric Hosted Exchange is available from as low as $7.95 and in convenient Mailbox Packs that help you save even more. Enable Hosted Exchange through the Concentric Help Center | Contact Customer Care or call our sales team at (866) 495-9696 and have them enable Hosted Exchange for your account. Consult our sales team or click here to learn more about Concentric Hosted Exchange.

Sign up Now for the Managed Server Beta Program

Concentric Managed Server is a hosted Linux or Windows server accessible over the Internet. To be launched in September 2008, it will be provided through the Concentric Cloud, a fault-tolerant, high availability cloud computing infrastructure. This important new service delivers on-demand processing power, bandwidth and storage capacity, high-availability, fast error recovery, and lower total cost-of-ownership.

Concentric Managed Server means affordable enterprise-class features and functionality for the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME). This fault-tolerant, high availability solution reduces capital expenditures on hardware, software, and other IT infrastructure resources. Customers have full control of their servers with administrative-level access. They can:

• Install and run their own applications such as Apache (web server), IIS (web server), Sendmail (mail server), Exchange (mail server), MySQL (database server), MSSQL (database server)

• Host and manage as many Internet, intranet, and extranet web sites as they want

• Retain control over all files and processes on the server

Concentric Managed Server is ideal for:

• Mission critical applications that require servers in a fault-tolerant, high availability environment

• Hosting custom web sites—independent from selection of platform, technology, software components and scripting language—with daily server maintenance and management provided

• Setting up a scaleable continuity/disaster recovery solution that doesn’t require replication of the entire production environment.

We’re currently looking for participants in our Beta Program from September 2^nd through September 22^nd, 2008. If you’re interested in being the first to benefit from this unique managed hosting service, call (866) 500-9696 to request more information. There’s no cost and participants will have the opportunity to provide valuable feedback that will drive future Concentric products and services.

Supercharge your Telecommunications

Concentric has partnered with RingCentral to help customers maintain their professional business image. RingCentral Hosted Business Phone Service allows the instant unification and intelligent management of all phone, mobile, and fax communications in one place. With plans starting as low as $9.99, you can now get the power and functionality of an enterprise phone system at a truly affordable price.

Advanced Call Management Features include:

• Toll Free or Local Number – Get an 800 or local number and transfer existing local numbers or toll free numbers to RingCentral.

• Internet Fax - No Fax Machine required! Send and receive faxes from a computer or any web-browser.

• Auto-Attendant - An auto-attendant offers multiple extensions (“Press 1 for sales, 2 for support or 3 for a company directory.”) that make any company appear larger. With extensions forwarded to the same number, a one-person business doesn’t have to sound small.

• Voicemail – Voicemail can be sent to email through the web or you can call in to retrieve your messages.

• Fax from any Microsoft© Windows^® Application - Just click the RingCentral Fax icon on the application toolbar, or select it from the File menu.

• FindMe/FollowMe – When customers call, the system will try to reach you at sequential office, mobile, and home numbers. Numbers can also be changed based on time of day.

• Advanced Call Screening – After identifying the call, the auto-attendant displays the number or caller’s name. It can also ask callers to state their name, which is heard through your computer or by phone when the call is sent for screening.

• Secure Faxing - Outgoing faxes are transmitted over an encrypted connection while incoming faxes are stored in a password-protected online account.

• Edit and Sign Faxes Electronically - Preview and print faxes, design custom cover sheets, annotate and sign faxes electronically.

RingCentral DigitalLine™ VoIP

RingCentral DigitalLine™ is a cost-effective alternative to existing landlines. This innovative service routes calls through a high-speed Internet connection using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology. RingCentral DigitalLine is great way to leverage VoIP over an existing Internet service for up to five lines. Companies looking for Internet access combined with VoIP should consider services provided by XO.

Start your 30-Day Free Trial of RingCentral Hosted Business Phone Service today.

Gear Up for the Holidays

With gas prices climbing, more people will rely on the Internet for holiday shopping. If you don’t have an online store, you may be losing key sales opportunities. Designing a retail site can be exciting but it can also take time. Concentric’s team of web design professionals can set up an effective ecommerce solution that fits your needs. We can integrate industry-leading payment and shipping options to make your customers’ buying experience smooth and easy. We’ll get you started with OSCommerce or ZenCart or customize your site with your preferred ecommerce or shopping cart solution.

Our Professional Services team can get your online store up and running fast. But don’t wait too long—the holidays are closer than you think! To get started now, just go to concentric.com and click on the Professional Services link and fill out the quote form.

• Super Charge your SEO
  
• MSSQL Update: ASP.Net Membership Support Now Available
  
• Get Free and Confidential Business Advice from SCORE, Counselors to America’s Small Businesses
  
• Taking Advantage of Google Webmaster Tools

The Concentric Currents newsletter is designed to deliver important information on new products, enhancements, market data, and the latest how-to tips in an easy-to-use format. If you’d like to receive email alerts about new products and updates, login to the Concentric Center, go to "Menu Map | My Profile" or select the tab "My Profile" and, under Preferences, select "Yes" next to "Receive Newsletter". It’s the easiest way to stay current.

Super Charge your SEO

Concentric Professional Services team now offers advanced Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Basic SEO can entail one or more specific techniques to help you improve your search engine rankings. Concentric Professional Services advanced SEO is a holistic offering that takes advantage of a suite of techniques to help you fully optimize your Web site for search engines, including:

• Web site indexing
• Web site (HTML) optimization
• Content optimization
• Traffic/rank optimization
• Web site analytics

Our advanced SEO package includes Web site analysis tools to help you see what is actually occurring on your Web site, from page statistics to user behavior. Analyzing the results your Web site is currently getting is the first step to understanding how your Web site is working for you.

Call us today at 1-866-500-9696 to set up a consultation or speak to one of our Professional Services team members about how we can help you with your SEO needs today.

MSSQL Update: ASP.Net Membership Support Now Available

Concentric now offers the ability to automatically create a Microsoft® SQL Server Database with the ASP.NET Membership capability enabled. Together, the Microsoft SQL Server and ASP.NET Membership create an environment that allows users to develop powerful web sites or implement third-party applications with built-in user authentication based on the .NET Framework. ASP.NET membership gives site developers the ability create and manage users and the ability to allow only trusted and authenticated users to visit the ASP.NET Membership-enabled site.

Using ASP.NET Membership reduces design and development time since the foundation code for creating and maintaining users, roles, and logins is ready to go immediately after the initial creation.

Existing customers that have already enabled Microsoft SQL Server and are on the Windows 2003 ASP.NET 2.0 Platform can go to the Databases Tab and Microsoft SQL Sever and check the box to create ASP.NET membership when adding a database. This will create the needed ASP.NET membership tables and schemas for application development. If you are not currently on the Windows 2003 ASP.NET 2.0 Platform and are interested in this new capability please call us at 866-500-9696 for information about migration options.

Find more information about ASP.NET Membership at these sites:

• Introduction to ASP.NET Membership
• How to Use Membership in ASP.NET 2.0
• Official Microsoft® ASP.NET Site

Get Free & Confidential Business Advice from SCORE, Counselors to America’s Small Business

Concentric has recently partnered with SCORE^®, a nonprofit association dedicated to educating entrepreneurs and the formation, growth, and success of small business nationwide. SCORE is a resource partner with the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).

SCORE has 389 chapters throughout the United States and its territories, with 10,500 volunteers nationwide. Volunteers are working or retired business owners, executives, and corporate leaders who mentor new entrepreneurs and share their wisdom and lessons learned in business.

If you just starting a new business venture, here are some useful tips:

Need a Mentor? 5 Tips to Getting a Good One

• Think about the end result. Let your mentor know what advice you want for success. Do you need advice on managing cash flow or a mentor to help keep you energized and motivated? Both are good. Be clear.
• Be prepared. Share a snapshot of your business today. Share goals so your mentor has a picture of your dream for success. Then, ask questions and listen for great ideas.
• More is better. Develop a network. No one person has all the answers. Not you, your CPA, or your mentor. You may want a mentor for business planning and a mentor for finance and one for cash flow issues.
• Cash is king. Good cash flow is important, especially at start-up and growth stages. Always be wary of economic slow-downs. A mentor can help you plan a collections policy, make plans for a line-of-credit, and project cash flow based on sales.
• Seek industry expertise. Find a mentor who can address your industry-specific issues.

Visit SCORE to see how you can find a trained mentor who has been where you are today.

Taking Advantage of Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools enable you to submit your sites and URLs to Google’s index. After you have added your site and sitemaps, you can view detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. Not only does this help with SEO, it provides valuable insight into how visitors are navigating your site.

Google Webmaster Tools are easy to add. Go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools and login with your Gmail account. If you do not have a Gmail account, you will need to sign up for one, which is free. Once you login, you should be on the Dashboard page. Add your site’s URL using the form on this page.

