Command Control Power: Apple Tech Support & Business Talk

Apple Consultants Network members Joe Saponare, Sam Valencia and Jerry Zigmont discuss working with Apple technology and clients in their consulting practices. Technical challenges and client relationships are freely shared in this weekly podcast.

Congrats to the Mac Admins Foundation on their successful launch!

We were honored to be joined by several board members of the Mac Admins foundation including returning guests Tom Bridge and Rich Trouton, and new voice Chris Dawe.

The Mac Admins Slack workspace currently serves almost 50,000 members, with approximately 5,000 monthly active members. Beyond providing for the use of community tools like the Mac Admins Slack workspace, the mission of the Mac Admins Foundation is to foster connections, share and preserve knowledge, protect the the independence of the community, and maintain broad accessibility to all community resources.

Tom Bridge is the Principal Product Manager for Apple Technologies at JumpCloud. He is also the producer of the Mac Admins Podcast. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife Tiffany, their son Charlie, and large cat, Macro. Prior to joining JumpCloud, he was a partner at Technolutionary LLC, where he managed IT operations for more than 60 Mac-focused businesses, including the 9:30 Club, Arcadia, Navanti Group, and more.

Rich Trouton has been doing Macintosh system and server administration for over twenty years and has supported Macs in a number of different environments, including university, government, medical research, advertising and enterprise software development. His current position is at SAP, where he works with the rest of the Apple@SAP team to support SAP's Apple community. Rich has also written for Peachpit, Apress and MacTech Magazine on various ways to manage Apple devices.

Chris Dawe is a consultant specializing in Apple technologies and networking. A partner in Seattle-area consultancy Wheelwrights, Chris manages systems for a variety of businesses, speaks regularly on industry topics such as Wi-Fi and IT management, and helps lead the Shadowy Cabal running the regional meetup group Apple Admins of Seattle and the Great Northwest.

Command Control Power has reached our 9th anniversary! We have been recording new episodes every week since June of 2013. We are very appreciative of our Patrons and over the next month or so, we are going to do something a little different to show our appreciation.

We will be airing new shows every week on the private Patreon feed. On the public show we will re-air a classic episode from our catalog of almost 500 episodes, along with the occasional new show. Become a Patron today for access to the freshest content, get a peek behind the scenes, and more candid conversations about running our businesses, dealing with clients and fixing tough technical issues.

An extended water cooler chat with Jerry, Sam, and Joe, discussing issues facing new ACN members, featuring tips from seasoned pros.

- Gary Hustwit, director of the Helvetica and Objectified documentaries tweeted that the correct pronunciation of Helvetica Neue is "noya"

- Command-Control-power "Have you tried restarting?" first generation shirts funded!

- hybrid Managed Services offerings; Joe's "Tech Checkup", Sam's "Wellness Visits"; Jerry's offering periodic monthly maintenance to check backups, check disks, run updates; discounted rate when paying for six or twelve months in advance

- the advantages of sporting an Apple logo onsite and in public; whether or not to advertise on your car; great sources for logo merchandise aside from the ACN-direct options: Zuse, Queensboro

- Apple Professional Services; operating as an arm of Apple; how to get involved with APS? face time with Apple, building a reputation over time

- Francois Daumard, formerly heading up Mobile Technology Competency at Apple in the Apple Consultants Network, left Apple a couple of weeks ago to join Fiberlink, sellers of MaaS360, a cloud-based Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution

- Apple Remote Desktop frustrations; Jerry coins a phrase for dealing with the black screen of doom: "cleaning the windshield"

"There's just these big black chunks of blocks and you have to open up a new Finder window and drag it around to have it clean the windshield." – Jerry

- Passenger

Apple Consultants Network members Joe Saponare, Sam Valencia and Jerry Zigmont discuss working with Apple technology and clients in their consulting practices. Technical challenges and client relationships are freely shared in this weekly podcast.

-Sam finds some Monterey changes difficult on his quest to be more efficient.

-Jerry uses Daylite exclusively for Reminders.

-Joe likes the Things app

-Intermittently. Sam’s reminders would stop appearing on his Mac. A setting in Notifications & Focus

-Back in his teens, Sam recalls the time he started up his own “reminder service”.

-Joe was using Terminal tools like ioreg to detect things like if a Mac is in clamshell mode.

-Poor care for laptops leads to screen or hinge breaks.

-Troubleshooting Magic Keyboard issues led to a simple upgrade being required.

-Sam is learning a lot more about Google Workspace and its MDM restrictions.

-Jerry poses the question about what cloud services to recommend to small clients.

-During a 1Password migration for his family, Sam moved a little too fast and deleted his wife’s private vault.

-Safari is causing Sam some greif and Jerry has advice.

-Private Relay and Addigy Live Desktop don’t play nice together in Joe’s experiment.

-confusion ensues for how and where to disable these privacy features.

-One of Jerry’s clients compares him to their “technical guys” at work.

Command Control Power has reached our 9th anniversary! We have been recording new episodes every week since June of 2013. We are very appreciative of our Patrons and over the next month or so, we are going to do something a little different to show our appreciation.

