LabTech RMM software is a great find, and we are very happy with the feature rich tool set, and limitless monitoring capabilities. We look forward to growing with LabTech. Their implementation team and tech support have been outstanding with the migration process assistance, and while change does take time and patience, they have worked through the majority of the kinks to completion, without any hesitancy. Thanks to LabTech, we expect to be back in growth mode, now that we have great RMM tools. Thanks LabTech Team!

Worst experience of my life. Everyone has a horror story about some phone company, some restaurant, some taxi driver, whatever. SOS is my horror story.

My needs in the beginning were:
rebranded backup
exchange, sql and virtual plug-ins
high level of support, to help me learn the ropes

Pretty simple, right?

First problem: the method used for caching means that the cache store is almost as big as the backup itself! Massive problems with storage on large backups.

Second problem: noone available to help me/ not getting back to me soon enough to resolve issues.

Third problem: "Oh, you need additional software for brick level exchange backups"

Summary of many problems since then: 20GB upload limit. Big uploads can take days, interfering with work. No option for manual seeding. No option for emergency HDD recovery....

Maybe it's better if you actually LIVE in america, but this is not suitable for australia.

Corporate Backup were my last resort after a number of broken promises and awful software from other, supposedly reputable vendors. I wish I'd gone to them first.

They made some big claims over the phone, but after 4 weeks of trialing it was obvious that they could do everything they said they could do!

Files, system state, exchange, active directories, exchange, SQL, VMware, HyperV to start with,
plus file sharing capabilities, online signup for my clients....

Best software I've ever purchased. hands down.

P.S I've only used the windows version, but I'm sure the Mac version is good too :)

We have been with LabTech Software since 2008, and I must say the 2012 release and the offerings/services around it are the BEST offerings they've brought to the table thus far. The product upgrades itself is nothing short of amazing. UI changes, enhanced speed, tunneling stability, are just a few things that have really made a huge difference in our usage of the product, and overall perception of how great their product is, and not only how far they've already come - but where they are going - and in the right way…

Other vendors could take a lesson from this up and coming pioneer of the RMM space, because it's very evident they are listening to their Partner base, and making changes to their processes and products based on the needs of the Partner base. Their Support, Documentation, and Training resources are more fortified than I've ever seen in the past, and the few questions we've had have been dealt with swiftly, correctly, and with the professional courtesy one should expect from a software provider. Another lesson other vendors could learn from.

We are ecstatic about what they've brought to the table across the board, and can't wait for the next innovations that will directly make me more successful - and not just a competition to have newest technologies that you often see everywhere else.

Keep it up Matt and Greg - you've done some incredible things in a very short period of time.

Between the much needed interface tweaks, the single pane BDR management, MDM, the Ignite service for helping new MSPs get immediate value right out of the box, to the stuff that's coming down the pipeline (TBA) the guys at LabTech are killing it!

I've heard grumblings about poor support, but let's seriously put that into perspective - just what, 3 years ago, LabTech had I think 7 employees? Now they are over 130 and have the backing of Connectwise to not only propel them financially, but also with best practices in development, support, strategy - and none of the other RMM tools out there are owned and ran by people that truly understand what IT Service Providers need to address the ever changing and expanding needs of our SMB Customers. Rapid growth is definitely still a problem, but they are putting the resources behind support to help their clients - but they aren't mind readers and at the end of the day YOU will only get out what you put in. If you are a lazy MSP who expects to click a few buttons and watch the money roll in, well, you probably won't be in business very long, but you may get a RTFM type response.

The new onboarding is probably one of my favorite features. You turn it on, and it discovers what types of servers your client has and then applies the appropriate monitors and adds them to the appropriate groups. No more ugly template or manual onboarding.

There are still some rough edges in the interface, but its nice to be able to fall back to the old interface if you can't find something in the new streamlined interface.

We have been with LabTech Software since 2008, and I must say the 2012 release and the offerings/services around it, are the BEST offerings they’ve brought to the table thus far. The product upgrades itself is nothing short of amazing. UI changes, enhanced speed, tunneling stability, are just a few things that have really made a huge difference in our usage of the product, and overall perception of how great their product is, and not only how far they’ve already come – but where they are going – and in the right way…

Other vendors could take a lesson from this up and coming pioneer of the RMM space, because it’s very evident they are listening to their Partner base, and making changes to their processes and products based on the needs of the Partner base. Their Support, Documentation, and Training resources are more fortified than I’ve ever seen in the past, and the few questions we’ve had have been dealt with swiftly, correctly, and with the professional courtesy one should expect from a software provider. Another lesson other vendors could learn from.

We are ecstatic about what they’ve brought to the table across the board, and can’t wait for the next innovations that will directly make me more successful – and not just a competition to have newest technologies that you often see everywhere else.

Keep it up Matt and Greg – you’ve done some incredible things in a very short period of time.

Great for managing workstations/servers. HORRIBLE for managing Switches/Routers and other SNMP managable devices. The network probe used for these features is a joke. The problem is the sales people told us that it would do all the things we had in our old product (WhatsUp Gold) yet it didn't. I'm only referring to the switch/router management/monitoring portion. The rest is good.

As a company our experience of Tigerpaw software has been abysmal.

There were problems from the beginning. The biggest problem is the software itself; at 700mb for the client, it is bloated. It runs very slowly, and appears clunky most of the time.

On all of our machines the software crashed regularly, but the automatic emails to support with the diagnostic information never got responded to without being chased.

Secondly the technical support is abysmal. The people on the phone rarely have an answer to anything beyond the most basic "how to" type questions. Escalated queries get forgotten about.

