This conversation appears to have morphed from Syncros priorities for Q2 into many things not in the original post that people are commenting with their opinions on.
I’m ok with that…it is good that we can have a free flowing discussion that isn’t shutdown at any point…
which is why I gave my opinion on the onboarding fees that was raised, in the context of the value proposition of Syncro, and my reflection on when we onboarded to Syncro.
I don’t have any problem with the Syncro pricing. I agree with all your points @andy, and only have a slight difference of opinion on the onboarding fees. Other than that, in my view all the Syncro pricing model is fair and reasonable.
@Andy
Can you please find out why the FR for Windows 11 to appear in the Executive report isn’t in the Q2 priorities?
Has it been investigated and found to be a huge project and expense to fix, or is it a small fix, but the Executive Report isn’t a priority.
One thing is clear.
I am not the only one who is concerned about the Executive Report not being a priority for SyncroMSP. over the last 12 months.
Sigh…if only we in the community had visibility to see specifically which FRs were in the planned status.
I understand that internally you have settled not to do anything like this.
But on our side, more transparency/sunlight, would save a lot of time, angst, and make it easier for MSPs.
There is a lot of discussion regarding reporting here. Reporting will never be good until there is full custom report writing. Just give us an easy way to use PowerBI with Syncro and you can stop worrying about creating reports. I only use a handful of the existing reports in Syncro because most of them are inadequate at best.
I have a few thousand endpoints, randomly machines or entire groups of machines will alert as offline, but when checked with ConnectWise Control, they are in-fact online with zero issues and without even an internet hiccup. I have to restart the Syncro agent and they show back up as online. Sometimes they won’t, especially when large groups of machines alert as offline when not, you just need to mut them and rely on your added tools until they figure themselves out and show back as online, usually 4-5 hours.
I probably wouldn’t call it a full-blown PSA, maybe 50%. I just had meetings with every PSA vendor on the planet. We just bought HaloPSA, for the Microsoft CSP Integration and the multi-tenanted ability as we grow and diversify.
Syncro’s PSA is full-blown for 2016. But as you struggle to play catchup, the ConnectWises, Autotasks and Halos of the world are lapping you. Granted, with the exception of Halo, Syncro is way more intuitive. I would even venture Syncro is a bit more intuitive than Halo. But Halo has full-onboarding and training. So yes, you are cheaper, but are you the better value? Your support team doesn’t answer or respond in enough time to make up for onboarding. Sending an email, and waiting 24-72 hours for a response really hurts. CW, AT and Halo have 24/7/365 live telephone support. I do understand for CW you have to pay $700/month to not get India, but the sales people usually “spice up the quote” by adding that on for free. I had to only wait 3 minutes on the phone for Halo support.
When we try and delve into the PSA, all the advanced features you do implement get very nearly there, but always fall short and the workaround to get complete functionality is just too complex.
The RMM is great, but as we were looking into new PSAs we were looking at RMMs as well. I can say that the RMM is a bit behind and falling further behind by the quarter. Especially with a lot of the AI integrations. Also they have significantly more reliable offline notifications. The biggest issue with Syncro RMM.
As far as the price increase, you did spring that with very little notice. I get it, inflation sucks but every other vendor gave 6 months notice. As far as new clients, we give them as most companies do, 12 months at a protected rate from increase. That is standard practice. I didn’t care, I was saving $5k/month over Datto anyway.
Don’t let sales fool you, they’ll tell you what you want to hear. Don’t think for one second you are not just another subscription to them. Phone support will be tier 1, and most of the time, your issues will not be resolved, they’ll create a ticket and throw you in queue, might as well just email the ticket in yourself with all the details.
My experience with CW before we left, support tickets would take a week for first response and it was boiler plate copy pasta. It would take weeks to get any resolution, if there was one. After we dropped them, they stopped billing us, but 2 months later, they billed us for the previous two months and then continued billing us. I took over 3 months to get them to stop, a lot of times not even responding to me.
Our final straw with CW was when they released RTF to beta, I tested it, and we had long delays for tickets to load, 30 seconds+ or tickets failed to load. Moving through the ticket, comments, saving the comment, each action took 30 seconds. It was crippling to get anything done. I informed them and they said it was a known issue and would be fixed. I had to disable RTF to get use the platform. 2 months later, they forced it on everyone as is. They said 30 seconds to load a ticket was within acceptable limits.
CWA side of things, they would release monthly updates and break features. They wouldn’t release intermediate patches unless it was a critical security issue, so we’d have to wait a minimum of 1 month for them to fix it, but it usually took several.
Hopefully you don’t see any of that with Halo, but I’ve been in the space long enough to know that everyone has their issues and you’ll always find someone that does some things better, while falling short in other areas.
CW requires a $700/month “premium support” fee. I had CW/Labtech/Quosal etc from 2013 - 2017. Then I went to Datto/Autotask/Centrastage and then Syncro in 2018/2019. They gave me premium support for free for my CW Control subscription. I can call in, tell T1 that I have premium support and request T2. Boom, immediate T2 - max around a 4-5 minute wait.
