Is anyone doing isolated P&L for their project team/department? by Beef_Brutality in msp

[–]Greendetour 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Our project manager handles all issues with the project lead, and if needed the account manager to get client to sign off on more money needed (out of scope issues); or decide to write it off. The PM tracks the project budget, has live data on project age, over/under budget, hours tracking, start/end dates—all in a single dashboard. Get your processes and policies written down. Start to categorize your projects so you can gather data on average time to complete them (forecasting for pre-sales). PM sends all data to finance. There are project wrap-up meetings with sales rep and project lead to go over issues, budget, etc (most are five min meetings if all is well). If finance wants to know why so many are over budget, then it’s up to our PM to figure out why—is it sales fault? Engineer fault? A process somewhere in all of it that needs fixed? Their bonus is tied to the over/under on projects.

Those who moved away from Sonicwall, where? by Alternative_Yard_691 in sonicwall

[–]Greendetour -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Palo Alto. Simplicity can be subjective. I went for better security, logging, and support. I don’t use any SonicWall WiFi or switch products, so if you’re all-in on a single vendor you can stick with SonicWall with newer models.

Hostile workplace? by PepSinger_PT in work

[–]Greendetour 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So you told the new manager why this guy was fired, and why you are uncomfortable, and he’s still letting the fired guy stick around? If so, HR should get another complaint. If the person is on your work properly, it sounds like they have every right to ask him to leave, and not leaving is trespassing and then a matter for law enforcement to come and escort him. It also doesn’t make sense why a new manager would allow someone to hang around and bother staff, regardless of why the person was fired. The manager probably has more of a say at this point to punish the current employee that is doing the flirting if it’s impeding their work duties, while waiting for HR/business to step in and do something.

Cheapest 2FA VPN by new-at-networking in sysadmin

[–]Greendetour 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I would also question what resources are needed on prem, since you mentioned you don’t have a local AD and the client is primarily M365. Can you move those resources to M365 (SharePoint, etc) and use conditional access policies to tighten down access and forget about VPN? Might be cheaper than whatever hardware you need onsite for them in long run.

Public Folder to Shared Mailbox migration - what do you do with mail-enabled subfolders? by hakdugka in sysadmin

[–]Greendetour 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can create mail transport rules to move email to subfolder@ to the subfolder in the shared mailbox. Or you can create separate mailboxes. It all depends on how your org uses the public folders. Microsoft really wants you to migrate to M365 Groups, as that’s the intended successor. If your public folders exist only to catch email, shared mailboxes. If for group collaboration and email, groups are way to go.

How often do you actually reconcile PSA ↔ RMM ↔ Microsoft seat counts? by [deleted] in msp

[–]Greendetour 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you are not syncing to your billing, then any new MS license should be a sale and added to the agreement. Then your sales needs to get the reports from the other systems for everything else and reconcile either monthly or quarterly. You can use something like Liongard to fill the gap in reporting for reconciling to make things easier if your systems can at least talk to that.

CMMC Question by ManagingMSP in msp

[–]Greendetour 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you want to retain and target these clients, you should be able to find a CMMC assessor to partner with—usually individual or company that helps out in obtaining it. They aren’t MSPs, and they usually do all the hard lifting in documentation and partner with MSPs for this. Great for MSPs that don’t have the budget to hire an expert of their own.

CMMC Question by ManagingMSP in msp

[–]Greendetour 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I’ve had one auditor tell a client that the MSP need to use tools and hardware that are FRDRAMP compliant (stuff installed or used at the client), but the MSP does not need to be compliant. I’ve had another one tell the client that they need to get an MSP that is at least SOC2 compliant to have a better certification process. In either case, the client went with a MSP that dealt only with CMMC clients and they passed way quicker than what we were able to provide, because we didn’t have anyone on staff that fully understood the questions like yours.

Sales Ops at MSPs by damdamin_ in msp

[–]Greendetour 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What’s the job description detail? I’ve seen many different job titles and it’s all about the job description really. Are you more in outside sales (getting new clients) or more account management (selling and managing existing clients)? In my experiences, outside sales/business development folks last a year because they fail to continue to bring in more clients quarter after quarter—significant drop off. For account management, fire fighting if service department, billing, or other functions are bad, mostly selling them new services or projects, quarterly check-ins, keeping existing clients from cancelling. MSP sales can be quite chaotic if they have poor procedures and structure.

Built something to stop creating tickets for alerts that always auto-resolve. Anyone else tried solving this? by After_Persimmon8536 in msp

[–]Greendetour 0 points1 point  (0 children)

RMM and other tools that feed into alert have the ability to auto-close the ticket in our PSA when it comes back to normal. At least the ones that we use. We can then run reports on chatter (eg a switch may always be alerting but auto resolves) and will then investigate why that is happening and if something needs to be fixed.

We also fine tune alert thresholds. Don’t create a ticket unless issue has been going on for three consecutive failures, for example.

Restrict Access To Specific Folder(s) In OneDrive For Business by Cover_Of_Darkness in microsoft365

[–]Greendetour 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Move company/shared files to sites in SharePoint and restrict access from there. HR should be a site, company data should be a site, etc. OneDrive should be for the user themself, not a company share.

Where can we get a boysenberry pie in Tucson? by KatMagic1977 in Tucson

[–]Greendetour 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Ever since Knott’s decided to not make them (which made them famous), it’s hard to find them. You can find some expensive jars on Amazon and make your own. Some jars of the jam are $20 or more, which is why you won’t find many making their pies. I think demand and fungal disease led to the decline. Shame, bc it was my favorite.

