First I hope all who read this are safe and healthy. I’m posting this to gauge possible interest in a program I’m putting together to provide free IT support and services to small businesses affected by the economic hardships brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically I wanted to propose this to ITarian/Comodo but also wanted to include other MSP’s as well.
The basic idea is to offer 1 - 2 months (maybe more depending) of free IT support for small businesses. This support overall would be basic compared to full plans but would provide emergency support, planning and service to help businesses keep their systems working. Also it would help them get remote access technologies setup they can use for employee’s or to support their customers. Many small businesses that are most affected recently don’t have IT departments or even a full-time MSP, therefore don’t have the means or knowledge to operate and setup remote technology outside of smartphone or basic conferencing tools. As more and more pressure is put on the IT infrastructure, security also becomes a concern.
Where ITarian comes in. I know this is a radical idea but I’d love to offer these small businesses ITSM and CCS free for a couple months to help support them and provide them extra endpoint security. Prior to ITarian going to a paid model, I would have immediately done this when it was 100% free. But now I would need ITarian’s blessing and they assistance to be a part of this.
I would believe the desire to help those in need would be enough justification, however here are some business reasons:
Goodwill is worth way more towards trust than any marketing could be. It would be great PR for ITarian/Comodo
Potentially this could provide great exposure to the ITarian products. Just look at Zoom as an example.
Can showcase the benefits of ITarian products such as CCS and containment technology
I am putting this together through my business, however I'm not concerned about who it appears to come from. I could pass it through to ITarian (or any other MSP willing to join) and just help where needed (setup, onboarding, support..etc)
This can be expanded on more but I leave it there for now to gauge if there is any interest
we have been offering 2 hours of remote IT support . but your offer sounds more on par with what we want to promote and to help out our local SMB prospects .
curious how you are pitching this to prospects ? telesales?
We offered all our clients remote access with free setup to their work pcs from home at our expense as a gesture of goodwill. The takeup, even though it was offered at zero cost was only about 10-15%. Unfortunately we couldn’t use the Itarian tool as it doesn’t support unattended.access so we used our alternative fall back tool.
@melih Much appreciated! Will be in touch for logistics!
@Ed_Johnson Yea the ITSM isnt really designed for end-user remote access usage, though you can make it work by setting up users as you would one of your techs and using permission groups to give them only access to machines/features.
We are more than happy to help were we can in conjunction with ITarian and Comodo where possible so @melih if you need to let us know anything etc please pass it on.
In regards to remote access for clients we use ITarian for our clients and is working extremely well. I have posted a guide on the forums, so click on my name and it is one of the recent posts.
This is a missing feature for sure, but an odd question that I gave to a client asking us for this was
“If you could print, who and how are you going to give the print out too as your not allowed to see anyone?”
As you can imagine, they did not come back straight away, but when they did they said they actually do not need to print.
Yea I think its more people learning to break some habits. In my case I have a client who is an essential service and still needs to print things like lab labels…etc but the remote personnel just print to the local printer for the onsite team.
Hi @datalink , it’s not clear to me the exact requirement. Can you please clarify with an example? Print redirect could be in both ways, that’s why I’m asking.
I’d like take to occasion to thank you all your team for the great Itarian product that, as small MSP, allow me to keep on working, giving assistence to my customers especially in this difficult moment.
Hi, any chance to see the redirection to home printer feature in the roadmap? WIth the return of the lockdown here where I live, my customers are preparing to work from home again and some of them asked me this feature, Thanks
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