Dear Partners,
Many countries and states are starting to reopen and the path towards the “new normal” is becoming clearer for many of us. It’s also bringing a lot of questions and concerns about how we as businesses operate safely, how to interpret and apply new standards around workplace health and safety, and many more.
When the COVID-19 pandemic started, ConnectWise was focused on helping many of our partners transition to remote work models, ensuring they were securing these environments, and providing education on the various legislative measures that emerged in different regions. Now, we’re looking ahead to how to best help you in the next phase.
Coming soon, we will launch a new webinar series and content assets focused on:
• Return to work plans: Whether you or your clients are heading back into the office, staying remote or looking at a hybrid office-remote work model, we’ll be bringing together industry experts and your peers to share what they are seeing and discuss the options.
• Optimizing remote workforce: We all figured out quickly how to work remotely, but if this model is becoming a long-term plan, there are technical and operational activities to help optimize the experience – we’re doing this too for many of our colleagues.
• Rapid Recovery: Like you, we’re anxious to get back to some sort of normalcy as quickly as possible and we’re going to help provide the tools to get you there.
Many of these topics have been informed by the continued feedback from our partners who I’ve spoken to and from those participating in our ConnectWise Pulse group. I want to thank each of you again for the time you’re giving us to share your thoughts. Your voices help us be better. If there are other topics you would like to discuss or need support with, I encourage you to reach out.
I want to also take a moment to talk about security. Our industry – and the world – has seen an increase in cyber-criminal activity in the wake of the pandemic. Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic on March 11, COVID-19-related online spam has increased over 6,000%. Google observed over 18 million malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19 in a single week.
The security threat during this time is real as attackers thrive on a state of fear and I encourage all of you, and all ConnectWise colleagues, to be vigilant. There are many simple but effective ways keep yourselves and your businesses safe:
• Ensure all OS and other software is up-to-date and patched regularly.
• Do not click on links or open attachments in any unsolicited emails that create a sense of fear or urgency around financial incentives.
• Never provide personal information of any sort via e-mail. Be aware that many e-mails requesting your personal information can appear legitimate.
• Access company data with corporate equipment and connect to the corporate network via corporate provided VPN only.
• Double-check authenticity before making donations to charities.
ConnectWise is always looking to improve our proactivity and transparency around security and will post the latest information and resources to our Security Trust site.
I wish everyone a safe, healthy, and happy weekend and for those of you in the U.S., I hope you all get to enjoy a long Memorial Day weekend with you loved ones.
Talk soon,
May 8, 2020: An updated statement from Jason Magee on COVID-19
Dear Partners,
I hope everyone’s week has been productive and that each of you have been able to find moments of calm in the whirlwind of news, reopening plans, and thoughts of what the future will look like. In the coming weeks and months, ConnectWise will be rolling out our plans for returning to offices and I will be sharing those plans with you as we ensure the process has minimal impact to our services and partner experience.
One update I mentioned in my last email that I’d like to recap is the decision to transition our June product training conference, IT Nation Explore, to be a fully virtual event this year. I’m personally very excited for what our team has in store for this event and am pleased that we already have over 1,000 partners signed up to attend.
Since making this announcement, I’ve received many notes from partners wondering about the fate of our November conference, IT Nation Connect. We, like most of you, are monitoring and trying to identify the best path forward to ensure the safety of our partners and colleagues. I'm optimistic that we will be able to meet in person (with new health and safety precautions in place), gathering for an impactful and inspiring finish to this year.
I’m really looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones in November. If you are ready to join me, you can register here. We are also actively seeking speakers who are interested in sharing their expertise or lessons learned in one of our many breakout sessions. If you or someone you know are interested in applying, you can do so here.
Now more than ever, being a part of the IT Nation community is important – we are stronger together and together, we will rise to the new challenges we are all facing.
Finally, a quick logistical update: I’ll be moving these weekly emails to bi-weekly to continue to provide you with valuable updates from ConnectWise while not overwhelming your inboxes. Rest assured, I and my team will keep you informed of the latest updates and content, and I always value your feedback and questions.
Talk soon,
May 1, 2020: An updated statement from Jason Magee on COVID-19
Dear Partners,
Wishing you all a Happy May. Hopefully this new month is bringing many of you sunny days and positive change on the horizon. At ConnectWise, we are starting the initial phases of plans to return to the office in some states, as permitted, and our teams and partners continue to find creative and unique ways to stay productive, deliver solutions and be optimistic.