Next, you need to verify your site. Choose one of the two methods offered and Google Webmaster Tools will crawl to your site. Once Google has verified your site, you will have access to all kinds of useful information and statistics such as:

• Errors in the html code
• Broken links on your site
• Top keyword search queries
• Where your site ranks in search results
• Reports on sites that link to your site

Using Google Webmaster Tools provides insight to help you optimize your site for Google’s search engine and study user behavior on your site, so that you can continue to improve how your Web site performs for your specific business goals.

May/June 2008 Newsletter

• Super Charge your SEO
  
• MSSQL Update: ASP.Net Membership Support Now Available
  
• Get Free and Confidential Business Advice from SCORE, Counselors to America’s Small Businesses
  
• Taking Advantage of Google Webmaster Tools

The Concentric Currents newsletter is designed to deliver important information on new products, enhancements, market data, and the latest how-to tips in an easy-to-use format. If you’d like to receive email alerts about new products and updates, login to the Concentric Center, go to "Menu Map | My Profile" or select the tab "My Profile" and, under Preferences, select "Yes" next to "Receive Newsletter". It’s the easiest way to stay current.

Super Charge your SEO

Concentric Professional Services team now offers advanced Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Basic SEO can entail one or more specific techniques to help you improve your search engine rankings. Concentric Professional Services advanced SEO is a holistic offering that takes advantage of a suite of techniques to help you fully optimize your Web site for search engines, including:

• Web site indexing
• Web site (HTML) optimization
• Content optimization
• Traffic/rank optimization
• Web site analytics

Our advanced SEO package includes Web site analysis tools to help you see what is actually occurring on your Web site, from page statistics to user behavior. Analyzing the results your Web site is currently getting is the first step to understanding how your Web site is working for you.

Call us today at 1-866-500-9696 to set up a consultation or speak to one of our Professional Services team members about how we can help you with your SEO needs today.

MSSQL Update: ASP.Net Membership Support Now Available

Concentric now offers the ability to automatically create a Microsoft® SQL Server Database with the ASP.NET Membership capability enabled. Together, the Microsoft SQL Server and ASP.NET Membership create an environment that allows users to develop powerful web sites or implement third-party applications with built-in user authentication based on the .NET Framework. ASP.NET membership gives site developers the ability create and manage users and the ability to allow only trusted and authenticated users to visit the ASP.NET Membership-enabled site.

Using ASP.NET Membership reduces design and development time since the foundation code for creating and maintaining users, roles, and logins is ready to go immediately after the initial creation.

Existing customers that have already enabled Microsoft SQL Server and are on the Windows 2003 ASP.NET 2.0 Platform can go to the Databases Tab and Microsoft SQL Sever and check the box to create ASP.NET membership when adding a database. This will create the needed ASP.NET membership tables and schemas for application development. If you are not currently on the Windows 2003 ASP.NET 2.0 Platform and are interested in this new capability please call us at 866-500-9696 for information about migration options.

Find more information about ASP.NET Membership at these sites:

• Introduction to ASP.NET Membership
• How to Use Membership in ASP.NET 2.0
• Official Microsoft® ASP.NET Site

Get Free & Confidential Business Advice from SCORE, Counselors to America’s Small Business

Concentric has recently partnered with SCORE^®, a nonprofit association dedicated to educating entrepreneurs and the formation, growth, and success of small business nationwide. SCORE is a resource partner with the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).

SCORE has 389 chapters throughout the United States and its territories, with 10,500 volunteers nationwide. Volunteers are working or retired business owners, executives, and corporate leaders who mentor new entrepreneurs and share their wisdom and lessons learned in business.

If you just starting a new business venture, here are some useful tips:

Need a Mentor? 5 Tips to Getting a Good One

• Think about the end result. Let your mentor know what advice you want for success. Do you need advice on managing cash flow or a mentor to help keep you energized and motivated? Both are good. Be clear.
• Be prepared. Share a snapshot of your business today. Share goals so your mentor has a picture of your dream for success. Then, ask questions and listen for great ideas.
• More is better. Develop a network. No one person has all the answers. Not you, your CPA, or your mentor. You may want a mentor for business planning and a mentor for finance and one for cash flow issues.
• Cash is king. Good cash flow is important, especially at start-up and growth stages. Always be wary of economic slow-downs. A mentor can help you plan a collections policy, make plans for a line-of-credit, and project cash flow based on sales.
• Seek industry expertise. Find a mentor who can address your industry-specific issues.

Visit SCORE to see how you can find a trained mentor who has been where you are today.

Taking Advantage of Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools enable you to submit your sites and URLs to Google’s index. After you have added your site and sitemaps, you can view detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. Not only does this help with SEO, it provides valuable insight into how visitors are navigating your site.

Google Webmaster Tools are easy to add. Go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools and login with your Gmail account. If you do not have a Gmail account, you will need to sign up for one, which is free. Once you login, you should be on the Dashboard page. Add your site’s URL using the form on this page.

Next, you need to verify your site. Choose one of the two methods offered and Google Webmaster Tools will crawl to your site. Once Google has verified your site, you will have access to all kinds of useful information and statistics such as:

• Errors in the html code
• Broken links on your site
• Top keyword search queries
• Where your site ranks in search results
• Reports on sites that link to your site

Using Google Webmaster Tools provides insight to help you optimize your site for Google’s search engine and study user behavior on your site, so that you can continue to improve how your Web site performs for your specific business goals.

• Updated Spam Filter Fights Spam with Greater Accuracy
  
• Beta Update: GroupWare Connector for Microsoft® Outlook® Now Available
  
• New for Windows Plans: Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005
  
• Spotlight on Professional Services : New Web Site Maintenance and Web Site Design Services Bundles Make Your Life Easier
  
• Feature Focus: Private Domain Registration Keeps Your Personal Contact Information Under Wraps

Updated Spam Filter Fights Spam with Greater Accuracy

In the almost fourteen years that ‘modern’ spam has plagued the Internet, there have been repeated predictions that it was coming to an end, whether due to new laws or new technology or the invisible hand of the market. I’ve made some of those predictions myself, but most experts now agree that spam is going to be an endemic drain on the Internet for a long time to come, and new technologies can only keep it from growing further.

To put this into perspective, we currently handle up to 200 million inbound emails on an average day, with 80 to 90% of that being spam or otherwise undesirable email. These percentages are in line with spam rates elsewhere. To handle the ever-increasing volume of mail, we continue to bring online new hardware and new versions of our mail routing and delivery engine. We’re now deploying high-density 24-CPU servers to provide aggressive filtering options to handle that volume.
As part of these efforts, we’ve also released a new spam filtering engine. This was rolled out to Standard filtering customers over the past two months and we’re seeing, overall, a decrease in missed spam of about 8x. Our new Standard filtering has a number of improvements to get that increase in accuracy; it performs a number of statistical analyses on inbound messages and collects pattern information on inbound spam, using that to update itself multiple times a day to keep up-to-date with the constant change in spam techniques. This same updating process takes reported errors from customers into account for future corrections; users of Concentric Web Mail who report errors are directly contributing to improved filtering performance.

Other than core protocol enforcement—i.e., we can reject messages that fail basic compliance/compatibility tests—all our spam filtering is opt-in. In other words, unlike many email providers, we allow our customers to decide whether and how their mail is filtered.

We strongly encourage users to enable, at the minimum, free Virus and junk mail filtering. If you’re seeing a lot of spam, please make sure that you have filtering enabled for your users by checking the radio button. To enable filtering go to My Profile | Email Options. Select On for the User Junk Mail Filtering option. You can also enable a safe list by checking the radio button for User Rule Filtering. Note that while there are sensitivity settings you can use to adjust how much mail is allowed through we recommend that most users leave this set to the default, middle setting. Also, please periodically check your junk mail quarantine (Concentric Web Mail Junk Mail folder is the default) to make sure there are no ‘false positives’ (legitimate messages tagged as junk), and adjust the sensitivity setting as needed.

We have a number of additional improvements in mail and filtering handling coming soon. The new filtering technology is currently deployed in the Standard filtering level; this same engine will be rolled into Premium filtering over the coming months. We are also deploying additional intelligence into the filtering engine to further correct the statistical analysis, and core mail routing engine enhancements are rolling out to slow down spammers while not impeding legitimate mail, and to utilize some emerging protocols to reduce mail spoofing and phishing attempts. For our Outlook users, we are testing an Outlook plug-in which can be used for client-side filter training without having to find messages in the Web interface for Custom training. And we will soon be offering filtering on forwarded mail and distribution lists.

Have questions about filtering or features you’d like to see? Contact our Customer Care group by using the Contact Customer Care form in the Concentric Center and we’ll take a look!

