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Richard Noggin posted:Picking nits, but ConnectWise isn't an RMM, it's a PSA, like AutoTask. CentraStage looks neat though. I was assuming Stugazi was crapping on Labtech. 
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Sep 13, 2014 20:42
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To be equally fair both Labtech and Connectwise have shittastic interfaces.
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Sep 14, 2014 01:14
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ConnectWise is outdated and bloated. Its like me in the dating world. :-) I don't trust CW anymore. Updates can't fix the problems It needs a complete overhaul and that will never happen. Got worse when they bought labtech and quosal. Too few modern developers working on too much product. AT is tempting. At least they are 100% browser and their API works with web2.0 stuff. Now AT has an RMM to complement the PSA? I would love to see a review.
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Sep 14, 2014 02:57
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Was wondering if anyone has had success with GFI Max Backup at all? We have about 50 or so clients on an ineration of Vembu at the moment which comes with quite a few problems (mainly the licensing is a pain in the rear end) and are looking to switch. Our biggest concern here is where does the data go? Is it stored locally in the US/Can or does it head on over to India? We have quite a few financial records / HR data and would hate to violate any international laws by crossing the borders with this type of data. We requested a quote and are just waiting on GFI reponse. As to the helpdesk discussion, we have been using Zendesk for over 2 years with great success. The price point is a bit high but at the end of the day the tool far outweighs the negative pricing point. Not to switch around too much, but what do you guys think of Naverisk vs N-Able for site management / alerts? We are currently on Level platforms but them having been purchased by AVG sort of put a sour taste in my mouth and we have been entertaining switching vendors completely. Naverisk seems quite robust although I don't think we could give up our Zendesk at this point, it's the management side of things that has me interested.
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Sep 22, 2014 17:14
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nuklear posted:Was wondering if anyone has had success with GFI Max Backup at all? We have about 50 or so clients on an ineration of Vembu at the moment which comes with quite a few problems (mainly the licensing is a pain in the rear end) and are looking to switch. Our biggest concern here is where does the data go? Is it stored locally in the US/Can or does it head on over to India? We have quite a few financial records / HR data and would hate to violate any international laws by crossing the borders with this type of data. We requested a quote and are just waiting on GFI reponse. I'd be interested in hearing about anyone's experiences with Naverisk as well. On a side note, how the hell did Tampa end up becoming some sort of epicenter for RMM companies?
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Sep 22, 2014 21:01
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Maneki Neko posted:which seems like a goddamn nightmare (even with a "YOU BREAK IT, IT'S BILLABLE" agreement in place). This is where you bill $120 an hour to fix the problem. Nothing is a nightmare at $120 an hour!
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Oct 2, 2014 21:14
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Trinitrotoluene posted:This is where you bill $120 an hour to fix the problem. Nothing is a nightmare at $120 an hour! Heh. Our standard rate is higher than that
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Oct 2, 2014 21:48
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Anyone ever use continuum's Helpdesk service to handle tier 1 calls? How was it?
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Oct 3, 2014 15:46
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Stugazi posted:Anyone ever use continuum's Helpdesk service to handle tier 1 calls? How was it? despite being hounded constantly by continuum's portal to try out their tier 1 call center poo poo, I just can not do it ethically as a business owner. 90% of why people come to, and stay with me and my company is because they're fed up with larger shops (leapfrog, bluewave, network 1, etc) not knowing who they are, or sending out incompetent techs, etc. I don't have anything against those companies, and actually think they provide pretty good (if pricey) service - but I am so involved with businesses my size (5-30 employees) that I can't imagine outsourcing that tier 1 poo poo. I genuinely feel their pain, and have witnessed IT horror stories of mismanagement and neglect - and I come in as the 'fixer'. first tier is the most important tier - it's the face of your company and the impression you leave with your partners. that said, I am definitely a small shop. I support about 30 companies now, and have just hired my first tech to take tier one poo poo off my plate. it's definitely more expensive than outsourcing it, but I get to yell at someone and have him do things my way, and he doesn't have a thick indian accent - so I'm happy. I've actually made him start interacting with continuum's noc on my behalf too, which is both cruel of me, very effective in saving me time and a lot of frustration, and sort of hilarious. no continuum, I won't use your tier one service - I'll hire my own tier one service to deal with your bullshit.
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Oct 6, 2014 07:22
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hey this is a really specific problem directed at you Stugazi, because I know we're on the same MSP software. I've hounded the NOC, my account manager, everyone about this problem : http://i.imgur.com/eOMUV38.png basically, continuum's patch management system doesn't integrate with Windows Action Center / Windows Update - so every loving workstation reports "last updated : NEVER" even though this isn't at all true. users get popups, ask me why I'm not doing my job, etc. it's bad. I can't imagine that literally every continuum partner just settles on this issue. is this happening with your sites, am I an idiot, is there a way around it? I can't get a straight answer from anyone. the NOC just runs me around in circles.