Some news I’d like to share this week as an example of this creativity is about IT Nation Explore — our in-person product-training conference. While we have had to pivot our events strategy, our IT Nation team has come through and I’m pleased to announce that this event will be fully virtual, happening June 23-26, 2020.
We’ve lined up four days of live keynotes and sessions and a huge library of on-demand content for attendees to up their game on all of the products within the ConnectWise platform. And some extra good news here — we are waiving all registration fees making the event, training, and content accessible for all of our community members.
Now more than ever, it is important to get the most value from your technology stack and Explore is a fantastic opportunity to do that. You’ll also hear from myself and other ConnectWise leaders about what you can expect from us in the coming months, give feedback on products, interact with vendors, share a happy hour drink with peers, and more. I truly hope to “see” you and your teams there.
We’ll continue to provide updates and new resources on our Business Resiliency Site. Our teams are currently putting together new content as it relates to the next phase of this pandemic, aimed at supporting you through things like moving back to offices and preparing for the ‘new normal.’
As always, if there is anything specific you’d like to see or questions you have, please reach out. We love your suggestions and insights and we’ve already seen a great turnout of over 900 partners responding to our new ConnectWise Pulse weekly surveys, so thank you to all who are participating. If you’d like to be a part of the Pulse group, providing your perspectives weekly and receiving the aggregated results, please reach out to our Partner Communications team.
With that I hope the coming weekend and week are productive and healthy for you all – May the Forth be With You and Happy Cinco de Mayo.
Talk soon,
April 27, 2020: An updated statement from Jason Magee on COVID-19
Dear Partners,
It’s been another week of pushing through this pandemic response. While summer approaches and many states look at reopening strategies, ConnectWise remains committed to the health of our partners, our colleagues and our company. As promised, I will continue to reach out with updates at the end of each week. I hope you find these communications valuable in what I know is a flood of information and content.
New Resources
We recently launched a new MSP COVID-19 New Playbook, a comprehensive guide to preserve the health of your MSP through this time. The playbook is available for download on our Business Resiliency site – a hub for all of our COVID-19 response resources and content, including:
• Legislative Webinars covering the various laws and policy updates in North America, EMEA and APAC regions
• Cybersecurity Education resources to help train your teams on security best practices and technology
• Managing Cash Flow guides on balancing cash and managing your business through this pandemic
I know that despite talk reopening the economy, many of our partners are still facing significant challenges and hardships. My leadership team and I are working hard to make sure we’re doing all we can to help our partners, support our colleagues and ensure a healthy ConnectWise. For our partners operating in the hardest hit industries, we have temporarily paused all contractual price increases, are working with many to be flexible with payment terms, and our ConnectWise Foundation will soon be providing funds to TSPs in need through our various fundraising efforts. On a personal note, I’ve decided to contribute 40% of my own salary to the Foundation for the next six weeks to help bolster our ability to give.
We continue to ask for your input and suggestions for how we can help you through this time. Thank you to all of you who opted in to our ConnectWise Pulse group to share your input in weekly surveys. We value your voices and will be sharing the results of the initial survey with participants early next week.
I know we’re in a grinding and anxious time, but I want to thank you all for the patience and resiliency you’ve shown, as well as your openness, support and candid feedback . I’ve had some of the most enlightening and useful discussions with many partners over the past few weeks and continue to be impressed with the strength and power of our community.
I wish you all health, safety and hopefully more moments of hope and laughter over the coming weeks.
Talk soon,
April 17, 2020: An updated statement from Jason Magee on COVID-19
Dear Partners,
As we finish another week of what’s still an uncertain and stressful time, I want to thank you again for all that each of you are doing to keep small business going during this time, and for all of the valuable insights and feedback we’ve received thus far.
One of the things we’ve been hearing from our partners is the desire to use this time to train their teams, so this week I wanted to provide an update on some additional resources that our team has been working on, based on your feedback.
