Note: This is not the same thing as the Shockey Outlook which is a Microsoft Outlook addin that allows you to click on the email and promote it to a support request with one click, or one click upload of contacts, tasks and calendar appointments. It is an email gateway that allows everyone to create new tickets in the portal just by sending an email to your support@ email address. It also supports conversations through the support@ alias, allowing you to respond to the portal and use the SLA framework to properly categorize/escalate the ticket and send proper notifications as you go along. I do not recommend the use of this feature to anyone.

Hope everyone had a great weekend. I have a new experimental feature to share with you. It is called Mail Connector, it allows you to create and update tickets through email.

In your portal you will find a new tab under Settings called “Experimental Features”; Click on it and look for your Mail Connector email address. Note the text in red. Your Mail Connector address is of xyz@tree.shockeymonkey.com

Implementation

Pick an available alias on your domain and forward it to the xyz@tree.shockeymonkey.com address.

WARNING: DO NOT MAKE THE ALIAS ADDRESS THE SAME AS YOUR BUSINESS CONTACT INFORMATION EMAIL AS LISTED UNDER SETTINGS > BRANDING. DOING SO WILL CURRENTLY CREATE AN UNBREAKABLE INFINITE LOOP.

Features

Mail Connector does the following:

• Email to the Mail Connector address from an unknown email address is rejected.
• Email to the Mail Connector address from a known email address creates a new ticket.
• Response to the email generated by the Mail Connector address updates the ticket.
• Response to the email generated by the Mail Connector are only applied if they come from the administrative account (companyid 1 or 2) or from the company that originated the ticket (any user within the company)
• Administrative response (companyid 1 or 2) to the Mail Connector address will update the ticket.
• ALL Mail Connector updates follow the defined SLA which can be granular with respect to the senders email address, so you can create specific filters for specific email addresses and sort them into adequate queues.

In short, Shockey Monkey Mail Connector is an email interface to your portal allowing you to create and update support requests through email on any device and still keep the SLA framework in place.

By the time 2.0 ships I plan to fully implement this feature and make it configurable (on/off), as well as split the mail confirmation sending address and archival copy sending address. Currently those addresses are identical, so if the message is sent to the archive and the same address is used to loop back to the Mail Connector feature which then generates the autoresponse saying that the ticket has been updated and then sends a copy back to itself which loops it back over and over and over again. So please, please be careful.

There is a comment bot (or someone with entirely too much time) that pings me whenever a day goes by without a blog post or a comment. Daily Dose of Vlad. Seriously, if you can’t dig up another source of technical filth on the Internet we’re going to have to shut it down. Here you go, hope you laugh. If you’re British I hope you’re offended.

How great software gets made

I’m sure that if you’ve read between the lines over the past two weeks or so you’ve noticed a fair bit of frustration in my writing. It has been an unusually frustrating time in my professional life but not because you may think - When you’re an ISP for over 10 years you get used to dealing with idiots allergic to documentation that want you to provide it to them that its not your fault. So work doesn’t bother me, positive stuff doesn’t do so much for me because frankly people kiss my ass and love what we do all day and night. However, when things turn ugly I find motivation because its an opportunity to improve and get better. Just how I work I suppose.

So yesterday I decided to squash my month-long angst towards billing side of Shockey Monkey and I decided to sit down and finally just bang it out. But you can’t just sit down and write software. Not good software at least.

First, we went to Buffalo Wild Wings and I ordered a Hurricane and asked it be “as strong as you can legally make it” and to my surprise they came just short of it being straight rum. That will get you started at 11am!

The rest of the day I spent hanging out with my son. At about 6 PM I decided to get on the Wii and work on getting a 1000 rank in boxing.

So let’s recap. Get drunk. Check. Get half naked and pound air in front of your TV in the living room until you are coated with sweat. Check. Start coding.

What I came up with after that is slightly hazy but incomplete to say the least. Here are my major design shortcomings:

1. For a true syncronization to work I need to mirror the data between the accounting software and Shockey Monkey. Things like account identifiers, invoices, amounts, etc. When one gets adjusted so should the other. Nobody in their right mind would do that.
2. Getting the experience to be the same across multiple accounting platforms is a huge problem. For example, some systems limit invoice item notes/description to a 256 varchar field. Others will take an entire book. There isn’t a consistent way to do this.
3. The way most consulting shops bill is on the time rendered during the week/month/quarter. The way Shockey Monkey logically filters items for billing is by waiting for the ticket to be closed. So I got about 24 hours to redraw the schema and my billing code to reflect the incomplete issue billing.

Now, why destroy your mind and body before trying to mess with the above? Because anyone with the ounce of sanity the above would have been a two second solution: It is what it is, adjust to my software and just suck it. K? Not quite what I’m going for.

So after the conference call today when I realized all I did to this point is pretty much broken I just sat there and spaced out and thought of the Shockey Monkey tagline. No, not the “Making IT Management Fun” but the more polite version Chris Rue designed specifically for the UK market: “Better than snorting coke of the hookers ass” after someone from UK actually bothered to call me and complain about the title and how it offended their sensibilities, and how a picture of my comment on ETAs offended the even more (can’t find the picture anymore, but its our official ETA guidance picture with me and the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland).  

Core frustration 

My biggest frustration is that I am (yet) unable to make this ridiculously simple. Most of the IT space has a fantastically simple job. We sell products and then we sell services, either in bundles or metered. Doesn’t get simpler than that. The software should eliminate all complexity from the “getting paid” part of the equation and it should be immediately obvious what needs to be done. Work on the ticket, update ticket, add time, close ticket, click on accounting, click on a link print the invoice and either email and ask for money or mail and ask for money. So simple, so beautiful. The only thing complicating it would be the 3,000 different accounting packages

But, it’s 1:30, I’m working on it and should have something simple by the weekend.

If you’re not on Shockey Monkey I am sad to say that the beta is closed until the product goes commercial which should have been this Monday but obviously didn’t happen. I appreciate your interest and hope you understand that due to the size of the beta it would be difficult for me to effectively support more than the 3,000 people on it so far. I appreciate the interest, and if you can’t wait for it I do recommend Connectwise. Call Arnie and tell him Vlad sent you and scream Go Gators after you mention that part. Hopefully gets you a discount.

This one is going to be filthy… You’ve been warned.

The blog post I wrote earlier today really made me think.. What “ability to work on multitask” really means. Apparently it means I suck at multitasking, at least judging by ability to write a blog title and proofread it at the same time. I originally titled it “What ability to work on multiple tasks really means” but that spanned two lines so I decided to change it to “What ability to multitask really means” or so I thought. Two college degrees folks, if that doesn’t prove the value of higher education I don’t know what will.

But it does bring me to an interesting point. We work on a lot of things throughout the day. All of them urgent… to someone. Service delivery is a double-edged sword. You have to work towards the resolution as fast as possible while still keeping the client informed about what’s going on. Those are not complimentary tasks, I can either fix the problem or write to you about it. Which would you rather? I can write a blog post, I can put an announcement in Shockey Monkey, and if messed up bad enough we’re  sure to see support requests from the people that read as well as I write blog posts.

So earlier tonight I took the laptop to the bathroom and decided to make some magic.

I also wrote some code. Below is the result (of both actions) the first Shockey Monkey Slimy Vendor SuperPower (SMSVSP): MultiUpdate.

Above is the Shockey Monkey portal for Own Web Now. We’ll just assume that OWN rocks and has only two open support requests.

Show of hands - how many times have you come out of a meeting, or woke up from an afternoon nap just to see a bunch of support requests waiting for you? Wouldn’t it be nice to be slimy and just update  all those tickets  and say something like “I’m on it, I’ll have it fixed in a jiffy” even if you were just about to go back to your nap or another meeting? Effortless deception, baby.

Maybe you’re not a scumbag.. Maybe something just blew up and you’re working on it but as you’re rolling along you get 50 tickets opened up in the space of 10 minutes that it took you to gain control of the server. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to update all those  tickets that just piled on without opening a single one? That’s what MultiUpdate enables you to do! Usage is dead simple too.

Click on “click here to update multiple tickets” text at the bottom of the ticket listing section. A new container will slide into the view allowing you to type in your update, including all your canned responses. You can also use the full power of SM ticket update functions - change status/priority/resolution, include attachments, cc the update to someone else, send a survey, you name it!

Click the nasty green button at the bottom and watch in awe as you deliver exceptional service and status update to your client base in a prompt, detailed manner with a personal touch… as far as they know

It will be our little secret.

Psst, this ships in 1.99.04 this weekend. If this doesn’t shave some serious time off your day-to-day ops I don’t know what will.

