ProVal Tech attended this year’s IT Nation conference in Orlando, Florida. With every conference comes new and exciting news. We have summarized this year’s conference into four big takeaways.
ConnectWise Unite & partnership with Cisco
ConnectWise Unite takes the hassle out of managing and billing for your cloud services, putting everything in one place to save your time and your sanity. By managing your Cisco and Amazon Web Services cloud applications from one place, you can stop throwing people at the issues and start getting back on the track to an enhanced customer experience with better billing, maintenance, and monitoring.
Capabilities:
- Single-Invoice billing
- This will be fully automated, aggregated and will be able to provide a single invoice for clients.
- Increased Visibility
- Dashboards to help keep track of cloud computing with AWS and Cisco
- Monitoring
- Proactive monitoring to ensure resources are available and are as productive as possible.
- Customer Relations
- Built in CRM to help keep track of everything as well as basic ticketing
- Simple and smooth
- Take care of all cloud computing in one pane of glass – your CW unite system!
ConnectWise Automate Patch Manager Updates:
The patch manager has received two major updates in the last two patches that help adjust several issues.
- Superseded patches
- This has now been corrected.
- Compliance numbers
- Added in new feature to break down compliance numbers further at the machine level. Any machine that is 0/0 (zero installed, zero found patches) will now be marked at 0% instead of 100%. This will pull down numbers and make it more visible to see patching issues.
- This feature needs to be turned on in the Patch Manager.
- Patch information
- Patches will now better display who installed it. Including if it was installed on the local system by a user.
- Windows 10/Sever 16
- Aware of the difficulties surrounding this and CW is actively working on solutions to better manage these updates.
- In the PM they will be showing which version of windows 10 is being used so it will be easier to assess which machines are on a version of windows 10/16 that is too old to receive new patches
Patrick Lencioni Talk – Finding/Building the Right Time:
In this talk, Patrick helped discuss how to find the right people for the organization. Finding the ideal team player and the qualities behind Humble, Hungry and Smart.
- Patrick focused on finding employees that have all three of these qualities and how to avoid hiring employees that are completely deficient in these categories.
- Not about firing people, it’s about helping employees transition into new jobs where they will not be miserable!
- MSPs should not simply hire based on skill – finding the right team player is the most important. Skills can be taught more easily to the right person than adjusting the wrong person with the right skills.
- Link to the book that was discussed:
https://www.tablegroup.com/books/ideal-team-player
ConnectWise is Listening to its Customers:
New focus groups setup gave MSPs and users who work in their tools everyday a soapbox to stand on and voice their needs from the products. ConnectWise is aware that there are deficiencies with their products and getting things nailed down in one room will help shape the future of the product.
ConnectWise Manage Plugin (In Automate)
- In this focus group, users met with the team lead and the developer to go over items that users would like to see in the product as well as discuss any items that are upcoming.
- In this discussion, we were looking for better system linkage between the two systems. Keeping the same terminology between the systems and better alerting between the two systems.
- Example of this: In Manage you can deactivate a Company (client) because their bill is unpaid, but tickets and everything still come in. The goal is to be able to deactivate a company in Manage and that would also stop all ticketing from Automate automatically. There would also be a popup or a change in the computer management window indicating a stop on all work for that company/client.
Virtualization manager
- Make it work! There were a lot of request to increase stability before moving on with anything. The probe V2 will hopefully solve a lot of this but for now that was the biggest item. Included in that would be better alerting for issues that arise in the plugin. Not specifically around issues with the actual VM hosts but with alerting for issues inside of the plugin. Example: If monitors aren’t working, then create tickets to say that items may not be working.
- Adding in a button that will refresh all hosts.
- Better Identification of hosts to more easily make sure none are missing from the plugin.
- A dashboard that would more easily show issues inside of the plugin