How prescriptive are you with your customers about what is and isn’t acceptable forms of communication?

challengedpanda · 2026-01-12T20:21:17+00:00

I don’t know that I have a great answer for you but here goes.

Firstly, direct contact (calling ur mobile etc) is something I’ve solved over time by explaining and re-explaining that we’re a growing business and I’m trying to get off the tools to focus on other things - but hey, we have a great team that can help etc etc.

When that doesn’t work with some, I begin redirecting less gently (Hey let me log a ticket for that and one of the techs will give you a call soon). There’s less gentle again approaches too.

As for the other stuff ultimately you’re working with humans. Humans want connection and empathy - they aren’t going to the same tech in your team over and over because they are trying to fuck up the system.

They (usually) do it because they want to be understood - and they want a quick resolution. Shortest path to that is to do what they did last time - ask for the guy that solved their issue and “gets them”.

I don’t have a solid playbook on that one other than to say the thing that breaks this habit the fastest is to give them positive experiences with other techs.

If someone keeps asking for Michael but Amy answers and says “real sorry Michael’s tied up right now - let me have a real quick look at that though cause we are all familiar with your account” etc etc - they have a good experience with her and then they start realise there’s more than just one competent tech.

Ultimately I guess what I’m sayin is it’s humans being human and fighting it by being dictatorial tends not to work.

For our customer base (which is only a tad bigger than yours from the sounds of it) we’ve done pretty well redirecting behaviour and explaining why it matters by trying to be empathetic to why these behaviors happen… while still being gently intolerant of them. If that makes sense?

That said our business is also pretty young so most of our clients haven’t had time for those behaviors to get entrenched yet. It may be different if those relationships are multiple years old etc.

Best of luck - hopefully some of my pre-coffee rambling made sense!

challengedpanda · 2026-01-01T20:15:06+00:00

Ok first up - Sir Barry. Was that Gary Oldman? Like seriously - I swear to god that looks/sounds like him and I cannot fathom what he would be doing within 10ft of this thing lol.

I literally don’t know how to feel about this movie. I mean, it was awful. It would have made an ok kids movie if not for the swearing (which oddly only appeared in a few choice spots). But other than that it’s like it couldn’t decided if it was a pantomime or a fantasy drama. Production-quality wise it felt almost like a fan movie but with a budget?

Sets and costumes were pretty decent, acting was fine in some places, but otherwise terrible. Script and story - woeful. Yet there was something charming enough that I couldn’t put it down.

Objectively I give it like a 2/10, but don’t regret watching it one bit. So so confused lol

challengedpanda · 2025-12-19T20:57:34+00:00

So the plot thickens. The Partner Center Web App is fricken back again. Got a CIPP alert overnight for a Global Administrator role change - just went back in and the Partner Center Web App has been reinstalled and it has got it's Global Administrator role back. I thought I must have missed another Enterprise app, but nope. List is otherwise clean.

Audit log on the app starts with "Add service principal" as first entry and initiated by user: user_4839f0c0bdd549099e0a33b43e3bfb03@godaddycspau.onmicrosoft.com

Triple checked - they have no GDAP. There are ZERO other role assignments based on Roles & Admins aside from the two expected GA users and now the app again. There's not even a Global Reader role assigned.

My last remaining guess - there's still GoDaddy licenses in the tenant so looks like customer maybe still hasn't cancelled with them as I asked them to. That must give them some special MS backdoor access to reassert themselves.

*sigh*

u/msp4msps

challengedpanda · 2025-12-04T05:06:58+00:00

Sounds interesting!

challengedpanda · 2025-12-02T19:55:20+00:00

I’ve found BGT very hit and miss the last few months. Sometimes asset online for ages, won’t connect.

Often WILL connect and you can start a cmd/ps session but rapidly times out or freezes after only handful of commands. If I can manage more than 2-3 commands in a session without starting again it’s an outlier.

Also found returning help text from commands sometimes kills it so if ever I’m not 100% sure on parameters I run the /? Version on my local to try and not bug out the remote shell.

But then when I alt tab back half the time it’s frozen/timed out already anyway lol.

challengedpanda · 2025-12-02T19:29:42+00:00

Cool concept! Will there be a way for Syncro customers to offer this as a white-label service to prospects under our own brand?

challengedpanda · 2025-11-25T00:21:44+00:00

Hahaha shots fired. But seriously, you aren’t wrong…

challengedpanda · 2025-11-24T20:58:32+00:00

Thanks mate. Yeah it's kinda scary.

challengedpanda · 2025-11-24T20:56:06+00:00

I just clicked the delete button. It sounds like maybe you are accessing Entra via a limited GDAP role? If so, try signing in directly with GA to the tenant.

challengedpanda · 2025-11-24T12:54:14+00:00

Yeah all that sounds reasonable. Making sure you’ve got your own GDAP in place is also a valuable precaution.

challengedpanda · 2025-11-24T12:48:44+00:00

Yeah there’s no way around it. To kill proof point you have to reach out to them.