One thing nearly all small businesses suck at is documentation of their inventory and processes. Unless they are a major chain managed and operated retail outfit, their documentation consists of postits and invoices kept somewhere by someone.

So what is a small business more likely to value - something overpriced that they can’t understand or value (”We defrag your Exchange store every weekend so it’s faster”) or (”We base all your technology decisions on knowing everything about your network and we’re an asset, not an expense”) - nearly all businesses have no problem paying for a cleaning crew to come through the place every night.. the same businesses that don’t want to pay for a business line T1.

So Karl says, sell them on Network Documentation.

And I shamelessly copy Karl. But many don’t. Why? It’s too hard. A document is outdated the moment that it is printed. It sits in a dusty folder on the shelf. There is a process for the process of keeping documentation.

No wonder it sucks.

Now, here is the Monkey way. Easy access, easy management, easy updates. Or so I optimistically hope. From any Shockey Monkey display select New, Documentation.

It presents the following screen to add a new document. Name and comments are self-explanatory. The email part binds the document to the particular user, it is smart and uses AJAX search to make sure the document gets associated with the right company in much the same way that your assets do.

The attachment can be marked private - hidden from the client. This is good if you are uploading documents that the clients should not be aware of or have access  to. For company eyes only you know.

Finally, where do the documents sit. Well, go to either the Company tab or the Contact tab and look under the Documentation link.

So how complex is the process of documentation management now? Well, once Karl hooks you up with the Network Documentation book, or the SLA book, or Erick’s MSP book (remember kids, theft is wrong!) and you adapt them to your business, the documentation upkeep process is simple.

1. Find the company or contact you’re working with.
2. Click to open the documentation from the web site.
3. Save changes, upload file.
4. Done.

I bet you it takes less than a minute. The documentation process magically no longer sucks anymore.

What’s more, this is something that can be sold in a number of ways. First, and most obvious one, we don’t kill a bunch of trees every time we upgrade Quickbooks for the R16th time.

Second, the data is always up to date. Where is the data? It’s under your profile in our portal. You know, that place you keep on going to so you can get our help every step of the way. That place we use to consolidate all your IT operations so we can save you money, eliminate confusion and work in an open an honest way.

The Karl way.

P.S. Always be pimping. Shameless whoring, or SMB IT leaders working together to bring you solutions designed for this market. It’s all in the perception I guess. But one thing is for sure, never ever ever take pictures with a slimy vendor when he gives you a free tshirt. You know you’re going to end up in the advertising clipart sooner than later.

One of the most important things I did with Shockey Monkey is to pick up the phone and call around the people that really had the whole SMB IT business figured out. If you are going to copy someone, you should copy the best, right?

Howard Cunningham is a widely respected Connectwise guru, not to mention one of the biggest supporters Own Web Now has ever had. Howard’s company services the Washington DC area and he works with a ton of other partners that need help with their clients DC offices - so I figured who better to talk to about ticket exports and sharing between portal than the man himself.

And being the bastard that I am, I had to ask him what he hated about his current software. One thing you learn about people and software is that the passion and frustration tend to go hand in hand - as much as you love something, you are at your wits end with the other things. So Howard shared a feature request with me that really fits in with the way that nearly all the successful IT shops out there do, and that is:

Everything is logged in the portal. EVERYTHING. It is logged when its done. If its not in the portal, it does not get done. If time is not in the portal, you do not get paid for the time.

Everyone I spoke to said that. 

(click to zoom)

Well, when you are expected to log everything and note as you go, sometimes you will find yourself without connectivity. Or a laptop. Or the mobile device signal. Or 3 acres deep in a data center Sometimes you will need to send an email directly from the portal. But how do you do that?

Well, with Shockey Monkey 2 there is an “hc” link next to the contact, click on it and the UI displays the new message window. It takes your information, allows you to provide a CC, BCC, change subject, message, everything except the attachment.

Where in the world would I use…

This is the other thing you get when you’re writing software - sometimes the feedback makes no sense to you. Why would you need a new message dialog inside of a portal, why not just open Outlook or OWA or?

• Sometimes you are at a client site and using their computer. You don’t want to connect to your own server just to send a message.
• Sometimes you are at a computer that doesn’t have Outlook or you use Outlook Web Access so copying and pasting email and ticket information from one web browser into another is just not the best use of your time.
• Sometimes you are at a shared PC / kiosk and you don’t want to put up with the 28.8 baud modem usually attached to those devices.

