Hello everyone, and welcome to the Synology
Partner Online Training. We have an exciting topic for everybody here today, going over Synology's MailPlus solution. For those of you who don't know, my name is Cody, I'm a Technical Account Manager here at Synology, and I'm going to be your guide this time around. Now on the agenda today, we're going to essentially go over three main portions. We're going to first take a look at why you might want to go with an on-premise solution, versus a third-party cloud-based solution that's hosted by another organization for you. We're going to then move into some MailPlus advanced features that will be handy for any admin or business user utilizing this mail system. We're then going to take a look at some implementation tips that we have. There are going to be a couple different tips that we can offer you. Because mail servers aren't really a one-size-fits-all game, and we want to make sure that everybody has these couple bits of advice that we can offer. So, on-premise versus cloud-based third-party solutions is owning or renting a mail solution, the correct decision for you and your small business. Now for small business owners, you're going to want to take a few things into consideration whenever you're making an investment in your IT infrastructure such as this. First and foremost is the cost associated with the solution. Is this going to be an initial investment that I have to budget for, you know, this month or this quarter? Or is this going to be more of a long-term subscription-based solution that I need to factor in the total cost of ownership into the final decision? Next, is the solution going to be able to shift and scale with your business as it grows. Because as a small business owner that's your ultimate goal is to grow your business organically and your mail solution needs to follow along accordingly as your business gains success in your industry. Next, you need to consider the deployment challenges that might be associated with an on-premise versus a cloud-based solution. There's going to be some configuration effort, ongoing maintenance, and support that you're going to have to be comfortable with managing yourself. Now, as a baker, for example, you may not be an expert in it
infrastructure or management of a mail server. But fear not, we have a whole network of Synology partners that you can utilize. So you can still use MailPlus in that situation, but we would urge you to partner with a Synology registered reseller. Next, you also have to consider the functionality associated with the mail solution. You need to have the right management features to be able to take care of that mail solution. It needs to integrate with the different services that you need to run your business effectively. And in terms of user functions, it needs to actually meet your users' needs whenever they're actually sending out those emails during the day. Also, on top of that, this whole solution needs to have a fairly short learning curve for your users, so they can hit the ground running right whenever you get this mail server deployed. Now, in today's day and age, there are essentially two main options whenever you're looking to do a mail server deployment. First and foremost is the cloud-based solutions, and that's really just a third-party managing, a subscription service for your organization. On top of that, you have self-hosted options like Synology MailPlus for example. And that's really just deploying all hardware and software accordingly and managing and supporting that down the line. We can all agree there's some pros by going with a cloud-based mail solution. For example, there's a low upfront investment in both cost and time associated with doing the deployment. On the personal email side of things, i think we've all created a cloud-based mail solution. We know how easy it is to set up that account, and likewise, for your small business, it's going to be about the same level of difficulty to do so. On top of that, these cloud-based solutions are easily scalable. We know that if you go with a cloud-based solution with one of the major tech providers, they have these large data centers at their disposal that can both scale-out in capacity and bandwidth for your small business to meet your email needs. On top of that, there's almost no hardware to support on the server-side of things whenever you're going with a cloud-based mail solution because your mail servers are hosted in the cloud. The only thing you need to support is the endpoint PCs where your users are going to be emailing from. On the con side of all this, there are expensive fees associated with going with a cloud-based solution. Because keep in mind these are subscription solutions so each and every day that your users are utilizing the email accounts and actually trying to make money for your business you're getting charged to do so. On top of that, there's limited functionality with cloud-based solutions. They're meant to be generalized solutions to meet the needs of many different verticals. So if your small business needed to customize anything, you would be locked out from doing so. On top of that, by hosting all of your mail servers in the cloud, you've lost all data privacy and ownership of that data. And now that's actually something that you get immediately back whenever you go with a Synology MailPlus an on-premise solution. You get the complete date of privacy because you have complete self-governance of that data you're hosting your own server. On top of that, there's an immense cost-benefit, because the upfront investment is a sunk cost. You're not going to be charged, you know, five days later for utilizing your mail server for example. On top of that, we easily integrate with third-party applications. So