Original Post: MSP Blog

Working in IT, you have a love/hate relationship (I'll let you mentally fill in that ratio) with your end users. Curious about the most common grievances, we reached out to the online tech communities of Spiceworks, Mango Lassi and Reddit to ask members what irked them the most about the end users whose sites they support. It turns out you all have a lot to say on this matter because the responses flooded in! After three very entertaining and enlightening threads, we've narrowed it down to the biggest offenses in a list we're calling 10 Things I Hate about End Users.

If this name sounds familiar, a tip of my hat to you for recognizing it! With it being February, we're celebrating the season of love by putting a managed IT services spin on some of the greatest rom-coms. In this latest installment, we celebrate the film adaptation of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, 10 Things I Hate about You.

1. When they generalize every issue, saying there's a problem with the Internet or server

If you've ever faced a similar situation, this can definitely be frustrating. Just know, however, that your end users are rarely going to understand the technical aspects of their business. If you need them to provide you additional or more specific information in order to deliver stellar support, you have to ask the right questions and be able to translate the state of their environment in terms they'll understand so that they learn for next time.

2. When they don't bother to learn - they've been fated to never be "good at computers"

Man, this one's frustrating! It's as if they think computer skills are just something certain people are born with. Good thing it's in your genetic code, or you'd be out of a job.

3. When they think they can do your job better than you can

It can be tempting to lose your cool, but don't. Yell at them in your head.

4. When they think you can fix anything, and call upon you to fix EVERYTHING

This idea that techs are seen as the go-to people for everything also came up in our previous blog post, The Biggest IT Myths in Need of Busting: Can You Grant My Every Wish? One tech even admitted he was called upon to fix a stapler.

5. When they don't give you any head's up about change requests

As Regional Sales Manager at Continuum, Matt Hubbell warned against this very situation in How to Account for Client Change Requests & Prevent Scope Creep. If you have clients that experience frequent employee turnover, factor that in when drafting your MSP agreement.

6. When they don't understand when and when not to reboot...

...or think this counts

7. When they abuse their ticketing privileges because they need you NOW

Then, you have clients that take this to a whole other level...

Non-descriptive emails marked as urgent make it challenging for you to prioritize which tasks to complete first. Perhaps it's worth going over the differences in ticket seriousness. Create documentation around examples of mission critical issues so they know when situations actually require urgent attention. Perhaps you could even devise and encourage clients to embrace a system of tickets codified to reflect the level of support required. For instance, you could ask them to name email or ticket subjects "MISSION CRITICAL" for the bigger issues and "Attention Needed" for smaller fixes.

Just hope that they are truthful with you...

This may be something you'll want to address with these clients in your semi-annual or quarterly business reviews (QBRs). Your Service Level Agreement (SLA) shouldn't only cover what's expected of you. You need to make sure you regularly review client expectations, as well.

Keep reading!

Original Source: MSP BLOG

It can be difficult to manage technical support and front-line user supportinhouse, so many MSPs look to third-party options and offerings to help absorb some of these tasks. When doing so, it's important to know the difference between an outsourced Network Operations Center (NOC) and Help Desk in a fully-managed - meaning support is integrated with your IT management platform - business model. So what is the main difference? A fully-managed help desk is where all the end-client interaction takes place, whereas a fully-managed NOC provides back-end maintenance, problem resolution and support for the MSP.

Let’s examine both solutions more closely.

Understanding How a Fully-Managed Help Desk Works

A help desk solution isn't just another version of a NOC, and if you’re running an inhouse help desk operation because you think it is, you’re missing the opportunity to grow your margins. A third party help desk solution is designed to outsource those time-consuming tasks your technicians are stuck performing on a daily basis.

Any of these sound familiar?

Top 5 Problems That a Third Party Help Desk Can Take Off Your Hands:

Email recovery and reordering of folders
Printer installation
Account management of new users or leaving users
Permission requirement of accounts
Password issues - from forgetting to expiring
Think about each time one of your techs has had to drop what they were doing to perform one of these jobs. Have they had to recover a client’s email or do a password reset? What else could they have been doing with that time? With an outsourced help desk, when a client calls upon you for a low-level request, your techs don’t have to field those problems and questions. Instead, you can direct your clients to this third party call center, staffed with skilled technicians equipped to absorb these time-consuming tasks. What are the benefits of this?

