Greetings from France! Things have been crazy at work over the past two months and to be honest, I’m just not one of those people that can unplug. IT is very much who I am and it’s far more than a job or a career for me – it’s just the way of life. So since I can’t unplug the next best thing is to travel to a place where I can’t plug in a laptop.

Over the past few months we have been really hard at work on Shockey Monkey, coding and bug fixing, wheeling and dealing. And now that work has been completed I have only one recommendation:

I wouldn’t buy the Pro. Just sign up for the free one. But that’s just me.

A year ago we shocked the MSP world by giving away Shockey Monkey – an MSP service management platform – for free. For some of the more advanced and more vain features we offered a commercial platform as well (Pro) to folks that wanted to help us fund the development and get support along the way. It has gone far, far, far, far, far better than I ever thought it would.

The problem with all great things is that they all come to an end and most of the time it’s due to the arrogance of the people that confuse success with invincibility. Europe is littered with empires that conquered the continent, just to end up confined to a tiny fraction of itself when they didn’t recognize the change or became too greedy. Even the mighty empire that built the massive victory arc behind me in the picture once covered nearly all of Europe – before deciding it would be a good idea to attack Russia. In Russia. In the winter.

But in terms of my own empire, Shockey Monkey has been more successful and became bigger than I ever thought it would. We’ve been busting our butt to bring the new one out and as we’ve been working with a ton of new partners one question that always came up was: “So when are you going to jack up the price and eliminate the Free/Fro versions? It would instantly put you on the same level with your competitors and be a no-brainer.”

The answer to that comes in October – but I have to stress that the following is my opinion, my opinion only and does not represent the views of the employees, shareholders or anyone even remotely connected to my empire – I wouldn’t buy the Pro version of Shockey Monkey.

Stay tuned.

It’s been a few months since I’ve offered you an update on Shockey Monkey. Since last fall the product has been very solid and in a few months we will be celebrating our first birthday!

Over the past few months I’ve been ignoring overjoyed by the amount of interest for Shockey Monkey among software vendors. To be honest, I believe Arnie Bellini (of ConnectWise) deserves more credit for that than I do, but I will take the compliment. While I have listened to some offers (mostly VC) I have not seriously considered any for one simple reason: Shockey Monkey is about you, not us. That’s why it’s free. We’ve helped more people enter the MSP business without spending a dime than I think anyone else around and it’s been my way of saying thanks for putting ExchangeDefender on the map. Personally and truly.

What does one thing have to do with the other? Well, shortly after launching Shockey Monkey many of you told us that in order for it to fit in your portfolio it had to play nicely with the stuff you’ve already invested your money in (primarily RMMs) – so the focus of the first quarter and second quarter has been on developing integrations rather than stuff from Vlad-thinks-this-would-be-cool™ pile.

Which is not as easy as it appears. It’s like dating. When you’re in kindergarten. It’s hard to make a case for someone to integrate with you when you’ve been on the market for 8 months. Yet folks took a chance on us.

I’m happy to report that you’ll see some major integration announcements soon (some are kind of obvious since we’ve actually been at their conferences to demo the product).

Now…

Over the next month or so I’ll be going to three different countries to talk to potential suitors that have shown interest in Shockey Monkey. I think our solution has a lot of potential outside of the PSA marketplace and I want to explore some ideas about my opinion of where the MSP marketplace is going with the cloud.

Like I said, much of the interest has come on the back of the moves ConnectWise has made with their investment portfolio. With each bag of cash they drop, the more complete their solution becomes (which now includes a world class PSA, RMM and a quoting tool) and comparatively puts the other competitors at a disadvantage.

You can’t hate capitalism.

But if you compete with what they acquired you also can’t stand still and just stay in your comfort zone of the solution you’ve developed because the client now expect more than just a point solution and a token integration.

It’s really not so different than the world that the solution providers find themselves in – you’ve got to be the jack of all trades.

Like I’ve said before, we’re not going to be competing with ConnectWise, Autotask or anyone else. I feel they are in an entirely different league and frankly I don’t have the budget nor the motivation to help people learn how to run and build an MSP. My business is the cloud.