if your users are used to a third-party client like Outlook for example. There's going to be almost no learning curve for them to utilize the MailPlus server. In fact, they might not even notice the mail server has changed, because all they are interacting with is just the Outlook client. Just on the back end now Synology MailPlus is supporting that mail solution. So let's go ahead and take a look at an example scenario to wrap our heads around this. In this example, we're going to be looking at a company that has 100 employees and we're looking at a time frame of about 3 years. Now, if you were to go with what is considered the most traditional or common on-premise mail solution, you're going to be looking at almost $30,000 for that three-year time frame around ten thousand dollars a year to do that self-hosted mail solution at least in that traditional sense. If you were to go with a software-as-a-service online cloud-based solution, you're still looking around $20,000 over that three-year time frame just to run your mail server. And if you take that a look at that and actually compare it to a Synology MailPlus deployment, all those hardware costs are upfront. You make that initial investment, and in the end, you actually save around 70 if you actually look at the total cost of ownership for the entire solution. Making MailPlus simply one of the most cost-effective ways to host your own mail server. So we're going to dive into configuring Synology MailPlus, it's actually pretty easy once you have your A records and your MX records already set up with your domain registrar. What we're going to do is open up our Synology MailPlus server application and we're immediately greeted with this wizard because we haven't created our domain yet. This is exactly what you would see if you're going to do your own MailPlus installation initially. So we're going to go ahead and create a new mail system here, and we're going to go ahead and add in several different things, but you can see under account type we could do these account types based on your LDAP or AD users on top of that. But for the nature of our demo today, we're just going to use our local users on the NAS. So we're going to go ahead and choose our local users, and then go ahead and type in some different details for our specific domain. We're just going to use our LAN 1actual interface here because that's the only one connected so it's going to be nice and simple. Now we're going to go ahead and type in that domain name and that's going to really just be synologywebinars.com So we're going to type that in and what you'll notice is that the hostname your fully qualified domain name will also populate with your mail.synologywebinars.com domain in this case. So as you can see, we got all of those details typed in, and we're going to go ahead and hit Apply. We're going to run through some basic settings automatically utilizing this wizard, but once that's finished, that's it. That's all you have to do to get Synology MailPlus configured on the Synology side of things. Again, once you have those A records and those MX records all setup, you're now able to begin receiving and sending out emails once you enable those specific accounts under the Account tab. We're going to go over how to do that in just a bit in the next
demo, but that is how easy it is to set up MailPlus. So we've gone over why you might want to choose an on-premise solution like Synology's MailPlus versus the cloud-hosted option that is going to be subscription-based. In this next portion, we're gonna be taking a look at some MailPlus features as we dive into these 4 big features inside of MailPlus. Please keep in mind that this list is in no way exhaustive of all the advanced features you're gonna have available to you, should you go with the Synology MailPlus deployment. Now we have support for multiple domains and this is going to be especially handy for those larger businesses that may need to apply, you know, a specific domain to a subsidiary that's across the globe for example. On top of that, we support role delegation, so what this is especially handy for those admin-level activities. So your internal IT team or your managed service provider that you're partnering with will definitely use this role delegation to help spread the workload of actually managing the mail server deployment. On top of that, not just actually adding in role delegation for those admin-level activities you can get really granular with how the users can actually utilize the mail system. You can limit how many emails are actually sent out per day or limit attachment sizes, just to name a couple different examples. We also have support for granular search on top of that. You can search for specific emails from specific people, from even specific date ranges, and then you can report on export those emails, and even delete them from your system if you have any privacy concerns. Now on the topic of multiple domain support. Again, this is going to be great to set up those different domains for those subsidiaries. But by adding in those different domains for the subsidiaries from one location, you're actually managing everything centrally at HQ. Because generally speaking, that's where most of your IT resources are going to be. Now, this is actually something that Synology does themselves, whenever you interact with us through our mail server, like the emails that you're going to get after this webinar. You're actually interacting with a MailPlus deployment across the globe in Taiwan. Now on the topic of role delegation, there are several different layers that you can utilize to help spread out this admin-level workload. On the top here, you have super admin, and that's going to be the server level management they're going to be