Better for Business Growth
First, let’s consider your bottom line. As a growth-driven MSP, you want to increase profit margins. One of the advantages of an outsourced help desk is that you can redeploy your techs to focus on more strategic revenue-driving projects, such as deepening client relationships and helping to support the onboarding of new ones.

Reduce Tech Turnover
Techs are redeployed in a way that helps them develop their careers, grow their skillset, accomplish more meaningful work and increase job satisfaction overall. Your techs are able to get their life back when they don’t have to work absurd overnight or weekend hours. One thing to note is that fully-managed outsourced help desk solutions offer that round-the-clock client support you need.

Impress Clients with Proactive Service
Normally, techs are short-staffed and struggle to resolve the volume of tickets that come through, which leads to negative customer experiences – you don’t want clients having to wait for issues to be resolved. Tying back to what we said about higher margins, if all your techs are able to do is keep afloat with lower-level tickets, they’ll be unable to support new clients and you’ll struggle to grow your business.

Bringing It All Together
Fully-managed help desk solutions act as the single point of contact helping to connect end users with IT administrators. Furthermore, they help impress your clients with proactive service, as well as offer your existing team after-hours support. The repurposing of your techs will give them a better quality of life, while simultaneously exceeding client expectations.

So Then What Does a NOC Do...?

Integrated with your remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution, a fully-managed NOC is designed to provide back-end maintenance, problem resolution and support, so that the MSP can respond to issues as they arise and ensure client uptime. You can look at a NOC as a separate entity that works as an extension to your IT team, but works behind the scenes and is never in direct contact with your end users.

In a lot of ways, the advantages of a NOC mirror those of a help desk.

Provide After-Hours Support So Your Staff Doesn’t Have to
With 24x7x365 coverage, the RMM agents you’ve deployed to client sites are tracked by a fully-managed NOC. This team actively monitors the health of customer networks on your behalf, so clients don’t have to worry that their service will be down when they come back in on Monday.

Allow your Technicians to Focus on Revenue-Producing Projects
Again, coupled with the proactive monitoring of your RMM tool, your techs don’t have to rush to put out fires. The team of highly certified NOC technicians takes care of this on the back-end so your staff can think about long-term projects and growth.

Grow Your Accounts without Growing Your Payroll
A NOC mitigates the loss of employee churn. If you lose a tech, you neither have to scramble to cover their workload nor hire a new person to backfill that position. That also means you don’t have to invest company time and resources in training and onboarding that new hire, which can be a significant expense in both time and money.

So what’s different about a fully-managed NOC, other than the fact that there are more hands on deck?

Access High-Level Tech Support without Breaking Your Budget
A NOC lets you take on more projects because you’re not constrained to the skillset of your current IT staff – you don’t have to refuse a project because your tech doesn’t have a certain certification. At the same time, those techs now have more time to go receive more certifications!

Examples of more advanced project work you can offload to a NOC that's integrated with your RMM solution:

Remediating backup failures
Ensuring sufficient bandwidth for applications
Fixing disk safe problems on servers
Migrating Exchange servers to another platform

Keep reading

Original post at: MSP Blog

Welcome back to our MSP Sales Success blog series, a collection of posts that dive deep into the sales journey and answer what you've been asking for some time: "How do I sell managed services?"! When we last left you, you had just started to learn more about the managed IT services sales process and its individual stages. Next up, we review one of the steps you have to take when laying the groundwork for a successful sale. Do you know who you're up against? In the following post, we'll teach you how to understand the competitive landscape in your local area.

NOTE: This series is designed to walk you through the MSP sales journey, from start to finish. Before researching your competitors, however, make sure you understand your unique selling proposition (USP) - also commonly known as your value proposition. We've already written on this subject matter and so have excluded it from the series, but please check out our explanation of how to set unique selling propositions as an MSP when you get the chance.

Now, on to the task at hand...

