🔒 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.

515: Can You Make The Beeping Stop?

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Topics:

-Sam saw an unexpected message on his iPhone, instructing him to share his screen with AppleCare.

-A client reached out to Joe about their Synology beeping. The story went south quickly but hats off to RAID recovery from Synology.

-MSP customers don’t reach out even when network or ISP changes occur.

-As a customer deleted 365 users, it was learned that they were sharing data from OneDrive and this data was suddenly not accessible to users that did not know its origin.

-Some changes to Dropbox storage locations can cause unexpected issues, especially working with third party apps.

-BitDefender had issues with MDM profiles and having to re-approve extensions.

-Joe references some of our recent Patreon only content.

-We take a moment to pay our respects to Bill Keogh, owner of NovaWorks in New York. Bill was involved in the Apple community for years and many colleagues had the opportunity to meet him as they trained at his facility over the years. Bill was a kind soul and will be missed.

514: The Fix Is In

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Thank you to our VIP sponsors!

Topics:

-Archiving/Deleting in Apple Mail is inconsistent.

-Jerry has been seeing issues on multiple computers when upgrading from macOS Ventura 13.2.1 to 13.3.1. Reinstalling the OS still creates data issues.

-“That’s a lot of nanas to deal with”.

-Pro tip about using the Option key when clicking About This Mac to reveal System Information.

-Thanks to Guillaume Gete for 80 Shades of the Option key

-Joe talks about his use of Nudge as well as an AppleScript automation with the help of sudoade.

-We discuss end user perception as Sam talks about a story upgrading Wi-Fi for a new customer.

-Jerry mentions The Hawthorne Effect, which discusses how people increase efficiency when they feel like they are being watched.

-Joe had been recommending a mail server upgrade to a client until finally one day, their provider went down. They still did not learn their lesson.

-We get into how to quote email migration projects and the economy of scale.

513: Pricing Your Device Management Stack

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Topics:

-Jerry & Joe talk about their monthly MSP offerings and the services it includes.

-Jerry uses Square for automated credit card payments and invoices.

-Joe talks about competing on quality as opposed to pricing.

-Offering a lower starting point without important services can put both you and the customer in a bad position.

-How do you handle consultants in your area that offer extremely low rates?

-The hosts speak to the benefits of monthly fees.

-Priority scheduling and unattended remote support are big selling points for Joe’s plan.

-We spoke with Tim Pearson on Patreon Episode 471 to discuss some great tips on managed services pricing.

-One of Jerry’s clients uses a Remote Desktop tool called NuoRDS.

-Jerry was able to remotely assist a customer while in an Uber in Belgium.

-The tool that Jerry uses to manage scheduled restarts is called Power Manager. 

511: Interview With Jon Brown, VP Of Technology & Cybersecurity at Interlaced.io

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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

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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.