Block hour contract variable on new invoice templates

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Brian Kerhin

I’m excited to write about a great new feature I’ve finally had the chance to get my hands around. The new custom invoice templates in AutoTask. At first I admit I was slightly perturbed that my PO field disappeared. Some of the HTML formatting tricks went from creating nicer invoices to making my invoices look like cryptic nastiness. BUT with change there is almost always a need to change and the required effort to get the train back on the tracks was very manageable. In fact one of my favorite determinations of if a software change is good is if someone new to the system can work better with the new system than the old. The new invoice templates are certainly much better than the old system.

My favorite new feature of the new invoice templates actually comes with a bit of a complication. You are now able to report on your block hour contract usage and balance right on your invoice. The one little caveat is that you must approve and post the cost that comes along with a block purchase or the block doesn’t get used in the calculation for how many hours are active shown on the invoice. Also if a block of hours is marked “inactive” in autotask that status is not reflected in the invoice block hours calculation.

BK

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Autotask 2013 October Release – Accounting strikes back!

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Brian Kerhin

Things have been quite on the Autotask front both for me and for Autotask for some time. Inside we’ve both been experiencing some major changes. Autotask moving from a US concentric delivery to a global delivery. I’ve been moving from having an office that was top heavy to a right sized work force.

Doing invoicing this month I noticed my HTML tags in my invoices notes started popping out as HTML tags instead of making my words bold. I went to see what’s the deal and WOW, the invoice editor took on a life of it’s own.

All the requests we’ve made over the years for an editor that resembled something more like quickbooks are now on my screen! In fact the editor appears to be even better. The block hour contract time information that customers ask to be added to my invoices so they know how much time they have left appears to now be an option to place on my invoices. This will be a huge feature for my office.

The new copy contract feature may be a great thing. I’m not going to be sure until I use it a few times. In this area of the program the biggest missing feature at the moment for me is a month to month contract option. We get around it by making a contract end date 2030 (in other words, so long that it’s not real).

Live mobile received a face lift. The color makes looking at the application less like living in the 1950′s. Speed seemed improved but it is obvious the application does not deal with a cached data set, it’s still reaching up to the cloud for every chunk of data. On my first test time entry the application gave me the classic:
“We are sorry. An unexpected error has occurred….”

I’ve debugged that down to any time I select to notify someone it crashes. I’m sure they’ll fix it :) .

Hope you all enjoy the latest features and update your invoices!

Brian

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Byte Harmony puts Lync into production as the primary phone system

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Brian Kerhin

After over 6 months of testing, tuning, tweaking and polishing of the Private Cloud Lync Unified Communications System Byte Harmony is now using it as the primary phone system and unified communications system.

There are 3 additional companies using the system as a secondary system (2 phones on an employee desk) to their primary system. So far all reviews have been positive. Most noted feedback has been:

• Great call quality
• Great stability
• Easy to use large feature set
– Text translated voicemail
– Real time chat on PC, laptop, mobile device and tablet
– Video and voice Web conferencing

Telecommunications is one of the critical services we sell, service and support. We love what we have now and look forward to the additional world of capabilities soon to be available on Lync 2013!

For those not familial with Lync, it is Microsoft’s first product to compete head to head with PBX vendors.

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Our Storage of choice is ZFS

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Brian Kerhin

I’ve been out of the lime light for the last few months. I’ve been able to spend time with our family’s newest edition, Jacob and one of my first technology loves, Linux. We just finished updating every storage system used by Byte Harmony for hosting our data and our cloud hosting systems to use a system called ZFS.

ZFS is a storage system originally created by Sun now owned by Oracle. Recently ZFS has made news both as the storage system used in the fastest computer system in the world, the Sequoia (Shown above, Info on Sequooia and a Video with a technical deep dive). We use both the supercomputer ZFS system and a ZFS system provide by Nexenta.

