 So, I'm going to do a video today on all the software that we're using to run my company Lawrence Technology Services. Now, I'm specifically covering everything we use for IT, not necessarily everything I use for YouTube. That was going to be a separate video, but which is pretty much just OBS and Cayden Live for that. I've done videos on some of those. I've done a video on getting started with Cayden Live. So, what we're going to focus on, like, the IT functions of my company, and specifically, like, how calls come in and how ticketing comes in. So, we're going to start with our calls. We're using Ring Central. And Ring Central has been great, allows me to track some of my phone calls, or track all my phone calls, allows me to keep an eye on all the incoming, outbound, all my employees are using it. They use it on their phones that way when they're on-site at a client, clients can dial their extension. They can hunt and follow them to their cell phones. I've done an entire review on how Ring Central works, so that'll be in the playlist I'll link below. Now, the next thing we have is our documentation system. Now, documentation IT is critical to getting this right. So, we're using still the Wiki system, and I've got a document on how this works. And this is a template inside of our Wiki, which shows you basically how we manage passwords, how we manage customer data regarding all their setup and documentation for any one particular client. So, this is a template of it, and what this does is it lets us see, like here's the firewall, some other server, some device, we'll throw in the IP addresses or whatever they are, the passwords. Now, some people say this seems like a little bit hard to edit. I find it really easy to edit. Most of my guys have some basic scripting skills, so editing a password into some other password. Well, let's spell password, right? And right away, this would let us, there, it looks some other password. I changed it. I can hit save changes if I want. Actually, I will, just like that. And now it's changed. So, it's really arbitrary if I want to edit it again. Just go here, and we'll go ahead and replace it, save changes. It makes it really easy to handle client data. Now, we, I will show you kind of, I got to blur some things out, but in our system here, this is all of our network info, miscellaneous documentations, syncing settings. There's all kinds of little things that we keep in here. Now this goes for a lot of clients. I'm going to talk about this client. We also use the discussion pages. And the discussion pages allow us, as we do bids and jobs, these are some of the details that maybe are more detailed than would be in an quote. It's like the behind the scenes of where we're ordering the parts from or we're going to get these cameras from this client, we're going to get the cabling from this place. So all those details, that way, if the bid says yes, this is all the documentation that's going to flow into that bid and build the entire job out. Because when you quote it, sometimes you have to quote some, you know, unique specific client requests. So that's kind of the Wiki documentation system that's very integrated. Now that is also directly integrated with our point of sale system that's custom. Now this is an in-house tool that we wrote that I really am working on getting open source. It's on my to-do list. It's finding a good developer is what I'm looking for. And I don't mind spending some money, but right now we spent a lot of money in a building. So I got to build up our cash dash a little bit more. So I realized even though we're going to open source it, I kind of need someone to help me go through the code and get it ready. The code needs to be sanitized. It's very messy. But this system works really well. Because of all the customizations that we put in here, it makes a really nice workflow. So, you know, call comes in, ticket open up as a lot of people put it. I don't like calling them tickets. I just don't like that term. But essentially, you know, jobs come in that need to be done. They'll start with a quote system. And right here we have it says create invoice or create quote. So this is what happens when you create quote. And this is really simple because I've used all this simple injection programming that just puts it at the bottom here. And this actually pulls from a table and a database. And then we can, you know, fill out the details of what we're going to do. And we can freeform and type. It's all HTML. So if we expand it by default, we actually leave it collapsed. I can customize and add things in here to make the quote look exactly how we want and insert all the information to start it going or, you know, to get the trouble ticket going. We have all these auto fills. Actually, one of the other auto fills we have here is one more quoting websites. Click a button and it fills out all the general stuff that we do for a website, almost like a contract. So this also is simultaneously our quoting system. I like it all being one system because it just makes everything super easy. And then we can just put in a price and hourly rate, a discount if they have it. The hourly rate default fills in because in our customer profiles, we have an hourly rate in here. And to see a customer in action is this company here. Yes, I got to blur out some of this. But this allows us to do each one of the quotes for each one of the jobs. And this is a simple conduit install. Like, sorry, I got to blur out some of the details here. But it's really easy. We do this. We press the no footer button because that means it's going to be used outside the office. We have another one that says print quote that's for internally in the office because we blend our retail and our business together. It sounds complicated to some people, but having one database and just having the two different quote buttons formats the quote differently whether it's used internally or externally makes it really easy to use. Now, another feature of this is the fact that we have a keyword search. So I can look for inside of all of our invoices like the word Toshiba. There's over 20,000 invoices in here. And you can see it's pretty instant. I can find any invoice. Now, Toshiba's really broad. So what if we wanted to put something in here more specific, such as an ID number that we have that I know is tied to a specific invoice for tracking. And this can pull up that quickly searching through 20,000 invoices and specifically pull the invoice with that particular word in it. This has also been helpful when I'm like, oh, yeah, we did a job where we installed a thing. And if I can't remember some detail of it, I can just put in something I know we installed that may have been unique, like maybe a unique camera we use for a client or any other thing. So it just allows us keyword searching. Then comes our solar winds. And solar winds purchased GFI. So now it's the solar winds GFI or they've pretty much dropped all the GFI stuff. So this system here is for our managed service clients. And it's the dashboard by which we manage everything on. So the more and more clients we keep adding, this has been really nice because it keeps everything consolidated in one place for all of our managed services. Now, this system, I've got a whole review of it. And I