🔒 Patreon Special
IT Pros: exclusive shows await you on Patreon, focusing on the more challenging aspects of running your practice and working with clients and employees.
511: Interview With Jon Brown, VP Of Technology & Cybersecurity at Interlaced.io
/Topics:
-This week we welcome back long time supporter of the show, Jon Brown.
-Jon is Vice President of Technology and Cybersecurity at Interlaced.io and owner of Grove Technologies.
-He recently completely a merger with Interlaced.
-Last time Jon was on the show, he was still evaluating options for his direction of growth.
-He discusses how difficult it was finding the right fit as some companies wanted to “acqui-hire” him.
-More emphasis was placed on his specific value rather than he company.
-As Tom Bridge told Jon, owner/operators tend to be bad employees.
-Jon is still running the day to day operations of Grove Technologies.
-Grove is acquisition #2 for Interlaced.
-Merging tools and systems is proving to be a challenge.
-Business models differ during acquistions as well, which can also complicate things.
-Jon speaks about the stages of a merger and compares his to varying stages of greif.
-Learning to work as a team means having to let go of some of you thoughts of how to get things done.
-As Jon joined Interlaced, he rediscovered his passion for the actual technology side of things. Some of that was lost in being an owner/operator of a business.
-Joe wants to know more about using Apple Business Chat.
-Grove uses a tool called Heymarket for business text messaging.
-Group SMS is a feature PsiMac is looking for as well.
-Sam has ongoing concerns about chat features creating more of an immediate response expectation.
-Jon talks about rules and auto responders to account for some of those concerns.
-Interlaced adds a 24/7 support team for after hours support of Grove customers.
-We debate the differences/similarities of Apple Business Messages and Slack.
510: Interview With Dav James of DIJ Consulting
/Thank you to our VIP sponsors!
Topics:
-This week we welcome Dav James of DIJ Consulting.
-Dav originally started at Apple in a variety of roles and moved to corporate IT support.
-DIJ Consulting is a Monday.com partner and works a lot on the automation side of things.
-We get into using integrations with Monday and services like Zendesk for automatic creation of tickets.
-Joe does some reporting in Numbers but it is more of a manual process so automation peaks his interest.
-The basics of Monday is that it is a task management software.
-Some of the frustrations Sam is feeling is the need of many different portals to manage things. Monday can integrate with a variety of those services and provide a centralized portal.
-Something as simple as centralized alerts was a big reason why Sam moved to Monday.
-Moving large amounts of data used to be a weak link that has now seen a major improvement.
-Affordability is a big draw of Monday.
-Connecting all the dots between the various services and Monday.com may be an initial challenge. Dav is working on how to make that easier for consultancies.
-You can find Dav on YouTube and in MacAdmins Slack.
-Taking action on a show request, Dav started the Monday channel in MacAdmins Slack as well.
506: Time Machine Blues
/Thank you to our VIP sponsors!
Topics:
-We would like to thank new Patreon member Rolf Woodward, and thank Bruce Corson for increasing his pledge.
-Time Machine is hopelessly broken in Jerry’s recent dealings.
-He has been recommending Carbon Copy Cloner.
-Joe had a specific issue where the Contacts app database was extremely large and causing an issue with backups.
-Sam is very keen on company policies where local file data is not company responsibility.
-Jerry talks about supporting a customer who had some major issues after a computer migration.
-BackBlaze has a great service to ship a drive with backup data.
-Joe talks about important directories to be aware of when troubleshooting macOS.
504: The Joe Penalty Box System
/Topics:
-Sam had a work themed nightmare where he accidentally deleted a client’s data.
-Jerry had a real life situation like this years ago.
-Sometimes it’s difficult to fall asleep when your brain is still thinking about work problems and solutions.
-Sam hit a hard limit of two step authentication with Apple IDs.
-He set up and eSIM for the first time to get a second phone number on his iPhone.
-Jerry updates us on his new managed services plan. He feels there is more money to be made with residential clients on this plan.
-After off boarding an employee, a company owned computer showed back up in Watchman after months of being dormant.
-Joe is surprised when a client immediately signs up for his monthly plan.
-Do you specify priority support in your marketing materials?
503: Interview With Ross Matsuda of Sudoade.com & Sys Admin at Ntiva
/Topics:
-On this episode, we welcome Ross Matsuda - Apple Systems Administrator from Ntiva.
-Ross is also the creator of sudoade
-Ross majored in theatrical direction with a minor in graphic design.
-He spent 7 years as an Apple Genius and also with Apple corporate.
-We discuss the necessity of support with Apple’s products.
-We get into GUI scripting with AppleScript on Ross’s site, sudoade. He developed a way to integrate automation with Addigy to only see the minor updates available.
-Initially using Nudge, he decided to develop a method that worked best for his users.
-Joe has seen a much higher level of software update compliance since using Nudge and Ross’s solution.
-PSA - get your Mac computers at least to 12.6.3 to avoid unexpected problems when performing updates.
-Joe & Ross talk about simpler ways of presenting information and designing for the user experience.