ZFS is a storage system that allows us to:

  1. Assure data integrity by using checksum, a data integrity signature, on every byte of data.
  2. Store data on multiple hard drives multiple times. We store data using ZFS multiple times so that if a single copy of the data is corrupted for any reason (drive failure, bad sectors,  head crash, etc) data remains available.
  3. Compress data stored on hard drives to increase system speed and reduce data storage space. Today’s modern CPU is so fast that it can compress data and store less of it faster than it can store a large amount of data. For this reason most of our data is compressed in the ZFS system.
  4. Deduplicate data that is stored many times. When storing data sets that contain the same data over and over again deduplication is used to keep only a single physical copy stored even though the system using the storage system sees multiple copies.
  5. Store data on multiple hosts so if a single system fails systems can recover without needing to copy data out of a backup device.

Combining the above benefits (and a few more) results in a system that can be restored instantly rather than the minutes, hours, days or weeks it can take to restore data using tape and hard drive based backups.

Best of all I’ve been able to put together a technology solution with ZFS that allows us to use the same storage technology to provide storage solutions to small offices as I would for large corporations. This means training my staff on a single technology used on all clients. Lower costs, higher quality and better systems are the goals of most companies who use Autotask. So from that perspective, ZFS is an Autotask thing J.

With ZFS systems in place our engineering attention shifted to the virtualization sphere. Server 2012 is about to be released so a new wave of projects will surely ensue.  Surely Hyper-V will get a chunk of that work, as will VMWare, however, the new kid on the block is making waves. That new kid is KVM. I’ll write more about our current progress with KVM and a new product we will be delivering in future articles as well as covering some new areas of Autotask.

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Autotask Community Live 2012

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Brian Kerhin

I’ll be speaking at Autotask Community Live 2012 in Orlando Florida on Managing Client Assets Using Autotask Configuration Management.

You can download the presentation here, the sort order sheet here and the CI Handout here.

See you all at the conference!

Brian

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The new Byte Harmony Office is now HERE!

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Brian Kerhin

Check out our new office space! Office space walk through video

It won’t be long and we’ll be posting video of the office up and running.

This year, we are delivering a number of changes that will provide significant improvements to our quality of service which will not result in higher prices, rather, greater value.

First and foremost we have 3 new offices:

Milwaukee Office:

Byte Harmony, Inc.
The West Allis Center
1126 S 70th Street
Suite N400
Milwaukee, WI 53214

414.443.9594

 Pittsburgh Office:

Iron Gate Technology, Inc.
The Cardello Building
1501 Reedsdale Street
Suite 107
Pittsburgh, PA 15233

412.265.6311

 Accounting Office:

BH & IGT
12141 W Holmes Ave
Greenfield, WI 53228

414.425.7447

The new accounting office location should be used for all future payments and will be shown on all future invoices. You can now avoid sending checks all together as we now accept ACH / EFT payment processing (and crediting). If you’d still like to send checks that’s no problem; we can electronically process them using ACH / EFT. We will also continue to support credit card payments.

Late in 2011 Byte Harmony formed a partnership with Iron Gate Technology to improve efficiency and quality. We depend entirely on our technology to keep our team of 10 running full speed together 550 miles apart. Those same technology tools used by us are available to you.

A large part of the office move for Byte Harmony was to increase our access to technology for the partnership and future cloud needs of our mutual client base at extremely low costs. The new Byte Harmony office will be a mixed office and data center location complete with fiber optic connectivity, dry fire suppression and multisite building fiber optic connectivity.  In some ways this is more advanced than our current enterprise (SAS70 Type II) data centers being used by our clients in both Milwaukee and Pittsburgh, in others it’s not. This new location does allow us to deliver cloud technology at a much lower price point for clients that could not otherwise afford them.

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Reviews on Brian’s CompTIA panel published

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Brian Kerhin

News articles on Brian’s panel at CompTIA Breakaway are published here:

http://www.smbnation.biz/Home/tabid/36/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/947/CompTIA_Diary_Part_3_What_Keeps_Solution_Providers_Up_at_Night.aspx

and here:

http://www.wisesaas.com/2011/08/whats-keeping-solution-providers-up-at.html

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August 2011 Release Notes

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Brian Kerhin

This feature release is one of the biggest, “You asked for it” feature releases I’ve ever seen. Some places where our hands were tied we are now free (return email addresses, cross browser support, etc.). In other cases we’ve had complex workarounds for years that are now possible to implement with straight forward settings. This is one of the best Autotask releases to date!

