OXtender for Plesk version 1.0.1
Quickly after the first version, we released a new version that features extended compatibility. We got many requests from customers complaining that they run Plesk 8.6 and they are not able to use 4PSA OXtender. Starting with version 1.0.1, you can use OXtender with any Plesk version higher or equal to 8.3.0. We also fixed some minor bugs and introduced new functionality, maybe the most important being that the new version can work with email passwords that are encrypted in the Plesk database (it requires IMAP auth module on the Open-Xchange server).
From the licensing perspective, there are some news also. As you probably know, 4PSA OXtender included Open-Xchange seat licenses embedded in order to simplify the entire process. While the pricing is efficient, it might be too expensive to start when dealing with an infrastructure that has many Plesk servers. Due to this reason, we introduced a simple licensing, called OX server centric licensing where you pay on the Open-Xchange server level for the seats you use and a smaller price for the 4PSA OXtender. This was you can still enjoy the superior provisioning and management capabilities while keeping the costs low.
OXtender for Plesk
Several months ago we announced a Plesk integration for Open-Xchange. Back then the integration was done with a command line script, which unfortunately didn’t simplify the administrator’s life enough to make it really easy to sell Open-Xchange. Additionally, the licensing terms for Open-Xchange were not too flexible to allow small Plesk based businesses to sell it.
With 4PSA OXtender for Plesk, all these issues are solved, because:
- It comes with a new, fixed monthly price per Parallels Plesk server (no additional licensing fees for the Open-Xchange server).
- Easy installation and setup (each Plesk server can be added to OX in less than 5 minutes)
- To add OX webmail or groupware to a Plesk mail account, you only have to click a button in the Plesk interface.
- The OX webmail is free for all users. You can replace Horde with a webmail having personal address book, calendar and tasks.
- You can upgrade any account to groupware. There are two levels for the groupware: standard (private and public address book, InfoStore, calendar, teams, subscriptions) and premium (all standard features plus mobility).
- You can allow your resellers to access the OXtender features in Plesk, by setting a permission.
- All users that can access OXtender have the possibility to download reports regarding the number of accounts on each level (webmail, groupware standard, groupware premium).
- We provide support for the OXtender / Open-Xchange setup.
OXtender is available for Plesk 9.0.1 and upper versions, running on Unix/Linux. If you are interested to get it for Plesk running under Microsoft Windows, please add a comment to this post. It would be interesting to ask you questions here, as we can follow-up with another blog article.
You can see here some screenshots and there is also a demo available on our demo server.
New 4PSA software for Plesk 9
We released yesterday new 4PSA software packages for Plesk 9. There are a number of general improvements that affected all products (as we have 11 packages for Plesk, I will not discuss about any particular product, but about things that affected all of them):
- New installer. This installer works (for the moment) with Linux distributions that support RPM packaging (Redhat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora, Suse). It is very easy to install bundles or separate products with the installer, as you only have to choose the packages you want to install.
- Virtuozzo templates. All products can be installed much faster on Virtuozzo machines, due to the EZ templates.
- Plesk 9 Resellers support. One of the top improvements in Plesk 9 is the support for an additional control layer, Resellers. This is quite important for hosting businesses, for example VoipNow had this management layer since its first release 2.5 years ago.
All 4PSA software for Plesk 9 requires new licenses. Because people use to forget about SUS and reinstatements, we also prepared a promotion. Customers with an expired SUS can now reinstate their license at renewal prices (54% discount). The promotion is also valid for 4PSA for Plesk Bundles.
To take advantage of this promotion, use the discount code plesk9 in the online store.
The promotion is valid until 31 December 2008.
PS. Contact sales AT 4psa.com if you want to receive a quote for the Plesk 9 Professional Upgrade Service. It’s the fastest way to upgrade your server to Plesk 9 in a secure and reliable way.
Time for SaaS. 4PSA Integrator 3 Released
We want to let you know that we released 4PSA Integrator 3, the latest update of popular SaaS delivery platform for Plesk. The latest version brings some new things; one of the most important is the simplification of the installation and maintenance process.
The fastest deployment might not sound like a big deal when you have two servers, but when you are dealing with 300 servers, such improvements can lead to important cost savings (and cost savings are very important now in order to remain competitive).
I think that the market will increase focus on SaaS, because as Paul Getty said once, “If it appreciates, buy it. If it depreciates, lease it”. I might add “if you are uncertain and you want to buy, think twice” 
With the present economical situation, this looks to be the perfect time for SaaS. And with 4PSA Integrator you can offer CRM, bulletin boards, collaboration, project management, ecommerce applications very easily to your SMB customers.
With 4PSA Integrator 3 hosting companies can easily deploy 4PSA Integrator on servers using the RPM or Virtuozzo EZ templates. This upgrade is available for all customers with a valid SUS.
4PSA Clean Server 4 is Available
I guess you remember that two months ago I told you about a new version of Clean Server. At that time it was planned for release in September. Well, it was almost on schedule, one week later , so right now you can download it. There are many improvements on this version, starting with the architecture and ending with the product distribution. I suggest you to read this brochure, as it describes quite nicely the new features and functionalities.