David Schairer
Chief Technology Officer
Concentric, an XO Business

Beta Update :GroupWare Connector for Microsoft® Outlook® Now Available

GroupWare now includes the GroupWare Connector for Microsoft Outlook . The Connector lets you experience all the features of GroupWare with the familiar Outlook interface, giving you much of the functionality of a Microsoft Exchange environment without the associated costs or IT maintenance.

Some things you can do with GroupWare and the new Connector for Microsoft® Outlook® :

• Synchronize your Outlook® mail folders, contacts, and calendar between Outlook and your online Web Mail contacts and calendars for anywhere, anytime access
• Select contacts from the Shared Contacts Address Book and send emails or meeting invites
• Simplify meeting scheduling by viewing time availability of individuals within your organization and schedule meetings in Outlook
• Set up Personal and Shared calendars
• Manage Notes and Tasks and keep them organized in lists
• Publish one or more of your calendars to your website

Collaboration Mode and the Connector are free while in Beta. After the Beta period ends, the Connector will be included with GroupWare Collaborative —just $5.95/user/month, or added to the GroupWare Personal for just $2.00/user/month.

Beta testing on GroupWare will continue for the next several months. Users will be notified 30 days before the end of Beta testing. Master, Domain, or User Administrators can enable the Collaborative mode in the Concentric Center by selecting Outlook Connector Beta under the Applications sub-tab under Calendar. Administrators can activate the Connector for users wishing to remain in Personal mode by changing permissions on the GroupWare settings page located under the Manage sub-tab under Users. While there is no phone-based support available during the Beta period, you’ll find extensive FAQs and an installation guide on the GroupWare Connector page in the Concentric Center.

Your feedback is always welcome. Please go to the Tools sub-tab in the GroupWare sub-tab and select “Feedback” to give your feedback to the product management team.

New for Windows Plans: Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005

We are pleased to announce the availability of Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) for the Concentric Windows hosting platform. The addition of Microsoft’s Premier database rounds out the Windows .NET hosting platform capabilities, and greatly expands the range of applications available, including leading applications like Community Server and Classifieds Web Site.

Available on all Windows premium hosting plans it includes up to four database instances and up to 200MB of total data storage. Additional storage is available for as an add-on. The MSSQL database features a full suite of web-based administrative tools. As the Administrator, you can execute TSQL scripts, easily add or modify database schema, and even make backup copies of your database ready for download. Due to security reasons we do not currently support direct access to the database.

FAQs are available to assist customers currently using MS Access who would like to move up to the robust and scalable MSSQL database. Additional FAQs to help you with the installation and configuration of a wide range of .NET applications are coming soon.

For more information about MSSQL please contact us at either sales@concentric.com or by phone at 866-500-9696.

Spotlight on Professional Services: New Web Site Maintenance and Web Site Design Services Bundles Make Your Life Easier

Our bundled Professional Services packages address the needs of business customers who need help getting their web site up and running as well as the ongoing maintenance to keep it running smoothly and up-to-date.

Bundles combine our most popular Professional Services:

• Web Hosting Account & Set-Up – Set-up of your hosting account, users email accounts, and configuration of our powerful antivirus and spam features
• Website Migration – If your web site is currently hosted elsewhere, we’ll migrate your web site to your new hosting account
• Web site Design – Whether you need a web site, or are ready for a redesign of your existing web site, we will design your site for you, including a Contact Us form
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – We’ll work with you to make sure your web site is optimized for search engines and help you select keywords
• Google Analytics – Set-up of Google Analytics, a free application, that provides a wealth of information about how your web site visitors travel through your web site
• Web Site Maintenance –Content and html edits, account maintenance, email issues - use this time for any web site issues you may encounter during the 12-month contract

Save 20% over our regular Professional Services rate by taking advantage of the Web Assistant and Web Designer bundles. Visit us at http://www.concentric.com/professional_web_site_services.php, or call ( 866) 500-9696 for more information.

Feature Focus: Private Domain Registration Keeps Your Personal Contact Information Under Wraps

Your domain is an asset just like other parts of your business; and as an important asset, it needs to be protected. ICANN, the governing body of domain names, requires that every preferred registrar maintain an accessible “WHOIS” directory for all registered domains. That means that your personal information, as well as the administrative and technical contacts for your web site, your name servers, and the IP address where your web site is located is available to anyone who wants to see it, 24 hours a day, everyday.

Private Domain Registration is an optional service that keeps your personal or business information hidden from public view. If a third party wants to contact you, that message is filtered through our domain name registrar who screens the message for spam and passes valid email communications to you. You control whether or not you respond to the message.

Private Domain Registration is only $9.95 for one year. Sign-up for this service by logging into the Concentric Center, going to Domain Settings and selecting Activate Private Domain Registration.

© Copyright 2008 XO. All rights reserved. Concentric, Concentric logo, Impossibly Easy, and XO are trademarks of XO Communications, Inc. All other products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

If you would like to receive email newsletter alerts about our latest product enhancements and system updates, please login to the Concentric Center and go to “Menu Map | My Profile”, or select the tab “My Profile”, and under Preferences select the “Yes” radio button next to “Receive Newsletter”.

• GroupWare Collaboration Mode - Free for a Limited Time
  
• Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Coming Soon - Sign Up for Beta Test Today
  
• DNS Management: Specialized Domain Manager Plans
  
• New Process Automation Tool for UNIX and Widows – Concentric Script Scheduler
  
• Website Marketing: Pay-per-Click
  
• U. S. Based Customer Support and Professional Services

GroupWare Collaboration Mode - Free for a Limited Time

Get GroupWare Collaboration Mode free for a limited time. Simplify your work and home life with shared calendars, notes, tasks and contacts. Master, Domain, or User Administrators can enable Collaboration Mode for each user in the Concentric Center under the user tab Manage | GroupWare Settings.

The GroupWare Connector is Coming Soon! The Connector gives you Exchange® -like features at a fraction of the cost allowing you to synchronize your GroupWare data with your favorite Microsoft® Outlook® program.

We welcome your feedback on GroupWare. Please go to the Concentric Center and select GroupWare l Feedback to let us know what you like or don’t like about this exciting new product.

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Coming Soon - Sign Up for Beta Test Today

We are pleased to announce the addition of Microsoft’s Premier database, SQL Server, to our Windows .NET hosting platform. SQL Server expands the range of applications available to you. Offered on Windows Premium hosting plans, it includes up to four database instances and up to 200MB total data storage. Additional storage is available for an additional fee.

The SQL Server database feature includes a full suite of web-based administrative tools. Using the administrator, users can execute a TSQL script, easily add or modify database schema, and make backup copies of a database ready for download.

We are now taking applications to Beta test MSSQL Server from website owners and developers on our Windows platform. To apply, please go to the SQL Server Tab in the User Interface tool bar in the Concentric Center. Please email questions about the Beta test to mssql_beta@concentric.com.

DNS Management: Specialized Domain Manager Plans

Many of our customers use Concentric DNS Manager to configure DNS settings for domain names (where Concentric nameservers have domain authority). The default mode of the DNS Manager tool provides the most commonly used features, such as: Address (A) records, Mail Exchanger (MX), and CNAME entries.

The advanced mode is ideal for DNS administrators who want the ability to manage zone transfers so that Concentric nameservers can provide “Secondary DNS” or “slave” DNS services to a nameserver hosted elsewhere. In advanced mode, administrators can also use this powerful tool to enter Pointer (PTR) or Text (TXT) records. DNS Manager changes are updated four (4) times every hour.

DNS Manager is available free of charge for most Concentric service plans. You can manage DNS for multiple domains by simply adding them as domain aliases.

For those who need to manage tens or hundreds of domains, we offer specialized Domain Manager Plans. All plans include DNS Manager and additional domain aliases. Domain Manager Plans are affordable and make managing multiple domains Impossibly Easy®.

Plan pricing and allocations:

• Domain Manager Basic - $7.95 MRC, 5 users, 30 domains
• Domain Manager Professional - $24.95 MRC, 10 users, 100 domains
• Domain Manager Enterprise - $59.95 MRC, 20 users, 300 domains

Add a new domain at any time. Additional aliases can be added for only $0.50/alias/mo (a 75% savings on our normal add-on price). Private Domain Registration and popular auto-renew may also be added to any specialized Domain Manager Plan.

These very specialized service plans are optimized for DNS management. They do not include web hosting, POP3, SMTP and Web mail services, Perimeter Email Protection (PEP), or GroupWare. For more information about our Domain Manager Plans, please go to http://www.cts.com/domain-manager/.

Consolidating Existing Domains

If you manage multiple domains across different Concentric accounts you may want to consolidate them under one Domain Manager account. To request this service, the account owner of each of the accounts must contact us using the Contact Customer Care form in the Concentric Center.

Why Choose Concentric DNS Management Plans?