But if the licensing of our technology can help fund monkey’s development, bring some features to the market faster, reduce or eliminate the fee for the Pro feature set and help many aspiring MSPs and VARs step up their game… that’s good news for me, you and by tangent even ConnectWise and Autotask. With every Shockey Monkey portal out there, the pool of clients looking for a PSA grows, the utilization and time billing is improved, spending on supporting MSP tools increases and our entire MSP community ultimately benefits.

Or I’m dead friggin wrong and Shockey Monkey is still free to you just for the asking

Who loves ya, baby?

Key to a successful IT business is communication. At times, marketing does a better job than technical support does in communicating technical events – mostly because marketing has a heads up and technical support is our version of FEMA.

At Own Web Now we offer phone support, online support through Shockey Monkey and we also offer a digital NOC blog. We do not and never will offer email notifications of outages – our primary service is email so sending an email to someone hosted on a server that is experiencing technical issue would border on ridicule.

What we have encountered in our experience is that at times we are just not fast enough at alerting our clients and partners when there are technical issues. The person with the knowledge of what is going on may be the one updating the NOC blog or we may be alerting about issues minutes after the issue has been identified and tickets have started pouring in. Crisis management is tough.

Shockey Monkey Dashboards

We have made a conscious decision that all our systems development going forward must be tied to Shockey Monkey. So even though we’re writing a system for us, we will build it inside Shockey Monkey and share it with all of you for free.

What’s the catch? Well, we hope you know better than us and are willing to share something we may be overlooking.

Click on the image above for a brief overview of what we want to build. Most of it is a lunchtime doodle but here is the summary.

Overall goal – Tied into Shockey Monkey. Provide an API for it from the getgo, allow the partners to customize it and tweak it because everyone has their take on the dashboard.

Issue reporting – Allow the user entering the issue to provide the time and date. The two should support fakery – after all if you’re reporting an issue that has been around for 30 minutes the users should be told when the problem started – ideally I’d like it to show the entire interval of an issue so that users reporting problems will know if it’s related. I would like to list a severity of the issue – I could care less if we’re experiencing performance issues but you better tell me when stuff is on fire. Allow updates to be provided and allow quick creation and updates – I want to be able to let people know we’re working on stuff quickly – but I also want to update them as we go along. I want the ability to remove things as well, if an update was incorrect I don’t want it leading to confusion. Finally, I want canning. We do this for OWN support and abuse the canned update system to it’s fullest – the update should be quick, approved and let the staff focus on addressing the problem not massaging the issue notice.

Subscriptions – Who cares about the issue? Shockey Monkey is used widely – both by businesses that manage their own IT and IT Solution Providers. Some systems are used for external alerting, the others for internal alerting. So the flexibility of displaying this information should be key. I’d like to be able to embed the monitoring dashboard in a web page, in an email, in a sidebar of a blog and I want it to send notifications. I for one will never allow email alerts – but you don’t run the kind of business I run so maybe the email reports are critical to you.

We have been disappointed looked at the dashboards used in our industry and we just did not see something that fit our need. To be specific:

We need an elegant, time efficient and portable dashboard system for internal and external alerts.

So.. what’s missing? Let me know via comments, email (vlad@vladville.com) or chime in at the forums at www.shockeymonkey.com/jungle (must be a current Shockey Monkey user, though the software itself is free)

Before I even begin talking about how much we’ve simplified your life, I need to extend some thanks. I would like to thank Vince Tinnirello of Anchor Network Solutions in Denver, Colorado and Howard Cunningham of Macro Systems LLC serving Washington DC and North Virginia markets. Both guys run very successful MSPs that have worked with us at ExchangeDefender for years and I endorse them wholeheartedly. But! I have no words to explain how badass they are: Neither of them uses Shockey Monkey, but they both took the time out of their busy day to share their expertise and talk about what a perfect world would look like in the billable time automation universe.

How sick is that? When was the last time you got a CEO of an organization to drop what he was doing to offer you free advice?

Sick.

I hope the feeling you get reading this stuff comes even a small way towards understanding why we give Shockey Monkey away for free and help so many small IT businesses worldwide get to that next level.