Certify® Cybersecurity Training Events
Based on overwhelmingly positive response to our cyber security trainings, we have additional, live Certify Virtual events coming up:
North America
• Fundamentals for Sales & Owners: May 6 and May 15, 2020
EMEA
• Fundamentals for Sales & Owners: May 13, 2020
• Fundamentals for Engineers: May 21, 2020
Australia & New Zealand
• Fundamentals for Sales & Owners: May 27, 2020
• Fundamentals for Engineers: June 10, 2020
Currently, ConnectWise Certify trainings are exclusively available to ConnectWise and Continuum partners. Register online here: ConnectWise.com/TheITNation/Certify
Curated Training Courses
• Degrees by Role – Use the Train your Team tab on the University to assign your technician or sales resource specific lessons to make them more successful.
• Ongoing Webinars & Bootcamps – Find all of the upcoming training opportunities on the University Calendar.
• Planning for Success – A tool for leaders and employees, as well as company owners that consists of 22 interactive lessons covering both business and life.
New Resiliency Site
We’ve reorganized and consolidated all of our COVID-19 response and educational content into a new Business Resilience Site. Here, you’ll find all of the on-demand webinars, blog posts, ebooks, past emails from me and many other resources that we’ve compiled over the last several weeks to support you through this time.
Advocacy Effort to Support TSPs
As small and medium businesses look to contain costs during these difficult economic times, IT Services and Cybersecurity services are being cut or reduced. In light of this, we are seeing a policy gap that could weaken the overall security position of the United States business environment and will impact the ability for employees to successfully return to work in the future.
We are encouraging our partners to contact your Congressmen and Senators by April 20 to ask that in future COVID-19 related funding bills for SMBs, funds be eligible to be utilized to pay for IT Services. Find the contact information for your local Congressional delegates and Senators and a templated message we crafted to them that you can use.
Finally, I want to thank you all again for the feedback, insights and perseverance you’ve all demonstrated during this time. Our community is a strong one and while I know some are faring better than others, we are committed to our three pillars: helping you, our partners, get through this, the wellbeing and safety of our colleagues, and the stability and health of ConnectWise.
Please continue to share your feedback with us and be on the lookout early next week for our newest initiative to hear your voices: ConnectWise Pulse.
Stay Healthy,
April 6, 2020: Thank You and Resources Round Up
Dear Partners,
I want to take a moment to thank you for all that you do for small businesses globally, your patience and feedback during this time, and for being a trusted partner of ConnectWise.
Another week and as promised, I’m touching base with brief updates and information from ConnectWise as we all navigate this new and evolving environment together. I know that there is an overabundance of information and noise in the world right now, but below is a quick round up of information for easy access now and in the future.
Also, I’d like to invite you to join us for an “Understanding the CARES Act” Webinar taking place today at 4:00pm EDT.
COVID-19 Resources and Information
Remote Working & Security Resources
• Staying Secure in a Remote Workplace Webinar
• Remote Workforce Resources Webinar
• ConnectWise Control Offer
• Fortify for Endpoint Security Offer
Legislative and Small Business Education Resources
• CARES Webinar TODAY at 4pm EST
• The Business Impact of COVID-19 Webinar
Information on IT Nation Events
• You’ll find details on specific events from the IT Nation here including events that are postponed, canceled or moved to a virtual format.
Past COVID-19 Communications on the Security & Trust site
• Find all the past communications from me, as well as our operational updates as it relates to business continuity on this site.
Additionally, our Partner Success team is always ready to provide support and guidance through this time and they can be reached at partnersuccess@connectwise.com.
Finally, I just want to wish everyone safety and health during this time. As I regularly say to all of our colleagues: practice social distancing, wash your hands, and take care of yourselves. Together, we’ll get through this.
Talk soon,
March 27, 2020: An updated statement from Jason Magee on COVID-19
Dear Partners,
Being several weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, I feel it’s important to continuously communicate to our partners during this time. I know you’re inundated with communications from all your vendors about COVID-19, but I’ll continue to send this email update at the end of each week. While you’ll be seeing less about ConnectWise business continuity with teams are up and running remotely, we’ll be delivering resources and updates covering topics that we think matter to you.
New Resources
Many of you may have seen our Remote Working website and various webinars on remote working and security. We’ve added more resources on a new Legal Education and Small Business resources page. This content covers legislative updates that may impact your business and curated small business resources to help inform you about the various options available to help SMBs through this situation.