Concentric’s patented technology is simply better than the competition:

• Proprietary, patented server technology creates a secure environment with no single point of failure
• Hardware-based load balancing, dynamically balances traffic load over 120 CPUs in real-time
• Standards-based nameserver software (not based on Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND), a legacy, often attacked technology)
• Our nameservers perform only authoritative DNS functions, not caching or resolving functions that add processing load and lead to poisoning attacks and stale data (for many ISPs, these functions are still performed by the same nameservers)
• We support primary service, secondary service, and hidden primary
• Security is a fundamental feature of our clustered platform, not an afterthought:

• No vectors for cache poisoning and similar attacks
• Multiple tiers of protection integrated into routing, switching, and firewall layers
• Protection against common shared platform attacks as well as Denial of Service and external attacks aimed at DNS using load balancing and attack isolation

Choose the very best for your mission-critical DNS services. Ask about Concentric Domain Manager Plans today.

New Process Automation Tool for UNIX and Windows – Concentric Script Scheduler

Running your Internet presence often requires a fair amount of administrative work. Concentric now provides powerful tools to help with many of these tasks. With Script Scheduler, Concentric users can automate actions to occur at specified times. These actions can run scripts, send out email, and do other things, such as:

• Rotate internal logs
• Analyze gathered data
• Clean or backup a database
• Send a reminder email
• Send out a notice or alarm

Some of you may have used a Unix tool called ‘cron’ to do similar tasks. Script Scheduler has the same features as Unix cron, but runs across our distributed applications cluster to provide a higher degree of performance and reliability than tasks isolated on a single server. And Script Scheduler is available to both Unix and Windows hosting customers.

With Script Scheduler, you can schedule jobs up to every 10 minutes. Actions can also be scheduled at a given hour, day, month, year, day of the week, or any combination of the above. For example uses and information on how to enable Script Scheduler today, login to your account in the Concentric Center and select Script Scheduler in the FAQs.

Website Marketing: Pay-per-Click

Do you have a strategy for driving traffic to your website? Have you been thinking about doing Pay-per-Click advertising but don’t know where to start? We can help!

Call Telesales today at 866-500-9696 to request a free Guide to Buying Online Ads. While you’ve got us on the phone, ask us about Market Builder, the easy way to start advertising online. Our marketing consultants will help you every step of the way. Open a Concentric Market Builder account today and see your ads on Google, Yahoo, and over 20 other top search engines plus:

• Get a guaranteed number of local or national leads
• Get help identifying keywords and writing ad copy that will sell
• Receive monthly reports, tracking, and optimization of your campaign

If you want to do it yourself, you can request your free Google AdWords credits. Credit amount is based on account plan:

• Basic – Receive a $25 Google AdWords credit
• Professional – Receive a $50 Google AdWords credit
• Enterprise – Receive a $75 Google AdWords credit

Only one credit per customer. Promotional credit must be applied to a new AdWords account within 15 days of creating the account and is valid only for new Google AdWords customers with self-managed signup accounts.

Call Concentric Telesales at 866-500-9696 today to learn more about Market Builder, get our Guide to Buying Online Ads, or to request your Google AdWords credit.

U.S. Based Customer Support and Professional Services

Standard Support is free with all hosting accounts. Our U.S. based, experienced CARE team provides live telephone support (866-495-9696) 7 days a week from 7 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. EST, Monday through Friday. Email support is always available. Note that Standard support is limited to the Master or Technical Administrator of your account.

Professional Services is an internal team of skilled technicians and web developers that can help you with virtually any web site project. Have you been thinking about starting a blog or finding a way for your employees to collaborate on projects? Call Customer Care at 866-495-9696 for a no obligation quote today.

® Copyright 2007 XO. All rights reserved. Concentric, Concentric logo, Impossibly Easy, and XO are trademarks of XO Communications, Inc. All other products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

This promotional message is brought to you by XO Communications, Inc., located at 11111 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA 20190. If you received this message in error or no longer wish to receive communications from XO about its products and services, you can opt out by logging into the Concentric Center, going to “Manage Users” and “Edit User Profile”. Select “No” for “Receive Newsletter” in the Preferences box.

• Get Organized with New GroupWare Collaboration Tools
  
• An Intelligent Spam Filter — Making Concentric Premium Junk Filters Work for You
  
• Ecommerce Made Impossibly Easy®
  
• New Productivity & Communications Tools for Former bCentral Customers
  
• Beta Testers for MSSQL Needed
  
• Make More Money on Referrals

Get Organized with New GroupWare Collaboration Tools

Concentric GroupWare is now out of Beta! GroupWare from Concentric has the tools you need to help you get organized, and stay organized. Cost-effective and easy-to-use, GroupWare delivers online collaboration without the costs and hassles of upgrades and software licenses.

Concentric’s new GroupWare tool set is a collection of personal and team collaboration software tools which are fully integrated with your email and hosting account. In Collaboration Mode, GroupWare lets you:

• Check your team’s availability and schedule meetings
• Share contacts with your domain
• Create calendars for team projects or create a personal calendar to keep your own life organized
• Track tasks and create note files

You can also synch your GroupWare data with your favorite Microsoft® Outlook® program or access information via the Gateway from any Internet ready computer without the expense of costly VPN client software.

GroupWare Personal Mode is included for all users at no additional charge. Personal Mode includes calendar, notes and tasks. Master, Domain, or User Administrators can set up users for the Collaborative Mode in the GroupWare Settings page for each user. Unlike the much more costly alternatives, you pay only for the number of users that you need to collaborate with, not your entire user base. To enable Collaboration Mode, go to the Concentric Center and under the user tab select Manage | GroupWare Settings.

As you use GroupWare, please give us your feedback. Go to the GroupWare sub-tab in the Concentric Center and select “Feedback.”

Find out more about GroupWare features and pricing or sign up for the collaboration tools here .

This feature is coming soon for former bCentral customers. Watch the “What’s New” postings for announcements.

The GroupWare Product Team

What Customers Have to Say About Us:

“I would like to commend Concentric for the service you have provided me as a new customer. As a former bCentral customer, I had to make a decision to move my website and recreate my storefront with another service provider. I am so happy I chose to stay on the Concentric platform. I am a complete novice at php code, but there were no problems getting my site recreated in osCommerce because your support and professional services teams are so knowledgeable. Everyone worked diligently to get my site working properly, including updating your server to accept requests from my credit card processor. I am very impressed with the level of service that I received, and I look forward to a wonderful working relationship in the future.”

Mark McCarley
Grace’s Unique Gift Boutique

An Intelligent Spam Filter — Making Concentric Premium Junk Filters Work for You

Concentric’s Premium Junk Filter is a unique, customizable, and trainable filter that uses user-defined criteria to distinguish between junk and legitimate email. No other email provider offers a spam filter that can be “taught”.

Here are a few tips on how to maximize how well Premium Filters work for you. To download a the Premium Junk Filter User Guide, login to the Concentric Center, select Help and then click on the link for Premium Junk Filter FAQs.

Filter Basics
Standard Junk Filters are included for free with every mail box. Premium Junk Filters are available for a small additional monthly fee.
Standard Filters use a “service-wide” database to identify junk or legitimate mail. Our Standard Filter is continuously updated, but because it is a common filter across such a broad user base, there are limits to how aggressively it can filter spam. Standard Filter users can add up to 100 Safe List entries to ensure critical correspondence is not tagged as spam.

Premium Filters must be “trained” by the user. This is critical because it is how you instruct the filter to accurately identify what you consider junk versus legitimate email. Premium Filter users can add up to 1,000 rules (including safe lists, block lists, or any mail handling rule based on message criteria you define). We don’t recommend using rules excessively however, so please read on.

Premium Junk Filter Tips
To train your Premium Filter, go to My Profile | Email | Train Filter. For new users, it is particularly important to visit this page often, so that you can train your filter with junk and legitimate email messages. You must provide at least 15 examples of junk and 15 examples legitimate mail before the Premium Filter starts using your custom criteria to filter messages. Depending on your email volume, this could take a few days or up to a week or more. We recommend that you train your filter beyond the minimum 15 messages of each type.

Review all messages displayed on this page and make sure the filter has categorized each message correctly. Check (for spam) or uncheck (for legitimate mail) all messages in the list and click “Train Filter and Clear Messages”. This trains the filter based on your input and clears the messages from this window so you won’t have to train the filter for these messages again. In this window, the filter always displays a running count of how many corrected legitimate and junk messages you have defined.

Things to Avoid
For the best performance by the Premium Filter, avoid using safe or block lists, or if you must use them, keep them to a minimum. Our system checks safe and block lists and any custom rules for inbound messages before junk and virus filtering. If it finds a match, it performs no other filtering. If your domain name is “domain.com” and you enter it on your safe list, then any email message from anyone at that domain is directed to your inbox, regardless of content. A common spammer trick is to fake sender addresses (since many anti-spam solutions rely on safe lists) and send mail to the same domain name as the sender address they’re faking. So with that safe list entry, you’ll likely receive spam from a faked address using that domain name.

