This day in age where IT is critical, businesses are looking for the best MSP out there, and sometimes it can be stressful when the client chooses another MSP or needs to cancel services. Don’t worry, because today we’re going to review some steps to help make this process flow smoothly and leave a good impression with that client.
Uninstallation Methods
- Manual
- Offboarding Scripts
- Custom Automation
Let’s break these down in order of difficulty to accomplish:
Manual Uninstallation Methods
Starting with Manual uninstallation methods, you can download the uninstaller from ConnectWise’s repo here and run this against those machines. I would only recommend this method if the business has 5 or less machines and you can remote into these machines to accomplish this within 15-20 minutes. Otherwise, I would only use a manual uninstallation as a last resort and maybe in just an email to the client (see template below) and use offboarding scripts wherever possible.
Offboarding Scripts
Let’s review the default offboarding script and talk about how it works before we get into the pros and cons. The offboarding script by default resets the Windows update settings back to the defaults, uninstalls ConnectWise Control, queues the uninstall of the Automate Agent, and lastly moves that agent to the retired assets tab. There are a few caveats we need to address with this. No 3rd party software gets uninstalled or removed nor does the session in ConnectWise Control get deleted. Sometimes the retirement of that agent doesn’t happen because the script isn’t marked for ‘offline agent’ therefore can error out before retiring. You can certainly run this script manually to kick out those agents you no longer need and uninstall them in this method, just know that there are some other steps you may need to take to completely remove all of your MSP stack from that agent.
Figure 1 – Automate’s Default Offboarding Script
Custom Automation for Offboarding
Custom Automation comes into play here for anything you’ve done outside of the default offboarding script. A solid example is something ProVal has written to talk with ConnectWise Control and during the uninstall phase, not only uninstall ConnectWise Control from the endpoint, but end the session in ConnectWise Control to keep your environment clean. You can duplicate the default offboarding script and make your adjustments to the logic as needed, even to include uninstallation of your MSP stack. However, some AV’s and Anti-Malware software don’t easily have an uninstallation method outside of that provider’s toolset. When you’re customizing your offboarding script, I strongly recommend including fail-safes in your logic to make tickets or alert when things don’t work properly. If you expect the script to complete but it is failing on a line above the final uninstall, the agent will never be able to uninstall through this script until fixed.
Documenting Your Process
Not only should you invest your time into learning how the offboarding script(s) work, but you should have a plan and process on how to offboard a client. I would encourage a full checklist internally documented for each step that needs to be completed. To me, this would be something either inside of your PSA or through a Project Management SaaS solution to automate this template. That way when the time comes around that a client must make that decision, you can have a template to follow that auto-assigns the proper position/department to specific tasks and have a central person to oversee all the steps to ensure a clean offboarding.
How can ProVal help you?
ProVal’s engineers and consultants excel at helping you coordinate an offboarding in the most efficient manner. There are plenty of times that you have specific needs from clients where you need to apply some timeframes for certain things to happen, and we can automate these processes for you. I personally have set up lots of offboarding methods ranging anywhere from a group that has a scheduled script to a monitor that looks for specific criteria to automatically kick those machines out of your system.
Written by: Alex Ramsbey – Business Operations Consultant