the ones who have the most power inside of the MailPlus deployment. We also have support for a help desk layer, which is really just those individuals that are going to be managing those internal user inquiries, especially whenever you have new people joining the team. Lastly, we have support for domain management. You can actually delegate who can be a domain manager. Especially handy if you want to assign someone to manage the domain for a specific subsidiary. On the user policy side of things, again, this is not just role delegation for the admin level rights. This is for specific users interacting with the mail server. You can limit your emails per day, especially handy for interns if you don't want them just emailing people at whim. On top of that, you also have support for customized login policy and mail delivery and all of this can be managed through your Active Directory domain that you've joined with the Synology NAS for example. So what that's going to be handy in is you don't actually have to, you know, individually change all these user policies. You can do it at the group level and it's going to be very handy and much quicker to do it that way especially if you have a larger organization. Now, again, this granular search functionality is going to be handy if you need to have any kind of query into, you know, all the email accounts across the entire deployment. There are really deep parameters involved in this. Again, you can do specific emails from or to specific people, subject, text, date, size, whole nine yards any attribute you can think of for the specific email you're going to be able to search inside of our search functionality. And again, you can export or delete results if you need any kind of reporting, or if you need to delete things for privacy concerns if GDPR is something you need to adhere to. Now that we've done our baseline deployment for Synology MailPlus. You're going to want to take care of a couple things before you go and actually enable all the accounts. You want to first make sure you have all your licenses applied to the system and you can do that under the License screen. You have five included with your initial Synology MailPlus deployment. Next, you want to go into Account, and you'll see a lot of different settings that we're going to go over in just a bit. But another good setting I like to point out to people early on in their deployment is you have the ability to activate all users by default inside of Synology MailPlus. What that means is that if you add any users to DSM or even your Active Directory domain, they'll be automatically imported and enabled in Synology MailPlus. Now, user policy is another thing that you're going to want to check out, maybe even before you actually enable some of those users. Because you're going to want to make sure under your default service, default policy rather that some of these other services are actually enabled. Like IMAP for POP3 so that your users can actually utilize some of those third-party clients that they want. As we fade back in here, what we're going to do now is actually enable those users because we have the licenses applied and all that good stuff. Now we're going to enable myself, Bobert, as well as a couple other users. We're not going to use the guest since we only have five licenses right now for accounts. So we're just going to enable Mary and Tom. Keep in mind those people will actually be coming up a little bit later, they're going to be part of our user policy and role delegation on top of that. So, now that we've hit apply these specific users are now able to utilize their mail system. They've been activated they can utilize their main mail addresses. So let's take a look at what that would look like in the Synology MailPlus client. Just to prove to you that it's all up and running at this point in time. If we open up our Synology MailPlus client, which is can be installed through our package center, you'll see that our specific user, Tom, were logged in with them, you can see that they've already received an email from me after we actually enabled their account. So now that we've added in users, we're going to want to go ahead and add in some multiple domains for our subsidiaries. So we're going to go ahead and name our first domain here. Actually branch A, and that's pretty much all you need to do
to configure that new domain. You can add a description there if you'd like, but on the next
screen, is going to be where you apply the users to that specific sub domain. So what we're going to do here is select a couple different users, but we're going to do so through the group menu because it's
going to be much easier to grab a lot of different users. So for branch A, of course, we're going to grab the branch A group. And you can see all the users' email addresses that are going to be added into that specific group. So now you see we have branch A all done and ready to go. We're gonna have another branch, branch B, that we're also going to enable. I believe Mary, they are actually the branch manager for that location so we'll name this branch B. Nice and easy just like the last one, we're going to switch over to groups once more and then add in our branch B location, so that we have all those users. And coincidentally, that's also the same location that has our marketing team. So as you can see we have Bobert the intern and also Mary the branch manager for that location already added in with those specific email addresses. And again, as you can see those email addresses reflect that specific domain that we assigned. Now that we've added in all of our branches, we're going to want to delegate some roles to make management that much easier for our admin team. So as we open up the delegation creator right here, you can