Overall, I wouldn't even bother. Their sales staff offer a money-back guarantee, which is verbal and totally worthless.

I'd second what Mark is saying.. I've read some reviews and had concerns about support while reviewing the product. I sort of ignored these as you obviously get competing firms bad-mouthing each other.

Anyway, I've had an engineer evaluating Labtech and I've been pulled in a couple of times. The level of service from the sales guy we've been dealing with is like nothing I've ever experienced, i.e. cocky, bad-attitude, failing to come back when promised (a couple of times), dismissive, avoiding important functionality questions.

This is the first time I've ever felt the need to comment about a company... I've never, ever seen this behaviour at a sales level. I wouldn't like to think what the support service is like.

Awful software. We have been using it for about a year now, and it takes more time to create and add time to a ticket than it does to actually work the ticket. It's called a cache, but apparently the CW developers are unaware of why a bloated quasi-browser front end is a bad idea. I'm sure there is some reporting on the back end that is useful for management, but as a tech that has to use it dozens of times a day - I hate it. I've honestly thought about writing my own front end. Every single step requires far too much complexity. Even entering time is cumbersome.

I'm sure all the complexity adds up to some nice back office reporting and tracking - but from one of the grunts who has to use it all day, I can say look somewhere else.

I am actively looking for an RMM solution. I've read many many reviews of LT. The way i read it is the product is on a whole deep and detailed but is flawed with poor support and promise after promise that this will be resolved. It seems (if you read the dates of posts complaining about the support problem) that the support issue is never resolved.

Get this, (this is a joke I'm afraid) i talk to sales, i ask a bunch of questions - sales guy cant answer them so tells me he will set-up a conference call so we can go through my list of pre sales questions - we agree on a time for the LT techs and him to call me...... call never comes and yes my phone is/was working because i checked just in case ( now its far fetched my phone would suddenly go down but hey i decided to give the LT guys the benefit of the doubt - i had several people phone in to make sure all was well).

So reading all these poor support issues that keep on coming and the fact sales cant be bothered to honour an agreement on a tech phone call.... I'll pass thanks. Does not mattter how much *potential* a product has, if it is not supported we will be in trouble sooner or later...why should i drop 20K to get poor service? Going to check out N-Able now

Move on folks...nothing to see here.......

Exec Summary: If you are an MSP, and want to improve capabilities, support customers more invisibly, speed up new client implementations (I just implemented a 80 seat client w/ the labtech agent doing most of the client side work), and reduce costs (toolset and labor), choose LabTech.

We've been on 3 prior RMM vendor platforms before switching to labtech. We don't tool hop too much, but we've been and MSP for 12 years now. The 1st tool was new, I mean Indian New in 2002 when we hopped on as the 1st MSP they had as a client. It was growing pains x 10 to say the least. We integrated another product that was later bought out by Dell that could never live up to the promise or price tag (amazingly they still sell this dog, at a very high price tag). After 3 years, there were finally some real alternatives out there and we selected a expensive, but capable product that served us well for about 5 years. We noted LabTech at a trade show in 2010 and followed up on the product, test drove it, and pulled the trigger early last year. After having used 3 other RMM tools (actually 5, but 2 predated the rmm term) in production, and test driving at least 5 other major vendors I think I probably know more about RMM tools than most anyone, if for no other reason than most MSP's haven't been around long enough to suffer through 3 major RMM tool migrations. I mean, it is painful to change, so most avoid doing so. Onto the review:
If i had to do it over again, we'd still go w/ LabTech, but I'd pay for their implementation team to do the install and deployment. I would also have gotten training earlier in the game than we did. LabTech does so much that it is hard to know where to start sometimes. The reason we changed was because of the vast capabilities. You don't really know how powerful it is w/ just a test drive in a test environment, you have to get it and use it supporting clients day in, day out. One of my employees is a Microsoft Scripting MVP, he can make this thing sing. If I had one gripe, it would be reporting. Now, the canned reports are fine, but the scoring methodology, depending on the report you use is, well, dopey. I'm actually on a support case now trying to figure out how to adjust things and get a more accurate summary of client statuses. That leads to discussing support. I've probably opened a dozen or so cases. Response is as expected, usually same day if I open a call soon enough. I have noted that support has improved over the 10 months we've been using labtech in production. So, kudos to their support team. There are growing pains to be sure, and LabTech is probably more bleeding edge that we'd like sometimes, but on the flip side, we see all sorts of capabilities that are just coming online w/ other rmm tools. It's worth the tradeoff. Other reviews talk about all sorts of errors, bugs, etc... Sure, we've even uncovered a few ourselves, but that is just RMM tools in general. None are perfect. My advice: Focus on what you need, then what you want. Oh, pricing: Very competitive. There are cheaper options, but so far, all the cheaper options are less capable. If you price shop the major rmm vendors, LabTech is actually towards the lower end of the scale. We have over 1000 machines managed by LabTech currently and will be buying more agents in the next month or two to handle additional customers.

A highly customisable product which has many many flaws, We spent an extensive period attempting to implement and indeed have done so, however for the whole process we have been made to feel like beta testers working with constant elemtnary school 101 errors that need fixing.

The product for the limited servers we had (less than 200) was costing circa £7k GBP per month so its not cheap and not good

AVOID!

Not sure where all of the positive comments come from, but I have found both the agentless and agent managed workplace offerings to be abysmal. Real poor at generating useful alerts and full of false alerts. After working with Zenith, Kaseya and Labtech, I can honestly say that this is not in the same league as thos products both in terms of reliability or functionality.

