MailExert Vs FollowUP

[andrewgroup]

We purchased Mail-Expert some time ago, but have yet to deploy.. Seems Follow-UP expert gets a lot of attention too, so I was wondering if I explained my needs one might suggest the best solution..

Here is the original thought that I shared in the discussion forums for users of the N-Central Remote Management System

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Heres the problem, and our solution that may be of interests to others....

Like us, you may have spoiled your SMB clients. Many may think it's ok to email the owner any day of the week expecting personal attention from the Boss. Others call on Saturdays or Sundays when they can't remote to the office.... Are you charging for 24x7 support? Likely not, nor are many of us interested in a 24x7 IT support business..

However I thought how great it would be if we could send to the owners of the businesses or to their designated person alerts on the important issues like (The ISP router or the Firewall is Offline) and explain to them that this will affect remote access, PDA email synching or whatever else would result in a T1 or Cable Modem Failure. The Alert sent to that person, would also say that this may clear on its own and another notice would comfirm the problem has cleared.

The Important part of that same message would tell them this is a courtesy notification outside of their M-F 8 -5 support hours and if they would like to authorize and after hours support ticket to be deducted from their pre-paid emergency block hours, please call the hotline... Otherwise our response will be on the next business day.... This same alert sent to the on-call engineer the details of the problem, and they may be called to action when and if the client calls the hotline requesting after hours support and authorizing the work...

The problem with N-central alerting is that alerts are locked to email addresses and changing them is a pain..... So after struggling with this, I've concieved and did some basic testing on an external alerting system.... All alerts are defined by periods of the week or day Alert names are self explanatory

MF8-5, MF5-7 MF7-12 MF-12-8 SAT8-12 etc... All alerts go to the same email address and the contents of the Subject line are parsed that contains, the client, device, status etx, alert name, and then emails are sent to subscribers of the alerts. this functions as a traditional list server and users can send subscribe and unsubscribe messages to the various alert names... The email domains will determine what alerts they get... The system sends prety HTML alerts with fancy WARNING graphics too...

It's not perfect, However with some additional development I think it addresses the weaknesses of alerts in NC.... If enough interests exists, I may invest the necessary resources to host the alerting system and make it available as a service or share/sell the how we did it..

concept is our N-Able Platform sends all alerts to an email address and mailexpert gets the emails parses the subject line and then sends both Pretty HTML alerts to clients about their internet firewalls and routers alerting them it is down. (Send to their home email addresses) or TXT messages to their cell phones... A typical alert subject is FW: Alert: 1 for DAMAR DAMAR-ONSITE Connectivity Failed. This line contains the ALERT#, the Client, The device, the status. From this the list server will send HTML alerts . Based on my understanding of this tool, this can be done.
Any tips or suggestions to help decide the better solution are welcome.

Thanks

[Martin]

Hi,

Yes, MailXpert should be capable of this and it may be a better solution that FollowUpExpert esp. if you need to send multiple messages based on the contents of a notification (it's slightly easier to do with MailXpert). On the other hand, if you need to delay a response, or send a message that notifies about a situation and then a follow-up an hour later, you need FollowUpExpert for this.

If there's anything else I can help you with, please let me know.

Best regards,
Martin Bilski
Xtreeme GmbH