I hope that this, in a small way, goes towards our legacy of helping small businesses win. Good karma, baby! Happy Holidays.

Now, Shockey Monkey Billable Time Automation. You suck at documenting time – you’re among friends (we’ll have a solution outlined and published in Q1 to help along with that by the way) – but once you have it documented, how do you make it pretty and never miss a penny that you’re due for your hard work?

P.S. Last week I outlined the process of how we do our design – check that out then look at the finished product. Who cares? Well, we do this for our service and solution layouts too – remember to DRAW!!!!

Say hello to Shockey Monkey Billable Time Automation:

As promised, we are bringing you Time Billing automation to Shockey Monkey before Christmas. It is live now and available to all Shockey Monkey portals for free. It automates the process of billable time entry review, approval and invoice creation. We worked very hard to make it simple and intuitive, please click on the screenshots for a better view.

How does it work?

The automation of billable time is quite simple and a core part of the Shockey Monkey automation. Just click on Accounting and select the Billable Time tab.

Here you will see all of your time entries that need to be reviewed and approved. Under the company dropdown you can filter by the companies that have (uninvoiced) billable time waiting for review.

Each billable time entry is here and can be edited – notes, time, rates – everything can be changed. Because what you approve here will end up on the invoice we wanted to give you a single screen to review activity, correct spelling mistakes, correct time entries and make the necessary adjustments.

Make the necessary adjustments. In our discussions with many of you, adjustments play a big part of your accounting so we wanted to make it a single-screen effort without refreshing and popup windows.

Once you’re done with your approval, just add it to the invoice. This is where it gets tricky – it depends on how you bill and when you bill. Some bill at the beginning of the month and add the hours to the invoice that has the managed services fee. Some bill one week at a time and have a new invoice every time. Some separate time and materials. Some do it at the end of the month. However you do it, Shockey Monkey will work.

Select if you want to add the time to an existing invoice (if you prefer to give people a single invoice with everything on it) or create a new invoice. The screen below illustrates how to add the time entry to an invoice.

You can make adjustments to the invoice as usual, add any other items and work from there.

According to several of our partners, “this makes Shockey Monkey accounting actually usable now” as it completely automates the billing process for a lot of service providers that do hourly or project work. It is also flexible enough to let you clean up the mess that is inevitable when you’re pressed for time and not taking full notes. It also adjusts well when you want to make your invoices fair.

We are making it available free, to everyone. Right….. now

For full details and the feature walkthrough as well as the business case scenarios, please check out the quick videos Hank and I put up for your enjoyment.

Shockey Monkey Billable Time – 17 minutes

Shockey Monkey Billable Time Automation (Windows Media, wmv)

Shockey Monkey Billable Time Automation (Apple Quicktime, mov)

Happy Holidays.

If you are still reading all this – and not signed up for the free Shockey Monkey – seriously? Merry Christmas from me, go put the monkey under your corporate Christmas tree (or whichever religious or atheist ritual you celebrate this season)!

On Tuesday, I will be presenting our roadmap for 2011.

It’s basically the biggest show of the year.

Last year we used it to launch ExchangeDefender 5. This year, we are announcing our new business plans.

First of all, a disclaimer: There are no changes to what we are doing or to our products. Your pricing, service and support will remain the same.

Beyond that, lot’s of new stuff. Here are a few hints:

1. Lower cost version of ExchangeDefender.
2. New third party company offering Exchange 2010 and on-premise SPAM filtering solution licensed from OWN (think BPOS, cheaper)
3. New “managed” solution.

Of course, the devil is in the details and I will share those with you on Tuesday at 1 PM. We are responding to the demand from our partner base. There are basically two new types of partners that have come out of this entire cloud shakeout:

1. Those with really solid business models – that want to add on the cloud but don’t want to manage it. This leaves room for our premium offering that will be managed and billed end to end under our partners branding.
2. Those that think the cloud is a commodity and are willing to ignore it but don’t want to lose their clients to Google or Microsoft. This leaves room for a bare bones Exchange offering to move the more essential messaging to the cloud while everything else stays in place.

We are kind of at a point where the cloud is no longer a discussion point at all, it’s a part of business model and partners have to choose what to do with it: ignore it (and lose), embrace it (and take their chances), embrace it somewhat (and try to live on smaller margins) or embrace it shoulder length (and just keep the clients).

In the end, it’s all about the clients needs, and you’ve seen what I’ve done in 2010. We’re built a world class CRM platform with Shockey Monkey absolutely free to help people manage their cloud services under their name / brand / pricing. Then we added Looks Cloudy, a blog to cover the cloud deployment strategies and considerations. We also rolled out Monkey Remote to enable remote support and monitoring.

Next, we introduce the actual support and service no matter where you are on the scale.

Our business model for 2011 is simple: We will only focus on messaging. Yes, we do a ton of backup business, a lot of security, virtual servers, dedicated servers, SharePoint, etc. At this point though, it’s make it or break it time and with the economy still struggling and record unemployment we can bring in the rest of the services later. But if we cannot address the most critical part of their business immediately, we may as well just close the doors and try to tell ourselves that being an Apple Genius still makes us an IT professional and not a slimy 201X version of the 90’s beeper salesman.

For the past two weeks we’ve been collecting input on the vital missing piece of Shockey Monkey Accounting that we’ve promised to everyone by Christmas. I spoke to Santa today and he said that it will definitely be under the Christmas tree. So what is this big hole?

Until now, the process of getting time & materials from tickets to invoices was a manual one.

This means that even though there was an ability to enter time, expenses, etc into the ticket, the process of getting those time entries into the invoice was not pretty or automated.

Today, we finalized the process by which time makes it into an invoice, which will be part of Shockey Monkey Accounting available for free. While the process itself is not all that exciting, the development and feature process might be. So here we go.

How do you bill?

We decided to ask some of our higher profile people, both on Shockey Monkey and elsewhere. Just how does the process of getting money for un-MSP work. Keep in mind that most MSPs are like this – yeah they have MSP contracts but they make a bulk of their revenues from onsite visits, project work, time and materials, etc.

So, when do you bill? Some bill on demand – anytime they need money. Some do it at the beginning of the month. Some do it at the end of the month. Some do it weekly. Some do it depending on how much they are billing their biggest customer.

And how do you separate invoices? Some put everything on a single bill. Some separate MSP and T&M. Some separate everything.

I see, and what do you put on your invoices? Ticket number. Oh, and a subject. Oh, and a ticket description. Oh, and a time entry interval. Oh, and the notes. And everything! Well, except if everything makes it seem like the description doesn’t meet the number of hours required.

So that’s it, you just send the ticket time entries to the invoice? Well, yeah. Except we like to edit and tweak the hours because we may not bill everything if it took much longer than it should have. Or if we messed up and it took so long because we didn’t know what we were doing. So we like to adjust it. Oh, and we also add time if we didn’t add time before because we need something to bill. Or if we forgot to enter the time.

As you can tell, it varies. If there is only one word I could use to describe the typical MSP billing cycle it would be: criminal random. The problem with “random” is that random events cannot trigger automated functions – you need to have a predictable set of inputs in order to come out with a predictable system by which things are done. If you don’t – and you make stuff up on the fly – the result is very similar. What’s worse, it’s nearly impossible for anyone to navigate “the way I like to do things” because opinions vary.

For us, in order for something to be easy it has to be predictable and fit a certain pattern. So here is how we work this.

Step 1: Put it on the board

First part in getting anything together is to draw it up on the board. We can be very creative when it comes to just talking – but process of drawing things up allows us to see things that just don’t fit for one reason or another. Everything “sounds good” depending on who is selling it, but it has to look good too. Even if it sounds ugly, sometimes the drawings help us fill in the blank as we go along.

Fundamentally, the reason you draw stuff is to be able to organize things.

Step 2: Organize

Once all the ideas are on the wall, it’s easy to group those ideas into logical steps. This is where user experience comes to the front because we are approaching our ideas from the angle of a clueless user: “If someone has never used our software, could they figure out what was going on?”

