Syncro Platform Investments

[emilyglass]

To our partners,

Syncro continually enhances our platform to provide the most feature-rich, secure, robust, and scalable solution. We release new features and updates to the Syncro platform multiple times every week without any service disruption and this has been our standard operating procedure for years.

In addition to these regular updates, over the next few weeks, we will perform some platform upgrades. These upgrades are required to continue providing a reliable platform into the future for all our partners.

We do not anticipate any disruption to your service and have planned thoughtfully to put your needs first. We know that you rely on us to run your business and we take this partnership very seriously.

We are working hard to honor our commitments to make your lives better, be transparent, and enhance the Syncro platform for your benefit.

As we progress through this project we will continue to provide regular updates to this thread.

If you have any questions in the meantime, please reach out to our Support team here.

Thank you for your continued support.

Emily Glass

CEO, Syncro

[canden.hicks]

As a reminder: We expect no downtime during our platform upgrades.

Next week the following dates are scheduled for our platform upgrades. All times are from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm PT:

Tuesday, June 28, 2022
Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Thank you.

[mgiordano]

Any chance we could get even a hint more detail on what is actually being done? Just for the sake of curiosity?

And thank you for continuing to make the platform better!

[DBlue]

Agreed,
We all run businesses that we are trying to improve.
Therefore we all need to make our own business decisions on which processes in our businesses to invest to improve, and which to not invest in.
Doesn’t matter if it is a 1, 10, 100 or 1000 person business.
The more information we have on what is coming down the pipe the better our own business decisions can be.

If new features are being released every week, why isn’t there a notification, so that we know about them and can benefit from those features?

[anon50555151]

I’d love to see a public Trello or roadmap or something; I’d also love to see anything kept up to date for us to track…

I believe that both @canden.hicks and @Andy would agree that its users would have a lot more faith* for the future with Syncro if Syncro kept us more in the loop.

Consider from our perspective… While Datto gets bought out by Kaseya, Syncro goes silent on the user-accessible update areas listed here:

• Syncro's MSP blog | Helping your business thrive
• hasn’t been updated since the end of April;
• SyncroUpdates - the last update on the ‘update notifier’ window thing (in between chat and your name, top right-hand side) is May 23rd. It’s June 24th!
• I’ve received two separate popups asking me if I would recommend Syncro to a friend or whatever, but no popup telling me about the all new 2022 Mac App!?! Heck yes!!! MDM next maybe? Linux client?

I really do enjoy using the platform. I understand that this is more of a constant development than a release. I’m fine with that, really!

I’d just like to know what the future is for Syncro, so I can better plan for my business.

*By “faith” I mean I would be more willing to give you more money every month if you added the features I currently pay other companies for. This community has thousands of ideas and all of them are most likely to make us and by extension Syncro more money by being more productive by using the platform that we already have. Syncro appears to be in a period of growth, so maybe it’s a good time to start keeping those who have paid Syncro’s way better up-to-date on what is happening. Just my thoughts…

[charles]

I am a little confused here. Your doing a platform upgrade in the middle of the week and yet in the communication below you say your going to schedule them for the weekend ?

http://syncro.staged-by-discourse.com/t/update-on-system-maintenance-from-april-12-2022/4606

[mike15]

Confused also, I thought after the previous disaster it was cited no midweek work and that all regions would be considered.

“We fully understand that the timing of the maintenance window caused major inconvenience for our partners whose working hours were impacted. We’ve read all of your feedback and apologize for the disruption. In the future, we will schedule maintenance on the weekend, as our partners around the world are extremely important to us.”

[canden.hicks]

Hi,

This project has no expected day-to-day impact, nor any expected downtime, we have scheduled these upgrades to proceed in a similar fashion as our daily updates.

[mike15]

100% vehemently agree.

Noone understands better the fluidity of IT and development than us, you literally have the most empathetic audience you could possibly have and yet you treat us like mushrooms.
Allow us to make informed business decisions, your platform has the most critical role in our strategic planning and you disrespect us by not acknowledging it.

Your communication and attention to bugs and feature requests is amateurish. Let me show you an example of future features done right:

This is Star Citizen, a video game in development, I’m sure the nerds like me have heard of it. This is their roadmap tool and they commit to it like a mother to her child:

Star Citizen Roadmap - RSI

Can you imagine how much time they save from not having to answer questions about what’s coming? This is the minimum standard you should be striving towards. Whether its Trello or your own tool is irrelevant, the information provided is what matters.

My business has grown 500% in the past 18 months but it sits on a platform that I really like, but honestly don’t have much confidence in. Now I’ve grown, Syncro makes me nervous, to the point where I have a serious look at other options when they are presented. The cost is mostly irrelevant so if you think because Syncro is “cheap” you can continue to get away with amateur communication, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong.