Learning about your local competition is a never-ending process and as such, the competitive analysis section of your business plan must continually be revisited and updated. If you haven't refreshed your competitive documentation recently, here are some tips.

Who Are We Talking About?

The Competition
These are the other MSPs serving your same area. You likely know some of these names. Maybe you have dart boards with their logos attached. Whether you're familiar with the local competition or not, don't skip over this step when researching the landscape. New competitors can easily emerge, and you may find a few names slipped under your radar.

To cover your tracks, start by opening up Google and searching any of the following terms:

"managed services [INSERT CITY NAME]"
"IT service provider [INSERT CITY NAME]"
best IT services [INSERT CITY NAME]"
You can even get more targeted and narrow the radius further by specifying the name of a suburb or town within the larger city. For example, if I wanted to find an MSP within 10 miles of my office, I could search "IT services cranberry township" instead of "IT services pittsburgh."

Then, note the companies that show up in the top organic - meaning listings that aren't ads - search results, and copy these names into an Excel spreadsheet. You'll populate that sheet with the rest of your competitive findings.

[Want to increase your own website's visability in search rankings? Watch this introductory vilink urlonline)

**Their Company Size and Demographics cs

Now that you know who your competitors are, let's find out a little more about them. There are a myriad of sources to help you build comprehensive portfolios for each of these companies.

LinkedIn
I like to start with LinkedIn. For each of the competitor companies you've flagged above, search within this social networking tool. I've found that people on LinkedIn are often proud of their careers and associate themselves to the company they work for. How does this information help? Not only does it offer a window into the professional experiences and credentials of key players within that organization, it also helps reveal how big your competitors are.

Here are two takeaways you may be faced with in comparing the size of your own MSP business:

You're larger than a competitor:

Let's say you have 30 employees as opposed to one competitive company's two. In later communications with prospects who may mention this other company, you can make the argument that this competitor won't be viable enough to truly manage their IT infrastructure needs.

You're smaller than a competitor:

If you find yourself on the opposite end of the spectrum, however, you can argue that you'll be able to deliver more specialized service and support. Unlike your competitor, your prospect wouldn't just be one of many accounts. Instead, they'd be a key client for you. Remember, people like to feel special.

Manta
Once you pull your preliminary competitive research from LinkedIn, cross-check that data using Manta. Manta is like another version of Hoovers and Dun & Bradstreet. It’s a free tool, and while the information is not always 100% accurate, when combined with LinkedIn, it can help you understand the number of employees that a competitive organization may have. Additionally, Manta categorizes the business's service, indicates how long the company has been around and gives an estimate for the organization's annual revenue. This last figure especially can give you a rough idea of how healthy and how much of a threat your competitor is.

Keep reading!

@DustinB3403 No he did not. It was in the fridge.

Hello all,

Help settle and argument here:

If you have pizza delivered Thursday, and then eat a slice of that pizza on Friday, is it Thursday's pizza or Friday's pizza?

Original post at: MSP Blog

Tis the season for unprecedented snow fall! As children, we obsessively watched the weather forecast when there was the slightest mention of snow, hoping that 67% chance crystallized into a sure thing. Then the next morning, we'd get up earlier than our parents would normally have to drag us out of our beds to race to the window, hoping to see nothing but white.

As MSPs you don't often have snow days. The biggest snow storms actually wreak havoc for the IT environments you monitor and manage. Are you prepared when they do? In a recent Channele2e post about business continuity, Joe Panettieri recaps the results of Jonas - the blizzard that rocked the east coast this past weekend - and highlights specific MSPs who proactively updated their disaster recovery (DR) plan in preparation. They, like many other MSPs and IT solutions providers, recognized room for improvement and increased responsiveness in the event of an emergency. Have you revisited and revised your own business continuity processes? Is your backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution Jonas-tested and safe from any other disaster triggered by natural disaster, malicious attack or user error?

Let's see just how robust your disaster recovery plan really is...

1. Have you properly defined and documented what you consider a disaster scenario to be?

You can't know when and how to act when you don't know what to act upon. It may seem like common sense, but you can never be too thorough when recovery planning.

2. Have you identified all of the risks that necessitate an IT disaster recovery plan?

Thinking back to Jonas, we know that by the time Joe had written his article, almost 72,000 customers had already lost power. In this scenario, the risk is systems going offline as a result of the power outage. A snow storm is just one case that tests how strong your plan is. Don't forget about the other threats to your clients' network uptime, such as a phishing email that's clicked and installs ransomware or hardware failure.

3. Have you conducted a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)?

With each of these risks, you want to know how likely they are to occur and what the impact would be if they actually did. Just as different geographic locations may be subject to different weather calamities, different IT environments may have varying levels of susceptibility to outside threats. If your client doesn't have a BDR solution in place, for instance, the impact of an unexpected power outage is critical - if their server and local backup fails, their data can't be recovered. If they do have a BDR solution in place, while they'll experience downtime with workstations being offline, there's not as big a risk of data loss. Once you've conducted the BIA for each risk, you can prioritize which vulnerabilities to address first.

Keep reading!

If you're an MSP with clients on fixed-fee managed service agreements, you've likely been faced with the issue of "scope creep," or unexpected changes in a project's scope. You know the situation well. One of your clients loses an employee, you have to configure a new user account or you're called upon to install applications you hadn't previously discussed. The trouble is that you don't know how to charge for each move, add or change (MAC). You either aggravate clients by surprising them with an additional bill, or you take on the work without any additional compensation. In both cases, scope creep stalls business growth by damaging client relationships, disrupting workflow and reducing margins. How do you then avoid it? Fortunately, as a former MSP who worked for All Covered, I have some experience navigating this conversation with customers.

Step 1: Know Your Clients and Indicators of Change Requests
First and foremost, to avoid scope creep in managed IT services, you have to take the time to get to know each customer. You should be able to predict which clients will require more MACs based on the information you gather, such as:

the company's growth plans, both in hiring and acquiring new business
the health of the business overall - is it profitable?
whether the client is bound by compliance regulations
the state of employee turnover
Each of these situations can affect the level and amount of requests you receive. If, for instance, your client has a history of high employee churn, that should signal you to expect future MAC projects like changing user access and adding new users (if they plan on hiring) to accounts.

Pro tip:
One of our partners has created a custom ticket list view in his professional services automation (PSA) tool consisting of keywords associated with these one-off projects, like "setup," "upgrade," "terminate," "disable," and "replace." Creating a similar view will help you get a gauge for how many of these tasks you're typically asked to complete.

Step 2: DOCUMENT MACs in Your MSP Agreement
It's also worth knowing the majority of these requests surface with newly acquired clients. Many MSPs don't understand that it takes a good six or seven months to sustain profitability, enter cruise control and not have to juggle a million support tickets. Considering that scope creep is a threat from the moment you begin onboarding a new client, you'll want to get to them early enough to establish clear guidelines.

Scope creep usually occurs when expectations aren't solidified in writing. In other words, you have to document these additional spends in your contracts. Notice how getting to know your clients and their IT environments precedes this step. That's because you can't determine how much work a client will be without getting to know each on an individual basis. Only once you've done this should you move forward with drafting a contract. To refresh you on what should be included in your Master Client Services Agreement (MCSA), here's a list of policy items to cover:

Scope of Services
Payment
Authorized Contact Person
Access to Premises
Warranties; Limitations of Liability
Termination
Uptime; Reporting; Remedies
and more!

It is under Scope of Services - also known as Scope of Work (SOW) - that you should clearly articulate that you will support your clients' environments as they exist today at a fixed fee. The number you quote to one client may be different than what you bill another, depending on the volatility of their environment. Adjust your pricing to include the projects you foresee having to complete, and build this figure into the agreement, clearly stipulating how this will alter th cost if performed.

Once you've had meaningful conversations with clients and understand how much of your services they'll need, you can prevent unwanted surprises down the line by adding these additional projects to your MSP agreement. That way, customers can't complain that they didn't know they were going to get billed for that printer add request they submitted a month later, helping you maintain client satisfaction. At the same time, you'll be able to manage client demands and know how best to deploy your techs for each site. Win win.