see that we have all kinds of different checkboxes that you can apply to those specific users. The easiest way to configure these delegation rules is actually to use the delegation profile. So for example, if we wanted to create a domain manager, it would automatically check all the boxes that we would need to give that person this functionality. On this next page, we're going to select who is our actual domain manager. So in our case, Bobert is actually going to be an intern that we apply a user policy to, and Mary, they are going to be the one who is actually our branch B domain manager. So as we select Mary, you can see that they are now underneath the branch B delegation rule right here as is expected. Now what we can do is actually go and create a user policy for our users. In this case, we want to create one for our intern, Bobert. So let's go ahead and create a user policy here, and this is going to be what allows you to get really granular on how this user is going to be interacting with their mail system day to day. So we're of course going to name this Interns as the policy, and we're going to go ahead and color code it any which way you want. This is great for visual people and visual admins at that. We're going to select our color, and then you can, you know, throttle back how much this user can actually utilize the mail server. So for an intern, you might not want them to have unfettered
access to the mail server at all times, so maybe 50 emails a day is probably enough for them, let's say you wanted to restrict their outbound traffic. You could do so or limit their attachment size on top of that. Also, you may not want an intern being the representative for your company yet, so you might want to just select that they can only internally email other users on the mail system. So that would restrict your intern users pretty nicely. So let's go ahead and select our users that are this is going to be applied to. And in this case, we're going to select Bobert here, and just like what you saw with roll delegation but Bobert is going to be populated underneath this user policy that we named intern so as we drop down here, you're going to see that he's selected underneath that as is expected. Now that we've set up multiple domains, set up some role delegation, and did a user policy. Let's go ahead and do a search here inside of auditing. You can see that we have multiple emails from my personal email address that were accidentally forwarded to this work email on the Synology MailPlus server. So we're going to kind of clean things up and do a search to delete all those emails from this work email server. So this is not too distant alert to what you might be doing to remain GDPR compliant. You actually might need to delete some emails from a certain person for privacy reasons. So in that regard, we're going to go ahead and name this GDPR Cody Hall Personal Email. And all we need to find these emails, in this case, is just to use a sender parameter here, but you could change the parameters as you need to, you know, keyword, date, even the mail size. Also, keep in mind, we're going to just use this sender parameter here but you can also add in more than one parameter if you wanted to get even more specific on the matter. Now before hitting ok, you want to set up the target of the search. These are basically selecting what mailboxes you want to search to be performed on. Since I only forwarded these emails to my personal work email on accident, we're just going to use my email box right here, select Cody, and hit OK. Once we actually hit OK, it's going to trigger the search, and you can monitor it on the right and see what the search status is. Once that search is finished, you have a couple different things that you can do. First and foremost, you can download task reports and keep that for your own records if you need. Or you can view the results and see all the different things that you can see in this menu. What you can see is all the different email details and you can see they're all forwarded emails, couple Active Insight reports, and even some recipes on top of that. So you have an option to export here, even, you know, mail lists and mail lists and even the original emails on top of that. But for our demo here, what we're going to do is actually delete all these emails from the environment, again, for privacy reasons. So as you can see, once we're all deleted there, we're good to go. Now that's just how powerful the granular search functionality is inside of Synology MailPlus. What's great about it is you can actually use it for compliance reasons like we talked about. But what if you also lost a contract or another critical email, you can utilize this search functionality to find that email across your entire MailPlus deployment. So we've gone over some of those great MailPlus features and in this next section we're going to be taking a look at those deployment tips, and some things you want to consider before implementing MailPlus. So before you commit, you're going to want to take a look at essentially these four sections. Is on-prem the right choice for you? Do you want to have this hosted in the cloud, or do you want to be hosting it yourself on your own hardware? If you're going to be hosting it on your own hardware, you're going to want to make sure you have full redundancy plans both at the software and hardware level and on top of that you're going to need a backup plan should any disaster strike your system. Lastly, you need to have a plan for how you're going to install and operate the system, and the big question in everybody's mind is probably should you hire a managed services or Synology partner to help administer this system? It's especially true if you do not have an internal IT team, we strongly urge you to partner with a Synology partner in that case. So let's talk about an example organization that would be perfect for a MailPlus deployment. These organizations would require complete data
