A great channel program is a two-way street. Elise Hymes, Kerio's Partner Program Manager, unveils the ups and downs of running a successful partner program.

How has the Kerio partner community changed?

It has been a turbulent year - from the Kerio Workspace end-of-life announcement to the Exchange ActiveSync licensing change, our partners were not happy with the way information was communicated to them. But, they are resilient and we have seen the partners grow and come to understand the changes we sometimes must make.

More ports; wall mount capability; fanless cooling; sleek styling. No, it is not a new HDTV. It is Kerio Control Box 1120*, the first refresh of our entry level UTM appliance, and it is quite refreshing.

Kerio's Partner Advisory Council has just completed its first year. We took this opportunity to sit down with Partner Program Manager, Elise Hymes, to see how that year went.

The Partner Advisory Council (PAC) just completed its first year. What does it look like to run a PAC?

We had the chance to bring on two great interns this summer who worked across all lines of business at Kerio. Their collegiate backgrounds span the country, from New York to California, and we are excited to watch them grow in the career paths following this experience.

Ari Fine

What did you work on: I worked closely with the business development team to identify, build and manage long-term relationships with strategic startup accelerators and incubators in the Bay Area to initiate the adoption of Samepage.

Beginning with Kerio Control 8.1, Administrators Can Rest Assured that their Custom Settings Will Always be Secure and Accessible at Samepage.io

Let's face it. You probably aren't going to change your firewall settings on a daily basis. Hopefully you will be upgrading or adjusting rules based on new employees or threat vectors as required, but for the most part you will let the silent guardian of your network do its job. It is easy enough to save the custom configuration you carefully created in the unlikely event of a hardware failure or for importation on to another Control Box in the organization. But why not make it even easier?

Kerio Partners Earn Revenue For Any Client They Setup with the Samepage Enterprise Collaboration Platform

Despite all of the fanfare over Google Glass, at the end of the day work needs to get done, and as of 8:00 this morning, we are still going to dive into our inboxes. Furthermore, while a growing segment of the business world is turning to hosted email in the "cloud" (including many of our customers), many businesses and Managed Service Providers (the vast majority in fact) are hosting it themselves. For these trend buckers, we are happy to provide the latest version of Kerio Connect.

Kerio Connect 8.1 Also Supports Windows 8 Mail

Today's launch of Kerio Connect 8.1 brings instant messaging capabilities into the corporate realm and behind the firewall. While you may want to use your personal Skype or Yahoo Messenger because it's simple, in business you may not want to be known as BeerDude1980 to your colleagues. Having a business email address on your favorite IM network is a better way to go. So now that Kerio Connect provides both email and IMs via its server, the question is: when do you IM and when do you email?

The answer...it depends. Let's take a look at the pros and cons of each.