Next Business Day SLA

For years we’ve asked Autotask to allow us to have an SLA option to make a ticket due before the end of the next business day. Now we can.

SLA based Workflow rules and new Workflow rules triggers, conditions and filters

With SLA based workflow rules you can make workflow rules fire based on SLA events other than the ticket due date. Workflow triggers will allow us to trigger rules to fire based on more specific changes to a ticket, like adding notes, time or making changes to specific parts (like status). Configuration Items now can play a part in service desk workflow rules.  No longer are we limited to just having the ticket edited (all of those prior events). This is an enormous improvement in how to program Autotask workflow rules.

Workflow rules that create To-Do’s

This is a very unique feature that may be answering a feature request to make service desk tickets into mini projects. At present there is no way to automate the creation of To-Do items outside of this feature. Release notes suggest using issue types to trigger the correct workflow rules. The problem with that is that different clients need different things done when deploying a workstation.  No solution is perfect but this is definitely a tool that our processes could be wrapped around in order to improve service delivery quality and automation.

Send from custom template notification

Master MSP companies, aka companies that do work for other MSP companies, have frequently requested an ability to send email as their clients. Now with custom templates that allow you to specify any from address you want you can do just that!

Client Access Portal / Taskfire Speed Improvements

The client access portal was so slow for many of our clients and taskfire users that they simply stopped using it all together. With the new grids design we should be able to get people back into the system!

Enhanced Browser Support

With this release of Autotask your users can use every module of Autotask (assuming they’re not Admins). Users outside if IE8 will not have the same experience, IE9 has bugs and Firefox, Chrome and Safari have limited support within the modules, it’s still MUCH better than it was before.

Improvements in the Quickbooks Integration

The Quickbooks Integration has always done what we want but with this new release we may be able to do more. This will most likely be a new blog article to cover how we use the new integration.

Outside of these features, which we really wanted, there is a new Daily alerts feature which will help us stay on top of information that is important to us as individual resources.  Managed Service Account Owners can be notified if their accounts are receiving any attention, People responsible for contracts can keep tabs on expiring contracts and contracts that are out of compliance.

Last but not least fellow QuoteWerks users even got a treat with a new API feature allowing Quoted Items to be deleted. This may not seem like a big deal, but with ConnectWise Capital having invested in Quosal Autotask users may find QuoteWerks to be the defacto solution to the limitations in Autotask Quotes.

August Release Notes

https://community.autotask.com/blogs/autotask_updates/archive/2011/08/03/autotask-august-release-workflow-engine-extended-browser-support-smart-alerts-and-much-more.aspx

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Brian Kerhin Speaks at CompTIA Breakaway in Washington DC

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Brian Kerhin

Join us in Washington DC to hear a candid panel of solutions providers share the biggest challenges they’re facing today in running their businesses. Nothing is off the table. From HR to marketing to relationships with vendors, we’ll discuss what’s keeping these guys up at night. Hear topics such as how do you fire a customer, or at least say no to them, what is the impact to partners with changes to vendor programs, and what are some best practices for managing relationships with customers and vendors.

Moderator: Regina Ciardiello, Managing Editor, SMB Nation

Panelists:

  • Brian Kerhin, CEO, Byte Harmony, Inc.
  • Edward J. Mana, President, Technology On Demand, Inc.
  • Ilene Rosoff, CEO and President, The Launch Pad
  • Chris Wiser, CEO, TechSquad
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Byte Harmony Celebrates 10 Years in Business!

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Brian Kerhin

10 Years in BusinessToday marks the 10th year of business for Byte Harmony!

Our Birthday story soon to come, we’re in the middle of contracting for a new office move. We’ll post pictures and information in a future story.

A special thank you to our valued clients who have helped us get this far. I can’t wait to release all the details of Byte Harmony Version 2!

Brian

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