Made enough sense to me, so its built into SM 2. You can thank Howard for the feature.

Shockey Monkey 2.0 beta launches tomorrow at 2 PM. All portals, across all continents will be upgraded to Shockey Monkey 2.0 beta. I’m not Microsoft, beta means broken, so it is not recommended for production use but it’s better than the full release 1.0 of Shockey Monkey not to mention that the time & billing, support requests, sla and (read below) are far superior than they were before.

One bit of exciting news is that Stewart Applegate and Nick Whittome have contributed their entire internal asset/inventory management process and warranty frameworks to the Shockey Monkey. This means that what you’ll see tomorrow will be far more useful than the basic info tracking I had designed for Own Web Now and built into SM2. Now, why did Stewart and Nick so graciously donate their IP to Shockey Monkey? Because I am such a nice guy? Yes, but:

“I’d rather give you my IP and let you develop a system around it than doing it myself at my own dime.”

People are buying the dream that I’ve been selling for about two years now, feels great.

Note: The system will go online at 2 PM EST tomorrow, we will have a live IRC chatroom to handle any initial bugs and bugfixes in realtime. I don’t expect there to be a ton of broken stuff but I want to address it immediately, this beta should last a few weeks at best and most work is really feature tweaking to implement best practices.

Note 2: Signup for Shockey Monkey is still closed, there is only one way to get it at the moment but since I don’t want my weekend taken up with a few hundred applications for it, just stand by unless you know what you gotta be and which tab to look under

Note 3: Training will be painless, before you can open support cases you will be required to watch a 1 hour video that walks you through every nook and cranny of Shockey Monkey 2. There is also a word document for reference but cannot be substituted for the video. If there ever comes a point that I need a “University” to teach you how to use my software, I truly have failed as a programmer. If I need a crack team to actually make my software useful in your practice, you need to dump me, fast. Truth is, the software is as easy as humanly possible because people will not use it otherwise. You SHOULD be spending money training to become a better business and better business planner, so there is a direct relationship and escalation into the services provided by MSPU (Erick Simpson) and SMB Books (Karl Palachuk) who are without argument the best ones in this business to teach you what you need to know to succeed. Why am I such a nice guy? Because I’m selfish and I don’t want my partners being crippled or bankrupted by internal practice management software, you need to be out there making me money (getting clients that need ExchangeDefender, hosting, cloud, etc)

In case you are not following the Shockey Monkey mailing list, this is the first demo week of Shockey Monkey 2.0. Travis is taking a 100 or so partners in small groups and showing off the feature set behind some of the core functionality. And while I will not push out Shockey Monkey 2.0 beta until Sunday, we are trying to get an idea of what raises question marks.

So let me be honest with you - I understand that you’d rather have it in your hands and provide feedback after you’ve had a chance to look around. It’s live up there, why can’t I have access to it, right? Truth of the matter is, because of the volume of people on Shockey Monkey, I have no idea where to start producing a relevant training video and which parts of the system are total common sense and which are just totally confusing! This is a hedging game of support, I am trying to find out what the top questions in my support portal will be on Monday so I can provide answers to them beforehand.

Call it pre-emptive technical support if you will

OT: It works. Thanks to those of you that have put up with the first day of demos, take it with a grain of salt. This is the first time we’re doing public demo of 2.0, this is the first time someone other than myself is explaining the product, this is the first time we’re using Adobe Acrobat Connect instead of Microsoft Livemeeting, this is the uncharted, undocumented territory and unlike the other stuff on the market that requires a University and a hack team and an advisor and a consultant and six other “gurus” to put the crap together, I will frankly feel like a failure as a programmer if it took you any more than a single 1 hour video to become a master of Shockey Monkey. So again, thank you for helping me fulfill my vision.

As I mentioned yesterday, if there was ever an easy way for you to score an iPod, this is it. Below you will find three pictures. What is different about them?

I need to know specifically what difference you see.

Post a comment, three winners will be randomly chosen from the comments that get it right. I’m not looking for the numbers, so this has a medium degree of difficulty.

But hey, free iPod, and an advanced copy of SBS Show #28. Can’t beat that. 