Also, you’ll run into a problem with safe lists if people with whom you regularly correspond change their email address. Assuming these people send you the same type of email from their new address, it should be transparent to a properly-trained Premium Filter. If you only rely on safe lists, you will be constantly updating your lists as your contacts change addresses or as new contacts send you email.

Adding more than the 15/15 minimum training messages will make your filter more accurate, but avoid high message counts of either type. Once you have more than 100 to 200 trained messages, you have such a large database of criteria that there is a good chance of conflicting criteria; some messages trained as junk or legitimate mail have similar characteristics.

With proper use, we have users who have reached 100% accuracy consistently with our Premium Filters. We hope you will join them. Once again, to download the Premium Junk Filter User Guide, login to the Concentric Center, select Help and then click on the link for Premium Junk Filter FAQs.

Professional Services and osCommerce. Ecommerce made Impossibly Easy®

We have always helped our customers successfully do business online. Now, using the popular open source osCommerce online storefront package, our Professional Services team has taken ecommerce to whole new level. We can help you get your own ecommerce web site up and running quickly for as little as $65.

We can:

1. Install and configure osCommerce including the more popular optional packages
2. Install the optional product import and export module (which makes loading your catalog seamless)
3. Install and configure your Merchant Account gateway
4. Customize your store front with your selection of standard templates
5. Set-up your preferred shipping options and tables
6. Set-up your catalog home page and upload your products and images. Take a look at these osCommerce stores recently completed by our Professional Services team.

Take a look at this osCommerce store recently completed by our Professional Services team.

http://www.gracesmoon.com/ - Gift Boutique

About osCommerce
Developed by the open-source community and supported by thousands of developers, osCommerce has a vast library of extensions. Some of the largest web stores on the Internet are powered by osCommerce. Use your current merchant account which supports Cardservice International, Authorize Net, iPayment, PSiGate, PayPal, and more.

Standard features include:

• Integrated catalog and shopping cart with checkout
• Automatically calculated shipping costs for popular carriers
• Easy-to-use web-based administrative backend and more

Professional Services provides you with a written quote for all projects. For more information about how you can get your store online with osCommerce, call us at (866) 500-9696 or visit us online at http://www.concentric.com/osc.php.

New Productivity & Communications Tools for Former bCentral Customers

All Concentric accounts include a bevy of tools and accessories to help you run your website and maintain your business better. For more information and a list of all the available tools, login to your account.

*All accounts include:

WordPress Blogging Software. Start your own Blog with WordPress, one of the web’s most popular blogging packages!

Personal Web Portal (PHP-Nuke). Build an intranet or extranet. Control users, access, set up databases, and stream in RSS feeds.

Bulletin Board (phpBB). Build a fully scalable and highly customizable open-source bulletin board package for your website. phpBB includes a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQs.

Photo Gallery. Add a photo gallery to your site. Use either our multi-purpose, fully-featured, and integrated web picture gallery script (Coppermine) or DAlbum. Coppermine is written in PHP using ImageMagick library and a MySQL backend. DAlbum can be integrated with websites built with Web Builder and uses your site’s style sheets.

MediaWiki. MediaWiki is a free software Wiki package originally written for Wikipedia. A Wiki is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration.
Calendar (PHP iCalendar). Based on v2.0 of the IETF spec, iCalendar, a read-only php-based iCal file parser, displays a calendar by day, week, month, and year. iCalendar includes printer view, is RSS-enabled, and is searchable. iCalendar supports 12 languages, is fully theme-able, and has complete time zone support.

osCommerce. An online shopping cart and ecommerce package that allows merchants to setup and administer an online store with minimum effort and no licensing fees.

Perimeter Email Protection. Designed for customers that manage an on-premise email server, Perimeter Email Protection provides a first layer of defense against spam, viruses and email attacks.

Please log into the Concentric Center and use the Contact Customer Care form or call toll-free (866)495-9696 with questions.

* The above tools are all available to Standard and Windows plans. Introductory customers may add DAlbum or PHP iCalendar to their site.

Beta Testers for MSSQL Needed

Concentric.com is preparing the launch of Microsoft® SQL Server™” database onto its Windows hosting platform. This represents a major feature enhancement to our platform. We are looking for website owners and developers who are currently hosting on our Windows platform who would like to take part in our Beta test program. Beta testing is expected to begin around June 15, 2007. If you would like to participate in the program, you will be contacted before the test period beings with more information. Please contact us at mssql_beta@concentric.com if you would be like to participate in the Windows Beta test.

Make More Money on Referrals

We’ve just increased our customer referral payments from $50 for every new account to $75. This is a limited time offer. For more information, log into the Concentric Center and click on the banner for Referrals.

Higher payout also includes our Affiliate program participants. Affiliates earn $100 for a limited time. For more information about the Affiliate/Reseller program, go to http://www.cris.com/reseller.php

® Copyright 2007 XO. All rights reserved. Concentric, Concentric logo, Impossibly Easy, and XO are trademarks of XO Communications, Inc. All other products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

This promotional message is brought to you by XO Communications, Inc., located at 11111 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA 20190. If you received this message in error or no longer wish to receive communications from XO about its products and services, you can opt out by logging into the Concentric Center, going to “Manage Users” and “Edit User Profile”. Select “No” for “Receive Newsletter” in the Preferences box.

• Introducing LDAP for the GroupWare Beta
  
• Marketing should be a priority for your online business. Market Builder makes it Impossibly Easy®
  
• ASP.NET: Why Windows Web Developers Will Want to Use This Feature, Part III
  
• Your ISP Won’t Let You Send Mail From Anywhere? There is a Workaround!
  
• Handling Resource Spikes

Introducing LDAP for the GroupWare Beta

LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) allows you to use Outlook® or your favorite mail client to search your online address book as you type an email. LDAP is the way your favorite email client can use your organization’s shared contacts, making it great for team collaboration.

LDAP works with these email clients:

• Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007
• Microsoft Outlook Express 6.0
• Eudora 7.1 (coming soon)
• Thunderbird 1.5
• Apple Mail (coming soon)

You’ll find special configuration FAQs in the GroupWare section on the Gateway. Specific LDAP features depend on whether you are a standard GroupWare subscriber or a premium GroupWare subscriber. During the GroupWare Beta period, we are allowing each user to be enabled as a premium GroupWare customer.

To use LDAP, simply turn it on for your account by joining the GroupWare Beta. If you are an administrator, just enable GroupWare for your users. For users, once GroupWare is on, follow the instructions in the GroupWare FAQs and begin enjoying the benefits of LDAP.

GroupWare is still in Beta and we would like your feedback on it and the LDAP features. If you find something you like, dislike, or confusing, please send let us know. We want to hear from you. To send feedback, go to the Groupware Beta Features (Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Tasks, or Today) and select Feedback from the GroupWare Beta sub-tab.

– The GroupWare Beta Team

Marketing should be a priority for your online business. Market Builder makes it Impossibly Easy®

Your Web site is like having the front door to your business at a great location. You may be utilizing telephone directories, but did you know that 70% of Internet users report using online search engines to find a local service? 46% of Internet users report using search to find a local service in the last 90 days! Of those who have used the Internet to search for a local vendor in the last 90 days, 68% said they would use the phone number on the web site to contact a vendor.*

Market Builder packages are designed to deliver you qualified leads over a campaign term of one year. You can specify whether you want to receive leads evenly over the 12 months or a higher percentage during a specific date range. We have plans ranging from $42.50 a month to $160 or more per month.

• Get a guaranteed number of local or national leads delivered to your web site
• See your ad on Google, Yahoo, and over 20 other search engines
• We work with you to recommend keywords that will attract the right customers
• Get a free website consultation on using your web site as an effective sales tool
• Receive monthly reporting, tracking, and optimization of your campaign

Get up to 15% off the package of your choice for a limited time. Call us at 866-500-9696 to find out more.

*Nielsen survey of Internet users and their online shopping experience

ASP.NET 2.0: Why Windows Web Developers Will Want to Use This Feature, Part III

Microsoft has released ASP.NET AJAX v1.0, formally known by its code name “Atlas”. ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 framework integrates end user scripts with the ASP.NET 2.0 server-based development framework giving developers the ability to create more advanced and powerful web sites. In addition, ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 is an extension of ASP.NET 2.0 making it compatible technology with our ASP.NET 2.0 platform. ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 makes it possible to easily produce functional and creative ASP.NET pages while presenting a professional web presence.

Q: I’m an existing customer. How can I check to see if my account has ASP.NET 2.0 available so I can use ASP.NET AJAX v1.0?

A: Login to the Gateway and select Menu Map | Account and look for your Server Platform. If your Server Platform is currently Windows 2003 (ASP.NET), you are on the correct platform and can begin using Atlas. If your Server Platform is currently Windows 2000 (ASP), you are not on the most up-to-date development environment and Atlas is not supported; you will need to enable ASP.NET 2.0.

Q: How can I enable my account to run ASP.NET 2.0 on my web site?

A: Just call Customer Care and they will enable your account to run ASP.NET 2.0 within the .NET Framework 2.0. Customer Care can explain all known issues the move may cause with existing scripts and applications and the present and future benefits of this upgrade.

Q: How do I learn more and start using ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 once I have ASP.NET 2.0 enabled?

A: It’s easy; just go to http://ajax.asp.net/ and download and install it on your local machine where Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition or Visual Studio 2005 is running. This process installs a template in the tool area which will be available when you create your web site. Once a web site using the new components is created on the client site, just copy the site to our server within Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition or Visual Studio 2005 as you have done previously.

Q: What other new technologies will be available on the Concentric ASP.NET 2.0 Server Platform?

A: Microsoft is in the process of releasing a series of new web development tools that integrate directly into the ASP.NET 2.0 environment and these new tools will only be supported on the Concentric ASP.NET 2.0 server platform. (Watch for more on the new web development tools in future newsletters along with some Beta testing opportunities)

Hosting your account on the Concentric ASP.NET 2.0 Server Platform enables you to take advantage of the most current Microsoft development tools. Developers can use the freely-available Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition and the more powerful Visual Studio 2005 to create your company’s Web presence on our platform.

How To: Your ISP Won’t Let You Send Mail From Anywhere? There is a Workaround!

Many companies have users who have had ISP-provided email addresses for years and connect from home using their ISP’s DSL or cable service and send and receive mail using their Microsoft® Outlook, Eudora®, or other POP3 email program. But, when they go to the office and their company does not use the same ISP for Internet access, they discover that their home ISP does not allow them to send outbound email from another provider’s IP address. This is common among large ISPs with older infrastructure or a desire to keep customers from moving around.

Concentric allows you to be much more flexible while retaining strong email security. Because we require all email users to authenticate with their user ID and password hosted on our service before sending mail from a POP3 mail program, Concentric customers can send outbound mail using our email servers from other ISPs’ IP addresses. This is called SMTP Authentication. Check our online FAQs to see how easy this is to set up. Even if your local provider blocks port 25 (the standard email port—such blocks are becoming more common among residential ISPs/cable providers/etc), you can change to port 587 to bypass these restrictions.

Furthermore, if your ISP does not allow this capability for the email addresses they host—i.e. if you can’t send mail from the office for your email address at another ISP, Concentric account administrators can enable a useful email feature called Alternate From Address for users who want to send mail using their ISP address.

For example:

• You want to send and receive email using Outlook for your bbBrown@large-isp.net email address when connected to your Large ISP DSL line at home.
• But your company uses XO Communications for their Internet access, and due to Large ISP’s restrictions, you cannot send outbound mail with Outlook from your office LAN connection.
• Your company has a Concentric hosting account with the domain name company.com and you have a user ID bbBrown@company.com. But you want all outbound email sent as bbBrown@large-isp.net and want to receive all incoming email at that same address.
• Your company email administrator just needs to enable “bbBrown” with Premium Mail Filtering (whether or not you use Concentric junk filtering). This lets “bbBrown” use Alternate From Address. There is a $2/mo charge for Premium Filtering.
• You then log into the Concentric Center and go to My Profile | Email Options and select “Authorize From Addresses”. Enter bbBrown@large-isp.net as an address you want to authorize for sending and click “Send Request”. (Note that Concentric allows unlimited alternate From addresses per user ID.)
• The Concentric email system then sends an email to bbBrown@large-isp.net asking you to perform a one-time confirmation by clicking a link, which validates to our system that bbBrown really does own and receive email for bbBrown@large-isp.net.

That’s it. Now you can send and receive email using your bbbrown@large-isp.net address that you’ve had for years.

Tips and Tricks: Handling Resource Spikes

Ever heard of the “slashdot” effect? You may not have heard the term, but you may have experienced the effect. A reference to the first big community-driven news aggregator, slashdot, slashdotting happens when your site gets sudden attention on a popular blog portal, or Digg, or even a mention on television or by a celebrity, and consequently your site experiences a huge surge of traffic.

Most traditional hosting platforms don’t handle spikes in traffic well—it’s not just your site that might get slashdotted. Any other site on the same server as you can just as easily take your site down if they get a burst of traffic. If you’re lucky, your service is restricted and your site is made unavailable for a time. If you’re not so lucky, the flood of requests overwhelms the server and crashes the system and your site is totally unavailable. Either way, you lose valuable traffic.

Concentric web hosting is different. With the power of clustered hosting, if one of our systems gets busy or if one of our servers goes down, your site is not affected. If your site is on a trend to exceed its allocation of a given resource, whether it’s disk space, resource units, or web site traffic, we notify you in advance. You can then dynamically add more of any resource to your account and it is instantly provisioned. Alternatively, you can set up your account so that your site is never made unavailable. If you use more than your resource unit allocation (how your CGI scripts CPU usage is determined), you are billed for the overage. The same can be done for web site traffic so that your site never goes down, no matter how many hits you get. Contact Customer Care to implement this for you.

If you find that you frequently need to add more resources to your account, you may want to consider upgrading your account to one with higher allocations. But these are success problems, the best kind of problems to have.

® Copyright 2007 XO. All rights reserved. Concentric, Concentric logo, Impossibly Easy, and XO are trademarks of XO Communications, Inc. All other products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

This promotional message is brought to you by XO Communications, Inc., located at 11111 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA 20190. If you received this message in error or no longer wish to receive communications from XO about its products and services, you can opt out by logging into the Concentric Center, going to “Manage Users” and “Edit User Profile”. Select “No” for “Receive Newsletter” in the Preferences box.

• Professional Services—What Can They Do For Me?
  
• Email Loads and Spam
  
• More Great Reasons to Secure Your Email Server with Perimeter Email Protection (PEP)
  
• Why Perimeter Email Protection (PEP) is better than Secondary MX
  
• GroupWare Beta Updates—Try GroupWare during Our Free Trial
  
• The Importance of Back Links in Your SEO Initiatives

Professional Services—What Can They Do For Me?

Our new Professional Services program was created to help you manage your online business or lend a hand with a specific problem. There are different types of Professional Services to meet different needs:

• Technical Professional Services
• Marketing and Advertising Services
• Creative Services

Technical Professional Services: For customers with web sites hosted on our platform, or for those who need to have their site migrated to our platform, these services are designed to provide a wide variety of applications and services for all hosting platforms including platform-specific services such as UNIX and Windows. Some of the Technical Professional Services available include:

• Web site migration
• Account and email set-up
• HTML code help
• DNS and Domain Registration

Web Site Applications Services: Web Site Application Hosting services provide robust applications to address all your business needs. Services include:

• Application installation and configuration
• Script consulting
• Business portal installation and configuration
• New Application Hosting offers you the most popular applications such as blogs, wikis, online photo albums, and much more

Business Enterprise Services: Our Professional Services team is ready to help you address the needs of your business using new enterprise-class business services such as:

• Perimeter Email Protection (PEP) for customers who host their own mail server and need protection from spam and viruses
• Corporate Domain Manager migration and configuration of all of your domains
• Advanced Email Consulting for businesses hosting their own email servers
• GroupWare – currently in Beta, this new service lets businesses hosting on our Platform get Exchange Server-like capabilities such as shared calendar, shared address book, and more.

Marketing and Advertising Services: New services coming to you over the next several months to address the marketing and sales needs of all web hosted businesses. Coming in mid December 2006 will be the Market Builder suite of marketing and advertising services for anybody with a web site; you don’t even have to have your site hosted with us to use the program.

Creative Services: An evolving set of services to help customers with web site design and HTML editing should be available in early 2007. Like the Marketing and Advertising services, these services are offered to anybody with a web site; you don’t even have to have your site hosted with us to use the program.

Visit us at http://cts.com/professional-services/ for more information about any of these new and upcoming services. Or call us at 1-866-500-9696 for a free consultation.

Email Loads and Spam

As many of you have probably read in the media, there’s been a significant increase in the overall network spam volume over the past few weeks. Spammers have started aggressively using massive networks of hacked machines worldwide (”botnets” or “zombie machines”) which has enabled them to push more email attempts than ever before, with much less regard for their own volume, since these botnets often number in the thousands of hacked machines, distributed across just about every network provider worldwide, often using those providers’ legitimate mail relays. Here are some recent media articles documenting this spike across the world:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/technology/06spam.html?hp&ex=1165467600&en=a3f1a74b08d60443&ei=5094&partner=homepage

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/110806-image-spam.html?t5

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=48196

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11420 (botnets)

This has driven our inbound mail volume up by about 40%, and right now about 90% of email attempts coming into our systems are spam and the remaining 10% legitimate email. These numbers are roughly in line with those reported elsewhere on the Internet for the past month. Our filters continue to intercept the vast majority of spam, and your individual spam volume will vary considerably based on the age of your email address, how widely it’s been available on the network, and other (often random) factors.