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Oct 6, 2014 07:27
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mindphlux posted:outsourced help desk stuff This guy gets it. If your business is built on providing personal 'touch' for someone then sending that poo poo off to India to save you pennies is just going to cost you more in the long run.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:24
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go3 posted:This guy gets it. If your business is built on providing personal 'touch' for someone then sending that poo poo off to India to save you pennies is just going to cost you more in the long run. Isn't that really all that's left on the MSP side of things these days (building a relationship, selling "you")
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Oct 6, 2014 18:49
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Continuums tier 1 is based in Pittsburgh. It is geared towards US based Helpdesk and if you think about it they can likely handle the majority of incoming calls. Not every call requires a personal relationship or specialized knowledge to complete. We have not used it. If we do I will report back.
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Oct 6, 2014 19:17
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Maneki Neko posted:Isn't that really all that's left on the MSP side of things these days (building a relationship, selling "you") It is and its the greatest trump card in the world
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Oct 6, 2014 19:45
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Stugazi posted:Continuums tier 1 is based in Pittsburgh. It is geared towards US based Helpdesk and if you think about it they can likely handle the majority of incoming calls. Not every call requires a personal relationship or specialized knowledge to complete. Wouldn't you have to give them access to your clients networks (Eg domain admin etc) for this to work? I'd have a really hard time doing this, we would have to disclose it to clients and some of them wouldn't take the news very well.
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Oct 6, 2014 22:16
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sanchez posted:Wouldn't you have to give them access to your clients networks (Eg domain admin etc) for this to work? I'd have a really hard time doing this, we would have to disclose it to clients and some of them wouldn't take the news very well. Isn't this kind of Continuums thing in general? They have help desk people and CJs to do basic stuff like restart a service without needing to bug you at 3am.
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Oct 6, 2014 22:28
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sanchez posted:Wouldn't you have to give them access to your clients networks (Eg domain admin etc) for this to work? I'd have a really hard time doing this, we would have to disclose it to clients and some of them wouldn't take the news very well. yeah you already pretty much do this to use Continuum effectively. their NOC is actually great, it's not the cheapest thing but it's worth it. if an exchange database store stops responding or something at 4am some guy from india will log on to your server and follow XYZ steps to restart the service/remount the store. they'll do lights off management even if you give them the credentials. I've never had a problem with anyone doing something they shouldn't, or making a situation worse - and there's an audit report so you can review when the NOC accessed both your passwords, and the machines themselves. Stugazi posted:Continuums tier 1 is based in Pittsburgh. It is geared towards US based Helpdesk and if you think about it they can likely handle the majority of incoming calls. Not every call requires a personal relationship or specialized knowledge to complete. no, I totally feel you. sorry, I think I came off as sort of insulting - but didn't mean to. I definitely understand the appeal of outsourcing that stuff, and if your clients are ok with it, go for it. I'd be really interested to hear how the service is.
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Oct 7, 2014 00:47
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Mindphlux, no worries. I was not offended or put off by any responses.
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Oct 7, 2014 12:21
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Joining in. I'm on the management/c suite side of a good sized services integrator/var that also runs an MSP division. I finally had to bite the bullet and split my teams between the project group and the MSP break fix side. We've been automating as much as possible and streamlining our process for on boarding and documentation standardizations. A lot of bumps along the way, but it seems to be a maturing product. My biggest challenge is getting my sales team to split their time between Big 'Ol White Whale deals and smaller, 'less appealing' MSP contracts (even though their commission incentive is loving awesome for MSP contracts right now). I've not seen a whole lot in the way of Level Platforms and AVG Cloud Care in this thread - curious as to why? So far, I've been pretty happy with it (with the exception of dialing down the unholy amount of MIB's/Windows notification. A lot of tuning on the back end). The support has been great, and once everything is going, it just works. Reporting is a powerful value add for the customers as well. We're debating a hardnose policy with our customers that if their OS or device is end of life, replace that poo poo or we pull it off contract. Anyone tried this? How effective was it for you?
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Oct 7, 2014 20:37
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We build minimum standards into all of our contracts. PC / Server hardware/software specs, no home-class network stuff, active support contracts on servers and software, etc. Works very well and I've never had anyone complain about it except for prospects who haven't spent a dime on IT in 5 years. Be very up front about it and set a timeline for upgrading/fixing when you sign them. Sounds like you want to retroactively apply this policy with existing customers though, that might be a bit more sensitive.
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Oct 7, 2014 21:14
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mindphlux posted:yeah you already pretty much do this to use Continuum effectively. their NOC is actually great, it's not the cheapest thing but it's worth it. if an exchange database store stops responding or something at 4am some guy from india will log on to your server and follow XYZ steps to restart the service/remount the store. they'll do lights off management even if you give them the credentials. I've never had a problem with anyone doing something they shouldn't, or making a situation worse - and there's an audit report so you can review when the NOC accessed both your passwords, and the machines themselves. We use Continuum, but strictly for monitoring/patching etc, the only thing the Indians get to do is call whoever is on call. The number of after hours tickets we get that require immediate action that aren't an ISP outage is very low though, so it's not a big deal. They were the best of a mediocre bunch of RMM products when we picked them, I've been pretty happy even though they're far from the cheapest. Do your clients know about them? We get asked to confirm everyone is a regular direct hire FTE (no subcontracting etc) sometimes by prospective clients.