But should ALL projects be added to the scope of the agreement?
I usually advise MSPs to draw the line for bigger projects like server refreshes or infrastructure upgrades - i.e. server migrations, network upgrades, new firewall installations, new office openings and replacing servers that unexpectedly crash. These are the kinds of change requests that happen every once or few years and so should be excluded from the scope of your agreement.

Pro Tip:
I recommend standardizing your documentation and sales conversations around the phrase, "separate billable projects" to classify these heavier lifts. Avoid using terms like "additional fee" or "added expense," which make your services seem like a hidden cost.

Keep reading!

@StrongBad Basically, where are you struggling? For example, if you're having trouble committing time or seeing results from your marketing efforts. Or if you can't seem to increase your client base. Areas that you just feel as though you can't gain any traction in.

Which areas of your business do you feel stuck in?

See the full post here: MSP Blog

The following are some responses that we got when we posed this question in Spiceworks. We would love for you to add your own as well!

That dreaded Reply All button. If only there were some kind of app or plug-in that made people have to answer a challenging calculus problem in order to enable it. OK, maybe instead they should have to answer a series of questions, like "Do you really intend to send this message to the entire company?" followed by "Are you contributing anything of value to the other recipients on this listserv?" Don't get me wrong, Reply All has its uses, but it can also be terribly abused. Just look at how it's plaguing the inboxes of thousands of Time Inc. employees! And if you think it's just a workplace annoyance with no real harm, then these stories will make you think twice before sending your next email. We reached out to IT professionals and MSPs on Spiceworks, asking them to share their funniest and worst Replyallpocalypse moments, and they did not disappoint. Keep reading for some of our favorites!

1. Warnings for Repeat Offenders

If you have members of your team that are Reply All happy, you may consider penalizing offenders like this IT department did:

2. Blame Orville Redenbacher

This next anecdote may have been prevented had the company used separate listservs for each of their locations. But hey, all of this could have been avoided had they had a popcorn machine in their kitchen like some offices do!

Too bad she didn't wait to send it on National Popcorn Day, a holiday I trust you all know was last week.

3. An Interoffice Romance

Isn't this how Jim and Pam got together too?

4. Are You There Chico? It's Me, Margaret

Read the final 3 blunders!

Original post at: MSP Blog

SplashData, a password-management application provider, has released the fifth edition of their annual “Worst Passwords List,” putting the spotlight on the poor password habits of Internet users. Unbelievably, the most terrible—and most common—passwords remain the same: “123456” and “password.”

Despite all of the warnings and notifications that have attempted to permeate the public consciousness, people are still using these risky and unsafe options, leading to the conclusion that they either don’t know or don’t care about the great risk such weak passwords pose to their data.

If you use any of the following passwords, please—PLEASE—go change them now. We’ll wait.

25. starwars (New)
26. passw0rd (New)
27. solo (New)
28. qwertyuiop (New)
29. princess (New)
30. login (New)
31. letmein (Down 6)
32. monkey (Down 6)
33. master (Up 2)
34. dragon (Down 7)
35. 1qaz2wsx (New)
36. 111111 (Up 1)
37. abc123 (Up 1)
38. 1234567890 (New)
39. welcome (New)
40. baseball (Down 2)
41. 1234567 (Up 2)
42. 1234 (Down 1)
43. football (Up 3)
44. 123456789 (Unchanged)
45. 12345 (Down 2) - remind any of you of this classic Spaceballs scene??
46. qwerty (Up 1)
47. 12345678 (Up 1)
48. password (Unchanged)
49. 123456 (Unchanged from 2014)

This list was compiled from over two million leaked passwords over the course of 2015, and some interesting trends have emerged.

Read the rest of the blog

Play the Video

A serious flaw in the Intel Driver Update Utility allows for man-in-the-middle attackers to install malware on user devices. Meanwhile, a Linux kernel vulnerability has been patched. To hear more, just play the video!

Transcription

Hey everyone welcome back for another edition of IT Rewind. Today is our 64th episode, the same number as former Green Bay Packer, Jerry Kramer. On today’s episode we take a look at an Intel flaw that allowed for possible man in the middle attacks. You’ll hear about this story and more right now on IT Rewind!