Our company has been using ConnectWise for almost two years and I cannot wait to move to another platform. Their support has been horribly slow, our cloud-hosted solution has been slow, and our experience in general has been terrible. They roll out updated with no apparent testing, which has taken down our company on invoicing days multiple times. You can't call for support without getting transferred to someones mailbox, which leaves you with chat or email as your only options. It seems like they couldn't care less about our business, as long as theirs keeps growing. I've tried to give them the benefit of the doubt and attribute these issues to growing pains, but it just doesn't appear to be the case.

There are so many intuitive reports that are not available. For example, if i want to know how much of product X have we sold in a certain date range, it isn't possible. Downstream IT and reselling CW to clients are both complete nightmares, and CW seems to just throw their hands up at both. The sales module, inventory/purchasing module, marketing capabilities, configurations, integrations with RMMs, etc. are all so cumbersome and complex that they are nearly unusable.

In an nutshell, CW does a lot of things okay, but does none of them well. It is very difficult to find someone at CW who actually cares about what you are going through or has any sort of pride in the service they are providing. I can't wait to get away from CW!

We've been using N-able for nearly a year and were one of the first users on version 8. Whilst we had numerous problems with our initial deployment (deploying the agent via AD/GPO/MSI, which is an approach now no longer supported) we are now in a position where we have over 4000 devices out in the field spanning over 150 different customers. We also use Autotask as our PSA and have N-able (N-central) automatically logging tickets into Autotask when an issue is detected. For example, we've got about 40 servers running BackupExec in a variety of versions that're logging a ticket into Autotask automatically when a backup fails. Other checks log tickets when the check fails and automatically close the ticket when the check returns to normal either by the triggering of a self-healing script by the software agent or after intervention by our service desk team. The latest version of the Remote Support Manager is a heck of a lot better than earlier versions that were included in v8 and we're happily monitoring a whole raft of services and applications. I've added some custom checks and scripts of my own and have also added a handful from the shared community repository that N-able have.

We are intending to expand our usage of N-able's products. We've already rolled out the Endpoint Security software to a few customers and are going to be starting to offer patch management to customers too. In addition we're looking at the anti spam and integrated backup parts.

Support is not a problem. We have a regular bunch of engineers that attend to our calls and are always knowledgeable and happy to help. A number of our feature requests have been added to the product and bugs that are picked up are resolved.

Overall, the product DOES work well. However, it needs careful planning and deployment. Don't just bang the agent out on to as many devices as you can get your hands on. Out of the box the product tries to monitor too much stuff and you'll end up with a sea of red crosses. You need to carefully decide what services you NEED to monitor and decide on the thresholds for those services. Like with a lot of big products, if you take the time during planning and deployment you'll reap the rewards in the long run. Don't rush it. Take your time and do it properly. N-central now drives our service desk and has helped us provide a better service for our customers.

Unbelievable impact on my business. Been a partner for 3 years and haven't looked back.

I am currently on the beta version of 8.2 and the new direct connect remote control feature is a game changer. When the sales rep first sold me on the essentials strategy I was slightly hesitant because I didn't feel that it fit into my existing RMM model that I had build around Kaseya. I took a long hard look at my customer based and realized that there was tremendous ooppourtunity within my T&M clustomers that I wasn't taking advantage of. I mandated that all my clients get on at least my essentials program so that I could consolidate all my customers into my dashboard. I had to fire a couple of clients but the end result had a huge payoff. All my clients are in my dashboard and I'm activly flipping essential clients onto fully managed programs. THE STRATEGY ACTUALLY WORKS!! I didn't have any means of achieving this with Kaseya without pricing my customers out...

Have I had any issues with the platform? yes there have been a few hick-ups along the way but their tech support has been curteous and quick to respond anytime I run into an issue. Still waiting for third party patching but all in all I would recommend N-able to anyone who is serious about becoming an MSP and wants a longterm platform that will support their business as it grows. Hope this helps! good luck

Product lacks significant polish. The start menu icons don't work properly, the uninstaller doesn't function well. Support is not great. At $5 a month per device it's not overly expensive but since it doesn't really provide a lot of reliable data and remote connections are hit and miss I wouldn't recommend it at all.

Interface is not easy to navigate and often slow to respond.

We were with Level Platforms for almost 5 years after being with N-able in the early days. We were quite patient with LP over the years, recognizing that that the industry was still in its infancy but the amount of time we spent just maintaining the LP System Centre was so enormous that it ate so much into any return we would have hoped to make from our clients.
We had many repeated real world situations where client machines would go down or run out of disk space etc. without ANY alert being generated from the Level Platforms system. There was always an excuse for why the system didn't perform as expected but I think that for the cost we should get a service that just works.
We lost the confidence of our clients in the system so much so that we had to change the way we offered our Managed Service.
The industry is maturing and you would be better served finding a partner that has a better product that is more competitively priced.

This year our company was fortunate enough to undergo strong growth, picking up new clients, improving our services for existing clients and tightening up lots of internal processes. Revenue grew steadily but more importantly, profit grew further - we are all really looking forward to 2012. We are based in London (UK), employ fourteen staff and serve fifty demanding clients in Central London and around the world.

I have used RMM tools since 1999, when I was at the wrong end of an enterprise rollout of HP OpenView across a 5,000 user network (not pretty). Since then, I’ve worked with Kaseya and N-Able as well as several of the lower end monitoring products with several service providers.

