I’m getting a least a couple of emails every month asking about building custom Kaseya reports.

Kaseya reporting out of the box can be nasty and in my opinion K2 took a backward step on a handful of reporting features (a step forward in a lot of ways too!)

I’ve seen a bunch of different SQL Reporting Services custom jobs around Kaseya reports which can work well if you’ve got inhouse SQL Reporting skills.

If you don’t have the time or patience and want to invest your resources into something that actually makes money, checkout Brightgauge.com

www.brightguage.com or hit them up on twitter @brightgauage – twitter.com/brightgauge

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For those that haven’t heard of Ninite before, its a tool that enables you to prepackage autoinstallers for common apps, quickly, easily and without digging around for a bunch of command line switches – well worth checking out at Ninite.com

Auto-update common apps

The guys at Ninite have released a new feature whereby Ninite can auto-update third party apps if they’re already installed. There’s also the ability to do some reporting on installed apps and whether or not they can be updated automatically.

Haven’t had a chance to play with the new feature as yet but more info on the update is available on their blog, go check it out! – blog.ninite.com

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There’s two resources I’m continually recommending to people I know and business owners I work with, that everyone seems to get enormous value from. I reread these two at least once a year and find they help me break out of bad habits I’ve inadvertently slipped into and retrain my focus.

I’d confidently say almost all MSPs are in the game because they want to make more money, do less work and have happier clients – building a business on a dollars per hour basis is a one way street to long hours, diminishing returns and no life. Most employees want to get more done, look good to their boss, work less stop working overtime and deal with less client emergencies.

These two are dirt cheap and well worth the small investment of time & money, regardless of whether you’re an employee or are running an Managed Services Provider business.

1. The Four Hour Work Week

Now don’t be put off by the title or what you may or may not have heard about this book, the title is mostly to attract attention. The Four Hour Work Week is less about working four hours a week and more about getting more done with less time.

Some of the key things you’ll learn from the book are:

• How to write better and more effective emails that save you massive amounts of time & dramatically reduce inbox clutter
  Most people write crappy emails which then require more clarification and a whole bunch of back and forth before the intended result is achieved. Ultimately, this means more inbox clutter and time wasting. The techniques is this book around writing more effective emails has saved me hours each week and made the 20 bucks I spent on the book worthwhile by itself alone.
• How to identify time wasting & non-productive activities, minimize or eliminate them ultimately spending less time at the office
  Again, I used to find myself burning hours every day screwing around doing unimportant tasks. I’ve a huge tendency to get distracted when I have a heavy workload day and am sitting in front of the PC for 10+ hours. Some of the strategies Ferriss suggests really do help realign your focus and eliminate a lot of time wasting which helps me cut my screen time down by hours every week.
• How to identify time consuming clients, non-ideal customers and non-profitable accounts along with some strategies to minimize their negative impact
  The change in perspective I got from this part of the was was huge for me. As a business owner quite often you end up taking a client because of the additional revenue they’ll bring in and then they turn out to be a nightmare client. Particularly for MSPs, who are often working on a fixed-fee basis, a time consuming client can quickly become unprofitable. The concept of the “ideal customer” is not new but Ferriss has a different approach I haven’t seen before.

The book is on sale at Amazon at the moment for less than $12 – definitely worth the 12 bucks so go and grab a copy. There’s also an audiobook available if you don’t have the time to consume a whole book.

There’s also a whole bunch of good productivity stuff at the blog for the book, particularly a lot of the older posts which are worth a look.

I’ve you’ve read the book, I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments section.

Link: The Four Hour Work Week on Amazon.com

2. Sourcecontrol by David Walsh

You’ve probably noticed the links in the sidebar to this one and I’ve written about this one before. This is an E-book – don’t be put off by this. The book is positioned as a guide to successful outsourcing and was inspired by The Four Hour Workweek. Although the book is focussed on successful outsourcing I found that its actually a great guide to using your own staff more effectively and working better with remote staff & remote teams.

A lot of MSPs & managers I’ve worked with are terrible at delegating tasks and building and working with process. They’re particularly rubbish at this when working remotely. This book provides a great framework for more effective delegation & management of staff, particularly staff who are working remotely or who you don’t see in person often – perfect for MSPs who may have staff located remotely, working from client sites or working from home.

