ConnectWise PSA (formerly Manage) is a business management platform for companies that sell, service, and support technology. The platform is cloud-based and integrates automation, help desk and customer service, sales, marketing, project management, and business analytics. It is the hub of the ConnectWise suite.
$35
Per Tech Per Month
Microsoft To Do
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft To Do replaces the former Wunderlist task management tool.
You absolutely need a full time individual on this program to manage it properly. It is likely a powerful application. However, you have to know how all the disparate parts interact with the other content in the application. How they actually interface with your businesses operation applications (really check this one out as it only seems to play nice with Microsoft suites based on our experience.) and decide how much time and additional money you are willing to bury into this. Figure at least 2x over CW cost your initial period of out-of-pocket costs
It's such a simple and effective tool! If you need an app to safely store your To-do's and make sure you stay on top of things, this is it. You can divide tasks lists into folders (like "home" and "business"), share the lists with co-workers, set notifications, even mark items as a priority. It's great for smaller, day-to-day tasks but if you need something to manage a bigger project or a team, you should look into more robust project management tools. Although this is a great app, it cannot replace tools like TeamWork, Basecamp etc. But they work great together
Tickets- Customers can email and a ticket is generated and falls under their profile for historical records. You can save documents and select if they are customer facing or only internal facing. The option as well to have communication in tickets whether its internal facing or customer facing is nice to have when you're trying to keep a record or important details for just internal means and the customer doesn't have to see all the jargon.
Procurement - It's great to have this integrate with Quosal Sell. Quotes being processed into opportunities and then into a sales order which connects to a ticket or project is pretty easy to use. It does have a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's straightforward. Everything is pretty connected, whether keeping track of products customers have purchased historically through us, to knowing what ticket is associated to an RMA.
Wunderlist is what you need for your to do lists. It's really simple to use.
Allows you to set due date to your lists, share them with your team and/or create a folder to divide and organize all your list set
Also, Wunderlist is compatible with all platform and devices. So you can always be updated on your list or work on them from wherever you are and with all the devices you have.
I will say the calendar option needs a little bit of work.
A calendar that looks more like lets say a Google Calendar would a nice feature.
Better Knowledge base section.
We attempted to get very good use out of the Knowledge however due to not really being able to organize it and it being very hard to navigate we had to go a different route for our documentation.
Possibly adding a cleaner user interface and adding more customization for the organization of companies would help.
A better layout for reporting would also be something good to have.
The layouts available are so difficult to put together to get what you want out of a report. Virtually makes it impossible to get what you want out of them.
ConnectWise has uniquely positioned themselves with the Modern Office Suite to have direct integration with a nearly full suite of tools for MSPs. Although each tool may not necessarily be the absolute best tool on the market, the efficiencies leveraged through direct integration make the entire suite an obvious choice for most companies.
I have been using ConnectWise since 2004 and I am impressed with the progress they have made. However, there are still bugs that don't work quite like they should. If I were to run reports and get consistent answers along with a couple other annoyances, then I would score CW as a 10
The actual user interface and the way to navigate around the app is very intuitive and easy to learn/use which would make me give it a high ranking, but the syncing issues drop down my rating because there are times where you add an item to the list and then it just disappears. Then when you add it again the sync will happen and now you have duplicates. The other negative with the usability is adding extra information to an item, such as files or comments or assignments. You can do it but it's difficult to tell which items have this information from the main screen. You have to click on them individually.
We use the cloud version of ConnectWise and in the last 5 years it has never been down for us during business hours. I can only recall 1 time when it was not available during off hours when we wanted to use it.
Some tab for certain areas load speeds could be better. Dashboards can load slowly when they reference multiple reports. Some reports can load slowly based on the tables and views they are accessing. At times the SQL queries being performed in the background can actually timeout and a tab or screen will fail to load.
The front line support techs are wildly inconsistent when it comes to the level of support. Sometimes you get someone who just wants to throw links to University documentation at you, sometimes you get someone who truly tries to understand your issue and confers with peers and managers to find an answer, and sometimes you get someone who just wants to create a ticket and escalate immediately. If you ask three different techs the same question you will probably get three different answers, one of them being, "That's not possible."
I have not had an issue where I needed to reach out to Wunderlist, but I know their contact and online chat is easy to access and feel confident that they would be helpful. My only worry is Wunderlist is becoming Microsoft to-do in May 2020, and I believe the app will become worse after that.
We are a telecoms company. Whilst CW were very happy to sell us their product and tell us how good it is for telecoms. All the training material is geared towards IT MSP's. The on-line training material was virtually useless. We found the implementation a bit of a joke. They tried telling us 12 hours of implementation time would be sufficient to launch the product. We erred on the side of caution and paid for 24 hours. This was quickly eaten away and we were nowhere near ready to go-live. I find the on-line chat facility is of much more use for us.
Rather than letting them sell you a block of time for implementation, create a list of things that must be completed do declare the implementation complete. The implementer will have the discretion on what they set up and in what order. They will be trying to end their services in as little time as possible and may not get things set up right. You are best advised to hire a third-party wizard that has done many of these setups. Record the audio and video of all of your implementation sessions.
ConnectWise, does more than one function well for a CRM, it enables managed service providers to place all of their services into a single solution, that helps smooth the running of the business. Now we don't have to have 4+ different software packages to provide customer tickets, account information, sales pipeline, and HR.
Wunderlist is the cleanest of all these products, and also the most functional. It performs exactly like you would expect a to-do app to work, and you can make it as simple or as complex as you want. Trello boards were too much for my employees to comprehend and they could never get the hang of it. Microsoft TO-DO is just a stripped down remake of Wunderlist and will be a while before it catches up (if it ever does). Todoist is the most similar to me, and it was mostly an aesthetic choice that made me choose Wunderlist.
ConnectWise seems to have a good understanding of the IT service industry. During the required onboarding training, they even preach configuring only features that you need right now, as you can always scale up later. The feature set for the most part takes into considerations all aspects of an IT business, whether small or enterprise, or growing from one to the next.
Productivity Increase - Knowing exactly what I need to do and when makes sure that I am on the right track, working on the right project and task at the right time, and not missing anything (or wasting my time on tasks that don't move the needle).
I'm delivering and following through on projects (big and small) without worrying about if I'm missing anything. This has helped specifically in product releases. One task I used to be late on every year was holiday greeting card releases in May. No one is ever ready to design holiday cards in April, so I wasn't even thinking about it. However, retail shops are buying their holiday products in the summer. I would always remember September as the weather started to change, which would lead me to miss out on the bulk of retail shop sales. With Microsoft To-Do, I mapped out the entire project, starting with designing 3 Hanukkah cards, to 3 Christmas cards, to printing them, photographing them, listing them, and marketing them. All with deadlines attached. Every detail was planned out in a doable way. For two years in a row, I did not miss out on this release and my sales have increased 300% year-over-year in part because of my release planning in Microsoft To-Do.
Do you know those tasks that pop up in meetings that you write down somewhere and then sometimes just completely forget? No? Just me? Either way, I used to have them scattered in notepads, sticky notes, and notebooks, and a lot would be lost in the wind. With Microsoft To-Do, I take all of those to-dos gathered during the day and add them to my to-do list with a deadline at the end of my work day. Now, I never miss anything.
