User of RMM here, some days I spent more time fighting with labtech then needed.
@scottalanmiller said in Tactical RMM:
Has anyone looked at the demo? Just fired it up, but so far, it seems quite impressive.
Definitely agree. Feels very responsive. Whilst many of the the other RMM haven't managed to move into the current century with their half baked baked web interface.
@scottalanmiller said in RingCentral and Vonage:
I bet we can find them there for way, way less.
I just had a look at Maxotel's price. We definitely get if for way less. My previous point Australian general have to pay much more due to location / size of market.
Price search engine I frequently use for Aus https://www.staticice.com.au/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=yealink+T46S
@taurex said in RingCentral and Vonage:
no one does it better here than Maxotel
This I agree. I spoke to them previously a while ago and they did impress me at the time. On another form I frequent they consistently get good feedback.
@scottalanmiller said in RingCentral and Vonage:
their handset prices are significantly higher than any market we've seen and we work all over the world.
Welcome to Australian pricing / tax.
@scottalanmiller said in RingCentral and Vonage:
Only people trying to sabotage their own businesses. I guarantee you can do it for a tiny fraction of that
I'm never paying Telstra price. It was just a reference for discussion. Most telco here will give you a all you can eat for much less. Their obvious selling point is 'we beat Telstra'. To most average SMB its a saving to them.
@JaredBusch said in RingCentral and Vonage:
In the 1000 user range I would expect RC to be $10/user or less.
We are not putting everything in initially. So would only be a small deployment. pricing seems ok-ish on the quote.
@scottalanmiller said in RingCentral and Vonage:
I wonder if that remains true in Australia where the underlying telephony costs are so much higher.
If you have a high enough volume than pricing is reasonable enough. Telstra here charges approx $35 - $40 a month for a 'landline / PSTN' so that's what everyone trying to price to.
@JaredBusch said in RingCentral and Vonage:
Ring central requires you to buy or lease the phones. They are not included in the advertised price. Since you have Yealinks, you should be fine.
Yes I know. I have put in my 2 cents about recommending we keep using Yealinks from a performance & price angle. We currently use the T46S as our standard.
@scottalanmiller said in RingCentral and Vonage:
How did we get ruled out, but not RingCentral?
I was asked to review the Ringcentral quote and give my opinion. It seems it has been very much decided to trial RingCentral before it got to me (without me realizing). I did suggest some providers to look at but it doesn't seem like those will be entertained so I gave my 2 cents and left it at that for now.
@scottalanmiller said in RingCentral and Vonage:
UC is a scam,...
Yeah I know. Higher up are drinking the cool aid with the whole 'presence' thing. Office365 integrated calling (via Telstra) were looked at and discarded due to cost and wasn't going to work for our use case.
Let not even go into the 'magic quadrant' crap! (hint it was brought up).
Feel free to continue the discussions. However my original purpose is concluded. Aka I wouldn't have bothered had I known what I know now of the 'requirements'. Dam its frustrating at times trying to do your best and get hampered by arbitrary things.
Thanks for all the replies.
The FreePBX instant are provided & "managed" by a telco we use and we are potentially moving away from them so that won't stay. We do not currently have access to End Point Manager due to its being a managed FreePBX platform.
Also looking at the next level that involve muti-country and all that "UC" stuff (to some degree, more like using a VOIP App).
I'm just arming myself with as much info as I can as I won't be the one making the call on this. Other non technical factors has also come into play so looks like we are going to trial RingCentral.
We are Australian based so Scott's company won't fit into the equation. I also now found out that another of our little subsidiary have been using RingCentral so that gave them some bonus points just because.
I'll report back here if we do go with RingCentral and how things goes.
BTW: It turns out that we don't actually need SSO for any technical reasons at present and it was just thrown in there just because we are on the train to auth everything with Azure AD.
Thanks for the reply Scott.
I know some of the things I listed are standard features. However just want to be complete just in case either don't have (not the 1st time I have seen such things happened!).
