🔒 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.

473: Announcing the Mac Admins Foundation with Tom Bridge, Rich Trouton and Chris Dawe

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Congrats to the Mac Admins Foundation on their successful launch!

We were honored to be joined by several board members of the Mac Admins foundation including returning guests Tom Bridge and Rich Trouton, and new voice Chris Dawe.

The Mac Admins Slack workspace currently serves almost 50,000 members, with approximately 5,000 monthly active members. Beyond providing for the use of community tools like the Mac Admins Slack workspace, the mission of the Mac Admins Foundation is to foster connections, share and preserve knowledge, protect the the independence of the community, and maintain broad accessibility to all community resources.

Tom Bridge, Co-Chair

Tom Bridge is the Principal Product Manager for Apple Technologies at JumpCloud. He is also the producer of the Mac Admins Podcast. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife Tiffany, their son Charlie, and large cat, Macro. Prior to joining JumpCloud, he was a partner at Technolutionary LLC, where he managed IT operations for more than 60 Mac-focused businesses, including the 9:30 Club, Arcadia, Navanti Group, and more.

Rich Trouton, Treasurer

Rich Trouton has been doing Macintosh system and server administration for over twenty years and has supported Macs in a number of different environments, including university, government, medical research, advertising and enterprise software development. His current position is at SAP, where he works with the rest of the Apple@SAP team to support SAP's Apple community. Rich has also written for Peachpit, Apress and MacTech Magazine on various ways to manage Apple devices.

Chris Dawe, Secretary

Chris Dawe is a consultant specializing in Apple technologies and networking. A partner in Seattle-area consultancy Wheelwrights, Chris manages systems for a variety of businesses, speaks regularly on industry topics such as Wi-Fi and IT management, and helps lead the Shadowy Cabal running the regional meetup group Apple Admins of Seattle and the Great Northwest.

Support Cmd Ctrl Pwr

Command Control Power has reached our 9th anniversary! We have been recording new episodes every week since June of 2013. We are very appreciative of our Patrons and over the next month or so, we are going to do something a little different to show our appreciation.

We will be airing new shows every week on the private Patreon feed. On the public show we will re-air a classic episode from our catalog of almost 500 episodes, along with the occasional new show. Become a Patron today for access to the freshest content, get a peek behind the scenes, and more candid conversations about running our businesses, dealing with clients and fixing tough technical issues.

Best Of CCP - 009: Welcome new members - part 1 2013

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Thank you to our VIP sponsors!

An extended water cooler chat with Jerry, Sam, and Joe, discussing issues facing new ACN members, featuring tips from seasoned pros.

Followup:

- Gary Hustwit, director of the Helvetica and Objectified documentaries tweeted that the correct pronunciation of Helvetica Neue is "noya"

- Command-Control-power "Have you tried restarting?" first generation shirts funded!

Topics:

- hybrid Managed Services offerings; Joe's "Tech Checkup", Sam's "Wellness Visits"; Jerry's offering periodic monthly maintenance to check backups, check disks, run updates; discounted rate when paying for six or twelve months in advance

- the advantages of sporting an Apple logo onsite and in public; whether or not to advertise on your car; great sources for logo merchandise aside from the ACN-direct options: Zuse, Queensboro

- Apple Professional Services; operating as an arm of Apple; how to get involved with APS? face time with Apple, building a reputation over time

- Francois Daumard, formerly heading up Mobile Technology Competency at Apple in the Apple Consultants Network, left Apple a couple of weeks ago to join Fiberlink, sellers of MaaS360, a cloud-based Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution

- Apple Remote Desktop frustrations; Jerry coins a phrase for dealing with the black screen of doom: "cleaning the windshield"

Memorable lines:

"There's just these big black chunks of blocks and you have to open up a new Finder window and drag it around to have it clean the windshield." – Jerry

Mentions:

- Passenger





Best Of CCP - 008: Live from ACN Advanced Camp in Austin, TX -2013

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Thank you to our VIP sponsors!

Topics:

Featuring Sam Valencia of HCS Technology Group, reporting live from Apple's ACN Advanced Camp in Austin, TX. Sam is joined by Jerry Zigmont of MacWorks and Joe Saponare of PsiMac.