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Oct 8, 2014 02:38
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sanchez posted:We use Continuum, but strictly for monitoring/patching etc, the only thing the Indians get to do is call whoever is on call. The number of after hours tickets we get that require immediate action that aren't an ISP outage is very low though, so it's not a big deal. They were the best of a mediocre bunch of RMM products when we picked them, I've been pretty happy even though they're far from the cheapest. Do your clients know about them? We get asked to confirm everyone is a regular direct hire FTE (no subcontracting etc) sometimes by prospective clients. they don't know about them per se, but my standard contract includes the following : quote:4. Sub‐contractors my part time tech is a 1099, so I pretty much have to include this for liability reasons - and I explain it this way if anyone ever asks. it conveniently covers Continuum as well though.
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Oct 8, 2014 04:15
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Back on the topic of remote assistance tools, does anyone have any experience with ScreenConnect? The website looks like poo poo, the product features are pretty extensive, and the pricing is incredibly keen. Is it cheap for a reason? I'm probably going to trial it but it would be good to know if I'm wasting my time before I get too far in.
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Oct 31, 2014 00:25
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Thanks Ants posted:Back on the topic of remote assistance tools, does anyone have any experience with ScreenConnect? The website looks like poo poo, the product features are pretty extensive, and the pricing is incredibly keen. We use it in our shop for clients that aren't on GFI. It works great and the only issues we run into are users with chrome who don't know how to launch a downloaded file.
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Oct 31, 2014 00:34
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Sounds good. Roughly how many concurrent sessions do you run on the server and what sort of load do you see as a result of that? I'm trying to work out if I could get away with hosting it on an Azure instance.
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Oct 31, 2014 01:00
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Thanks Ants posted:Back on the topic of remote assistance tools, does anyone have any experience with ScreenConnect? The website looks like poo poo, the product features are pretty extensive, and the pricing is incredibly keen. Just started a trial for this today. My techs seem pretty impressed with the toolset already.
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Oct 31, 2014 01:01
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Thanks Ants posted:
Concurrent connections vary on a daily basis with about 60 remote machines always connected,I don't manage the screenconnect server so I can't speak on server load. Never seen performance issues with with the site or accessing clients though. The "toolbox", built in file transfer and screen flipping are all great features as well. The only caveats if you will is again an issue with accessing clients under Chrome. The click-once extension has been pulled from the store a few times, and it at least used to use a depreciated command set to do it's thing. All is working fine for me now and Chrome is my primary browser. Just something to be aware of. the other issue we see most often is Mac's, and this is due to the primary connector being a .net program and the fallback being Java based and not all mac users have Java installed. Other than those two issues all the techs here love it, and those issues don't pop up to much anyway.
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Oct 31, 2014 16:32
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The new Kaseya remote control tool occasionally breaks the right shift key. Left shift works fine though 
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Nov 1, 2014 22:33
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Anyone rocking Quosal or ConnectWise ChatAssist? We just signed on for Quosal so we basically put a ring on ConnectWise. No going back now. ChatAssist features look great too. Would love to hear firsthand experience.
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Nov 2, 2014 05:11
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Stugazi posted:Anyone rocking Quosal or ConnectWise ChatAssist? We have Quosal. I've used both Quosal and Quotewerks now, and I can't say I really like either. Quosal is quirky, and god forbid you want to format text in the web interface (haven't tried in the fat client - it's slow). The web client is a bit quicker, but to put things in perspective they give you a little game to play while your quote is rendering to PDF - no joke. It also doesn't update pricing accurately. Quotewerks I last used 2.5 years ago, but I'm pretty sure it was written in VB6 and desperately needing an overhaul.
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Nov 3, 2014 22:50
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Three things we want out of Quosal. Better CRM. The built in CW stuff sucks. Hopping Quosal makes that livable. Process flows. The CW workflows we have paired for QuoteWerks suck. Proposals. It's in their name but seriously, we do a lot of proposals. Quosal needs to help us do this better. Are we completely hosed?
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Nov 4, 2014 03:35
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I honestly can't answer 1 and 2, as that's outside of my job function. It definitely does proposals, has Etilize lookups and all that, and can even decipher some Dell quotes. As I mentioned before, text formatting sucks, and I don't know of a way to pull in documents from outside sources. You're definitely going to me more hands-on with it than I am, so you might have a different experience.
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Nov 4, 2014 13:29
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Stugazi posted:Three things we want out of Quosal. how's quosal going for you? I've been thinking about getting a bidwriting program. Bidsketch is the only one that has stuck out to me, but I also don't use any PSA software, so I don't have to worry about integrations just yet...
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Nov 17, 2014 06:43
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