Soon, we’ll also be hosting webcasts for owners and business leaders on pertinent businesses topics, such as leveraging SMB programs and others. We’ll bring in experts to answer your questions and present the current best practices in response to our rapidly evolving social, health, and economic environment.
Additionally, we want to encourage you to take advantage of our Partner Success team, who are here to help you utilize the ConnectWise platform to its fullest extent under these new and challenging circumstances. They are here to answer your questions about the platform, help set up your clients for remote work, review best practices, or even just talk about business processes. They are also available for system health checks - a process we offer partners to ensure the products you’re using are optimally working to support your needs. Again, I encourage you to tap our team for help and you can reach them at partnersuccess@connectwise.com.
Product Help
Our teams have been working tirelessly to bring products to market that we feel will best support you. You may have seen emails or spoken with our team members about these, but at a high level, we’re offering existing partners the ability to use a 90-day license of ConnectWise Control Remote Workforce. Additionally, through a partnership with SentinelOne, we’re providing partners 100 licenses to Continuum Fortify for Endpoint Security with full SOC support until the end of June.
If you’re interested, you can learn more about our offers via your account manager or through our web pages: ConnectWise Control Offer, Fortify for Endpoint Security offer.
ConnectWise Operations
All of our offices are nearly 100% remote as of today, for the safety of our colleagues and in line with state mandates to slow the spread of COVID-19. While we are fully operational remotely, we will continue to update our Security & Trust site with any changes, as well as the IT Nation Updates page with details on our events.
Finally, I want to thank you all for the patience, positive messages and support many of you have shown us through this time. We are all experiencing the stress and fear that this pandemic has caused. With drastically changed personal, family and social routines, economic upsets and full-time remote working situations, it’s a tough time for everyone. I am proud of how our team and community continues to come together to support each other and I know we’ll get through this, despite the uncertain times ahead.
As always, our commitment to you, our partners, is to provide the solutions and services you need now and going forward to succeed. I welcome your feedback, questions and concerns and rest assured, we are in this together.
Talk soon,
March 20, 2020: An updated statement from Jason Magee on COVID-19
Dear Partners,
As many of us are feeling the personal and economic effects of measures to slow the spread of COVID-19, I want to continue to provide updates to you about ConnectWise operations and share resources we’re developing to support your businesses during this time.
ConnectWise Operational Updates
Our offices in Cranberry, PA; Sydney, Australia; Pune and Mumbai, India are closed due to legislative measures and for the health and safety of our colleagues there. The teams are working remotely and are fully operational.
In line with state policies and federal recommendations, many of our offices, including our Headquarters in Tampa, have teams working from home to maintain adequate social distancing. Our remote working capabilities ensure that the teams continue to perform as normal.
Service Team Remote Work Tests
As you may have seen, our Service Delivery teams have been running remote working tests to ensure our NOC, SOC and Help Desk teams in India maintain service levels. As our India teams moves to 100% remote work, our tests have shown that all SLA parameters are in line with our normal operations and committed performance levels:
• Critical Alerts: >98%
• Critical Tickets Acknowledgement: >97%
• Ticket resolution rate: >90.2 %
• Chat Acknowledgement: >90%
• CSAT: >95%
Other Mumbai and Pune teams continue to work from home as per plan with no issues reported.
We’re pleased with these test results and are confident that our teams will be able to continue to deliver excellent service for our partners and end-clients.
Please note that the calls you may receive from our India support teams will be from an unknown number. We will never ask for personal information as our outbound calls are used to provide updates. Our team will cite ticket IDs with partners to verify their identity. Our NOC Inbound Contact number will remain the same, in case you wish to reach them.
Help Desk Volumes
Our Help Desk (HD) is experiencing double the normal daily volume of calls and chats as we support our partners through remote working transitions and issues. Given this high volume, partners will see significant hold times and response. To help mitigate, we are implementing some temporary process changes. Effective now, the HD will not close tickets after 72 hours of not hearing back from the user experiencing the problem. Here is the temporary process:
• A ticket is opened and we cannot close it due to various reasons
• We will attempt to call or email within 24 hours from the ticket open time
• 72 hours after the open date, another email reminder will be sent (This is when we would typically close a ticket)
• 7 business days after the ticket is opened, we will close the ticket and send out the final email
While we’re working hard to redirect all available resources to addressing your needs, we appreciate your understanding during this time and also encourage HD partners to tap each other for support using our online community, Collaborate.