I don’t want to change platforms, I really don’t. There are a few showstoppers in Syncro right now that are rapidly souring my belief in your ability to deliver and costing me labour time to work around. If I had an idea that these would be addressed, and some idea of when, then my perception changes, confidence is high, loyalty goes through the roof and then suddenly you have a partner giving glowing referrals to a platform they are invested in financially and emotionally.

I actually snicker when I see your referral bonus emails come out, because right now, I couldn’t honestly put my reputation on the line to refer you to anyone as I have no idea what it will all look like in 12 months time.

[mike15]

And you still miss the point, we don’t know what they are, daily updates or longer term. We are just expected to trust you?

The ongoing long term silence coupled with April disaster, has hurt the trust and it needs to be rebuilt with care and communication.

[canden.hicks]

Hey all,

I appreciate your feedback. Syncro is committed to transparency with our partners, and this community post was our way to let the community know that we are doing work to scale our platform again, to accommodate our continued growth.

These updates are expected to have no impact on platform availability, just like our day-to-day feature updates. We did promise not to schedule planned maintenance windows with platform impact during the weekdays. Nothing is changing from a customer-facing perspective, there are no associated features to discuss, and users should expect no interruptions to service throughout the upgrade process. We have every intention of continuing these types of communications as we move forward.

I agree we could do better at communicating what’s been launched and what’s coming up next. We’ve made some progress here, but not enough. Two recent changes include rebooting our release notes and publishing them frequently, as well as starting to pre-announce features.

Our release notes showcase all the improvements we’ve been hard at work delivering month over month, and June’s release notes should be up any day now. We publish release notes every two weeks. You can follow all of our release notes here in the community or on our blog page.

We’ve also recently started to pre-announce upcoming features, for example, we announced HTML ticketing support for inbound and outbound communication coming soon. We’re also prioritizing more rapid small updates. For example, we just added the ability for a user to add time onto a ticket on behalf of a technician yesterday, which was another highly requested, albeit small update to the platform.

We hear you and we’ll continue to make progress to ensure we communicate better.

[mike]

Canden,
You’re coming into this game late, so you get a pass, but one thing you have to understand is we’ve been dealing with this a lot longer than you have. Syncro is not transparent with their customers, and it’s based on fear. Fear that they may give something away to the competition, or fear that they may tick people off if they don’t bring a feature to market. Either way you look at it, it’s fear. All we want to know is what’s going on. We are tech people and we use your service to assist our customers. If we don’t know what is going on behind the scenes, we can’t support our clients properly.

And btw, Atera does a much better job at letting us know about new features than Syncro. I’m not even a customer and I get emails about their progress, new features released and ROAD MAP. You’re so worried about giving away secrets that you can’t even see the lack of transparency is making you guys look weak. Syncro needs to step it up.

Our lastest and newest integration - Malwarebytes | Atera Blog

[mike15]

I would like…actually no, I demand some further comments from Syncro upper management on the state of Syncro.

I’ll be honest, I’m just about to jump ship, my MSP is growing and I need to put more staff on but Syncro just isn’t mature enough to handle it. The only reason I’ve stayed so long is the convenience of PSA/RMM in one. Syncro system is its current state is just not fit for a growing modern MSP. It’s just Repairshopr with a few extra features. I wrote a 10 page long post a few days ago, detailed the flaws in each area of Syncro as I see them, especially since I’ve been trying to automate everything.

Then I found this 2 year old post, which pretty much summed up how I feel in 2022: https://www.ninjaone.com/customer-stories/blue-collar-computing/

I ended up not hitting Post because history has told me it will do nothing and the silence will just continue.

The very worst part of Syncro is the Contracts system, the way it ties to Recurring Invoices and Payment Gateways, literally the most important part of an MSP business, managing MRR and GETTING PAID.

The second worst thing happens to be the second most important thing to an MSP owner. I can’t make a single useful report for a QBR/TBR or get proper metrics on my client value without a ton of manipulation from outside sources in outside tools…

The third thing that is super important for an MSP owner is having a strategic plan. As Syncro is the core platform and it doesn’t have anything even relating to a development roadmap or feature request management, how can we strategically plan the future of our business?

So as the owner of an MSP and the person paying for this system, if I can’t get what I NEED out of it, then it’s basically useless (and I haven’t even mentioned the workflow issues)…

No matter how much other good stuff sits inside Syncro, the tools the person paying for the system needs most are either complete garbage or don’t exist at all.

That’s 3 strikes, you’re out…

Seriously, someone that has a clue about running an MSP needs to get on top of this, or Syncro is going nowhere but to the bottom. I’m glad I did write this in the end because it’s made the decison for me.