We’ve been expecting this for sometime since it was the logical “ultimate spam machine” (no, we didn’t give them the idea), which is why we’ve been taking steps to improve our mail infrastructure. We’ve made significant hardware upgrades and brought new servers onboard for all cluster functions, but especially inbound email. All of our new servers are 16 or 24 processor servers, giving us significant CPU capacity for new filtering functionality and other applications. We’ve also continued to tune our mail filtering databases to match the new spam techniques. No spam filter is 100% and all anti spam efforts are a constant battle to compete against new spam methods; we believe we’re getting the upper hand. I personally get 5000-6000 spam messages a day (my oldest email addresses go back 12 years and are in EVERY spam list), and our filtering does a good job of keeping my inbox sane.

We’ve also been making significant improvements to ensure that spammers can’t use our resources to hit others, including our move to turn on outbound authentication for all users, regardless of network, earlier this year. These changes lay the groundwork for more advanced anti spam features coming early next year, including some emerging mail validation technologies which are getting some traction on the industry.

Despite all this, we’ve had, over the past few weeks, some spikes in mail traffic big enough to cause some slowdowns in service handling during peak hours. We’ve also seen email slowdowns due to other providers bogging down under mail load – since email is truly a World Wide Web, much more so than the web protocol itself. When major providers start to slow down, everyone else does as well. Once our delivery to other providers starts to slow down, we spend more time queuing and reattempting messages. This “hole” was especially true on Monday, November 27th, during the morning hours, where a significantly higher filtering volume combined with after-holiday load caused some slowdowns across-the-board. We consider any slowdown in performance unacceptable and we continue to deploy new hardware and improve our software to ensure this does not recur. After Monday’s load spike we made specific changes to the way our filtering works so we can process significantly more inbound mail without bogging down the same way and without reducing the filtering in any way.

What can you do to help fight spam and the spam load?

The obvious things people have always said still holds true…be careful about leaving your email address in public (on web sites, chat-boards and the like, which are mined for spam addresses), never follow links in spam email, and never, ever click on “remove me” links. But furthermore:

• Make sure your computers are kept up-to-date with your software vendor’s security patches, and if your operating system has a built-in firewall, make sure it’s turned on since many of the zombie machines used for spam are hacked not through mail viruses but through web-based Trojans or network attacks. Keeping your computer secure will help keep it from becoming a spam-injecting zombie. If you’re a Windows XP user, your built-in firewall settings are in the Control Panel.
• If you’re currently using the “forward all unknown mail to master” feature, reconsider if you really need it. While this feature is useful in certain circumstances, most spammers today have large enough zombie networks under their control that they can afford to do dictionary attacks – sending email to every name they can think of at each domain – and “forward all to master” can mean that a single account gets tens or hundreds of thousands of messages a day (really!) that need to be filtered. Without this option, the vast majority of those messages will bounce before analytic filtering. You can adjust this option in the Gateway under Menu Map | Account | Controls.
• Consider the “premium mail”’ bundle for users with large amounts of mail or excessively large spam volume The premium filter builds a customized database for each user and is more effective at dealing with certain kinds of spam because it learns not only what IS spam, but also what is NOT spam based on your individual email history. Therefore, it can do a better job of cracking the obnoxious content-free spam that’s currently plaguing the Internet.
• If you’re using our secondary MX service and an on-site mail server, consider discontinuing secondary MX, which has been rendered largely ineffective by these same dictionary attacks, or investigate our new Perimeter Email Protection (PEP), which works like secondary but has us filter mail based on a list of your users, rather than having secondary MX pass every single address to your local mail servers. Said another way, if you have an on-site mail server, PEP does the filtering on our network before we send the mail to your server. PEP could save you from a server failure or having to upgrade your mail server capacity.
• If you’re filtering spam to a folder, we’ll soon be releasing some new options to help reduce the amount of junk mail you need to deal with. We’ll be moving the custom setting of hold time from the premium mail feature to all users, so anyone can reduce the hold time from the default 15 days. We will also be adding a “drop junk mail” feature which simply deletes junk as it comes in rather than holding it in a folder at all.

New features coming soon…
We have some new features currently in development to further help with spam reduction, including tools to reduce address spoofing, more advanced filtering options, and features to make it easier to manage large numbers of users and their spam filters and mailboxes. Expect to see more over the next few months.

As always, we appreciate your business and welcome your feedback on this or any other topic.

David Schairer, Chief Technology Officer
Concentric, an XO Business

More Great Reasons to Secure Your Email Server with Perimeter Email Protection (PEP)

As we mentioned in our we told you about our new Perimeter Email Protection (PEP) service, which enables administrators who host their own on-site email server to implement a layer of security and protection at the perimeter. PEP blocks spam, viruses, phishing, and dictionary attacks, which means that you can significantly reduce the amount of incoming email your server processes and how much junk mail your users get daily.

PEP now comes with PEP Filtering, which lets administrators implement account-wide junk and virus filters affordably, securely, and quickly, for only $1.00/user/month. This, combined with the PEP recipient validation (we only deliver email to your server for valid email addresses that you upload), means that Concentric customers now have available a complete email security solution at a very affordable price!

Some of the PEP benefits now available to you:

• Account-wide junk mail filtering: Filter out unwanted junk email and email viruses. Options include our Standard Junk filter or for specific power users, our Premium Junk Filter. Administrators can configure how all users’ mail is filtered and handled quickly.
• Account-wide custom mail rules: Set up safe or block lists or specific rules that filter email based on the criteria you enter.
• Flexibility: In addition to the account-wide Standard junk filter settings, PEP allows administrators to configure individual user-specific settings to filter email for particular users. Power users with the Premium Junk Filter option enabled can train the filter specifically for their type of incoming email; the Premium filter can be trained and used by individual users or shared across many users.

PEP Filtering is available for an affordable $1.00/user/month in your account. The Premium Filter option is available for only an additional $1.00/user/month. In both cases, your Concentric service plan must include enough user IDs for all the email addresses you upload. You can affordably add more users beyond your plan’s allocation ($1.00/user/month) or upgrade to the next available service plan.

If you’re too busy, call our Professional Services at 1.866.500.9696 to discuss our affordable, complete account set-up package.

Why Perimeter Email Protection (PEP) is better than Secondary MX

Many Concentric customers have configured our email servers as secondary Mail Exchanger (MX) records, so that if we cannot deliver email to your primary MX mail server, we spool your incoming email and try to re-deliver it for up to 5 calendar days. This helps ensure that none of your users lose any critical inbound email.

Lately, however, spammers have started aggressively exploiting secondary MX to push mail to the primaries, and since traditional secondary MX can do no user validation or other filtering, all the spam flows down to the primary.

Figure A shows how secondary MX functions – if email can’t be delivered to your mail server at your premises, Concentric will spool all incoming email and attempt to redeliver it hourly to your server for up to five days.

Figure B shows how spammers suborn traditional secondary MX architectures to relay their junk mail. The secondary MX server(s) interpret this inbound email as email that cannot be delivered directly to your primary MX server, so like figure A, they try to redeliver it hourly. The result – your primary MX server thinks that Concentric’s email servers are deliberately spamming it! Some anti spam software or services then identify Concentric email servers as the spammers and blacklist them, or email administrators mistakenly block Concentric’s email server IP addresses. This causes numerous problems; those blocks will prevent the spool-and-deliver function from working for legitimate email that could not be delivered; and, should anyone using a Concentric email address send email to your company, it may be blocked.

PEP eliminates all of the above problems:

• We only deliver email to your server for valid email addresses you have uploaded. Most spam attacks are dictionary attacks, with the vast majority of addresses being bogus addresses. Your email server does not have to process and reject all of those inbound messages with bogus addresses.
• If your email server cannot accept incoming email or your access line goes down, Concentric still spools and delivers the messages when your server can accept mail. Your users won’t lose critical incoming messages.
• You can further prevent spammers from targeting your email server directly by configuring it to only accept email from Concentric servers.

Note that Concentric is working on PEP enhancements for customers who prefer that their email server remain primary MX. But to address the above issues with traditional secondary MX, the only secondary MX configurations allowable must enable user validation at a minimum. PEP Filtering will also be optionally available (see the other PEP article in this newsletter for cost information) for these same secondary MX implementations. Stay tuned to the Concentric What’s New section in the Gateway for these announcements in the near future.

