Concentric®
Integrated Messaging, Collaboration & Hosting for Your Growing Business

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®

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  • We work with you to recommend keywords that will attract the right customers
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Get up to 15% off the package of your choice for a limited time. Call us at 866-500-9696 to find out more.

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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.

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