We will be airing new shows every week on the private Patreon feed.  On the public show we will re-air a classic episode from our catalog of almost 500 episodes, along with the occasional new show. Become a Patron today for access to the freshest content, get a peek behind the scenes, and more candid conversations about running our businesses, dealing with clients and fixing tough technical issues.

-What is a Windows NUC?

-Jerry had to reconstruct a network and struggled with the guest network.

-Another Jerry networking story, he struggles with a network setup and Comcast/Xfinity cable modem.

-Billing for essentially observing a situation can be an uncomfortable to bill full rate for.

-Sam also had to deal with an ISP issue with an old client. Turned out to be a billing issue.

-Not to be left out, Joe has an ISP story of his own.

-During a recent fiber upgrade at Sam’s own house, he runs into a set of issues and runarounds from the ISP.

-Do you accept direct emails and texts from customers?

-Zendesk macros are handy. As well as smith.ai chat bot features.

-A client from a decade ago re-engaged with Sam. A lot had changed since then as he wasn’t even an MSP back then.

-Adobe’s Creative Cloud sharing functions are terrible yet they don’t support other cloud services or on-site servers.

-Sam ordered AirPods Pro on Amazon and thought he got “Jerry’d”.

Command Control Power has reached our 9th anniversary! We have been recording new episodes every week since June of 2013. We are very appreciative of our Patrons and over the next month or so, we are going to do something a little different to show our appreciation.

We will be airing new shows every week on the private Patreon feed.  On the public show we will re-air a classic episode from our catalog of almost 500 episodes, along with the occasional new show. Become a Patron today for access to the freshest content, get a peek behind the scenes, and more candid conversations about running our businesses, dealing with clients and fixing tough technical issues.

-We kick around our thoughts on WWDC and hardware releases.

-Jerry is quoted in an article about his thoughts on WWDC 2022.

-What are your thoughts on the latest Messages updates?

-Small Cubed could get “Sherlocked” with the latest Mail announcements. They quickly made an announcement: https://smallcubed.com/support/ventura/

-Joe wants custom Tapbacks.

-Texting with clients comes back up.

-We would love to hear from anybody using Apple Business Chat.

-Back to Mail Cubed, Jerry used Send Later and had another incident of messages disappearing before being sent.

-In a recent TidBITS Content Network article, they discuss iCloud shared folders and the extremely dangerous behavior of deleting items.

-While discussing the very welcome shared Photos library feature, Jerry warns us that all users will have full edit/delete capabilities.

-Screen sharing with some clients can be so infuriating at times.

-When you direct a client to restart to resolve an issue and it’s clear they have not, what’s the best way to address that?

This week on Command Control Power, we are featuring a patron only show for our supporters. If you are already subscribed on Patreon, you will find this show in your private podcast feed. To sign up and get instant access to special features like this one and several other Patreon only episodes, visit us at our Patreon support page and become a patron. For our general audience, we are featuring a classic episode from our catalog of nearly 500 episodes. We hope you enjoy it.

-Sam talks about his recovery from Covid.

-Some personal experiences and opinions are shared.

-Joe shares a sneak peak of an offering for Patrons. A Numbers based tool based on Watchman Monitoring reports with customized output.

-What monthly MSP plan works for you? Do monthly services work for residential clients?

-Jerry has abandoned the “monitoring only” approach since most clients ignored the alerts.

-Raising rates. Is it the right time or the wrong time?

-How do your phrase a rate change to clients?

-Joe has an update on using his new Synology with Synlogy Central Management System. After digging around with notifications, he was frustrated. Thanks to Dan Monge of Mac IT Pros for the tip to look at the client Synology notifications as there is an additional CMS column.

-PsiMac charges a monthly service fee for network management.

-“Don’t be afraid to charge the client” -Jerry Zigmont

-A pesky client calls Jerry multiple times as he racking up his Smith.ai bill.

-Someone that needed help and Joe spent some time diagnosing, decides to try and migrate data on her 10 year old computer on her own.

-Jerry expresses concerns about working with customers that have 10 year old equipment and the risks that come with it.

-For new clients, Joe standardizes on getting a system report from Watchman Monitoring.

-PSA - BackBlaze keeps your historical data for only 30 days by default.

-Keeping old hardware for cost saving reasons can end up costing people in the end as the labor to upgrade can be extended due to aging equipment.

-Joe brings up finding better ways to manage automatic updates across different hardware/software.

-UniFi updates seem to handle rolling updates well.

-This week we welcome back Jason Dettbarn. Founder and CEO of Addigy

-There has been a 50% growth in the MSP sector and they are banking on this sector.

-We talk Apple Business Essentials and it’s coexisting with a third party MDM like Addigy.

-This is also contributing to fixing the foundational changes needed.

-Addigy has a big training arm.

-Jason discusses providing tools to migrate MDM vendors.

-Addigy uses Gainsight to understand and react to customer satisfaction levels.

-Joe & Sam talk about how managing software updates has become more challenging.

-Jason’s team is working hard on InTune compliance and Okta integration.

-Addigy was named one of Inc. Magazine’s Best Places to Work