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Here's a screenshot of our Waiting on Client Auto Close workflow rule setup.

We send email reminders on days 2 and 5, and auto-close on day 7. One of the issues with the Last Updated in X days trigger is that so many different things can cause a ticket to update. For example, if you update a schedule entry or make an internal note, that counts as an update. I prefer to go by when the status lasts changed. With this trigger, it looks at hours, and hours refer to SLA hours, not "actual" hours. You would need to have an SLA Setup to do it this way.

I also set up the workflow rule to look at tickets in between time periods, for example between 18-27 hours = 2-3 days (I use 9hrs business day in SLA), so that I can run it repeatedly on the same ticket. I check the ticket every 2 days, so after it runs once it will check again in 2 days and it should be out of that first time period.

You should also set up another workflow rule that changes the ticket status to Customer Updated if it's been updated by the customer, so it takes it out of the Waiting on Client status.

If you want, we could do a screen share session and get it set up together. The first hour of consulting with me is free, just use the link in my signature below. :)

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Group

Yes! You can set custom work role rates (and/or work type) on the agreements. There is a work role and a work type tab on the agreement you can define custom rates. If these are standard by agreement type you can add them in the Agreement Type setup table. You can also set agreements to default to different service or project boards, but not specifically by the ticket "type". There is a defaults for new records section on the agreement where you can define which boards the agreement will automatically default to.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Group

We ran into this same problem at my last MSP, here's what I ended up implementing...

1. The technician is working on a service ticket on their Support board and decides products will need to be ordered.
2. The technician fills out the Quote Request Form, which gives the Procurement team all the information they need on what products to add to a quote. The technician then puts their Support ticket in "Waiting on Equipment" status.
3. The submitted form creates a new ticket on the Procurement board. (The submitted form also references the original ticket #)
4. The assigned Procurement rep will assign themselves and the requesting technician (so that they are kept in the loop of the quoting process) to the ticket. Create quote, send quote, get approval, payment, order, etc. Close procurement ticket.
5. Procurement then converts the sales order into the original support ticket (that is "Waiting on Equipment") to add products and sets the ticket to "Needs Dispatched" status which assigns the Dispatcher to schedule the setup/install.

Having the above process made us able to report on the Procurement team's SLAs. We tracked things like "Time to Pending Approval" (time to get the quote out), "Time to Order" (how long it takes from the quote being paid to when it gets ordered). I helped that Procurement team streamline a lot of their processes, so many balls were being dropped before and it was our biggest pain point with clients. Happy to help answer any other questions you may have!

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Group

1. Head to System > Setup Tables > Service Board > Select the board > Scroll all the way to the bottom where it says Customer Update Notifications > Select Add Email Notifications > Select Assigned Resources. This will get the assigned resources on the ticket an email whenever a customer updates it.
2. On the same Service Board head to the Teams tab > Click into the Service Team > You should see an Assigned and an Available tab > Make sure everyone who you want to receive an email when there are no assigned resources is on the Assigned tab. Now, proceed to the next step.
3. Head to System > Setup Tables > Workflow Rules > Create a new rule > Table Reference is Service Tickets > You can limit it to a specific service board or leave that field blank and have it run on all boards (up to you)
   1. Event should be:
      1. Ticket is not currently assigned
      2. AND Ticket is open
      3. AND Ticket has been updated by the customer
   2. Run Schedule should be:
      1. Continuously, check every X hours (however often you want to email your team until someone is assigned and responds). If you leave this at Just Once then you'll only get the email once, and won't ever be notified on it again if it's updated by the customer and unassigned at some other point in its lifecycle.
   3. Action should be:
      1. Send email to All Team Members (you cannot email distribution groups with workflow rules, so this will refer to the team members on the service board set up in Step 2.)
   4. Activate the workflow rule and have it run every 10 minutes (10 minutes is the fastest you can have workflow rules run on cloud)

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Group

Hey u/wellholymonolly,

I think u/n_dufault would have some good insight as they are heavily developing CW API to PowerBI dashboards over at NexNow

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Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Group

Yes, when we right click a machine we get the option to "Assign Machine...", after a machine is assigned to a user, it adds a note to the machine. An important note on this, the default maintenance script that the Control instance runs will actually clear the notes field, which will break the access, so you'll need to remove the notes field from the maintenance.

https://snipboard.io/W4Jjr7.jpg

To add to u/cassiekerr's reply: Wrike would be another one to check into. No direct experience with it, but their APIs are apparently easy to use, so some partners have been evaluating this for integration into their Manage.