At the start of this year, as fully engaged ConnectWisers, we took the strategic decision to migrate to Labtech. Of course, we had resistance from our technical team who had got used to doing their jobs with Kaseya and had completed the upgrade to K2. So, why did we change and how did it go?

We knew Labtech’s pricing was competitive and had been tracking this for several months. We visited service providers already using Labtech to see how they were getting on and what the toolset could (and could not) do. We listed our business priorities and how the tools would support these. We checked these assumptions with peers. This collaboration made easier by communities like ConnectWise User Groups and HTG. We sought buy-in across our company to ensure focus and momentum. Finance were happy when they saw the difference between Kaseya and Labtech over five years… The smart technical guys picked it up quickly and loved it.

The sales approach was low key, informed and flexible. I am not keen on discounting but we did get a very good deal. Our sales contact worked into the deal elements to help us run the product (online backup to Doyenz for example) and explore further capabilities (LT backup).

For implementation and rollout we used a low-risk, incremental approach to minimise impact. This followed training (online) via sessions with the Labtech technical team. The logic behind the product is complex and flexible – that’s the dilemma I think for some teams. You can do a lot with lateral, creative thinking and a sensible testing approach. However, if you dive in, you get lost quickly and can make mistakes. One or two of our techs did this, disappeared into scripts, groups and searches and needed their colleagues and a trail of breadcrumbs to get back on track. Labtech can of course help, but your own application of logic is key.

Labtech is clearly focussed on the MSP market – there are lots of little tricks in the product. Think right-click-time-saver. Techs love this and the approach of course relates to the Nemsys origin of some key staff.

In general, if you think like they do things will be easier (like ConnectWise). Don’t try to shoehorn existing processes which may not be that robust/logical anyway (be honest) into the application.

Having been to Automation Nation 2011 and met the leadership team, I strongly believe Labtech is committed to serving our market to a very high standard. They have a great product and a creative, compelling vision. Sure, the GUI looks dated in some areas, but this is not a serious criteria when assessing a tool with this level of impact. This toolset - when engaged with, researched, understood, shared and enhanced with peers - is one of the most powerful drivers of capability, profit and free time you will ever own.

We started with Zenith as a small firm but after awhile we realized it was limited and gets expensive. We did trials on most of the stuff out there and settled on labtech. I am now sure we can grow, keep costs down and make happy clients.

The software is heavy duty and we took the implementation services to help. They asked about our systems and did a good job of giving us a running server. Darren I think was the tech, and he went out of his way to make sure we were on a good plane. There have been a few issues with configuring some scripts we want, but its a learning curve for sure. It's solid, runs flawlessly and we couldn't be more pleased.

I think if you want a RMM to have complete control over this is it. You can make it alert anything, at least what you can make money off of. Happy over price and install, now we gotta light fires under sales team (me).

Been using their service for several years. Support is very responsive to issues.
Very competitive program.

We have been in selling some form of online backup for years and have tried many vendors in that time. We operate as an MSP focused soley on the SMB segment.

Many of our clients have no central servers and are very cost sensitive. They also have a weaker tolerance for downtime since many of the owners are heavily engage in growing their business.

For the last year we have been using Egnyte on a trial basis, they offer a really amazing product, beautiful interface, and many advanced features. The problem is they have in many critical areas failed to deliver a product that works in the SMB environment as a pure cloud storage server. I will post a review of them one I get them added to this site as a vendor.

We had several clients who were really getting upset with Egnyte problems, and we were forced once again to find a replacement.

Livedrive is a really great product, it covers all the bases for todays modern business owner. For the reseller, several options are available including a white-label option.

Support IS lacking, but luckily for us we have had almost no need to call them, the issues we did have I found answers to online and reseller support did eventually get back to me. They recently upgraded their support site and I see some progress on the development side as well.

In our testing and client trials, the speed is amazing. As a point, I just sent a 200 MB exe file to our cloud drive in less than 7 mins, downloads were pushing 300k down.

Livedrive is worth a look and consideration if you are looking to add remote backup and access to your current portfolio.

To date, I've been using Nable for two years and really enjoy what the product has to offer and have never thought ill about it. Sure, the price tag was steep to get in but Kaseya was higher priced and I heard too many horror stories about their support.

When looking at any product for our use or for our clients, we look at what a product has to offer, what it lacks, and narrow the field accordingly. The two things that help solidify our choice are: 1) Customer Service and 2) Technical Support. Both of these elements are well represented by Nable and our firm can attest to it because we've used both..and still do!

My constructive criticism for Nable is their product is heavily deep in terms of configurations and settings. Without fully reading the materials and learning the product before launching it on paying customers, one can easily get eaten alive by all the configuration items. My best advice is to start small, use it internally to gain a baseline, which from there templates can be created and global settings can be propogated to all customer sites. By taking this approach, we're able to pull off some awesome RMM functions and provide monthly/quarterly reports that impress. The other dig I would give is with the reporting. Sure, we always want more and NAble gives us access to the database to use our own reporting tools; however, it's a lot of work to get going.

The monitoring side can lead to a lot of false alarms, but that's where careful consideration of what you monitor and when it notifies come into play. The self-correction feature is great and getting notice when something corrects itself is great.

We integrate with AutoTask PSA and both of these tools working together gives us so much more information than we ever thought we'd ever need.

Scripts are always a work in progress for any RMM, but there's times I wish Nable had more to go on. Pushing software to our client computers is fairly straight forward, even if they're not on a domain where we can use group policy.

I would highly recommend this product to other MSP's.