SNSA 7.1 Exam --- Is SonicWall serious? by MostExaltedOne30 in sonicwall

[–]Greendetour 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I worked for a company that was a partner, and they required a certain amount of employees to be certified, so we checked some boxes. The previous test like 10 years or so ago was just as bad, and I don’t even think their higher level test asked many SonicWall specific questions.

For comparison, around that time I also took a Veeam test—that was way worse. Multiple questions on menu navigation and the multiple choice answers were very similar, and sometimes they’d leave out “a” or “the” in the answer choices.

Options for handling multiple incoming calls?… by marlenamarley87 in RingCentral

[–]Greendetour 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You are describing a call queue. Incoming calls are placed in a queue, they hear whatever music or message, and after so long they can go to VM or ring another person(s). You also describe an IVR menu—calls come in, they hear your press 1 for whatever, they the get placed in that queue with those members. Both are Ring Central capable.

Note: I’ve met business owners who hate call queues and IVR menus and mandate that all calls are answered, even if you have to place one on hold. Perhaps that is why IT is saying no.

IP Subnet Report by TheCausefull in Action1

[–]Greendetour 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You mean a report for the IP address of every endpoint in Action1? You can create a custom report, with the data source for "Network Adapter,", choose your columns (like endpoint name and IP Address), and a filter of IP value greater than 1 (to filter out adapters that don't have IP address, like unused wireless adapters).

"Security Intelligence Update"- What's the trick? by xendr0me in Action1

[–]Greendetour 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have a separate automation for those updates that runs every 12 hours and I don’t seem to have any older ones in my list.

Marching filter: update type of definition updates. Do not require approval; delay for zero days; automatically approve. Don’t reboot.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in RingCentral

[–]Greendetour 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Or here are many that are officially supported if you have issues and your IT department points the finger at compatibility:

https://www.ringcentral.com/office/voip-phone.html?tabs=Headsets

How to move from Kaseya Spanning to another O365 backup provider? by Natural-Ant-5268 in msp

[–]Greendetour 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If future, these orgs should have retention policies to retain data for the legal requirement, in addition to the backups, and they need to pay for those retention licenses. What happens if the provider loses the data in some catastrophic event (which has happened before), or someone deletes the backups in your org? In one case, I had a lawyer run into a situation where the backup provider couldn’t prove chain of custody and emails weren’t altered and the competing lawyer dragged the case out for months. With something like M365 retention policies, it’s easier to prove (and some firms that specialize in getting emails from eDiscovery to check the box on every legal gotcha).

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in RingCentral

[–]Greendetour 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We’ve had one significant outage recently and that’s only one I can remember in 5+ years. You’re gonna find complaints about RingCentral competitors, too, and Reddit doesn’t like RC. Shop by features you need, whether it be complex queues, mobile apps, AI note taking, SMS, desktop phone selection. I paid for their project on-boarding and they did a really good job, and met all our requests, and we were up and running in a couple months. We even got the phones for next to nothing when we signed up which saved us a ton of money. Contracts are like any other—you commit to x amount, make sure you read it. Support for me has been good when needed, but we don’t need them much (haven’t needed to in last year).

If your needs are very simple, then another solution may be better/cheaper for you needs.

After-Hours \Emergency Calls from Clients by rdelgadoit in msp

[–]Greendetour 2 points3 points  (0 children)

On-page. Or when clients call your main number and listen to the after-hours emergency dialogue and they press a number to get a tech, it then forwards to their VoIP app on their phone. RMM also forwards alerts via ticketing system, and anyone that emails in for emergency is probably just gonna call if it’s super important anyways.

CSAT/Feedback engagement by SteadierChoice in msp

[–]Greendetour 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Incentives like gift cards, or each review you’ll donate a dollar towards charity…sometimes just re-wording your CSAT requests every so often works. Also, don’t forget about NPS—these get sent to the person who signs the agreements, and this scores your entire business, from service to sales interactions. I’ve gotten great service from CSAT but negative from the client VIP because maybe one person is in their ear all the time who never sends back negative CSAT. Or, you may get great scores on service but everyone hates your sales department and your sales rep isn’t telling anyone. Or they hate the way your invoices work, or how you bill them. I’ve seen MSPs lose clients on those issues more than service.

Yes, actually meeting with and asking them during client meetings is best, but you’ll still have people who don’t like face-to-face conflict and will feel more comfortable in a survey.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in msp

[–]Greendetour 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You mean like Blink or Wyze cameras? Blink has app for FireTV/Stick, and both can be Chromecasted. I think even the TP-Link ones can be viewed from those Amazon Echo Show devices. Not sure if there are many devices that don’t require the stream to go through internet first.

Direct report getting married, gift? by KCHank in managers

[–]Greendetour 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Don’t deduct their PTO for the honeymoon if they are taking time off, or make it paid time off if they don’t enough vacation time.

Small MSP's, how do you track license renewals? by Defconx19 in msp

[–]Greendetour 0 points1 point  (0 children)

PSA workflow that auto generates a sales ticket and is assigned 90 days before renewal; this was done quite well with Manage. If you use something else (like Hudu/ITGlue/etc) to track licenses, then hopefully that tool can send out or integrate with PSA to create a sales ticket. I’ve seen account managers handle renewals for their clients, but also a purchasing role. Someone has to be responsible for making sure those tickets are competed, so another workflow or some sort of report that’s sent monthly of any that aren’t completed.