need to probably do an update once I've added a lot more features. And it's only improved since I did the review on calling it GFI. The names change for one, but they've added more features. So I'll probably do an updated review of this software, but you can find out. And, of course, you can get a demo from them and start testing this yourself. But it's a great system. Then we use Slack, which I'm not going to show you everything that's in there because there's all kinds of details for clients in there. But of course, we use Slack for communication for all of our stuff. And occasionally, some fun things go in here, too. So that's business communications. Now, backup and disaster recovery, we also use a SolarWinds product, which is their backup and disaster recovery management. Now, I really like this software. And I know there's a lot of other ones out there. I've tried some of them. This one's fairly easy to use. It's got a little bit of a different way it works because of the way it runs locally on each machine. And you can view the dashboard of each machine directly. It's kind of weird. It creates a web wrapper, so it runs locally on a port that you can get into that port. But it's a nice system. It allows us remotely to easily backup, restore, or even download in a complete system image. It does support what they call a speed vault on site. And what that allows them to do is it will automatically and seamlessly pull from a local store of all their data. So maybe the client has a lot of big files. It creates a nice encrypted backup locally so I can restore from that file. So if we get a client call that says, oh, man, we deleted that spreadsheet, we can just jump in here. We can expand out the system really quick. And the system will automatically, without this happening to do much, determine whether it's stored, if there's a local copy for the version I want, or if it has to be pulled from the cloud. And everything's pre-encrypted for it backs up. So all this stays nice and secure. And at the same time allows us to very quickly just drop and restore a folder. And it keeps quite a few days back. So this system right here has got about 30 days with the backups in it. So their system works really well for this. We've been using it for a little while. Real happy that I'm gonna do a specific review of the Max backup system and disaster recovery. It even will let you remotely do an entire system restore. So if you're doing this to back up a workstation for a client, you can push remotely the entire restore to a previous state, including all the registry and everything else, reboot it and the computer is back at that state. We've tested it. It also does bare metal recoveries. It's really handy if they have the local speed vault synchronized, if they don't, it still works. You can download an image from the cloud and bare metal recover the system. I'm gonna do a review later of this particular product, but you can sign up for a free 30 day trial and try it yourself. It's definitely a slick system. So one of the next things I'm gonna talk about is Screen Connect. For companies we don't have in our managed service or some that we do even, we use Screen Connect. Basically we use Screen Connect anywhere we know we're gonna have to make a lot of regular connections because there is a tool inside of the MSP to do it. But I don't know, Screen Connect just works really, really well. I think it works even maybe a little better than the tools that are inside of SolarWinds. But don't get me wrong, the software they have for remote connection handling is really, really good. But this also handles our retail and our one-off, so people just calling and needing remote support. This is the system we use for that. It gives us plenty of information about each computer. I've done a whole review on Screen Connect so I won't get in too much detail, but this allows us to grab any one client by their ID or by their machine name and get us started on connection. And one of the last things I'll show you is a lot of people ask this question because if you didn't notice, I'm running Linux. So the way I handle that is with VirtualBox. And I say handle that is because one of the tricks of doing this is the fact that, well, some things don't work inside of Linux. Now Screen Connect, it's fully cross compatible, but the MSP software is not. There's a couple tools we have to run. So this quickly I can double click and there is my Windows system completely booted up and I won't lie, I use Photoshop as well because, well, unfortunately, GIMP sucks. So all my YouTube templates and things like that are done here in Photoshop, so we're a lot of our ads. So I kind of considered a tool that we use here, but this is how we run Linux and then we run a virtual machine of Windows as needed if there's some support tool or some type of testing. Now this actually makes things really handy because when I have to test some type of software, this allows for quick sandboxing as well. So I had already created a quick clone here whenever I want to test software, I just clone it real quick and then I can just destroy the clone later and hit remove and delete all the files and the clone's gone. That way I can sandbox or test some software someone asked me to load without messing with any of my production machines or this is also how I do my PFSense testing and yes, I keep a Windows XP machine. It's occasionally we have to test some software or get some software that's really old and only ones XP. So this is kind of a quick overview because people ask me this question a lot of so what's the software stack you're using? Just wanted to cover this a little bit. I'm going to go over another video on how we secure some of these systems. For example, you may have noticed that these all have like the point of sale system and that self-signed certificates and how we host that. There is a video in the playlist for how that's done in terms of, you know, that our Linux stack running on PHP virtual box in the back, which is all the servers, but I've seen some people asking about how we secure them. So I do want to talk about that. So far everything that I've shown here though, all of these are two-factor authentication, firewall protected, separated network from our standard network here to keep things real secure. But I'll kind of cover that in depth in another video. But this kind of answers those questions that people ask of the overview of what is the software that you're using to run your business. And yes, I'd love to open source my point sale system. It's on my to-do list. Hopefully within the next year, I can get that project going. Or if you're a developer, you want to reach out to me and talk about it. I mean, I don't mind giving away all the source code to it. I have to do some sanitation before I can send it over to you. But we can definitely talk about this and get that going. So thanks for watching. If you like to content here, like and subscribe and appreciate it. If you have any more questions, comments, leave them below. And it'll hopefully inspire some more videos. But I will get to the security ones too. So I can kind of overview of how we secure our network. So I think that's important. I'm hoping I can share my practices and help you as well with that. So that one is coming. Thanks.