Kathy Boulet | Sierra Pacific Group

I've made a couple using Zapier (and it's email parser and Google sheets) as the glue between the two ticketing systems, that work well enough, but Zapier can get expensive (depending on the number of tickets your dealing with each month).

If you've got the time and are familiar with the ConnectWise Manage API you could use something like n8n.io or n8n.cloud (it already has integration for ServiceNow, but you'd need to build out your integration in it for CW Manage).

Hey u/yac_99

I’d really check out CW university administrator degree and invest the time to sit through the courses. As rudimentary as it sounds, and as much as people bash it, it’s a decent starting point for advanced administration.

From there, this subreddit has a lot of great communication and topics concerning some of your requests.

The system is very detailed and, honestly, that MSP should recognize that it's not just a ticketing system but also a critical system for running their business. It should not just be you.

I am going to have one of my cohorts, u/cassiekerr, comment with some other resources to help you plan as she leads many MSPs in implementations and will point you in the right direction.

Last, always feel free to PM me or schedule a meeting and I’d love to extend some time to streamline your administration.

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Group

we've seen this a few times. Typically it's because the HTML fails to accurately size the images for some reason.

We normally resolve it by making the hosted images the size you need them to be.

Yup, it's a pain, but this is what got it done

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

So glad that you enforce that!!! I struggle sometimes when MSPs do not invest in new hires to learn a tool that is essential to their financial and service stability.

Message me whenever you feel the need. We got enough people on the team to figure out most crazy ideas.

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

u/lfernandes !!

I’d really check out CW university administrator degree and invest the time to sit through the courses. As rudimentary as it sounds, and as much as people bash it, it’s a decent starting point for advanced administration.

From there, this subreddit has a lot of great communication and topics concerning some of your requests.

For your design, We’ve built similar items when you have ‘books, of clients for certain seats in your org by utilizing types or custom fields. This is fairly common for MSPs with pod structures as well.

Last, always feel free to PM me or schedule a meeting and I’d love to extend some time to streamline your administration.

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

100% right and I completely forgot that. Thank you for the correction!

Great idea for a script as well, reset the EDF and child-script the onboarding script :-)

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

Care to share your SQL Statement or search logic? Your search may have to many and/or's and may need to be refined. Sometimes searches need to be better tailored to return what you're look for.

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

Yup.

Take those select statements from your searches, paste them in a script, save the output to a variable (it’ll natively just return the number returned), and put those variables in a ticket note.

Once your script is confirmed working, schedule the script against your all agents group every desired interval.

Not a very elegant way but would get you quickly started with some better ways to utilize SQL commands.

Most would probably approach this in report center but that’s a whole other beast.

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

Hey u/TbAlltimetech,

Schedule some time with me below and I'll get you with the mastermind Josh to get you situated. We'd love to knock this project out for ya :-)

Thanks /u/IronMarkC and /u/vonkoolaid !!!!

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

If you want u/jmcdf01 book some time with me and I’ll point you in the right direction.

We handle a lot of CW implementations now and I can give you an idea of their training and the best practices to get you moving.

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

For your email connector options, does it reopen assigned resources? And under Automatic Email Options, do you have Resources checked or unchecked?

According to the documentation, the Team Leader will get an email if there are no assigned resources, but this sounds like it is also sending the email to the assigned resources... This is bizarre, I'm very curious to know what's happening.

If you want, you can schedule a screen share session with me and we can take a look together. Here's a link to my calendar if you're interested!

So for something like this it would be easier to run the powershell to output the csv/ xslx to the machine locally and then have a further step in the script move that file to either an ftp share, cloud repository, or your LTShare folder and grab it from there. Than a step at the end of the script that once the confirmed file has been moved, to delete the file to not clutter up the client environment. For extra credit you could then try to attach that file to the ticket .

I'd also reference the built-in 'Backup and Report on GPO's' script as it does something similar and then 'zips' the report. It utilizes HTML, though, so you'll want to 'flavor to taste'

that's just one way to skin this cat; though, and I'm sure more community members will come up with other ways to do this (and maybe easier!)