Time has come to decommission the Shockeky Monkey mailing lists as they have more than served their purpose. Earlier today a new mailing list server has gone online and I will be moving the content/people/etc to it at some point either tomorrow or Thursday. My hope is to use the current list to drop the final release of the Shockey Outlook VSTO (different from the legacy Outlook agent designed to move contacts, convert emails to support requests, upload tasks and calendars - the 2007 one is built on Visual Studio Tools for Office and is far more robust) as well as Shockey Server (Shockey Monkey agent software for Windows platform monitoring; Rich has been working very hard on the fixes for the hung service so the system can be rebooted). So more on that today.

Today I started to wrap up the new signup management code so that portal creation, activation and branding are more automatic and reliable. I have also tested a significant portion of the migration code (Shockey Monkey 1.x to 2.x) but intend to run our paying OWN Partners by hand to minimize impact to their business operations. In case this doesn’t make sense think of it this way - who is more important than the people that pay OWN salaries? Egg-zactly.

Things are moving pretty darn quick now that everything is done. As I have mentioned before, Shockey Monkey delays are starting to make even Microsoft look good, so as this becomes professional software it will be handled as such in every way.

Today is a very proud day for me because I can finally say that Own Web Now Corp gave back in a really big way. One of the best things you can hope for in the IT business is that people love your products. Following that, one of the best feelings is having those same customers go to their peers and tell them to go sell your products and services. On the very top of that IT satisfaction pyramid is when you start working with your clients to provide solutions to their clients, when you see how your work helps people achieve some pretty remarkable things.

When you look at what you’ve created, and when you see what others are able to create because you’ve given them a few more hours in the day, or a little more money, or a little less frustration, you can’t help but to try and do more. Two years, almost to the day, I outlined the vision of truly partnering with my peers and designing the next generation of SMB IT management software. After all, with very few exceptions, we all sell a service yet we are managing our businesses with software that is geared at providing value only to the service provider, a bloated and crippled CRM product with some billing export features. We can do better than that, can’t we? But where is the incentive?

Over the past two years I have been able to team up with my partners, my clients, their clients, people that have never heard of OWN, resellers that have been with us for a decade, and design something that extends our value as a service provider to our customers. I bankrolled the project without OWNs help, wrote about 99% of the code, and got actual partners in designing this software - people ran their business on what was experimental code, people gave feedback on how to improve it, people sent me tshirt pictures from all over the world. I could not be prouder of what has come out of it.

I do have many regrets as well - I wish I didn’t do all this by myself, I wish I initially hired a bunch of people to work on it and provide better support as we went along. I am mixed on my regret because I believe we really would not have come up with the product that it is today without it being squarely on my shoulders - so while I am happy with the result, I do wish to most sincerely apologize to all my partners that missed opportunities because they trusted that I would produce something that would work for them in the long term. Again, this has been a true partnership for a lot of us, both good and bad parts of it, not onesided by a long shot. My biggest regret was not recognizing the volume and scope this project would encompass - I honestly expected maybe 100 people would sign up. Perhaps 500 tops. So I never bothered to write activation scripts, never created advanced signup forms, never really thought there would be a whole lot of people that really saw it my way. By the time I processed 2,800th portal by hand and had to go to ARIN for more IP addresses I finally gave up and shut the doors. But they are opening up again, and yes, it will be free for a while. 

So what have I done?

I will keep it simple - I have designed the software based on the requests of my partners and I have coded in every feature requested and then some.

How’s that?

I have staffed and trained the helpdesk, and you will even have a phone number to dial for sales and support assistance. I have written a lot of documentation, videos and going forward this will not be a development project, it will be professionally supported and managed software.

Further announcements on the Shockey Monkey mailing list, the new web site is scheduled to go live in a week or two. In the meantime, everyone will be upgraded to Shockey Monkey 2 and put on the new infrastructure. Oh, and if you’d like some eyecandy, here are Shockey Monkey wallpapers:

Shockey Monkey wallpapers:

Full Screen:
1024 x 768
1280 x 1024
1600 x 1200

Widescreen:
1280 x 800
1440 x 900
1680 x 1050

There is a lot of pressure to deliver a rock solid product, I thank all of you who have been in the line for the very long time giving me the chance to prefect Shockey Monkey 2. Personally, I think it was worth the wait. Over the next two weeks I will explain how Shockey Monkey and SMB Buddy fit together, what they are geared towards but if you’ve followed this blog for a while you know who I am, how I work and what my beliefs are. This is just a huge thank you to the people that have put OWN where it is today, that made ExchangeDefender a world leader, and truth of the matter is that many of us are in this for the long term and we want something that differentiates us. Simple as that.