I spent $140k on ConnectWise back in 2013. We left them in 2017 because the support was absolute garbage tier. But at that time they wanted $318/hr for a SE as Support fee with a minimum of like 10 hours. So we went to Datto.
I have used every RMM and PSA in the industry since I started in 1997.
Oh and I always require a POC, with support and I always test support.
I am writing to express my ongoing appreciation for your services, as well as to bring to your attention a significant issue that has arisen with the Syncro integration for QuickBooks. As a long-time customer of yours since 2012, I have enjoyed the benefits of your platform, especially after transitioning from RepairShopr in 2015.
However, despite my satisfaction with your services, I have encountered a problem that has caused significant delays in my bookkeeping. Since we fired our bookkeeper and decided to switch to QuickBooks, the integration with Syncro has been broken, and I have been unable to sync my products and services for the past four months.
This issue has caused us a lot of stress and anxiety, particularly as we are on a quarterly filing schedule. I understand that issues can arise, but I was disappointed that my follow-up inquiry to tech support did not yield any response.
As a loyal and satisfied customer, I hope that you can address this problem promptly and effectively, as it is impacting our ability to conduct business smoothly. Thank you for your attention to this matter, and I look forward to continuing to utilize your services in the future.
Sincerely,
Mustafah Walai
Founder &CEO
Fasthuma iT
Things MSP’s really need. (All have been submitted and resubmitted since 2020)
1.) Reliable Windows Backup alerts and reporting. Many missing backup error / fail codes.
2.) Raid monitoring for major vendors. LSI, Microsemi/Adaptec (missing error codes), Dell Perc, Lenovo, HP.
3.) Access to all Windows Event Logs. Currently cannot access or trigger alerts on subtree EventViewer (Local)/Applications and Services Logs/Microsoft/Windows Need to monitor DFSR, DNS,DHCP, Hyper-V, Windows Server Backup events, PowerShell logs…
4.) Ability to exclude DRIVERS category from vunerable assets report and total score on executive summary.
When we made the business decision to not use the Syncro PSA and to use the HaloPSA, we gave ourselves a 50% price increase because of the additional licensing fees incurred.
I don’t care, I am prepared to pay now for the additional features because I expect the benefits to far exceed the costs.
Waiting years for Syncro to successfully implement FRs, and not even knowing if they will ever implement FRs has a cost too.
Trying to find out that the Exec report Win 11 FR is in the roadmap felt as difficult as pulling Hens teeth.
@kristen.costagliola & @Andy
Can we add to the priorities a proper Feature Request voting system and an Actual roadmap, don’t need dates just need to know you are working on XY & Z most vendors now have this and it would enable the community to feel there is some transparency on what is being worked on and the priorities. Alot of our vendors seem to now be using canny.io
Like what are the Top Requested PSA features? this means nothing, are they my top requests or someone else’s? is the design work for the PSA features following ITIL best practice or a different best practice, or the Whim of the design team etc.
Awesome to see SOC2 being worked on and look forward to that being completed.
I haven’t seen any issues with Event Log monitoring, but this is present today. We stopped using Windows Backup several years ago, but this is how we monitored it.
You can do this with Event Log monitoring or SNMP. We mostly have MegaRAID and we do get triggered events through the Event Log monitor. You can also setup email alerts through the controller. The vendors do not always release all their codes, so when I built my raid monitors through the Event Log monitor, it was a chore trying to find all the needed info. What I did notice is that Syncro has the same event log list that other RMMs use, particularly CWA.
I agree, anything not “approved” shouldn’t be on the reports.
We are still hoping the executive summary will be addressed. Notifying customer monthly on what service was performed and what microsoft updates were installed.
This is something our clients are asking for.
I think the Canny type implementation would be one of the best things for MSP’s and Syncro Staff to really know what people want and to be able to better prioritize. Forum is nice, but, it can be alot like facebook where it can become a complaining forum only.
I don’t want to derail this thread with a discussion on voting, as we’ve discussed this several times in the past. I will mention it once more here, though, for clarity. There is no intention of a voting system as of today. That is for a few reasons, the biggest of which being a high number of votes won’t necessarily mean we’ll be developing said request soon, if at all, and may set the wrong expectation.
We listen to feedback from many sources, and this does in fact factor into what we build next and why. That said, so does company priorities, as well as the current focus of the platform. For example, we’ve said our focus for 2023 is the PSA. So if a complex RMM feature has a ton of votes, it’s unlikely we’d be taking on a new long-tail RMM feature because that conflicts with our current focus.
So customer feedback is absolutely one aspect of what we build, and you see that in the quality-of-life features we’re releasing live at our Ask Us Anything events we hold every few weeks.
When you say addressed, what is it missing that you are looking to have added? Also, have you added it as a feature request here in the Community Forums?
I am also looking to move to HaloPSA at end of 2023, unless some major improvements happen before then. Curious if Syncro will provide RMM-only pricing for us and those who can’t run our business on their PSA.