This product is wonderfully designed. We were looking for a tool that reduces labor and is managable. We just switched from one of the big names to Naverisk and it has simplified things tremendously. The support is first class and the features are added on a frequent basis. The product has been built on a firm foundation that is quite intuitive. If you are looking for a RMM tool you should definitely consider Naverisk.

We have benn using LPI for about 5 years. We are very pleased with the product. Support has been excellent and the product just keeps getting better with each release.

LPI helps us support our Clients better and has a postive effect on our bottom line. We have looked at all the other RMMs and find no reason to switch. Overall, LPI beats them all.

I've been a user of LabTech for approximately 18 months. It was a big change to get used to the interface, permissions, and the many tabs spread through the system. As far as the value of the product, I'd challenge you to find another RMM that provides the integration points, the flexibility, and the ultimate ease of use as LabTech.

As far as setup goes, once the system was setup and running, it took us a long time to really get our heads around the layout of the system. This was a bit of a frustration and why I dinged it a couple of points in setup. Sure the installation for the software itself was pretty painless, but group setup, best practices, and template inheritance was not without struggles to fully understand.

Once we understood how the product was designed and we became aware of the limitations of the software (sticky groups, limited groups, inheritance, etc.), we became much more productive with LT. I will also say we brought in an outside consultant to further assist us in maximizing our investment in LT. That was extremely beneficial, and I'd happily make that decision many times over. My understanding is that the consultant we used now works for LabTech in an effort to improve the "out of box" experience as well as provide continuous enhancements to the RMM toolset.

Over the last 18 months, we've submitted several support tickets. Some were basic functionality questions, others were more significant systemic issues we encountered. Based on the last 3 months, I'd actually rate the support very differently from my fellow users here. I can tell you that I get responses for non-critical issues within 24 hours in almost every case, and generally the responses include troubleshooting steps, code samples, or alternative solutions to accomplish what I'm trying to do. Sure, they close a ticket if you don't respond in 72 hours, but we've started doing that ourselves with our end clients. We just reply to the ticket once we have the answers they requested and the ticket re-opens.

I had one technician resolve an issue with a 3rd party product without my assistance. LT and I had a scheduled call setup with the 3rd party. When the 3rd party wasn't available at our scheduled time to discuss a resolution, the support tech worked the ticket on her end to resolution. She then provided me with an email and voicemail that contained the solution from the 3rd party. I can't say that I've received that level of care in the past, and I don't know that I'll receive that level of care in the future, but I do know that one call made a huge impact on me as a customer and as a service provider to my end user.

Of all the features, my favorite is the level of customization the product affords. The redirectors are incredibly powerfull in that nearly any 3rd party app that creates a sustained network connection can be integrated with LT. I've got 3 technicians who used dameware at a previous job - they raved about the stability, low cost, and ease of use. We've run into a couple of issues with VNC, in particular around multimonitors when the primary monitor is not the left-most monitor. For a minimal investment, we deployed dameware as a backup desktop connection tool to LabVNC for remote support. Very straight forward, and very cost effective.

From my interaction with the LT team and from watching their new hires, I know they are actively working with MSPs to determine what features and tools will be most beneficial to their users. They don't sell directly to end-clients, and they are working to streamline the product from a usability standpoint. Their support is on an upward trend in my book, and I don't know that I could ask too much more out of a service provider.

Please read this review we posted on RipOffReports.Com:

We hired Cloud Services Depot to augment our IT services and provide technical support for our customers over the phone when we could not. What we got was not what we bargained for when we noticed that our service wasn't working one day - the toll free number they provided was no longer working. We promptly notified Cloud Services and it took them a day to respond back to us and fully get services restored. When we complained and asked for a refund our account was closed. If you need technical services for your customers stay away from Cloud Services Depot.

I've been with Labtech for almost three years. In fact I've used them since before they were even big enough to make it into the arena of public awareness. There was a day, when, if I had a problem, I emailed Greg, and the next day I would get a new build of the software with the bug fixed. In those days, every time I did something, I found a bug (almost). The cool thing was I didn't mind because I felt that there was a company that stood behind their product, took ownership of issues, and fixed them - in a very timely manner.

I regret to say that the whole company has changed since the infusion of ConnectWise capitol. I can't prove that it is related, and, to be honest, it was going downhill before that too. I guess the disappointing thing is that support hasn't gotten any better since then. Documentation has improved, quality of releases has improved (a lot), but support is completely a joke.

I've had tickets closed that weren't even close to resolved. They take over a week to respond to a ticket, but then close it because you don't provide them some detail of info in the first 72 hours. There escalation process is completely lame. First level solves very little, and is just there to give you the feeling that you are talking to someone who thinks they know what they are doing.

I would actually prefer fewer features, and a company that really, truly stood behind it's product. I would prefer a product that was less "functional", but had a support team that KNEW how to work the features it did have. I'm tired. I'm tired of trying to make it work. I'm tired of spending hours troubleshooting issues that I should never be dealing with. (logo's on reports, anyone?) Last week I spent a solid day just trying to figure out why I had duplicate product keys in my product keys list. I don't have time to do this, Labtech. Give me a product that works, and a company that stands behind it with five star support.

I've invested nearly $10,000 into this system - not much but still significant to me. There are days when I feel like throwing it down the toilet and buying on with somebody that has a support department where I can get on the phone with somebody WHO CAN HELP ME. In fact, support is now my #1 requirement for ANY software product. That's at the top of the list.

Labtech, it's time to decide which game you are playing. And play it well. I don't need a salesman to tell me your support department is in it's final ramp up stage to something awesome. I need an engineer to fix problems (without having to complain to upper level management first!).

