Keep up with your Dashboard Skillset, request a Tech Walk!

by David Ianetta

Once upon a time we could count on twelve years of school followed by some college and then happily say goodbye to books and study.

Sure, we might want to improve a skill here or there, but once you landed a good job the rest of your education was combined with experience.

As Aerosmith sang, "Dream On...Dream On..."

Those of us who work in the IT field we know that time has long past. We constantly need to improve our skill set, or get left behind.

System Tray Application Icon - Greatest thing since sliced bread!!

There are many features that can be deployed to your customer's devices by simply getting Advanced Monitoring Agent installed to start with.

There are now options such as antivirus, remote access, unobtrusive (background) management, web filtering and browsing protection, silent patch management, and even individual offsite backup.  All of which are simple to deploy, easy to monitor, and great ways to help you take care of your customers computer & network health.

But in my opinion, the feature that provides you with the most value is the System Tray Application icon. Of course, since it is your business, you may configure it any way you like but here are just a few examples of what you can accomplish with this feature.

Biggie size my Project!!

           The only real way to get value out of any system is to use it to it's fullest capabilities and to refrain from working outside of that system. Basically, for the system to work, you must work the system. Whether you would like to franchise your business or if you just want to create a successful business, to truly be successful, you must create a system, follow it, and allow for it to be duplicated. This way, you are creating a business versus a job.

Mix and match

By David Ianetta

We can have a tendency to look at the RM dashboard as providing us with a number of different services. Therefore it is easy to compartmentalize these services and isolate their functions.

However like any good tool box, RM provides us with tools that can be used in an endless number of combinations to get our job done.

I'd like a System State Backup with a side of critical data and databases please!!

                 I'm sure all of you sit down with your clients periodically, if not you should, to go over their current state of affairs in regards to their network and their business technology needs and suggest what you feel is necessary; which should include some type of  backup solution. Translation - Tell them what they need with people skills :) These types of conversations need to be addressed because they don't have a proper working solution in place or if you've decided that you should be in charge of the backups since you will be blamed for it if your customer doesn't have the data they need when they need it. I call it the CYA (Cover Your Agreement) policy.  This scenario would give both you and your client piece of mind. So when it comes time to introduce possible solutions and alternatives, I'm also certain MSPs lead with some type of hardware appliance that does full images so that you can bring them back up rather quickly with either another image,some type of virtualization in the cloud capabilities, or maybe even both.  Then the new customer will probably give you one one of these three responses: