 I'm here for Lauren systems and this video is not for everyone. This video is a well me talking about the software used to manage and run my IT services business and this is a greatly debated topic where people's in rightly so spent a lot of time sometimes overthinking what software they should use to run their business and uh yeah it's not an easy choice and for those you that want to not even watch any more of this video the description's down below and a link to our forum post where I have all of it posted so you don't even have to watch any more of this video to just find out that list I wanted to make that part as easy as possible and I wanted to get it out there for those of you that are in the home lab space or end users that may follow my channel that yeah this video is more talking about the business software so unless you work in the IT industry it may be not that interesting for you. Secondly a lot of the software I'm going to talk about has minimum some of those minimums are 500 or 200 endpoints in order to sign up for using this software that being said it may not be where you're at in business so for those of you that are in that IT MSP services business just be aware that that is a moving target I don't have that information sometimes you do have to call to the sales reps to find that detail out I'm not here to talk about that aspect of it what I am here to talk about is what we do and the easiest way to figure out what we do is well I'm going to throw an ad role right here just to talk about the services we offer and then we'll talk about the software but as I said it's in the description so you don't have to watch the ad role but if you like to watch the ad role it's here are you an individual or company looking for support on a network engineering storage or virtualization project is your company or internal IT team looking for someone to proactively monitor your system security or offer strategic guidance to keep your IT systems operating smoothly not only would we love to help consulting your project we also offer fully managed or co-managed IT service plans for businesses in need of IT administration or IT teams in need of additional support with our expert install team we can also assist you with all of your structure cabling and wi-fi planning projects if any of this piques your interest fill out our hire us form at laurance systems.com so we can start crafting a solution that works for you if you're not interested in hiring us but you're looking for other ways you want to support this channel there's affiliate links down below to get your deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel and now back to our content all right for those of you that made it and survived the ad role or just skipped ahead here is the forum post link and this has all of the different software like that we use g-suite that we're using fresh test for ticketing we use invoice ninja we use ninja one i like things with ninja under name and we use sentinel one we use huntress those are the primary tools that we use now let's talk a little bit about how we came to those conclusions now one thing i want to preface this with is i'm not here to try to convince you to use the same stack that we have or that anything that we didn't choose is somehow inferior or terrible there are a lot of different methodologies you can use ultimately if you have a system that is keeping your clients happy safe secure servicing everything that you need servicing your business and also of course has to be making you profitable you found the right mix and congratulations don't rip it out just because you've seen something shiny and new i think this is something where until you get more operationally mature as a business a lot of people will go well i see i can get this product cheaper that product cheaper and unfortunately price sometimes really starts driving the decision making tree a little bit too much for some people not saying everyone i'm just throwing it out there that we don't drive it based on price matter of fact that's one of the things we have to consider but the first and foremost consideration before choosing any of these is talking to their security teams asking them for how they handle and for documents of how they handle their internal security this is just really important because these tools all operate at high levels of privilege at all of our clients end points therefore a compromise of any of these tools can lead to some really bad ramifications such as the casea ransomware incident of 2021 now let's talk about how we do our testing testing is really not simple there's no way about that it's easy to look at all the products and think about all the things they do but it's another reality to integrate them all into your business and i'm not going to hear sit here and slam the products we didn't choose and the reason why is some of the product choices we were making started last year we tried things they didn't work out we dropped those products we didn't like the way their web interface worked we didn't like the way they were managed that could be very different here in april of 2022 then it was in 2021 when we evaluated so i'm not here to make the list of things we didn't use but we did try the tools we used just like the ones we tried all went through kind of a process internally of setting up labs making sure we logged into their management interfaces and just kind of got a good understanding of how things worked with the product and some didn't make the cut the ones that are on the list are the ones that we chose that we did like and before we roll them out to clients we still didn't roll them out to all of our clients at once we still would do sections at a time just to try to minimize any disruptions that may occur that when you go from maybe five or six systems in a lab to 100 200 300 400 endpoints and beyond there are more problems you find as you run across all these diverse business environments that we manage so as we roll it out to larger groups of endpoints you end up with different perspectives on things we have done all the troubleshooting and understand how these products work even before we switched with ninja one before we switched to enable one of the things we had to do is go through a windows patch cycle i didn't even want to start loading this at all on clients until we really were clear on how it handled windows patching so we actually had to go through two windows patch cycles so there was two months of just having it run on evaluation servers this is something you can usually get some flexible time with with the companies when you're deploying this when you're buying it you know buy a few licenses some type of minimal proof of concept to before you roll it out to the rest of your fleet essentially so there's a lot of time and effort that goes into this this is why i don't have time to test everything that people will grab their caps lock and suggest well i like this product and i wish you would evaluate it because it's the best one out there sometimes we do evaluate them sometimes we don't it's just about finding time to do so and figuring out what's the right fit but all these products as i said are linked down in the description to the forum post where we can have a more in-depth discussion on it i will of course be replying and reading the youtube comments but for those you wonder where did your youtube comment go i don't know youtube sometimes filter things this is why i run my own forums and do the own moderation on it so i'm not subjected to the youtube's algorithm of whether or not they want to filter comments which is kind of their own random thing they do so if you want to have more in-depth discussion about the tools we use or just want to click the link and view it my forums are free to sign up and are free to view without signing up at all you can go there completely anonymously i don't block people from doing things in my forums alright and thanks and thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video if you've enjoyed the content please give us a thumbs up if you would like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon if you'd like to hire a short project head over to laurance systems dot com and click the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways there's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated for deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums dot laurance systems dot com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel thanks again for watching and look forward to hearing from you