We have several customers already running it, one of them with a large infrastructure of Plesk servers. He has around 300 servers, but they didn’t find enough time to upgrade them all. Anyway they keep upgrading several every day and they dedicated several nodes for scanning (last time I checked they used five nodes). The results impressed them (funny: before this test they also offered Dr.Web for dedicated servers and VPS, but after the last week they decided to drop it from the offer). The average load on the servers got 40% lower and they did not experience any problems related to local email delivery. Before Clean Server 4, a lot of problems occured due to email floods.
But I let you test it and build your own feedback.
4PSA introduces 4Grid Technology
We added some details on our website about 4Grid, more to follow in the next months as we will introduce products based on it.
Well, I realized that I wrote months, actually the first product is very close. Next week? Or maybe in two weeks? I am not trying to play Steve Jobs, I don’t know exactly. If you want to ask questions, don’t hesitate!
4PSA Clients Area 3 Is Available!
This is quite of a long expected announcement. We have more formal announcements on our PR, but I think that you are interested on what happened behind the stages . BTW, we have a 10% discount to celebrate this release (for all 4PSA and Parallels owned licenses). The discount code is
clarea3
and can be used in the Online Store when you make a purchase! The discount code is valid until 23 September 2008.
Why an Updated Clients Area?
There are a couple of reasons.
First:
Our ordering facilities were designed five years ago. At that time, software was owned. As far as I remember, we started to offer leased licenses, but they were not very successful. Even providers used to purchase licenses rather than lease them. However, in the last year we noticed that there is a powerful trend to lease rather than own licenses. This is quite normal, considering that most of our customers are providers. For them it makes more sense to lease licenses because this better fits into their business structure.
So, with the new Clients Area customers can provision and terminate (unfortunately providers will have customers that want to cancel their server or VPS) leased licenses. This can be done from the Clients Area or using an API. The interesting part is that they can do this not only for 4PSA products, but for Parallels products also. We have a lot of customers purchasing Parallels licenses from us and they will find it very easily to provision licenses.
Second:
Partners’ invoicing was pretty complicated for us, therefore smaller partners had to pay per purchase.
With the new features, even smaller partners can be invoiced monthly. This way they will not spend precious time on submitting payment information with any purchase.
Third:
There were some areas of the Clients Area that were not so efficient from the customer’s perspective. It was OK to manage 10-20 license keys, but we have partners with several thousands keys under their administration. For these it was kind of difficult to manage the keys.
We fixed all these issues in the latest release.
4PSA Server Controller – new version
We launched a new version of Server Controller. Server Controller is not such popular 4PSA software, and personally I fell sorry for this, because I think that it deserved more. The main problem with it was that no other control panel had such an addon and for most people it was (and it still is) difficult to understand what is Server Controller and what it does (looks like we weren’t either very good at explaining this).
The software is a Microsoft Windows program that can be used to manage and monitor multiple Plesk servers. I use it almost every day, because in many cases it’s hard to remember the logins, than login in the browser to the correct server in order to check customers and domains, add new domains, etc. With Server Controller this is very easy, because everything is accessible at a click of a mouse (you only have to add the server to it once). I estimate that most companies with serveral Plesk servers can save a lot of minutes every days with Server Controller.
The software also allows you to monitor the most important parameters of a Plesk server (an agent must be installed on the server). The new version is compatible with Microsoft Vista and also brings some other improvements. I recommended you to check it.
4PSA Clean Server 4 – A giant step forward
A new version of 4PSA Clean Server is scheduled for September. There are many unique features built in this new version. You know that 4PSA Clean Server was the first mail antivirus for Plesk (it was released almost five years ago). Parallels also introduced some antiviruses, using engines from Dr.Web and Kaspersky. Although much more expensive than Clean Server, especially Dr.web is quite popular. There is no major difference between Clean Server and Parallels offering (well, two years ago Clean Server was considerable faster and more stable, today the difference is minimal). Clean Server still has many more features than any of them, but we felt that this was not enough for our next generation product.
One of the common problems with antiviruses (the same with antispam – yes, a new Spam Guardian 4 is also in development) is that in one massive email flow, some emails might not be scanned because the scanning engine is too busy. In order to prevent this, with Clean Server 4 we introduced a Grid scanning infrastructure. Let me explain.
Let’s say that you have a single Plesk server. You will install Clean Server on this server and it will work like previous versions. But, let’s say that you do not want your machine to be loaded by antiviruse scanning. No problem, you can get another server (a VPS might be fine) and install there the scanning engine. Then you point your Clean Server to that scanning engine. Even better, you can have multiple Plesk servers pointing to the same scanning engine, which means that a machine will be dedicated only to antivirus scanning.
Wait, that’s not all. Let’s suppose that this scanning server gets too loaded. No problem, add another scanning server and point your Plesk servers to both scanning machines. Add three, four – it does not matter. The Plesk servers will load balance scanning requests between servers in the infrastructure.
Benefits? Hard to count them all:
- It will be impossible for a hosting machine to be loaded with too many scanning requests, meaning that other services will not be affected by high loads.
- Emails can no longer pass unscanned due to QoS settings. When your scanning machine is too loaded, simply add another machine!
- Resources are much smarter spent.
- The scanning engines collect information from multiple machines, which mean that they can learn better about nasty email profiles.
This is just the most important architectural improvement in Clean Server 4. We also increased its speed by more than 200%, added more control features for end-users, improved interface, etc.
With Clean Server 4 we make a considerable jump ahead our competition. I am fully confident that this idea will be sooner or later copied. But this will take some time and guess what – we already know which one will be the next generation architecture and we started the research on it
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