Why keep trying to fight spam and viruses on your own? Let us deal with the headaches around incoming spam so you can focus on your business! You’ll find more information about PEP, on the Concentric Gateway home page, select Menu Map | PEP. Or use the Contact Customer Care form to send your questions to Customer Care.

GroupWare Beta Updates: Try GroupWare during our Free Trial

If you have ever considered looking into a team collaboration, personal productivity or GroupWare application such as Microsoft® Exchange™, GroupWise™ or Lotus® Domino™; you can now get significantly similar capabilities with Concentric® GroupWare!

GroupWare is a collection of personal and team collaboration tools which are fully integrated into your account. GroupWare lets you:

• Share personal and public Calendars
• Schedule recurring meetings and events with your team
• Keep Contacts private or share them with a Shared Address Book
• Manage Notes and Tasks and keep them organized in Lists
• Publish one or more of your Calendars to your web site so anyone can see it
• Use Web Mail with online Calendars and Contacts or synchronize in real-time with a Microsoft Outlook® 2003 connector (coming soon)
• Upload iCal files to your Calendar and import Contacts you may have in Outlook or Yahoo Mail® format.

If these features aren’t enough to entice you, participants in our trial will get special support, user forum access, and qualify for special promotions and free services available only to trial participants.

Don’t worry about using the premium features during this free trial period since all features are free. We’ll send you a notice 30 days before the beta trial period is over to make you aware that the free trial period is ending.

For more information or to enable GroupWare for your account during this free trial please log into your account, select the Calendar tab, read the information on the beta trial period, and select “enable GroupWare”. Please call our sales department at 866.500.9696 if you have any questions.

The Importance of Back Links in Your SEO Initiatives

I suppose I shouldn’t assume that everyone knows what a back link is, but if you don’t, and you’re managing your web site’s SEO, it’s time to get up to speed.

A back link is any other web site, blog, RSS feed, or newsgroup posting that points directly back to your web site. More than ever, especially in Google, these links are what search engines use to evaluate the importance of your site. Put simply, the way a search engine looks at it, the more people who find your site important enough to link to it, the more important your site must be. And if you’re in an ultra-competitive industry (such as web site hosting, real estate, medical, restaurant, attorney, etc.) the importance of back links grows even more.

In general, for a non-competitive industry, 70-80% of your SEO success comes from effective web site optimization. The other 20-30% of your ranking algorithm comes from back link equity. However, for highly-competitive industries, that number is flip-flopped; meaning that up to 80% of what the search engines look for is based upon your back links.

I know…astounding.

So how do I build up my back links?

Back links can be acquired in a number of ways. And all back links are not created equal. A link from somebody’s front page is more important than if it’s buried somewhere deep inside the site. A link from a site inside your industry is more important than one from a random personal web site. A one-way link is more valuable than a reciprocal link, and so on.

There are dozens of criteria for what makes a good back link, but let’s start simple. Here are some ways to start building up back links:

Directory Listings:
Submit your web site to as many directories as possible. Start with the big ones such as Google and Yahoo and then branch out to the smaller ones. Stay away from services or software that claims to automatically submit your site to hundreds of directories at once. It’s just not true.

Blogs:
Look for blogs that write about your industry and engage the writers in your business. If they like what your company does, they may write about you and point people to your web site. Not only does this create a link to your site, it’s also free marketing and promotion for you.

Start your own Blog:
More than ever, blog portals are popping up all over the place. Start your own blog and then submit it to their directories and you gain valuable links in the same manner as with traditional directory listings.

Reciprocal Linking:
Find other people who complement your business and see if they’re interested in exchanging links to each other’s site. As I mentioned, reciprocal linking doesn’t get as much algorithm boost as a one-way link, but if 10-20% of your links are reciprocal ones, you’ll get a natural boost. If you’re having trouble finding reciprocal link partners, there are companies that create networks around this very thing.

Online Press Releases:
The online press release industry has become a multi-million dollar industry. Over 20,000 press releases go out over the Internet every week. Most all of these releases will never be seen by anyone; however, they all get picked up by a number of online news aggregators, thusly creating a link back to you somewhere. You can hire an agency to write these releases for you or you can do it yourself. The formatting is rather simple (you can Google something like “online press release formatting” to find out how). Generally, sending out a press release costs $70 on average, but there are also a handful of free services that aren’t as far-reaching, but will get your stuff out there at no cost.

Online Journals and Magazines:
Take a stab at submitting an article to an online trade journal or industry magazine. Often, writers are more than happy to take what you’ve written and use it in their own articles. You can also hire a firm to do this for you or you can contact the writers themselves to see if there is interest in your business. This option is another great way to simultaneously build back links while also getting free publicity.

Text link advertising:
Here’s where it gets serious. One of the more up-and-coming industries is the text link ad industry. In short, you can select any number of web sites in the company’s network and purchase links on their site. Depending on the quality of web site you choose (you’ll want to research “PR rankings” to understand which web sites are better for this type of advertising), these links can cost anywhere from $25 to $250 per month or more. However, strategically-placed, these links can not only get you a search engine boost, they can also drive traffic to your site. This can get expensive, so choose wisely.

There is a great deal more involved with the wonderful world of back links than described here. Building a successful back link program is a time-consuming and potentially very expensive long-term project. As an additional challenge, back links are not only ranked by relevance, they are also ranked by age. This is important when considering text link advertising especially, since purchasing back links generally means you’ll need to keep them for the long haul. Search engines want to see your back links increase over time, not diminish. So if you suddenly decide to discontinue your back link purchases, you could potentially get penalized by the search engines.

Ultimately, despite the challenges, potential costs, and time-consuming nature of building back links, link-building is a critical reality if you intend to take your SEO endeavors seriously. If you’ve already optimized your site for SEO, take a few minutes to analyze how well that’s working for you. If your site is doing well in the rankings without the help of back links then it might not be important for you to build an extensive back link program. On the other hand, if your site has been lingering around the same SEO rankings for some time without getting any boost, building your back links may give you that extra edge you’ve been missing.

Last tip: want see who is currently linking to your web site? Go to Yahoo Search and type in: “link:www.yourweb site.com” to see the complete list of web sites currently linking to you, by order of Yahoo’s ranking of importance.

Good luck and good linking!

Scott Milrad, Concentric Internet Marketing Manager

® Copyright 2006 XO. All rights reserved. Concentric, Concentric logo and XO are trademarks of XO Communications, Inc. All other products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
.

This promotional message is brought to you by XO Communications, Inc., located at 11111 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA 20190. If you received this message in error or no longer wish to receive communications from XO about its products and services, you can opt out by logging into the Concentric Center, going to “Manage Users” and “Edit User Profile”. Select “No” for “Receive Newsletter” in the Preferences box.

The problem with focusing only on the protection of files leads some users to believe “This account isn’t important since I don’t store anything of value here. I’ll just pick my name, or ‘123abc’ as my password.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

In addition to storing files, your account has email access whether you use it or not. And even though many ISPs are cracking down on spammers by requiring users to be authenticated with their systems before allowing email to go out, spammers now use automated programs to find accounts with weak, easy-to-guess passwords. They don’t want your files, they just want to send out their spam under your name.

A responsible ISP takes steps to suspend spammers’ accounts as soon as a rapid increase in outgoing email volume happens. However, should a spammer appropriate your account due to a weak password, access to both incoming and outgoing email will be suspended and you will have the added inconvenience of needing to contact customer service to get your account re-enabled since you are responsible for your account whether you are the one abusing it or not.

What can you do to help thwart Spammers and Identity Thieves?

Pick good passwords! Here are some tips:

don’t pick a dictionary word or person’s name
don’t pick part of your domain name
don’t pick repeated letters or numbers like “aaaaa” or “88888″
don’t pick the above with obvious substitutions like “i” for one, and “o” for 0
don’t pick the above with just a digit or two at the front or end

Do use mixed case letters
Do use punctuation
Do use numbers and letters
Do use the full 8 characters

Obviously, you don’t have to do all of these things, but the more you can work in to something you can remember, the better. One suggestion for really strong, easy to remember passwords is: “Use the first letters of a phrase you can easily recall, with creative substitutions.”

Something like: (Note, do not use these exact ones; these are just examples)

Phrase –> Password
—————————- ——–
“XO is the best to work for” –> XOitb2w4
“I hate password crackers!” –> Ih@epwc!
“Mom’s apple pie” –> M’sa3.14
“My wife Alice, love of my life” –> MwA,L0ml
“It was a dark and stormy night.” –> Iwad&sn.

Okay, so maybe these aren’t exactly the easiest to remember, but you get the idea. It’s near impossible for an automated program to guess high-entropy strings like the above examples. But since they are derived from a phrase with meaning to you, they are much easier to remember.

Happy passwording!!

– Jesse Mundis, Concentric Senior Engineer