Posts made by Mike Davis

Ah, maybe the best approach would be to have two SSIDs. One on a schedule and one on all the time. Then only allow devices you want to connect to the all on SSID.

Are they Windows clients and are you opposed to putting in a NPS server? If so you could add time of day as a factor for allowing the client to connect or not.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/networking/technologies/nps/nps-crp-crpolicies

If you have a bunch of questions about the MSP world I would suggest Managed Services in a Month by Karl Palachuk:

https://www.amazon.com/Managed-Services-Month-Successful-Consulting-ebook/dp/B078J7ZKV1/r

@eddiejennings yes. Of course there are different ways of doing this. There is even on hybrid of managed vs break fix that is the prepaid block of hours classification. The next up is the managed contract that has covered items and non covered items. Typically what you see here is remote is covered and on site is additional billable. The premier offering is the AYCE (All you can eat) plan.

Some companies break out their plans by a bronze, silver, and gold offering. They do things like patching is covered, but application support is not at the bronze level and at the gold plan even the office 365 licenses are covered.

The other thing I would add if you're trying to figure out how to create your agreements, is if you charge a 15 minute minimum for each task. Lets say you have a "needy" client. They email you every half hour with a quick question. How do you bill? Myself I convert those clients to managed clients.

I usually round to the nearest 15 minutes. If I let ConnectWise Manage keep track of the time (it has start stop timers) it tracks it by default to the 0.05 and I haven't changed it.

What @Dashrender is describing is per trip charges and minimum trip charges. These are usually spelled out in your agreement as well as if you charge drive time and if you charge that at a different rate.

@scottalanmiller said in How MSPs provide their services:

That's a lot of investment for a system like that. If you have hundreds of customers, it can make sense. But it takes a lot of customers to recoup the lost time into that system. It can work out well for a traditional MSP, but depends on large scale standardization to justify the investment.

I don't know about hundreds of customers. The number of end points might be more relevant. For me at about 10 MSP customers I can justify the investment. When you look at the time it takes to set up something like a zabbix server and maintaining a WSUS server vs not having to that helps make it worth it. Missed revenue because you didn't have a system in place to capture every minute hurts.

@tech1 Sometimes it helps to take a step back and evaluate what you're really trying to do instead of look for a product for what is already in place. Liquid mail claims to filter, but clearly it's not working. o365 and gmail do a great job, so why not consider them? It would probably be better to filter it before it hits the client.

$5 a month for a commercial email system (o365 / google apps for business) that has great spam filtering. Is there a reason you're on Liquid Web?

@minion-queen said in How MSPs provide their services:

To be fair the MSP we were pitching in with might not have done a good job setting anything up so it could be because they didn't know what they were doing with it.

Their is a fair amount of set up and tweaking to be done to make it work like you want it to. It took me a month of learning what it could do and the advantages of doing it one way or another to make all the decisions and set mine up.

Today I finished building my first project proposal out of it. The client accepted, so now all the steps in the project turn in to tickets that I can take notes on and track time on. It's really cool.

@scottalanmiller said in How MSPs provide their services:

Having just been forced to use ConnectWise, we found it to be horrible. The tech works, but the overall integration and system was so bad that there is no way we could work if we had to use that all of the time. The theory is great, but the execution failed.

Which piece of ConnectWise? ConnectWise has a bunch of "formerly known as" products under their umbrella. LabTech, ScreenConnect, and Manage to name a few.

@jaredbusch said in ERP for small manufacturer w/web integration:

@mike-davis said in ERP for small manufacturer w/web integration:

@jaredbusch So roll this thing as a SAS and the cash flow is improved from they way software was sold and released the way it was 15 years ago.

Except development is expensive. Probably a year, at least, for 2 devs.

So, 6 months for one dev?

@jaredbusch So roll this thing as a SAS and the cash flow is improved from they way software was sold and released the way it was 15 years ago.

@jaredbusch said in ERP for small manufacturer w/web integration:

Also, some tiny company using QuickBooks is unlikey to pay for quality software.

I started to think that as well, but on the other hand, I started to think, there are so many small businesses out there, they have to be using something. Where there is a demand, there is usually a market.

@JaredBusch or basically everything in the picture you posted while I was typing that.

@jaredbusch They are actually using another add on for inventory trying to make it like an ERP, but as you said, they are making an accounting package do way more than it was designed to do.

What they need is a system that tracks orders, inventory, supply orders, sales, shipping, accounting, etc.

I have a client that is a small manufacturer. They sell wholesale and retail. They are on QuickBooks and some even more unreliable plugins to do their web orders. Can anyone recommend an ERP system? They only have 5 employees, so small shop, but we all know how back QuickBooks sucks at any size.

@momurda said in Copying Content from other sources:

I agree 100% with this.
The I Cant Even thread has been dumb since day 1. Fairly certain i have 0 posts in that one. If you want to say how wrong someone is go post in the thread they made(you all have user id there) and 'say it to their faces', not on some other site where they have no user id and no way to defend themselves.

I have posted original content to that thread of things I found on site as a consultant. Sometimes we find stuff so bad we need to share. It serves as a reference to anyone new to IT that a garden hose should not be considered conduit.

In your hypothetical example, my tools allow me to install patches on the hyper v server on Saturday night, and patch and reboot the VMs Monday night. I can also create different groups for the workstations and patch them different nights instead of the way WSUS and group policies handle it.

When I started as a MSP I used some of the free tools for some tasks and paid for ScreenConnect and a few other things. Then I kind of hit a wall where the free tools wouldn't let me do things that I needed for some of my more demanding clients. I decided to go all in on the MSP side and start moving away from break fix, so I needed more automation to be more efficient. So far, I'm glad I did.

To answer your question about tools, for a new client, I spent 15 minutes putting an agent on his network. Then later that day I emailed him a report that showed all the machines that were missing patches, running AV or not, running questionable software, etc. Graphs, colorful pictures, etc right out of the box. 20 minutes of my time. Have you ever tried running a report out of Spiceworks?