ownership of their mail server. Either an internal company policy or just to stay compliant in their specific industry. The perfect organization for MailPlus is also going to have an IT team on staff 24/7 and available support for anything that might happen to the mail server. Because keep in mind, this mail server is going to be the main way that you interact with your clients, and a big way that your actual business makes money. So if you do not have that support team in place, then it's going to affect your bottom line. Lastly, these organizations understand security, threat monitoring, data protection best practices for mail servers. Now you need redundancy as we said, of course, the mail server also needs to have a software component of redundancy. So we actually have a mail server HA, a MailPlus AJ solution that's going to be software-based. On top of that, we strongly urge you to always have spare drives on hand. Because all drives, even hard drives, SSDs they have a specified lifespan, it's inevitable one day that one of the drives will fail. So having cold spares on hand so you can easily rebuild the RAID is going to be critical. Next on the list, is you also need backups for your MailPlus deployment. Now you have on-site backup solutions for pretty much any Synology application or data utilizing either Hyper Backup or Snapshot Replication. Off-site, you can even use both those same applications you can use Hyper Backup or Snapshot Replication to push data off the NAS to a different location, and you can even use Hyper Backup to push it up to the cloud. But my advice to everybody here utilizing a Synology MailPlus deployment is definitely check out Hyper Backup, because it has a specific
Configuration Backup for MailPlus. So that if you did need to do a big restore from the cloud
for example, you could easily reconstitute your entire mail server deployment without having to reconfigure everything from scratch. Now I hope a big question on everybody's mind right now is should we hire a Synology partner. Now if you don't have on-staff IT in your organization or if your current support isn't available 24/7, you definitely need to hire a Synology partner. On our list of Synology partners, we have a whole range of MSPs that will provide you a support contract. So you can rest assured that you'll get the support you need when you need it. On top of that, if this is your first mail server deployment, if you're not already comfortable deploying a mail server, you don't understand best practices for threat monitoring, etc. Then you need to get help, and partnering with a Synology partner is the best way to do so. Now if you just want to find out what else you can get for your business by partnering with an MSP for example. Then you definitely want to check out our Synology partner list. They're going to be a great resource to help ease IT pain points across your organization. So in our last section, we're going to summarize some of the things we went over. And we're going to take a look at where you might want to
begin, should you do a Synology MailPlus deployment. Now your first stop is going to be at the Synology Knowledge Center. And this is going to be where you want to go for any facts for pretty much any Synology application you can think of, not just Synology MailPlus. Now you also want to make sure you grab the Synology MailPlus admin guide. Because it goes into even more granular detail on some app-related tasks than even the Knowledge Center does. Lastly, you want to contact us for a consult before you do your deployment, so that we can help size your Synology NAS to meet your mail server needs. Now after you have a successful deployment with Synology MailPlus, Synology support is there to help you out should any issues arise. If you have an issue, go ahead and open up a support ticket. And if you are a Business Advantage Program member, go ahead and contact your rep. I'm actually on that team, the end-user team, so I actually might even be your rep personally. On top of that, you want to make sure you follow all instructions promptly from our support team. I can't tell you how many times a support ticket has been stalled, because the end user goes unresponsive. Please respond promptly and make sure you attach your logs when you create your ticket that will speed things along. Next, we have our Where to Buy page, this is going to be a great list to pick from for trained resellers and MSPs if you just want to grab one
quickly. They have several support plans available depending on the organization, some MSPs might actually have contracts available to you, so you'll want to reach out to them to see what they have available in your area. And lastly, if you don't see one in your area, please give us a call, because our partner network is much larger than what the Where to Buy page details, it's much more expansive. So we can definitely find a partner in your area even if you don't see one on the Where to Buy page. Lastly, the Business Advantage Program and the onboarding team are there to help any enterprise business user. We help with consultations for builds or current builds, and we also help with trainings for both your IT team and your end users on top of that. Now you might be wondering what's the criteria for the Business Advantage Program, it's really the users the business end-users that are utilizing our enterprise-class devices like Flash Stations, Unified Controller, and our SAS Arrays like the SA3400 and SA3600 on top of that. So with that said, thank you for tuning in today and we'll see you next time.