This would also make sure that the when writing the output of that script to a variable you don't have any odd formatting issues during the translation.

Than last would be to do something like this in report writer instead but I'm not skilled enough in crystal reports to direct ya.

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

+1 for Wise-Sync it's really the way to go, but if you're keen on doing the manual export/import you could build a custom report Writer report. Nathan at NexNow helped us build a custom invoice export report for a procurement partners integration that one of our clients required we adhere to.

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Consulting

Have your workflow rule that automatically moves the ticket, also create a historical activity (use a custom activity type like "Ticket Escalation"). Then report on how many activities of that type you have.

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Consulting

There are a few things to look into on this one as it isn't a single point.

• Manage plugin configuration to sync contacts automatically
• AD Plugin configured correctly to pull int the right OUs to contacts in Automate
• Review the asset templates as well in the manage plugin to make sure configurations are syncing correctly
• What is the 'source of truth' in the manage plugin (and what get's overridden)?
• User Centric is an answer and solution, but would need to be deployed separately (and OUs designed appropriately).

I know this really isn't an answer, but need a lot more information or 'poking around' to see where things may go wrong. I do know that some 3rd party tools offer more flexibility with this as well, and some do azure/ 365, but just depends on your use cases.

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

Curious if you are onprem. I've known many people to fail trying to bolt powerbi into cloud even with their SQL connectors (that damn read-only intent stuff)

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

Are you trying to have the script in a monitor type situation or a manual interaction?

I ask because it may be easier to bind a group to a search w/ your monitor criteria than from a script (as sometimes you'd need it to run offline or on the Automate server, etc)

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

Product Class is how the product is treated within CW. Service class products will always convert into a ticket. If you're wanting to treat it like a product, you'll want to set the product class to non-inventory. Product Type will still be service so it maps to your accounting package correctly.

Hope that helps!

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Consulting

Gotcha, I would first be curious on why the contact is being created in the wrong company and going to catchall. Should have the domain in the company. 2nd, make sure the company domain is ONLY in 1 company or it will always go to catchall (just do a quick contact search).

u/JustanITperson has a good suggestion to make a workflow look for tickets without resources. The workflow would be created on your Helpdesk service board and use the rule "Ticket has never been assigned (or all resources have been deleted)" and not status is closed (to prevent closed tickets from flagging) (and use more 'and not' for other statuses you don't want).

Could also do no resources and status is "x" or status is "x".

As always, make sure to his that test button and dial in to your preference.

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

My best guess is it's going to be a combination of factors to better schedule resources automatically. You can get pretty complex with auto-assign as well as workflows (and even some third party tools build logic) but without know exactly your board and resource structure it's kind of hard to make a suggestion accurately.

I first would try to approach the root of the issue and prevent tickets from being made for the wrong company, and only when that wasn't possible, switch to workflows (beyond escalations).

I wouldn't worry too much about multiple adds for resources, that's pretty easy to overcome.

Care to provide an example? That or you can schedule some free time with me below

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

I'll be honest, I haven't heard of this type of agreement before but I think I have a workaround for you.

Set the agreement back to the way you had it before, where it is set to limit to n-hours and everything is covered. In the Invoicing pod, check the box for Time under "Show covered items on Standard Invoice". This will send the covered time to the Invoicing screen and you can create an invoice, although it will be a zero dollar invoice to start. On the Service Adjustment Amt field, update that with the service total to counter-act the amount the agreement covered. This will bring the invoice balance to what it should be.

The invoice will look weird at first, so you'll want to update the invoice template.

• Setup Tables > Invoice Template > Body tab
• Services Section > Uncheck Display Extended Amount and Display Subtotal
• Adjustments Section > Uncheck everything

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Consulting

This definitely can be done and in a number of ways.

A couple thoughts:

• Marketing module and a campaign if you are looking to track clicks.
• Create a 'patching' status/ board with an email to be kicked off when a certain status is used and than a workflow or service template to kick that off.
• Service Template with Closed loop on that gets created the day of patching with a 'we're patching today!' and a workflow to email them X hours after that 'patching completed!' and finally a workflow to close the ticket.
• If you're using Automate, create a group of servers (1 per client) that runs a script after patching reboot that sends an email to the client

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All very simplified answers above, but hit me up and we can work through them in more detail.