For context I currently manage a some what "managed cloud PBX" (aka FreePBX) for one of our sub business which is near ~1000 handsets. We are merging with our sister business which has different set of requirements and more fancy features.
I currently do most things day to day admin of the the FreePBX setup (minus keeping the serer running). This allows us to quickly respond to our "customers" needs (rapid extension changes, update routing etc at short notice).
I did not know and take RingCentral as being consumer/SMB target and level. Hence asking here.
@scottalanmiller said in RingCentral and Vonage:
being able to break down charges per department / site etc
Chances are, you'd do this in your own reports.
Currently doing this and its not fun or accurate.
@scottalanmiller said in RingCentral and Vonage:
24/7 support
Define support. Both have good support (in my experience), but limited. They don't support end to end so unless you need support only within what they handle, you might need a second support vendor to fill in the gaps.
As in if their system (or things under their control) shit themselves we can talk to someone on their end and not have to wait for days... to get things fixed up in a reasonable amount of time.
@scottalanmiller said in RingCentral and Vonage:
self management for basic things (add ext, change routing, IVR, queues, enable disable accounts etc)
Do you really want that? Or do you only want it because you assume that their support can't be good enough and you'll have to take it on to work around their problems? Not that anyone doesn't offer this, just in theory, why would you need to have it if you have a good vendor that handles it for you and you know knows what they are doing?
As I mentioned. Its more of we can handle things ourselves and in a timely manner without needing to lodge a ticket and wait each time. We have very rapid changes due to business requirement. Lodging a tick to quickly activate a call forward or change the routing is not going to work too well.
@scottalanmiller said in RingCentral and Vonage:
Having to learn how to manage the system themselves because RC doesn't manage it for you. For simple things, like a quick recording of a message, this can be trivial. But for reprogramming an IVR, it can get pretty complex. I've seen customers spend more money paying an MSP to handle the gaps in RC's support than it would have cost to completely replace RC entirely!
We have internal resources that are more than capable of doing these things ourselves and changes as business needed it.
Who else would you recommend we look into at our level?
I can't seem to find anything recent on both RingCentral and Vonage on here.
We are looking for something that meets the below requirements plus the usual. I've been given a quote from RingCentral (tens of pages of marketing crap with no tech details) and got asked to look at it. What do people on here have to say on either of the above or similar competitors.
For reference we have a few hundreds sites. Looking to go on something initially for a subset of them with a view to put it all there eventually.
Need:
Anything else we might want.
RingCentral:
Vonage
I know both are America based so wondering if their support level is acceptable for non American customers.
Thanks.
@JaredBusch said in Why Do Vendors Use MAP Pricing?:
@360col said in Why Do Vendors Use MAP Pricing?:
@JaredBusch said in Why Do Vendors Use MAP Pricing?:
@360col said in Why Do Vendors Use MAP Pricing?:
In Australia it called price fixing and comes with a huge fine from the ACCC. Even Apple didn't escape from it. As with anything there are ways around it..unless you get caught.
MAP is very specifically not price fixing. It is minimum advertised price.
That is still price fixing in my book. Suppliers cannot force a retailer to "advertise" a certain price.
First, a supplier is not a manufacturer. MAP are almost exclusively a manufacturer thing.
Second, a manufacturer can absolutely sell their product for any price they want. It is impossible for you to call this price fixing. They may choose a stupid high price that is morally wrong to you or others, but it is 100% their business decision.
Just because you don't know anything about business does not make something a fact.
The Australian ACCC want to have a word with you https://www.accc.gov.au/business/anti-competitive-behaviour/imposing-minimum-resale-prices
On the other hand, don’t be tempted to ask your supplier to use its price list to stop your competitors from discounting. You and the supplier who agrees with your suggestion would then be breaking the law - inducing resale price maintenance or a price fix.
...