Labtech is a pretty amazing product - but the support is worse than horrible.

I can honestly say that 100.0 % of the tickets that I have submitted in the last year have not been answered in the first submission. What usually happens is one of a couple of scenarios: either the ticket is ignored totally requiring me to open multiple tickets for the same issue or the ticket is closed without a solution. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have to BEG for support. My favorite is that they will direct you to their forums for support … and then close the ticket… or offer you a solution that you have already tried and you told them that you tried this in excruciating detail in the ticket… they don’t read the ticket and are utterly unhelpful until you scream at them and actually get someone on the phone. This usually takes about a week or so… if at all.

Why am I paying for support then?

We just went through the upgrade from 2011.1 to 2011.2 and had some pretty heavy issues and errors. We now see approximately once per day that every monitored device will go into an error state for a few minutes and then report in again as being back online. Let me tell you that that will get your attention. The other thing that we see is that the agent will just shut down for no apparent reason. This will cause a server-down alert and also block your access to the server unless you have an alternative path for management.

I have to say that the vision of this product is pretty spectacular – but it isn’t ready for primetime just yet. I have reached out to LabTech many many times and I get the canned response that we have just added (fill in the blank here) resources and we are getting better blah blah blah… the truth is that they will not support you without your persistent chasing and hounding them for a solution.

If you are fluent in SQL and scripting you may be able to survive without the support – in which case I would say go for it. But if you are like the rest of us slobs trying to be a solution provider to customers in the SMB space and you don’t have a staff of 20 people you may want to look at some of the other solutions out there.

The RMM space has expanded substantially in the last couple of years, and while no tool will be all things to all folks, I would strongly recommend that you take a long hard look at the support that is available behind the product and not just the feature list of the product.

I can say that I have partnered with several MSPs and we all use LabTech and we are all experiencing the same issues – we are begging LabTech to step up and support the product. Stop giving us hollow promises that you will do better in the future. Lost the cocky attitude and answer our phone calls. Stop adding features to the feature list and start supporting the product that you have today.

I have known Richard for many years through his growth at Netlink and merger with James Cash. With many years of running and growing successful I.T support businesses under his belt, Richard's information is one that is not to be ignored.
Held in high esteem by not only his peers, but by some major players in the I.T services industry, Richard manages to offer the right advice, reaching out to the correct people while making the information personal to your business, practices and goals.

If you are serious about growing your I.T business, there are only a handful of true professionals to get information and assistance from. Richard is one of those.

Unless you want to spend $3000 per year on pricing info that has no relation to your target market and a weekly pep talk, stay away.

Amazing !!! Actually after having a hand on the new server interface from HandsFree Networks product. I am kind of getting the feeling that they are pushing harder to go ahead their competators.

To my surprice, they have a new client interface like any AV product. And a new per-incident fix solution where we can use Handsfree networks for one time fixs suchas as for per-incident fixes. They have a one-click solutions like virus cleanup , PC tune-up, IE optimization and so on where they run some 20-25 steps automatically for 30-40 mins and fixed my problems automatically without me doing anything. Fully automated.

I tried contacting them through their website but no reply. I think they should pur their support system in place properly evenif they are expanding fast to help improve customer satification.

I would like to get contacted by Handsfree Networks to see how I can move forward with new solution.

Dirt cheap per GB and works as advertised. No Autotask integration but I have set up rss feeds for all of my low-end clients using Jungledisk/MySecureBackup to keep tabs on backups completed, failed, or missed.
SLOW seeding, SLOW restores, but everything ultimately works.
JD is a great starter solution, it's also very flexible because you can use the storage as a backup destination, as a mapped drive, or as a folder synch.
They are working on their reseller program to bring everything under the Rackspace brand...someday.

MozyPro can be a nice, inexpensive addition to a backup program. It's one of the most end-user-friendly systems.
However I found myself working many, many issues where backups didn't complete or were slow.

This was in 2009. Newer versions may be better but I wasn't impressed or confident that it was working or recoverable.

Been using Opsview Community edition, the free version for a while now. Multi-tenancy support looks good. SLA reporting is available with the enterprise edition.

A tightly integrated solution that hits all the marks when it comes to delivering a complete backup and business continuity offering - enabling MSPs to add off-site backup to their portfolio with ZERO up-front costs. They also offer a reseller program allowing product centric VARs the ability to sell the service as a CapEx and collect commission on the monthly fees paid by end users.

When it comes to making a check list of everything you could want in a local backup/failover solution with bundled off-site storage they offer everything except for failover to cloud or alternate backup destinations (for local warm standby data sets).

Their highest marks are in service and support (perhaps the most important too) as users rave about the quality of their training and support. With good support, all the right features delivered on quality HP hardware, and multiple partner models that make sense, Axcient has set the bar high for other BDR and online backup services to hit.

While not terribly easy to setup on the mozypro side, the software itself is very easy to use for backups as well as restores.