Hope this helps!

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

Couple options here:

1. Instead of setting the recurrence to the total 36-month term, you can set it to just 1 billing cycle so that the monthly recurring amount from the opportunities screen shows just the monthly total. The catch here though is that when you go to convert the opportunity into the agreement, it will set the end date on those agreement additions to expire after 1 month so you have to go in and adjust the end dates.
2. Create a custom field for someone to manually input what the recurring monthly total is on the opportunity. Set the custom field to be shown on list views so you can see it from the opportunity list.

On a side note, I'm a CW consultant and offer first hour free consulting if it's something you want to schedule some time to take a look at together. Just use the link in my signature below. :)

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Consulting

You would set this up on a project ticket status email notification or using a workflow rule on project tickets. There isn't really a link that you can just send out as it will be a unique link for each ticket. If it's something you want to send every day, you could set up a workflow rule that sends the email to the team members with the attached survey and have the run schedule be once a day.

I'm a CW consultant and offer first hour free consulting if it's something you want to schedule some time to take a look at together. Just use the link in my signature below. :)

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Consulting

You can ask BrightGauge support to bring in that custom field into your dataset. Just send them a screenshot of where that custom field is located and they'll add it for you.

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Consulting

I'm a consultant who also does Gold Manage implementations. I typically recommend for block hour agreements to have application units be set to amount rather than hours. Most companies have a higher rate for after-hours/holiday work. Let's say your normal hourly rate is $100/hr but after-hours is $150. If you sell a block of 10 hours for $1000, then set the agreement to be covered to an amount of $1000 and then if they use after-hours time it's billing at that rate rather than trading one hour for an hour. Make sense?

If the pricing for the hourly rate is different for your clients, you can use those Work Role/Work Type tabs at the top of the agreement to specify what the custom rate is. You can also set this on the company finance page of that company.

Lastly, I would also recommend having this agreement set to default to new records. (This is that option at the very bottom of your agreement type page). This will make sure that whenever you create a new ticket for this company, this agreement will auto-apply and time gets billed against it.

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Consulting

Like Cell phones, this will always be a problem with Clients trying to find ways to 'skip-the-line'. This is a behavior change that you'll need to address with your team to have some standard responses to their clients.

Now as already mentioned here, I'd make sure you have drivers/ KPIs that also encourage your support teams to do this (Utilization, kill rate, etc). That way if they ARE getting shoulder tapped, they use your standard responses OR make tickets for them on the clients behalf.

We've also seen the inbox of the ticket mailbox access to the teams so they can simply drag and drop email's into the support inbox for Manage processing.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Kyle Christensen | Sierra Pacific Consulting

Might be easier to have 2 different Work Types for time entries. Have "Out of Warranty" work type be not covered under the agreement, and "On Warranty" be covered under the agreement or marked as non-billable if you prefer.

Cassie Kerr | Sierra Pacific Consulting

No one wants to learn it. It is a BIG platform to get a grip on so if you have staff like I do that don't give a shit and only want to clock in and out it is always going to be a big turd.

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I am lookin at Syncro, yes, Syncro. It has grown up a lot over the past 18 months and it is so much fast than CW Manage. Manage drives me nuts with how SLLLOOOOWW it is.

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Just look at this simple side by side ticket search. I am simply searching for any ticket that has 'Konica' in it.

https://www.screencast.com/t/Fgd0lV2PQoUI

just force 100PB virtual storage and see if it does it's thing

If that doesn't work try exabyte. Apparently more than 3 columns in one table is really expensive to CW devs

explains why loading a ticket with one note takes 8 seconds on a modern i7 with 32GB of RAM and a gigabit connection to fast.com is still the blame when I open a ticket for the awful slow

We rely mostly on email after hours to wake us and use this app on the on call phone. It can be set to repeat your notification sound - loudly - until you manually silence it. It is also somehow more aggressive about checking email and often beats the push notification from the native mail client by a few minutes. It costs a couple bucks, so maybe only makes sense if you are sharing a phone like we are. If everyone is just carrying their own phone, it probably wouldn't work unless the company was willing to reimburse. YMMV ¯\(ツ)/¯