Resale price maintenanceIt is illegal for suppliers to:
put pressure on businesses to charge their recommended retail price or any other set price, for example by threatening to stop supplying to the reseller
stop resellers from advertising, displaying or selling goods from the supplier below a specified price.It is also illegal for resellers to ask their suppliers to use recommended price lists to stop competitors from discounting. In most cases, a supplier may specify a maximum price for retail.
In this case the manufacturer is effectively forcing you from advertising a lower price to attract business.
Edit: Update the quoted bit from ACCC
@JaredBusch said in Why Do Vendors Use MAP Pricing?:
@360col said in Why Do Vendors Use MAP Pricing?:
In Australia it called price fixing and comes with a huge fine from the ACCC. Even Apple didn't escape from it. As with anything there are ways around it..unless you get caught.
MAP is very specifically not price fixing. It is minimum advertised price.
That is still price fixing in my book. Suppliers cannot force a retailer to "advertise" a certain price.
In Australia it called price fixing and comes with a huge fine from the ACCC. Even Apple didn't escape from it. As with anything there are ways around it..unless you get caught.
@notverypunny said in MSP Helpdesk Options:
https://www.jitbit.com/ is what we're rolling out for both our internal and external clients.... Haven't been too involved but it seems pretty flexible and IIRC you get access to the source with the on prem enterprise version.
That looks very nice. Looks like it has loads of integrations.
FreshDesk
Currently using FreshDesk for Internal support and hating it. The most basic things don't work. I spend more time fighting it than doing work. Its like they copied MS and sack their entire QA / usability team. Too many basic features not implemented and you pay through the nose for the higher packages that still sucks. FreshDesk project management component can die in a fire.
Too many things to list off the top of my head. Complete pain to correspond privately (not having the customer see the corespondent) with a third party troubleshooting an issue, forget it! You can do an initial forward but can't keep conversing on that thread with the 3rd party.
Want to link 10 tickets to a "Problem / Incident" . You would have though you can tick the list of tickets then assign them all to the "Problem". Congratulation you have to open each ticket individually and then link them from there.
The FreskDesk "Solutions" / KB article suck balls too. Formatting is so limited. My biggest issue is that you create a kb article and realise you got a typo in the title and fix typo or you decide to rework the title. Congratulation your URL to that solution is now broken! (it auto change the URL based on the title) No way to keep the old URL.
Zendesk, have used in the past. Wasn't too fond of it but didn't hate it.
HelpSpot: Not ITIL compliance but very easy to use. Designed by someone who had real help desk experience. Don't have some of the fancy features / integrations. However works very well for the feature it provides. I would use it again if I have any say in a helpdesk package. It has an API for you to integrate with other stuff. HelpSpot has Public Notes (aka customer corespondent), Private Notes (internal corespondent), External notes (corespondent with 3rd party). They have a policy of keeping it simple.
Managed Engine (I think it was): have used briefly in the past. ITIL compliance, UI was way too complicated and the 1990 wants it interface back!
BTW currently using Labtech but not even bother with its ticketing system.
my god openfiler is still around? I remember playing with it and wanting to use it but never ending up using in the end. One of the reason was it barely updated.
Well if the site is not complex then something like Grav these days is much better IMHO. It a flat file no DB involved. No need for any plugin although there are quite a few. I've been trying to convert a site I look after for charity over to it. If not for me sucking at graphics & color stuff.
Couldn't find a reasonable nice template for it. Which brings it back t everyone goes for WP because everyone 'design' for it and so many resources out there even through it is not that good / secure bit of software.
The endless plugin security updates is a headache. The less plugin the better!
@scottalanmiller said in Why Do Email Readers Always Default to Oldest Email First:
ability to search well in a large volume of emails
Thunderbird does this very well. Its whats I used for my private email accounts.
@DustinB3403 said in Free Server/Network Monitor?:
Multiple ping sessions could solve that...
Then use https://www.hammer-software.com/metaping/
My go to for such things.