Ninite Pro is surely one of the best tools to have in the MSP's 'toolbox', the time it saves is massive.
Basically once you have subscribed you download a small application from the Ninite website. From this you can choose any or all of the 80+ Windows applications and utilities to install on the PC or server very quickly and easily. Essentially there's one click to choose each application and then one more to install. Ninite then fetches the very latest version of the application from the vendors website and silently installs the application without any of the accompanying junk or toolbars that occasionally attach themselves to utilities. The correct 32 or 64-bit version of the software will also be selected automatically.
Ninite can also upgrade installed applications just by selecting one option and then clicking 'Install' and Ninite takes care of itself.
The Pro version also allows you to use the command line to control Ninte even further. In an MSP environment, the power of this is brilliant. Ninite already has instructions for integrating Ninite into Laseya, GFI, Level Platforms, Labtech and many more. The ability to script installs and updates to an estate of PCs and Servers is a winner.
When you run Ninite Pro it downloads all the executables to a folder. With command line switches, this can also be used to create both offline installers for copying onto a thumb drive if you know you won't have a good net connection. You can also put the downloads folder onto a network share to save on bandwidth. Ninite checks the latest version online with the latest in the cache folder and only gets the file once off the net and then other PCs get the file from the central cache.
There is also a Linux version, currently with about 15 apps.
Overall this one tool has saved us endless hours installing and updating hundreds of PCs and is worth every penny and then some! 5 Gold Stars!!!

I don't normally give all 5s for a product but this one really hit a home run in delivering all that it promises. It leverages more than a few Windows tools that you should be using anyway and adds a few clever features of its own.
To give this a true road test I loaded on my wife’s computer. The one the kids get on all the time... My wife was complaining that her PC was freezing up and running painfully slow. After running most of the basic utilities the performance of her computer was noticeably improved.
The full version of this software runs $49.00 and is good for up to 3 PCs. Not bad for a good set of tools for around the house. They also have a free 15 day trial so you can judge for yourself if it’s worth the coin. The only thing it was missing was a backup solution but then again I guess a backup doesn’t improve performance that is its claim to fame.
Now if you are reading this I assume you are an MSP and are thinking, “What does this product have to do with MSP software?” The truth is, it doesn’t. At least not yet. I can imagine in my crystal ball a day in the not too distant future where pieces of TuneUp are deployed and managed via an RMM tool and either billed as an additional recurring service or included for value add. I’ll keep you up to date if I hear anything in that area but until then, don’t be afraid to push this out to your do-it-yourselfers or, if you are still living in the stone age and selling block hour/monthly maintenance contracts then this might be handy on your thumb drive.

We deployed a Siris device to a client and it was so easy to setup and train the user on how to backup, virtualize, and add more agents. The interface is very simple and easy to understand and the device 'just works'! When we did have to work with support, they were very helpful.

There was an issue with one of the drives that gave an error and when we contacted support they quickly sent a replacement drive overnight for replace. It was a simple process and support walked me through logging back into device and running some commands in a terminal window for it to see the replacement drive. Only suggestion, I wish the support was available via phone more than just 9AM-8PM EST. Most of us put these devices in after hours and having support available during this time would be vital for MSPs.

I believe we took our first look at Level Platforms Managed Workplace back in 2005 (version 2, maybe 3). Alerting was minimal and not many policy modules (called templates back then). Creating custom policies was pretty daunting. There was much to like, but much that confused us so we passed at that time. One year later we made the decision to take another look at the product and were delighted with the improvements in Managed Workplace in just one year. We partnered with LPI and haven’t looked back since. And no reason to look elsewhere.

Back in the mid 80’s I sold an $8,000 software package to manufacturing companies that ran on a $100 Atari computer. It was the graphics of the Atari that we needed for charting. Given we were taking a gaming computer into the business world we knew the only way to succeed was through an extreme commitment to software product development, quality and support. The only company that I have seen in the ensuing years that could even come close to the overall commitment we had, has been Level Platforms. From the newest staff member right on through to the top level execs, Peter Sandiford continues to assemble an exceptional team that shares his every vision and commitment to insuring that Managed Workplace remains the best RMM tool available today… and for tomorrow.

With every new release, major or minor, the new features and functionality continues to amaze us. LPI has always listened to user requests “and complaints”, and improved the product significantly every time. There have been some bumps and frustrations over the years as there is with any product as sophisticated as Managed Workplace, but by and large from each new release would emerge the most solid, stable and feature rich RMM platform available. The agent-less architecture in the beginning is what sold us with Managed Workplace and with the new 2011 Device Manager agent we can monitor servers in remote locations just as though they were sitting in the main office. Our ability to support offsite Laptops changed significantly with the Device Manager and we now have an unbelievable level of monitoring and management for laptops that rarely ever show up on the corporate network.

Windows patches… ho hum. A couple of clicks and presto the entire fleet is patched. Tired of those almost daily Adobe and Java critical updates. Third party patching introduced in 2011 has made this task effortless and completely automated. The scripting engine is awesome! There is not much you can’t do with the new scripting engine. LPI even automates the process of updating itself as new versions are released. Help desk access right to the desktop is available through a variety of included and available third party products. There is also an option to access workstations behind the user’s desktop, without interrupting the productivity of the user. If ever you needed to collaborate or bounce an idea off a peer, the partner forum is the place to go. Unparalled participation is what you receive. The sharing of ideas, processes, procedures, and custom policies is unlike any other forum I’ve encountered. Postings are answered almost immediately and normally by several peers as well as LPI moderators. A true partner community.

If you want to razzle-dazzle a prospective client with the results of your free network assessment just print out the hardware and software asset detail reports (two sided of course) and hand it to your prospect. Caution, you should purchase stock in a paper company before printing the reports. Toss in Server Health and Patch Status reports and new prospects as well as established clients will be overwhelmed with how deep your view is into their network. The breadth of information collected about every device on the network will overwhelm even your most challenging prospect. For those times when we encounter a unusual problem and need to contact tech support, well what can I say that the others haven’t already said. They really are the best in the business. The only bad experiences I’ve had with Level support is when I embarrass myself by doing something stupid and they have to bail me out. Yes, there were a few things over the years that was their fault, but support calls were answered quickly by a knowledgeable tech and remediation was swift.