I’ve done quite a bit of work with Kaseya’s NOC and Zenith’s NOC over the past 12-18 months and some of the things I’ve learnt from this book have saved me a lot of time and headaches.

The book is about 160 pages long all up with a bunch of additional guides & templates, you can grab the first 30 pages free and read more about it at getsourcecontrol.com

Link: Source Control by David Walsh

More Resources & Juicy Stuff

This blog didn’t get much attention in the last 12 months and I haven’t written much about Kaseya lately. I’m planning on mixing things up a bit in 2011 and sharing a lot of tools & resources I’ve been sitting on so watch out for that. I’ll also be adding a Resources page which I’ll be using as the index for all the stuff I share along with an Archives page so you can dig through some of the old stuff on the site so watch out for that.

Any juicy resources you’ve found? Feel free to share in the comments!

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If you’ve read my “About” page on the site you’ll know in a former life I ran an online retail store. That business grew extremely rapidly through leveraging online marketing techniques, primarily SEO & old school social media. I now do ongoing consulting for a handful of online retail stores helping them with building their businesses online.

How-to Marketing stuff for MSPs

After reading Mike Cooch’s latest blog post he does paint a pretty clear picture of how badly MSPs market and sell themselves. While there’s plenty of technology to help MSPs do business better there’s only a handful of people that MSPs can turn to for marketing and sales advice. If you don’t know the big ones, I’ve listed them below (please add any I’ve missed to the comments and I’ll update this post):

Gary Pica

Robin Robins

Kutenda

Stuart Selbst

I figure that I might as well pitch in and share the love so over the next few months I’m going to rollout some posts around online marketing and see how they’re received – I think the guys above have the strategy stuff pretty well covered so I’m going to share some tactics, more “What To Do” and “How To Do it” around online marketing. Some of it is common-sense mainstream online marketing stuff, some of it you’ll only know about if you’re heavily in the online marketing space, either way, looking at some of the MSP websites in the MSPMentor top 100 list, most MSPs have implemented neither.

Brightgauge.com – an up & coming tool to keep an eye on

I tweeted this out the other day, if you missed it then this is one to keep an eye on, particularly for newer MSPs who are still feeling their way around Kaseya’s reporting engine.

Check out www.brightgauge.com which is scheduled to launch in Jan 2011

Basically, its a dashboard and reporting tool that sits over the top of Kaseya & Connectwise…like they say in their website copy, this could be an invaluable sales tool!

Kaseya2 upgrade – time to upgrade now

I’ve had a lot of emails come through this month about Kaseya 2, is it any good? should I upgrade? what should I watch out for? – I figure that everyone has been working through their todo lists in the leadup to Thanksgiving and looking to get some of the bigger action items ticked off the list.

The quick answer is upgrade now!

My experience now is that K2 is as stable as its ever going to be and the scheduling engine and some of the improvements now make this a really worthwhile upgrade. Kaseya has done a good job ironing out the bugs and apart from general support stuff, I haven’t really seen any major issues for a few months now.

The new 6.1 version of the VSA is also due out soon and the improvements scheduled for the new .1 upgrade will leave MSPs who’ve haven’t upgraded at a disadvantage. I’m sure 6.1 is going to have some bugs so if you haven’t bitten the bullet and moved to K2 I say do it now, iron out the bugs over the holiday period when things should be fairly quiet and then look at the 6.1 upgrade towards end of Q1 next year.

If you have an K2 upgrade feedback, please share in the comments!

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Subscribe by emailing KaseyaScripts-subscribe AT yahoogroups.com

Here’s a great app/tool Yan from Jointtech posted about this week: Ninite.com for creating scripted autoinstallers….timely post for me as I need to create some Irfanview deployment scripts today.

Also loved this comment re the Video chat in K2: “P.S. I find my guys use video chat way more often with the younger hotter employees of my customers. Can’t really blame them either. Some of them are gorgeous. ”

Know any other tools the community could benefit from? Post a link in the comments

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I’ve been on the road for a bit involved with various projects over the last couple of months and have been insanely busy so very few updates from me.

