282: Interview With Allen Hancock of Watchman Monitoring - Zendesk Private Ticket Creation

Topics:

This show is brought to you commercial free, thanks to our Patreon sponsors.

On this episode we welcome long time supporter of the show and owner of Watchman Monitoring, Allen Hancock

-Some news for Allen and the team is that they have hired Ben Mason. You may know Ben from his excellent support at Gruntwork.

-Hiring new staff and remote vs local employees becomes an interesting topic of discussion

-Allen has a big announcement in that they are changing the way they handle Zendesk Tickets. Listen to find out more about Zendesk private ticket creation and how Watchman Monitoring takes full advantage of this.  

-Watchman Monitoring can also work with Zendesk’s Essential Plan

-Zendesk Private Ticket creation is the new feature that allowed this integration to happen

-Looking for help with these features?  Watch the Watchman Monitoring webinar 

-If you need quick assistance, visit http://watchmanmonitoring.com/schedule to set up a time for support.  Pro Services options are available as well.

-Allen will be in Los Angeles for MacTech Conference 2018
Visit http://conference.mactech.com/go/ccp to find out about special pricing for CCP listeners

-The Watchman Monitoring community forum has been recently revamped.  You will no longer receive emails from the forum unless you request to watch a topic or receive responses to your posts.  You can also vote on features.

Visit http://community.watchmanmonitoring.com to be a part of the Watchman Monitoring community. Get involved!

264: On The Road With Joe Saponare

Topics:

-Joe is reporting from the streets of Boulder Creek, CA #vanlife

-Joe talks about the unglamorous life of living in a camper (down by the river)

-He actually references Marco Arment discussing camper stories on Accidental Tech Podcast: http://atp.fm

-Cellular difficulties creep up as Joe discusses using his cellular modem

-As a board member of a non-profit, Joe discusses his ability to score an unlimited data plan with Sprint: mobilecitizen.org

-Joe's transition has been surprisingly smooth after going on the road, largely due to his staff at PsiMac

-The disasters of Kerio / GFI are brought up once again

-Both Joe and Jerry have hosted CrashPlan PROe for clients.  Joe is slowly migrating his users to BackBlaze.  Jerry has decommissioned his PROe server.

-Since the root level Library is excluded from BackBlaze by default, Jerry provides a solution to use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the data to the Documents folder, which would then be backed up.

-Joe's MacBook Pro had a bit of damage when purchased from a client.  Now it is reporting "service battery".  After deciding to send it to depot for repair, he shares his dealings with the process.

-As Jerry comments on Joe's name dropping in California, Joe recalls the SNL sketch called "The Californians" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jIBZjL8G5s

255: Live April Show - Deep Down In A Bunker In Switzerland

We welcome our new VIP Patreon sponsors:

Zvon Petric - At Your Server

Topics:

-Jerry has an amusing client story about a lost password and how he put Addigy to good use

-Speaking of passwords, Sam describes an uncanny story about how an Apple employee guessed a user's password out of thin air

-Sam describes a story of how a client was scammed via email for over $200,000.  It calls to mind that Ubiquiti was similarly the victim of an email scam to the tune of $47 million dollars!  
http://fortune.com/2015/08/10/ubiquiti-networks-email-scam-40-million/

-Two possible options for secure mail:
Proton Mail: proton.me, formerly protonmail.com
Mimecast: https://www.mimecast.com

-Joe encounters an interesting startup message in verbose mode: "Too many corpses being created"

-One of Jerry's clients has some issues with spam filtering with Only My Email and directing messages to Fast Mail

-Is long propagation time still a thing?

-GFI sucks! - According to Joe's experiences.  Media Temple isn't much better.
Go to status.gfi.com and view the history to have a laugh

-Jerry has an interesting experience with Sherweb where a certificate trust dialogue box appears for a client's email...

-Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer: https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com

-Sam runs across a situation where copying files using the Synology GUI was unbearably slow.  He ended up enabling SSH on the Synology and used a host Mac to initiate an SSH connection and utilitized the cp command:
cp -pr /source/directory/ /destination/directory/

-ACEs is just around the corner and the group shares some great quotes from previous attendees.  If you haven't already, sign up for ACEs today!

-Sam & Joe have a secret meeting at PsiMac World Headquarters

-Joe spins a yarn about calendar invites and an Apple ID, Google Calendar, and Microsoft Exchange, oh my!

253: Interview with Justin Maxwell of Smith.ai & Keypad

Justin Maxwell of Smith.ai and Keypad joins us for an incredibly informative and in depth interview.  Most recently the design lead for Google’s Android Auto, Justin has designed products and built teams for Google, Apple, Mint (Intuit), Sony, and plenty of startups along the way.  Here are two of Justin's offerings that we discuss on Command Control Power:

-Smith.ai is a superior call answering & intake service for small & solo businesses. Their live, U.S.-based virtual receptionists capture & qualify leads, book new clients, and build better relationships with your existing clients.

-Keypad is the most advanced & affordable cloud phone system for small businesses.  Keypad offers call routing, call analytics, and many customizations to help you track your performance, and convert more leads.

-Justin takes us through not only the story of how he brought these businesses to life but his life at Apple as an interaction designer for Apple.com

-As we talk Smith.ai, Justin describes the look and feel of the site and how it relates to their customers

-Smith.ai acts as your virtual receptionist, to provide a layer between customers and your business.  At the same time, they are able to weed out all of the spam or unnecessary calls.