The answer better be yes. This is typically represented in a form of breadcrumbs on web sites, there is a starting point and a finish – along with steps in between. Where do our individual features fit in this tree?

This is pretty critical because our “wishlist” includes everything – but the reality is that we have to make sacrifices to get it done. Which means picking and choosing.

Step 3: Cut & Sell Dreams

Once we know how our desired features will play a part of the finished product, we start from the inside out. What is the core feature that you cannot live without? That one better work!

Now that we have the core feature, what sort of nuances play a part in it? Are there any flexibilities we can allow for in this feature and how is it controlled or can it be modified externally?

It’s important to answer these questions because it’s typically ridiculously difficult to go back to this step after you’re done. Think of it as a foundation for the stack of cards – you can rearrange the top layers without much trouble but if you knock things down at the bottom of the pyramid you will have to rebuild all the levels above it.

“Imagination: Dreams of people that don’t have to do any real work.” – Vlad Mazek, 2010

This has a lot of what-if’s. What if we did this? Wouldn’t it be cool to do that? How about this? – this stage in the process lets us pile on features we couldn’t quite fit before because we didn’t know how the whole thing would look in the first place. Now that we have a better picture, we can pick things up.

Remember: No real work has been done yet. You can go back and forth between drawings. 0 lines of code have been written. It’s all just hot air (and some dry erase marker) so feel free to go back and forth, ask people for input or suggestions.

Once you’re all doodled out, talk about what gets done now. What gets done in a month. Year. Never (In Vladville, 2 weeks = never)

Step 4: Write

Now you’ve got your blueprint. Draw it up in the UI (or if you’re not writing software, ask for input based on your sketches). You should have something pretty close to the finished product at this point:

Remember, you work from inside out.

But you present from the outside in.

For example, I’m showing you the bull@#%$ of how we come up with this stuff and what it’s going to do for you. Someone else has to get the actual process of moving the time into an invoice and prep it for a Quickbooks export.

Step 5:

Any questions?

P.S. Key to your success in steps 1-4 (and especially #5, because it takes a LOT of Free Monkey love to buy a Ducati) is involving people. If you are the designer, painter and creator of the whole masterpiece then you’re really only showing a part of it – part that you care about. The key in getting from step #4 to step #5 is getting enough people in the process so that you can fit your solution to solve their problems.

Seasons greetings!

I’ve been having an argument with my sales monkey over trying to make Shockey Monkey simpler, particularly the accounting side of things. I’ve pretty much sunk all of his attempts to try to further dumb things down because of one clear concept:

There is no cure for stupidity.

Empowering idiots doesn’t make them smarter, it makes them needy and demanding.

For example, we have the simplest way to bill for cloud services in the industry.

We also have the full documentation for it here.

Every single process, step by step, on how to create, manage and even export to Quickbooks.

The problem? “When they click on the accounting screen they don’t know how to get started.”

Did they read the manual? “No, in this day and age nobody reads.”

Did they watch the video? “No, the video is too long.”

Well, tough #@%. We have a corporate responsibility to keep inept lazy people that can’t or won’t read documentation away from IT. Yes, I am all for making intuitive interfaces and live loading search results and eliminating popups and making people efficient.

Simplicity in software design does not and should not compensate for ignorance and laziness when it comes to documentation and training. Just as a child can’t open a bottle of Tylenol or start a chainsaw, neither should a piece of software be used without understanding the underlying business concepts.

It’s going to be a busy quarter for us so I wanted to make some of these announcements personally and provide some background on them all.

ConnectWise / HTG / CharTec Conference

Next week we are sponsoring the cluster of conferences happening in Orlando. ExchangeDefender will be as present as ever so stop by our booth, hear about the new stuff we’re doing and get some swag. ExchangeDefender has grown by leaps and bounds in 2010 and we’re adding even more stuff to it.

However, I will not be there in an official capacity. This is mostly personal – I have a second kid on the way and frankly, I like my wife more than you. I know this comes as a crushing defeat to so many balding middle aged men, but.. yeah.. awkward. But! I will be there if anyone wants to meet with me. Just fill out this survey:

Meet Vlad:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RPTBRYC

With the exception of Wednesday, I can make a trip down at any time since the hotel is about 15 minutes from where I live.

