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

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.

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