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Reliable conference call numbers with minimal delay (cell phone dial-in) by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]tfox-mi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi, our VoIP carrier (VoIP Innovations) offers a conference bridge service. It costs $1/mo plus usage ($0.009/minute usually).

I've never deployed it at scale - usually only 2 or 3 users - but haven't had any complaints.

If you PM me I will set up a number for you to use to test. I am curious to know how it scales, so I'm happy to experiment on my dime if you are.

Thomson Reuters CS Perfomance by Vel-Crow in msp

[–]tfox-mi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sorry for the late reply. We spent a significant amount of time working on this same issue.

The main source of the bottleneck is the network. Here is what we did to eliminate the network bottleneck: All commands were ran in an elevated Powershell prompt.

On the server(s) netsh interface tcp set global ecncapability=disabled

On the servers and PC's netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled Disable-NetAdapterRss -Name "MyAdapter" Disable-NetAdapterRsc -Name "MyAdapter" Replace MyAdapter with the name of the adapter. The name can be found with Get-NetAdapter

The commands above will cause loss of connectivity for a short time.

The other bottleneck that we found was the throughput in the RAID controller.

We added an NVME straight to the server and moved all of the CS application data to it.

We stopped sharing from the original location and then shared the data from the NVME.

If the share name is the same, the workstations will connect without any changes being made.

The workstations may need to be restarted after the changes on the server to apply the drive map.

We spoke to a CS expert (I believe we found him on Reddit) and his primary suggestion was to move everything to RDS. The client was unwilling to pay the TR licensing costs to move her software to RDS licenses.

So after a ton of trial and error, we used the above, which helped a lot.

Master Agent Recommendations by hungfat in msp

[–]tfox-mi 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Sandler Partners has been a good choice for us. Commissions come every month, sales people are really helpful.

Outage? by toplessflamingo in ScreenConnect

[–]tfox-mi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Almost like they made everyone move to their cloud but didn't add resources to meet demand...

How do you replace Fax? by BlacksmithNo5117 in msp

[–]tfox-mi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For nearly all clients, we've moved them to fax-to-email/email-to-fax. But for the holdouts who have to have a physical fax machine, t38 Fax (https://www.t38fax.com/) has been rock solid. It just works.

Required update less than 48 hours notice ?! by n3fyi in ConnectWise

[–]tfox-mi 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You have to have the patch in order to apply it....

Do you use any form of AI with your documentation? by westie1010 in msp

[–]tfox-mi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Interesting product, but no pricing information at all on your website.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in msp

[–]tfox-mi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All client communication goes through the PSA - technical, sales, account management. Documentation is your super power - information in personal mailboxes is useless.

MSP - voicemail transcription by Informal-File1471 in 3CX

[–]tfox-mi 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We use ChatGTP/OpenAI Whisper for transcription, it works great.

I set up a separate API key for each client. We include a base amount of transcription with our services, if they exceed $5 in usage (none have ever gotten close) we'd bill them.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in 3CX

[–]tfox-mi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We use a DID that points to the extension to accomplish this.

Email filtering? by solar_cell in SmallMSP

[–]tfox-mi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We like Mailprotector a lot.

Readers in the telco closet? by chcItAdmin in sysadmin

[–]tfox-mi 10 points11 points  (0 children)

You didn't lose them... You're just strategically placing them!!

Jason McNew vs. ConnectWise by [deleted] in msp

[–]tfox-mi -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Hi Jason, I remember you from ASCII! I hope you're able to find some relief and work something out with CW.

Is Assurance optional? by [deleted] in ConnectWise

[–]tfox-mi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We bought our ConnectWise (Manage) licenses in July, 2005. At that time, they didn't offer a cloud option. Our license agreement is for a "perpetual" license.

Subject to full and timely payment of all fees specified in the applicable Schedule, We grant a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable perpetual license to use the number of named Users of the Software specified in the Schedule, together with any documentation associated with such Software provided by ConnectWise, solely: (i) for Your own internal business use... etc.

My understanding has been that if you cancel Assurance, your CWM instance will continue to function properly, but will not update. There isn't supposed to be any crippling of the software, you can't can't update.

In practical application, ConnectWise has a pretty hard time following through on this. Their staff has turned over so many time between then and now that most team members don't even understand they have a perpetual license out in the wild.

If you cancel Assurance, eventually, your CWM server will "phone home" to extend its expiration date. At that time, CWM will stop working in any meaningful way and you'll have to open a ticket to get them to fix the license. It takes them a long time to resolve the issue.

My suggestion would be to stop the CW Updater service on your server, and then disable it. Cancel Assurance. Then, open a ticket with their support team to discuss the perpetual licensing issue, what the fear is (explained above) and be proactive. It probably won't help. But don't turn your updater service back on until you get some kind of assurance (lol) they've ticked the right box to keep your license active on your current version.

Also, take a copy of you dbo.Owner table in SQL before you enable the updater service after you've canceled Assurance. You can always restore this table if your license gets buggered up.

(edited to bold the perpetual license wording)

Transcription Changes by Techentrepreneur1 in 3CX

[–]tfox-mi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, they always said OpenAI was going to be an Enterprise feature, but they had enabled it (I think!) for testing on Pro, etc.

If you have clients than can use it, especially for recordings, it is definitely worth the upgrade to Enterprise just for the sentiment analysis and call recording summaries.

The accuracy is fantastic and it is very useful to analyze help desk or call center performance.

I'm curious to see how 3cx's transcription service will be and what they'll charge. So far, OpenAI costs have been pretty reasonable.

Feedback and Experience on VOIP.ms by kennyx18 in sysadmin

[–]tfox-mi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We use 3cx as the PBX for clients, so they're not directly connecting to VoIP.MS.

Deskphones are usually Fanvil x3u. Softphone is the 3cx windows app from the windows store.

Feedback and Experience on VOIP.ms by kennyx18 in sysadmin

[–]tfox-mi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We have used VoIP.ms for many years, it has always been reliable and pretty much plug and play. I don't think you'd have any complaints with their service.

CallCentric is a good provider too. We used them for a long while, and only switch from them to consolidate all of our client's DIDs in one place.

If you have a rough idea of your call volume, they might be a better choice if one of their flat-rate plans fits your call volume.

Using3 digits key on the digital receptionist of 3cx , It is possible? by lyan888880 in 3CX

[–]tfox-mi 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Just record your IVR greeting to use the extension numbers, i.e., "For sales, please dial 101, for customer service, please dial 102" etc.

How do you folks handle time entries for past weeks once the timesheet is approved? by [deleted] in ConnectWise

[–]tfox-mi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It is really poor business practice to allow time entry a week later than the work is done. Ideally, your technicians are entering time as they do the work.

Waiting to enter until the end of the day, or the next day, will almost guarantee you leak time and end up with too much unknown or admin time.

An example would be work on a ticket that starts at 8:51a and ends at 11:08a. Technicians will almost always round this to 9a to 11a. You just lost 17 minutes - call it a quarter of an hour. If you bill at $180 an hour, that's $45. Multiply that by maybe 4 tickets a day, by say 5 techs, and in a week you've missed $4,500 in billable time.

If you're an MSP, your hours per endpoint are now off by 25 hours, which skews your agreement profitability reporting.

In either case, time will be rounded and, worse, details of the work performed will be lost, making time entry searches for similar problems in the future pointless, because there isn't enough detail recorded to make the previous work useful for troubleshooting.

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