An Intel software utility called the “Intel Driver Update Utility” was found to contain a serious flaw that could allow for man in the middle attackers to install malicious malware on user devices. The vulnerability stems from a failure to encrypt HTTP connections that are used to check for driver updates. The tool was designed to provide an easy way to find the latest drivers for chipsets, graphics cards, wireless cards, desktop boards, NUC mini PC’s or the Intel Compute Stick. Since the discovery of the flaw in November, the issue has been fixed and a new version of the tool was released on Tuesday. Those who use the Intel Driver Update Utility are advised to download the latest version immediately.

Another serious vulnerability has been patched, this time involving Linux. The patch is for a critical Linux kernel flaw that affects versions 3.8 and higher and extends to two-thirds of Android devices. The vulnerability exists in the keyring facility, which encrypts and stores login info, encryption keys and certificates. The vulnerability was discovered by a startup called Perception Point. Yevgeny Pats, CEP of Perception Point said, quote – “It’s pretty bad because a user with legitimate or lower privileges can gain root access and compromise the whole machine. With no auto update for the kernel, these versions could be vulnerable for a long time. Every Linux server needs to be patched as soon as the patch is out.” End quote.

Before we go we’d like to give a shout out to Kaeli O’Connell who was featured in this week’s Employee Spotlight. Kaeli is an Interactive Web Marketing Associate here are Continuum and was nominated for her ability to rapidly grow within her team. Do you have a recommendation for next week’s Employee Spotlight? If you know of an employee that has been going above and beyond lately, leave a comment below, or tweet @FollowContinuum using the #EmployeeSpotlight.

That’s all the time that we have for this week’s episode of IT Rewind, As always, read the full stories that we covered today and other tech stories by clicking on the links below.

Of course, you can always find us on Twitter, Instagram and Vine at FollowContinuum. We’re also on Facebook, LinkedIn, Spiceworks, YouTube and Periscope.

Take it easy.

@Dashrender It's obviously going to depend on the content. If you're not seeing the content that a company that you follow is posting it's because they aren't posting enough and nobody is interacting with it. If you consistently post content that is relevant to the network that you have built, it will reach them.

@scottalanmiller I follow plenty of company pages on Facebook. The companies that my friends work for and contribute to. I see their content regularly. From time to time I will share that content and then all of my connections will see it.

The more you share, the more exposure you will get and the better the chance that others will see your content as well.

@scottalanmiller But if you are connected with that person on Facebook, you won't have to share it to their wall. You can simply share it on your company's Facebook page and it will show up in their feed. There for them to read if they would like when they may not have otherwise seen it.

@scottalanmiller If you share it with them directly, you are sharing it ONLY with them. By sharing it socially you are opening up the shared content to that person, PLUS all of your other connections. If you really feel like they will be offended by you sharing it that way, then just email it to them as well!

@scottalanmiller I think those are also potential benefits of using social media.

What if you were talking to one of your clients about a recent phishing attack while on a visit with them. Later on you see an article talking about ways to protect your business from phishing attacks. You could share the article with that person to provide some value and context to your earlier discussion while simultaneously making the content available to all of your other connections.

@scottalanmiller I don't think it should be THE place to build relationships, but it's another place to connect.

@scottalanmiller It depends on how you want to brand your accounts. Many of our MSP partners have expressed interest of simply fusing their business into their personal accounts to sort of create a blend of those two worlds. Yes, you can still interact on that personal level, but you can also share helpful, topic content that your clients might find useful.

If the accounts are broken apart (personal and business) you could always use the personal account to point to helpful content shared on the professional accounts.

@scottalanmiller Would you not interact with your friends on social media? I have all of my friends phone numbers and text them throughout the day. But if I see an interesting article on social media that they may be interested in, I'll tag them on it so that they can see it as well. Maybe we'll discuss it later when we're chatting. I don't think it has to be one or the other and I'm certainly not suggesting that MSPs rely only on social media to build relationships, but it can be an additional measure to doing so.