April 26, 2024 - This week’s notables
Infrastructure & Support
This week we faced some challenges with Apple Business Manager and Microsoft Azure’s Mobile Device Management solution that blocked managed iPads from accessing the app store. The resolution was a combination of changes to Apple Business Manager to publish apps to Azure and ensuring proper Intune licensing for users. We’ll be working on Android enrollment next – while the Azure steps have been completed, we’re still working on the proper way of enrolling the devices themselves. Mobile device management is an important and somewhat convoluted process, and we’re glad we can help our clients address some of their challenges.
We also discovered that Adobe has stopped supporting the file sync feature for personal Creative Cloud accounts. This caused a problem with sharing files among team members who were using a shared Adobe account. The account owner used to be able to sync their creative cloud files to their PC and share them, like how you would with OneDrive. Since the feature was discontinued, the updated files were not synced to Adobe Cloud and files could not be shared with others. We were able to bypass the difficulty by moving the content from Adobe to OneDrive and changing the customer’s workflow slightly. Ricky participated in the first of two information sessions on Microsoft Lighthouse. Lighthouse allows managed service providers (MSPs) like us to access all our client tenants through one dashboard. We’ve followed the product's development over the last couple of years, but it seems that there have been very helpful improvements made recently that can make it a powerful tool in our daily workflow. This week’s session was an overview of the improvements, and next week we hope to explore more of the features!
Devices
AI is becoming more widely used, and this also means that PC equipment is changing. AI is a powerful tool, and while web-based versions of AI use external resources to process data and interact with the user, PCs that have native AI components in an operating system will need specialized processing hardware to offer similar features. Microsoft recently announced a new generation of AI Surface devices, and we’re looking at the AI powered products that HP is launching. Stay tuned for more information! The INW team is eager to try out WatchGuard Fireboxes. We’ve mostly worked with their end-point products since we started using WatchGuard, and our next step is to deploy Wireless Access Points and Firebox firewalls to secure our own offices.
Operations & Growth
We started to use our new Dynamics solution for asset management this week. We’re happy with the results so far and we’re preparing suggestions for the next round of updates. We also have a great opportunity to offer our customers: 10 free licenses of Microsoft Copilot for a whole year! Through our partnership with TD Synnex, companies that complete two required training sessions can qualify for the offer. We’re organizing a special “How Do I?...” Happy Hour next week with a guest presenter that will be one of the two required trainings. Look out for more details or contact us if you’re interested!
Information Radiation
Our information radiation discussion this week focused on our shared dislike of time sheet management and tracking our time spent on different projects and tasks. We often talk about this because we know it is a vital part of our business to record and charge for the work we do but getting it to the time sheet can sometimes be very hard! One of the obstacles we’ve noticed is the high cost of context switching – stopping the active work to switch to another task (like recording a time entry). So, we continue our pursuit for the perfect solution of automated time keeping. Afterall, time keeping IS a form of information radiation. It shows managers how team members are using their time, and it tells customers what we are billing for.