Thought I’d post a quick one anyway particularly for those who aren’t subscribed to the Yahoo user groups for Kaseya.

Couple of quick links to:

Kaseya 2008 Script pack for Kaseya 5 – several hundred scripts to do various things in Kaseya

K2 Script pack – handful of new scripts for K2

Enjoy!

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If you’re running an MSP business or in any way involved with selling MSP services you should check the site out.
Some really good stuff there on the less technical facets of the MSP business model

Mike’s the CEO of both Everonit.com and Kutenda.com

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It annoys me that AVG Corporate has such a bad name/reputation in the wild because of its association with AVG Free. As such, several MSPs I work with want to keep the AVG name away from users as much as possible. One of the options when rolling out KES is to setup a Windows Explorer shell extension – you know where you right click and choose “Scan with AVG”

There’s no way to undone this from the KES Management console once you roll out machines with it. So here’s the Kaseya script (v5.1) that does it – pretty simple, just delete the regkey and it disappears immediately. You should be able to straight copy and paste this into the script import window:

Script Name: AVG/KES/Managed AV - Disable Shell Context Menu
Script Description: This script disables the shell context menu that shows the "Scan with AVG" menu item when right clicking in Windows Explorer.
Script by Tullibo.com

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To me, you could easily double the value you get out of Kaseya by switching all your clients to KES. Its not really about the dollars you bring in the door (although I did write another post about making 400%+ margin selling KES), to me its about not having to manage 50, 100 or 200+ odd antivirus consoles out there in the wild. The time saving there alone would justify giving KES away for free.

Bla bla bla, my antivirus is better than yours…

I’m tired of seeing arguments in forums about this antivirus is better than that antivirus. In the past 12-15 years of being in this space my experience tells me they’re almost all identical and the effectiveness of the top of the top tier commercial AV products compared with the bottom of the top tier may be 5-10%, IMO, this is almost nothing. Besides, endpoint security is only one piece of the security puzzle, if you’re not employing IPS/realtime AV at the network level using devices like Fortinet Fortgate Firewalls, Cisco PIX or Watchguard Firebox along with inline email scanning services like Messagelabs then you have failed, you aren’t doing your job properly.

To me, having a central console to manage AV deployments across all clients with the ability to ensure, at a glance, with very little time cost, that AV is deployed site wide with no gaps, beats the 5-10% advantage I may get by using the top tier product (effectiveness changes with every version, almost yearly anyway so the top usually isn’t the top for long). I feel much more comfortable knowing AV is rolled out everywhere, without any machines missing it. A single machine without AV installed is a much bigger risk than using a product that might be a tiny bit weaker overall.

I agree, AVG isn’t perfect but is still good – here’s how I do it

I’ll admit that AVG is “good” but not “great” and tech savvy clients may bawk at paying for it due to the over-exposure of AVG Free in the wild. Out of the box with default settings, AVG is actually quite rubbish. All their link scanning and webshield garbage is just bloatware IMO and as per my previous point, there are better ways to protect from web based threats.

So, to the point, here’s my KES installation checklist. It’s not pretty looking, but it works, and works good! I have this config running over 2000+ machines without a hiccup (bar the recent AVG bug). Download it, try it, check it out, post some feedback, ask questions, let me know what you think either way! Oh, and if you’re really stuck, you can always Hire Me and I’ll fix your KES for you

Click here to download Kaseya Endpoint Security Setup Checklist (PDF)

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So if you follow me on twitter you’ll have seen my rant I had a few days ago about AVG9 problems and server freezing & crashing along with some stuff directed to @kaseyacorp re actively notifying clients of known issues.

Starting at the beginning – I’ve been working with a client on a Netware & Groupwise to Windows & Exchange 2010 migration. It’s in the final steps and we’re in the process of unplugging the old Netware gear and cleaning up minor tasks left behind.

The solution is a combination of data centre hosted VMs and a physical box onsite. Its been a difficult migration but all has been working well for a couple of months until the Exchange box locked up about two weeks ago, *almost* unresponsive. The weird thing was, mouse movements worked on the console, the box was accepting OWA/webmail connections through a web browser but wouldn’t allow SMTP connections or allow any Outlook clients to connect.