With ACN Advanced Camp well underway, Sam got up early to share his experiences before another 12+ hour day of intensive mobile solutions training.

TOPICS

  • increase business in 2013 by offering Mobile Solutions

  • training provides essential experience with third party MDM solutions in addition to Apple's Profile Manager

  • social aspect of training conferences

  • partnering with ACN colleagues for real world experience; the strength of the ACN community; cooperating with the competition

  • cloud hosted MDM solutions vs. self-hosted

  • value of the Consultants Locator and ticking the Mobility checkbox with MTC Plus

  • value of the Apple Developer membership; early access to new releases

  • "lightbulb" moments

  • importance of wireless infrastructure in mobile device management solutions

  • MTC training led to a 30% jump in business for some consultants

  • keeping in touch with vendors

  • being Client 0

  • Atlanta beer vs. Austin beer

  • special considerations for cloud-based solutions

  • vendor support for third party mobile devices

  • did Sam spill the beans about secret features of Mavericks Server?

Thanks to everyone who listened to our live broadcast. We're looking forward to doing more of these in the future.

MENTIONS

Mass360 (@maas360), AirWatch (@airwatch), Mobile Iron (@mobileiron), Aerohive (@aerohive), Meraki (@meraki), Aruba (@arubanetworks), Craig Cohen (@ccohen), Arek Dreyer (@arekdreyer), Ben Greisler (@magikben), Allen Hancock (@ahancock), and Kim Manitt (@macdivas).

470: Beans In The Buckets

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Topics:

-Sam finds some Monterey changes difficult on his quest to be more efficient.

-Jerry uses Daylite exclusively for Reminders.

-Joe likes the Things app

-Intermittently. Sam’s reminders would stop appearing on his Mac. A setting in Notifications & Focus

-Back in his teens, Sam recalls the time he started up his own “reminder service”.

-Joe was using Terminal tools like ioreg to detect things like if a Mac is in clamshell mode.

-Poor care for laptops leads to screen or hinge breaks.

-Troubleshooting Magic Keyboard issues led to a simple upgrade being required.

-Sam is learning a lot more about Google Workspace and its MDM restrictions.

-Jerry poses the question about what cloud services to recommend to small clients.

-During a 1Password migration for his family, Sam moved a little too fast and deleted his wife’s private vault.

-Safari is causing Sam some greif and Jerry has advice.

-Private Relay and Addigy Live Desktop don’t play nice together in Joe’s experiment.

-confusion ensues for how and where to disable these privacy features.

-One of Jerry’s clients compares him to their “technical guys” at work.

469: Past Performance Is No Guarantee Of Future Results

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Command Control Power has reached our 9th anniversary! We have been recording new episodes every week since June of 2013. We are very appreciative of our Patrons and over the next month or so, we are going to do something a little different to show our appreciation.

We will be airing new shows every week on the private Patreon feed.  On the public show we will re-air a classic episode from our catalog of almost 500 episodes, along with the occasional new show. Become a Patron today for access to the freshest content, get a peek behind the scenes, and more candid conversations about running our businesses, dealing with clients and fixing tough technical issues.

Topics:

-What is a Windows NUC?

-Jerry had to reconstruct a network and struggled with the guest network.

-Another Jerry networking story, he struggles with a network setup and Comcast/Xfinity cable modem.

-Billing for essentially observing a situation can be an uncomfortable to bill full rate for.

-Sam also had to deal with an ISP issue with an old client. Turned out to be a billing issue.

-Not to be left out, Joe has an ISP story of his own.

-During a recent fiber upgrade at Sam’s own house, he runs into a set of issues and runarounds from the ISP.

-Do you accept direct emails and texts from customers?

-Zendesk macros are handy. As well as smith.ai chat bot features.

-A client from a decade ago re-engaged with Sam. A lot had changed since then as he wasn’t even an MSP back then.

-Adobe’s Creative Cloud sharing functions are terrible yet they don’t support other cloud services or on-site servers.

-Sam ordered AirPods Pro on Amazon and thought he got “Jerry’d”.