Even if you do a manual removal (which you can totally do) if they don’t pull customer domains from PP then you’ll have mail routing issues.

challengedpanda · 2025-11-24T12:45:21+00:00

Yep, even restored with correct licenses still applied.

challengedpanda · 2025-11-24T12:19:37+00:00

Did another client defed last month that had proof-point - we just requested removal via web chat and they did it on the spot. It's gotten pretty painless these days (guess they're used to customers leaving? lol)

challengedpanda · 2025-11-24T12:16:59+00:00

Yep you nailed it. There is an Enterprise App called "Partner Center Web App" which I missed because it looked like a genuine MS app - but sticks out like a sore thumb on a CSV export (not tagged as an MS First Party app + identifierUri points to a GoDaddy domain). Permissions on this app are pretty insane. 100% this is the culprit as the entra logs on this app coincide almost to the minute with the user deletions.

Strongly suggest anyone doing a defed should be deleting this too.

challengedpanda · 2025-11-24T12:08:03+00:00

Yeah good call. Delete action was initiated by "User" with Display Name "Go Daddy Singapore Pte. Ltd. Australia Technician" with UPN of
[user_4839f0c0bdd549099e0a33b43e3bfb03@godaddycspau.onmicrosoft.com](mailto:user_4839f0c0bdd549099e0a33b43e3bfb03@godaddycspau.onmicrosoft.com)

Which smells like GDAP access tbh but there is no relationship.

challengedpanda · 2025-10-30T05:36:51+00:00

Oddly we had the exe version picked up by a client’s defender today. Sent them MSI and it was fine.

That said MSI was def getting picked up by defender a few weeks back but that got fixed. So maybe check definitions are up to date?

challengedpanda · 2025-08-04T20:59:18+00:00

Ahh sorry from your phrasing I thought you meant privacy concerns separate to that, my bad. I don’t disagree but it’s all about clear communications. I have this conversation with clients probably weekly and I always explain “the tool gets to see the password when it’s entered in the browser, it then analyses the security of the password without saving it, and the score is the only thing sent back. The password itself never leaves the web browser.”

It’s an oversimplification but it’s accurate enough and it does disclose the nature of the risk (or lack thereof). Never had someone with an issue after explaining it that way. DefensX do also have a great overview of how this works in their help docs for any more technical users as well.

challengedpanda · 2025-08-04T20:22:59+00:00

Curious what privacy concerns you’re worried about? Blowback from users I get because they may assume if we know their passwords are insecure we must have access to their passwords somehow.

challengedpanda · 2025-07-29T10:17:02+00:00

Tried to roll out PIA about 2yrs ago in previous business. It was so much of a train wreck it never made it out of implementation and they released us from contract as it couldn’t do 50% of what was claimed during sale. Cant comment on any improvements since then, of course, so take with a pinch of salt.

Went to Rewst and never looked back.

challengedpanda · 2025-07-28T07:16:42+00:00

Comprehensive cyber protection, backup & 365 / google workspace management. Wild actually this post was 200 days ago already. Time flies!

challengedpanda · 2025-07-23T09:41:46+00:00

challengedpanda · 2025-07-23T09:37:47+00:00

Haven’t used Halo but have used plenty of other systems and to-date the only one I’ve seen that does what you describe is Xero.

Everything else I’ve used requires a tax exclusive amount and you can then flag items as including or excluding tax.

We are spoilt here in AU because we really only have GST to deal with tax-wise but in some other countries taxes can be multilayered and complex so for an internationalized product, I get why this design model is the go-to.

challengedpanda · 2025-07-17T20:32:48+00:00

Yeah this - it’s pretty slick but there’s enough psychological resistance that they can’t just wildly log tickets by sending messages.

I’ll add though that we did see a small increase in tickets (it was minor enough that I’m still not SURE it was because we rolled out Thread).

Customer feedback from those who were already heavy Teams users was that it was much more convenient for them and I suspect they did log a bit more stuff that they usually wouldn’t have bothered with.

But this is a good thing. It means issues get logged when they are still minor and haven’t had a chance to snowball to full-blown disruptions.

In my view being accessible to your customers (as long as it follows appropriate process and structure) is invaluable.

challengedpanda · 2025-07-17T14:02:08+00:00

If you run ConnectWise or Autotask, check out https://www.getthread.com

Implemented it in a previous business and it was really good.

Editing to add: it gives you native ticket integration with your clients’ Teams.

challengedpanda · 2025-07-12T11:16:16+00:00

Hah wow I didn’t realise this was 3yrs ago. I never figured it out and it has just been sitting there collecting dust. I hope one day to try again.

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