My partnership with Level Platforms has always been nothing short of spectacular at every level. The partnership is real. The commitment to excellence is real. It begins with the Managed Workplace product and continues through development, support, marketing assistance, ongoing training, partner forums, user conference, road shows, and our very own dedicated partner development manager. A partnership with Level Platforms is designed to insure that every LPI partner succeeds.

We, from Raka Brazil (http://www.raka.com.br), believe that, without Naverisk, we could never reach the quality of service delivery like we have today.

In a single console we have total control over our managed devices. It is not only our RMM tool; it is also a complete Service desk platform where I also support user requests.

Naverisk also brought me new opportunities to enter in a different market. Selling the onsite installation for big IT departments is a great deal.

They are constantly improving the tool and developing features based on Naverisk Community requests. It is 3 to 4 upgrades per year, and august, I believe, they will release the third major release of the year - v5.0.

Excellent support, very fast and efficient, even with the 13+ hours of time zone.
A really good option for smaller IT service provider, their team has a ton of Break – Fix and Managed Services business experience and I feel very confident running my business with Naverisk partnership.

I rate them 5, because I am sure that I wouldn´t be more happy with another platform.

Exchange Defender (“ED”) delivers not only good mail hygiene but more importantly, good business continuity. If you have a customer still running Exchange on-premise, don’t even think about an on-premise mail filtering solution. Filtering your mail with ED not only effectively removes spam and malicious files but also provides a reliable and sometimes need archiving solution that can also double as a fail-over for users (via web-mail) when their Exchange server is unavailable ensuring that the mail keeps flowing.
So here is the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of ED:
The Good - I used Exchange Defender for years and have found its overall reliability to be better that that of the average SBS Exchange server. The feature set continues to grow and is only missing the dynamic alias feature that one of its competitors has used to claim fame. The ability to private label everything from the web interface to the message footers is available and management of multiple customers into the hundreds is fairly easy. For the price, it is beyond a value – it’s like printing money with the ability to fairly markup 100% or more.
The Bad - Support is, well, you get what you pay for. Bottom line is that the product works as it should and odds are that if you are having an issue, it is probably caused by something you did wrong or something with the user or Exchange server so don’t get your feelings hurt when the unapologetically tell you that it is your problem and close the ticket without any further guidance. In all fairness, if the issue is on their end then you can expect them to work hard and through the night to fix it. What I’m saying is that this solution is not for the wanna-be, earn while you learn Exchange 101 students. If you don’t know how to manage Exchange and/or won’t take to the time to review ED’s help files then don’t be surprised when they offer to send you to their competitors because you ask too many stupid questions of their support team.
The Ugly – Well here is my chance to take a cheap shot at Vlad, the owner of ED. ;-) But, I won’t. If you don’t have thick skin then you probably don’t want to read his blog. Either way, the product rock sfor the price and will add $ directly to your bottom line along with thanks from your customers.

We can generate our invoices from salesforce in just one click!!

The analytics are awesome, uses data already in CRM - real time.

The best online accounting software!

Having tried dozens of online backup providers, I could never find one that was "right" for my clients. I have tried services that work well technically, but if there was a problem, I had trouble finding support.

I have been using Nine Technology as my primary online backup provider since March of this year and I have been extremely pleased with them.

Nine Technology is one of the best service providers I have ever done business with. The company seems to "get it" offering exactly what small SMB IT providers like me want. No-long term commitments, no minimum sales quotas, simple setup, custom branding and a great team.

Where Nine Technology really stands out is their team.

They have helped me every step of the way by providing my business custom branded marketing material, technical support and even alerting me of sales opportunities (like when Mozy upped their pricing a back in April).

From a technical standpoint, their service is quick and hassle free. They even do free initial seeds for your clients. I also get plain text reports delivered to me every morning and have yet to have a failed backup.

There pricing is very fair, running around $0.50 / GB.

The only negative thing I can say is that their user interfaces are ugly and can be hard to wrap your head around how accounts work.

Autotask is one of those really great products, that just works. I wrote a blog post about it a few months ago, which says it all.

http://www.christimm.com/?p=73

We have used Reflexion for many years with our clients and also in-house. Its a great product that works really well, and has one of the best AntiSPam detection rating I have seen. Great product .

As someone that has had an Autotask session open on my desktop for the past 8 years you can be sure I'm both a fan and a critic. Autotask is the ultimate hosted IT service management platform. Since this review is for Autotask Go! I will assume that you are a smaller shop (1-3 person) that is tired of keeping customer asset, time entries and issue resolution documentation (knowledgebase material) in disparate systems or on yellow notepads to one day get entered into a spread sheet or billing system. You are losing billable time, you can’t grow your business that way and frankly, you customers deserver a more responsible method of data management. For the small price per month (1/3 of a cell phone), you can centralize all your data and billing and even utilize workflow to ensure nothing fall through the crack. You will never look back!

Having been an actual past reseller of eFolder I wanted to give them a quick review. The do deliver a fair value for the $ but nothing to jump up and down about. If you want a product that you can resell directly off of your website to end users and SOHO then this is the perfect product. If you are backing up a company's entire data set then it may get a bit price and you will want to compare it with solutions that offer on-premise backup to virtual drive recovery with hardware (BDR - Like Zenith, CharTec and Datto). I would suggest that this product is great entry level offering for cost concious users. By they way, they have a GREAT staff managing their partner program in the US so you won't be dissapointed in the reseller support they provide.