ConnectWise PSA Reviews

MSP Help Desk (Dispatcher & Help Deskt Engineer/Tech).  Clients call, I create, assign, schedule, update...  tickets in Connectwise Manage.  As dispatcher, I only use a small percentage of the application.  85 to 90% of the form I don't even bother with, I just ignore those fields.  My job is the firefighting aspect...  all the other stuff, operations, accounting, sales, etc is all on the boss... and much of those features are available to me, but it's really too much clutter on one form, and I don't mess with it 'cause I don't have the time.

Before I joined, they used it right out of the box...  no saved queries/views...  ticket creation was never standard, and contact info was always questionable...  I created new views for lots of things I needed and got life a little more organized.  So, even w/o much training, the Views & macros lauguage used for it in the interface are GREAT. VERY Intuituve!

ConnectWise has a lot of shortcut keys, and you can manipulate the forms. This is all great stuff. If I had the time, I would create some more custom forms. There are some canned forms for basic input, like call-taking forms. When I open a new ticket, I've got a zillion fields, and only 10 apply to the current situation. I haven't taken the time to see if they have any way to import or download forms for specific situations, like forms specific to billing. I'm sure my boss doesn't want to see a form with 3,000 fields on it, and he's only interested in two of them.

I also like ConnectWise's ability to set up queries. I can set up all these different queries that look for specific things and end up with a list of results, like feedback from the client or the ticket status. There is a little thing where you can click a dropdown box. And I don't know if ConnectWise added some by default, but when I discovered this, it was like, "Wow, what a gold mine!" I usually have ConnectWise open with five to six tab screens where a specific query is the end result in each screen. I start my day, sign in, and run macros to open up my basic five or six screens to run throughout the day.

All other ticket systems can search previous tickets, whether they were homegrown in Oracle or something else. I'm talking about searching the actual contents of the discussions in the ticket. In ConnectWise, you can only search the summaries. It's ridiculous. It needs to be a usable knowledge base. I know I could probably search our ticket base and find 800 tickets for customers with the same problem. And that's the whole idea. I was always an analyst evaluating trends. If we show the data to management, we can get them to focus on certain things and make problems disappear forever. 

Also, it's nearly impossible for visually impaired people to use the ConnectWise application because there are only two modes. There is a mobile mode that is optimized for the iPhone, and it doesn't change. You can't change the font size. It's quite limiting, but I've grown used to it.

ConnectWise is really the only ticketing system that I've ever seen that ties into the money, like the billing, contacts, etc. It's a little overwhelming for a ticketing system. If I had the time, it would be nice to create custom forms. But I also made a bunch of macros that were isolating only open tickets for a particular tech. It would be awesome if there were a way to insert some form of macro language in ConnectWise, like dialogue boxes that prompt. This is the kind of stuff I used to do. It's what we call "continuous process improvements." 

I worked on the help desk many years ago, and I stepped away for about 12 years to focus more on network activity. I was working for a network provider help desk. Because I did a lot of scripting myself, I ended up developing tools to evaluate their product. So I was away from desktop support for about 12 years. During that time some of the solutions changed hands from company to company. I left that company and decided that I really like doing desktop support. I sought a job in that field. I'm not very mobile anymore, but I can work from home and have a dozen machines here. 

Well, I can't speak to what Manage's limits are. As a dispatcher on the front end of the help desk, I'm putting out fires. 

to clarify...   IT Helpdesk is the 'putting out fires'....  allot of people out in the world who need help with their PC's & laptops...    not with the ticket system of Connectwise...  that usually runs like a clock.  It's rare that we have issues with the ticket system. :)

I can't provide any honest feedback here.

The few times I've had to call, when I first joined the company...   Always excellent, professional, courtious, friendly, and efficient...   always resolved my issue or answered my questions...  I never had to wait forever, and get questioable help.  Your support team is great.

(I rate it a  '9' so you still have room for improvement...  ha ha.)

Positive

Four years ago, I started working for this gentleman who hired me primarily for my scripting skills and experience at the help desk. And when I first started, he had already owned and LabTech for a few years, but he wasn't really using it. They didn't understand how to use it, so they were only using the remote access feature. It was going to waste. After I was there a few months, I figured things out and wrote a whole flow chart for them. Then they switched to Kaseya right when I had gotten everything under control and was starting to feel good about what we could do with LabTech. Kaseya was a nightmare. It's so useless and convoluted.

A guy who was working with us unscrewed a lot of that and got Kaseya working better. But then had some security problems and had to restore. They had to go back several months in their restoration, and all of our problems returned.

I want my boss to go back to LabTech. With LabTech or Automate, one individual with minimal training and a certain amount of focus could manage 400 different clients with special setups. I loved it. It was the first time Ihad been introduced to anything like it. I'd been away from desktop support for 12 years. So when I saw things like that, I was like, "Holy moly, you guys have remote access to everybody? Wow." 

Remedy is another option. I haven't used it in years, but Remedy was the ticket system I used at another company. At another place, they tried to make their own database ticketing system with Lotus Notes and Oracle. Oracle's ticketing system is homebrew. They give you a bunch of stuff out of the box, and you have to hire a development team to make it usable.

The whole ticketing system was already in place when I was hired. We've had some other changes to the operations structure. I don't know if we changed providers or it went from on-premise to the cloud or something, but there was a lot of funny stuff going on. 

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I was never involved in the choice...   always on the tail end as a user or admin.

I'd rate ConnectWise Manage nine out of 10. It's the utility that I have to use.