ExchangeDefender Rebranding

As we keep on growing and doing more and more to make our friends successful, promoting the Own Web Now business is becoming difficult with so many different brands. Most people can’t reconcile the fact that we do so much stuff in the cloud yet still provide so much on-premise service (Microsoft has the same problem).

So we’re considering rebranding it. If you have a moment, please fill this out.

Shockey Monkey

I don’t know what I was thinking about when I figured out the business model for Shockey Monkey but at this point it has turned into a beast. It is far bigger than we thought and the amount of excitement for the product is beyond anything I ever expected.

I have paid a lot of attention to the feedback, to the requests and to the need that the marketplace has for the unPSA solution. I hear you. You need to see this:

Shockey Monkey’s Big Webcast Announcement & Developments

Join the Shockey Monkey webinar next Wednesday at 11:30 AM. It will only take about 30 minutes:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/371920033

It’s only the biggest Shockey Monkey announcement since it launched.

So in conclusion: let me know if you want to meet, fill out the ExchangeDefender survey, sign up for the Shockey Monkey webcast and wish me luck

If it’s easy, everyone will go for it.

Only a small fraction of people appreciate the benefits that can be realized from complexity and the true power that comes from being able to completely fine tune everything to perfection.

Most people aren’t perfectionists.

Make it simple to use and obtain.

Make it easy to understand.

Make it relate to their problems and frustrations of everything they have seen so far.

Experienced skepticism aside, people appreciate “free” beyond anything else.

. . .

These lessons, which much like any business book are just common sense, are seriously starting to make me reconsider how we manage the sales, distribution and positioning of all our products.

Question being, how quickly can you expect to see ExchangeDefender or Exchange hosting provided for free?

I still haven’t quite put the finishing touches on the masterpiece that will be the “Vladville Launch of Shockey Monkey” – stay tuned for that. Launching it to my fans isn’t quite as easy as hiring a PR company and going to a trade show. Mostly because you know the truth. It’s hard shadowing over “If I spent less time writing funny blog posts maybe this thing would have launched 2 years ago”

We are still tweaking and perfecting things on a daily basis and taking massive amounts of feedback that I intend to take most of this week to fully collect, process with the team and offer manageable, reasonable timelines and expectations. Given the Duke Nukem history of this piece of software, I hope you can all appreciate the extra caution I’m using in putting things out there.

Below is a portion of the newsletter I sent out to my partners on Friday – they were the first to hear since I wrote it for them. If you’re curious, please hop on in. If you’re a competitor, join in as well – since the official launch of Shockey Monkey I’ve received no less than a dozen “you beat us to it” emails so this place is about to get a lot more crowded.

Tune in.

Check it out.

Hopefully it’s funny.

If you can, aim for the noon webcasts. I actually have content for those. The midnight ones are just me getting drunk followed by an hour of of Arnie and The Siols of Chaos tribute band featuring the hits from ZZ Top’s Sharp Dressed Man to Simon & Garfunkel – The Sound of Ping Silence from a dead SAN.

…

I know sometimes folks don’t like to read. I’ve got your back. And just to show you how much I believe in this, I will be talking about it live next week. But wait, there’s more. I will double that offer – if you can’t make it Monday at noon, I will do another presentation Wednesday at noon. Tune in and let me show you all the awesome things this is going to do for your business. Here are schedules that are hopefully convenient to all my American and European partners.

United States & Europe
Mon, Aug 16, 2010 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EDT
Register Now!
Wed, Aug 18, 2010 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
Register Now!

But what.. there’s more! What about Australia? That’s 2 AM my time Vlad!!! What about us? If you sign up for a webinar right now, I will stay up till 1 AM to talk to you too! Here are the Aussie webinars.

Tue, Aug 17, 2010 12:00 AM – 1:00 AM EDT
(Tuesday, 2PM in Sydney)
Register Now!
Thu, Aug 19, 2010 12:00 AM – 1:00 AM EDT
(Thursday, 2PM in Sydney)
Register Now!