Fair enough, we’d been playing with the VM snapshot backups and VSS and figured it had broken something, hard booted the box and it’s been running fine every since.

I hate weird server crashes

Then comes Monday, the physical box onsite locks up with the exact same problem. Hmmm…coincidence? I think not. What do they have in common? One box is physical, one is a VM, can’t be a VM or hardware issue. Hmmm, both Win2008 boxes, same patch level, could be an MS update problem or Win2008 issue. Both running Kaseya & KES. Well, plenty of other Win2008 + KES servers about but these are missing about 15 odd MS patches since put into production. Lets roll out those badboys and log a case with Microsoft.

Crashedy crash crash crash…

Tuesday rolls around – I get a call in the morning, one of the other boxes has locked up, same problem again. One of the data centre domain controller VMs…..well this is getting awkward, fortunately the client didn’t notice this lockup. Looks like client signoff on this project is going to be delayed until we can work these bugs out.

So MS were completely useless. I logged a case on Monday. They suggested running Windowsupdates and then trying to do a manual memory dump the next time the issue happened. Great! The box isn’t blue screening and is unresponsive when it crashes, how am I supposed to do a memory dump? So, I took matters into my own hands because clearly I’m not getting anywhere in a hurry with Microsoft.

Kaseya agent v5.1.0.10

The client is running Kaseya 5.1 and the agents are at 5.1.0.0 version. Turns out theres an agent version 5.1.0.10 – thanks for the headsup Kaseya! Netter upgrade that agent version.
What else do all three boxes have in common? Hmm…KES/AVG
2 minutes and some snappy Google-izing later, I uncover a well known issue with AVG9 freezing boxes in the exact same manner as the three crashes on these boxes. Check the Kaseya forums, oh yeah, there’s multiple threads about the problem, oh, and with a workaround! Great

I then proceed to apply the workaround and all has been running sweet since.

Communication is key

So here’s my problem. I know that software issues happen. Bugs happen. Shit happens, its IT after all, stuff breaks all the time, we wouldn’t have a job if it didn’t. What really bugs me is that this is a known issue. From what I can see in the Kaseya forums, it’s been a known issue since January! Why then do I:

1-have to wait until this problem happens to me/clients I’m involved with, causing completely unnecessary downtime, stress and client angst
2-have to actively search for the potential existance of this particular problem
3-have to rely on a Kaseya end user workaround to resolve the problem

Selective hearing talking?

One thing that Kaseya is really good at is interacting on twitter. What I don’t get is that they have Twitter, Facebook (i think?), Kaseya forums, a blog, an email list and a knowledgebase and they still can’t advise clients of known issues, problems and their fixes.
For a company who’s primary business is software, this is absolutely beyond belief. Granted I tweeted this out and @cozthegrov @replied me right back and advised that they’re working on this in the Kaseya portal but frankly, I don’t care. For the last 3-4 years Kaseya has happily send me marketing emails at regular intervals, why can’t they have a second email list that advises clients of known issues, workarounds and also things like what the Kserver updates they roll out actually do!

There’s a lot of Labtech ranting on twitter lately and a lot of Kaseya bashing re K2 support…I totally understand the frustration and at the same time think that it’s a lot of noise over nothing and disagree whole-heartedly about the K bashing and labtech ship jumping. On the flipside, I think its time Kaseya got their asses into gear and started acting like a real software company.

Here’s my immediate right now Kaseya wishlist – to me, this doesn’t need to wait for the new Kaseya portal, it needs to happen right now, as in this week:

1-an email list I can subscribe to where I can get notified of known issues & notification of Kserver updates PRIOR to them being auto rolled out
2-ability to subscribe to knowledgebase updates so I get notified when new articles are published
3-a unified front across all Kaseya social media, I current need to watch Twitter, Kaseya Forums and the blog just to stay on top of things, why can’t important updates be published across all mediums?
4-an update on how Kaseya 2 deployments are going and regular updates on bug fixes/issues. With all the noise going on, I’m hesitant to get involved with K2

What are your thoughts?  A lot of noise on the net about K2 support & Labtech at the moment…how’s your Kaseya experience been lately?

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