-Justin was mint.com's first UX hire and gave him good perspective on small businesses and their needs

-Their team essentially followed around small businesses over the course of a Summer to figure out what their needs were and what they found was that phone calls were the biggest pain point

-Instead of being a brick & mortar company, they utilized VoIP technology and highly skilled employees working from their locations

-"It all starts with a phone call"

-Jerry can't imagine running his business without Smith.ai at this point.  Even just not having to answer calls at client sites to try and make a sale

-Smith.ai's system uses machine learning to help the receptionists make the right decisions over the course of a call and provide the correct answers, versus reading from a script

-Joe & Justin discuss their easy to understand pricing as opposed to minute based pricing

-Keypad is an excellent complement to the Smith.ai service.  Instead of using services like Ring Central, Google Voice or Grasshopper, which can add latency to a call, they developed Keypad.

-You can sign up for the beta of Keypad here

-Simplicity is a focus of Keypad because of feedback the team has received about similar service offerings

-Justin discusses analytics to understand when volume is high or knowing when you need additional support

-Jerry mentions a possible higher tier offering for VIP support and how to tie it in to our monthly services plans

-Joe signs up right here on the show!

-Look out for service offerings in the chat space from Justin's team

252: Migrate Is Becoming A Trigger Word For Me

Topics:

-Joe has some follow up for same from Episode 223 "It's not you, it's me" about Mail notifications

-Sam follows up on his experience at the ACN Road Show in Santa Monica, CA

-Sam shares a story from one of our listeners that recovered a stolen MacBook Pro with assistance from the police department

-In working with a client, Joe discovers that Find My iPhone was off.  He also discussed enabling show last location, which is a handy feature.

-Sam tries to inject a new segment in the show, "Sam's travel corner"

-Jerry reminds us about taking a few moments to ask clients for an online review

-Jerry talks about an experience with a client that had a failed High Sierra upgrade - "macOS could not be installed on this computer" and used terminal to correct it:
diskutil list
diskutil umount force /dev/disk1
(Take note of your disk id. disk1 in my case)
diskutil apfs convert /dev/disk1

-We reference Mike Bombich from Carbon Copy Cloner and an APFS issue that was found when dealing with sparse images:
https://bombich.com/blog/2018/02/15/macos-may-lose-data-on-apfs-formatted-disk-images

-Not to be outdone, Joe introduces yet another segment, "Joe's Kuriosity Korner"

-A client that politely declined Joe's monthly services plan ends up with an issue with data loss after a liquid spill and the Apple Store replaced hardware.  PsiMac to the rescue: had her order the hard drive from Backblaze. It contained a full copy of her home folder, which brought her data back.  Two fallout issues were Keychain related and the Photos library.  

-Sam has an issue with spotlight and Outlook 2016 and found a more recent support article to deal with the issue using the mdimport command.  This was a welcome new approach to removing and rebuilding the spotlight database:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2741535/outlook-for-mac-search-returns-no-results-and-task-items-are-not-displ

-A story you have to hear to believe - Joe's client has an issue with sending emails from Outlook and coming out as gibberish to receivers.  After upgrading from Outlook 2011 to 2016, the issue remained.  In the end, an errant carriage return in one of her contact names caused this formatting issue to occur.

"Just re-index it dude" 
-Apparently Sam

250: Interview - Justin Esgar of ACES Conference, Adam Engst Of Tidbits Contenet Network & Adam Rice of AdamRice.org .

Join us all at ACEs Conference on May 9th & 10th in Baltimore, MD! 
https://acesconf.com/ccp

ACEs Conference was created for one reason and one reason only:
To help IT consultants grow their companies.

With unique, premium content delivered by world-class speakers, ACEs Conference is the place for inspiration, ideas, business networking, and instantly-applicable knowledge. It’s no surprise that our attendees continue coming year after year—just one ACEs Conference and you’ll be sold.

Justin esgar

Adam engst

adam rice

Our Guests This Week:
Justin Esgar - Founder and creator of ACEs Conference
Adam Engst - TidBITS Content Network & speaker at ACEs - https://tcn.tidbits.com
Adam Rice - Fellow ACN and ACEs attendee extraordinaire - https://adamrice.org

Just some of the great features of ACEs Conference 2018:
-Sit Down with Charles Edge - Panel Discussion
-Adam Engst will be Moderating a marketing panel
-Mark Berman - Journey Mapping (to be revealed)

-A general discussion brews about how marketing works within the world of small business

-Find that one "golden nugget" that resonates the most with you and introduces new way to thinking about things

-Jerry brings up an excellent question that Justin answers about business owners that may think they know the lay of the land and what ACEs can do for them

-Adam Rice discusses his business location, clientele, and how his first ACEs opened his eyes

-Justin talks about the ACEs Mastermind Group, which continues the conversation after the conference: https://www.acesmastermind.com

-Addigy will be holding a welcome party overlooking Camden Yards on May 8th.  Join us there!

-Tickets are $529 but using the code CCP will give you a 10% discount.  Use your code before prices go up!

-Command Control Power will be doing a Live Show at ACEs Conference 2018 on day 1.  We hope to see you there.