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November 11, 2018 |

ConnectWise Previews Portal Customization, Single Sign-On, and User-Specific Dashboards

Described by Chief Product Officer Craig Fulton (pictured) during the managed services vendor’s IT Nation Connect conference in Orlando last week, the new features are designed to help MSPs improve brand recognition and technician productivity.

ConnectWise has an enhanced end user portal, cross-platform single sign-on functionality, and a new user-specific dashboard coming soon to its managed service software suite.

The Tampa, Fla.-based vendor announced all three changes at its IT Nation Connect event, which wrapped up in Orlando on Friday.

The updated customer portal, which is scheduled to become generally available in January, offers expanded customization support, including the ability to import and display information from ConnectWise’s own solutions and third-party systems via a built-in API. Users can employ that feature to provide self-serve access to information about service tickets, security incidents, or paid and pending invoices, according to Chief Product Officer Craig Fulton, who notes that letting customers answer questions on their own helps MSPs not only save money but demonstrate business value as well.

“When people are in a subscription service they kind want to know, ‘hey, what am I getting every month that I’m paying?'” said Fulton last week in a conversation with ChannelPro. “We see the portal as the future of providing that.”

The new portal will offer more complete white-labeling support as well. While the current edition lets partners add their logo, the revised version will allow them to control colors and other design elements too.

New as well in the revised portal is the ability to integrate customer billing collection functionality from Connect Booster, a payments processing and management vendor for MSPs based in West Fargo, N.D.

“[It] gives the MSP the best of both worlds, all of the ticketing, and service, and access functionality of the current ConnectWise portal, while putting them in a single pane of glass for everything related to finance that ConnectBooster does, and meshing that into a single solution,” says Connect Booster President Ryan Goodman.

According to Fulton, a chat client is in the works for a later portal update, along with a new feature that will let customers pre-populate tickets in the ConnectWise Manage PSA solution before calling an MSP’s help desk. The forthcoming enhancement will add an optional “click here for support” button to the portal that will collect preliminary information about a user’s issue before displaying a phone number to call.

“When the call comes in, the ticket’s already there for you,” Fulton says, helping both the technician and the customer resolve the problem sooner.

Over the long term, ConnectWise envisions turning the portal into a self-serve tool for approving quotes, ordering software, and almost everything else customers must use the phone to do today.

“We think it could be the one place where the customer can go to completely do everything, like an Amazon-type experience with your service provider,” Fulton says.

The new single sign-on functionality, which is rolling out now, enables users to log themselves into the entire ConnectWise solution suite, as well as third-party systems accessible from within those products, at once. Equipped with multifactor authentication support, the new feature will gain integration with Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory early next year.

According to Fulton, introducing single sign-on is a critical milestone in the journey ConnectWise has been on for years to convert a family of stand-alone products into a single, unified platform.

“You can’t declare you have a platform if you’re logging into multiple things and having to do all these unique things to get them to interact with each other,” he says. “With a single sign-on, we now truly have a platform.”

David Tan, CTO of CrushBank, a maker of help desk applications with headquarters in Syosset, N.Y., is looking forward to the productivity improvements single sign-on will make possible. “Basically, you sign in and you’re in everything,” he says. “It’s been a little bit of a point of frustration, so I think that’ll be nice.”

Adding SSO to the ConnectWise portfolio does more than just simplify the logon process though, according to Fulton. By authenticating users not only with ConnectWise products but with third-party solutions, the new feature arms systems like the ConnectWise Automate RMM offering to more fully automate processes that previously required a separate logon.

For example, Perch Security, of Tampa, Fla., plans to leverage the new SSO functionality to automate the response to threats identified by its intrusion detection solution. Future editions of the Perch product will create a ticket in ConnectWise Manage when they detect a new issue and then execute remediation scripts via ConnectWise Automate without technician assistance.

“That single sign-on, single authentication, kind of allows that to happen across the board without someone interacting to kick off the next step,” Fulton observes.

ConnectWise has an investment stake in Perch, whose software is part of the massive cybersecurity push ConnectWise outlined for IT Nation Connect attendees last week.

SSO plays a critical role in the user-specific dashboards Fulton previewed last week as well. Slated to arrive by February of next year, the new feature will let users create an individualized “cockpit” displaying the precise mix of information from across the ConnectWise portfolio they wish to see.

Previous ConnectWise dashboards were customized by role for technicians and salespeople, for example. Technicians who prefer that version can switch back to what ConnectWise calls “classic view” if they choose.

ConnectWise has been discussing the importance of customized cockpits as far back as the 2016 edition of IT Nation.

In prior years, Fulton would have spent more time during the keynote address he delivered last Thursday describing a wider range of porduct changes. In January, however, ConnectWise announced that the conference previously known as IT Nation and now named IT Nation Connect will deliver business development content, while the conference formerly known as Automation Nation and now dubbed IT Nation Explore will focus on product and technical content.

The company renamed IT Nation and Automation Nation three months ago in conjunction with a larger move to consolidate its events, user groups, peer groups, and training programs under the IT Nation brand.


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