BDR Seed and Recovery Drive Services
Regarding our BDR product seed drive and recovery drive services in all regions, we are adapting our operations as required by conditions at our operating centers and we are closely monitoring the situation with our shipping partners around the world. As of now, our shippers are maintaining delivery services except where limited by government restriction. Currently, we are able to maintain our service agreements (click here to see estimated time to ship) for North America and EMEA. However, we have been forced to temporarily stop processing seed and recovery drives in the Australia region. We will provide additional updates when we are able to resume services fully in Australia or if we see further disruptions in other regions.
Security and Remote Workforce Resources
Many of you already have the ability to set up your customers for remote work via Automate and Control, but we want to continue to provide resources to help you work through this uncertain time. In addition to the Trust site and IT Nation Update site – where you’ll still be able to find the latest on ConnectWise’s business continuity, operations and events – we have created a Secure Remote Workforce website. Here, you’ll find an array of content, on-demand webinars, and other resources to help you navigate the current landscape of mass remote workforces and keep your business and your client’s businesses secure.
Some specific resources I’d like to call out:
• Remote Workforce Resources Webinar
• Helping Clients Secure a remote Workforce
Please continue to look towards the Security & Trust site for operational updates and the IT Nation Update page for specific on our events that are either postponed, cancelled or moving to a virtual format. Also, stay tuned for communications on more resources and offers to further assist you through this time.
I want to personally wish you all health and safety during this time. I know the future is uncertain but know that we at ConnectWise are here to support you in any way we can. Our teams are working around the clock to make sure we’re ready and available to help you and your clients. We’re all in it together and together, we’ve got this.
In good health,
March 13, 2020: An updated statement from Jason Magee on COVID-19
Dear Partners,
Last week, we sent out information on our business continuity strategy in response to the global situation with COVID-19 (Coronavirus). As promised, I wanted to share an update on what ConnectWise is doing today to keep our community safe and operations moving, as well as specifics steps we‘re taking to continue to deliver the solutions your business relies on.
As a reminder, I encourage you to regularly check the Business Continuity page on our Trust Site, which will contain the latest operational updates and links to additional information on specific events and product statuses.
ConnectWise Continuity & Wellness Activities Update
Remote Work Testing
As part of our ongoing preparedness with respect to the COVID-19 spread, we are activating business continuity plans to periodically test various team’s remote work capabilities. This is done to ensure we maintain service levels and resolution times regardless of where our teams are physically located.
This past week, the Service Delivery Teams in Mumbai, Pune and the U.S. held drills to ensure a seamless work experience for our teams and operational continuity for our partners. The Tampa-based Support team and others will be conducting similar tests through the coming weeks.
Office Disruptions
Teams in some of our global offices, including Boston, MA; Bothell, WA; Sydney, Australia; and Bracknell and London in the UK have been given the option of working remotely given their urban locations and COVID-19 spread rates in those areas.
Our teams are well equipped to perform their job functions remotely through our proactive measures to provide remote workstations, soft phone capabilities, VPN access, internet bandwidth and access to required applications for colleagues
Events
As some of you may know, we are postponing our IT Nation Connect Europe event in May and have cancelled or moved other IT Nation Share and User Group events to virtual formats. The most up to date information on events can be found on our IT Nation Event Updates page.
Limiting Travel
We have decided to halt all our team’s international travel, in line with CDC recommendations and the recent travel policies from the U.S., Philippines, Italy and others. Additionally, we are limiting domestic travel to slow the spread of COVID-19 and decrease our colleagues’ potential exposure. Our teams are ready and able to conduct most meetings virtually and while we’ll miss our face time with partners, we feel this is the right choice to support the health of everyone.
The health and safety of our colleagues, their families and our communities are the highest priority and we continue to encourage everyone to follow the preventive measures recommended by the CDC to stay healthy and slow the spread of the virus, including:
• Clean your hands frequently
• Avoid touching your face
• Stay home if you’re feeling ill
Rest assured ConnectWise is well positioned and prepared to work through this pandemic. Although we feel our plan is good for our partners, our colleagues and community, we will certainly not be perfect as we move through this situation. We ask for your patience and we will continue to communicate often of any updates and other measures we’re taking as the situation progresses.
As always, stay safe and healthy,
March 6, 2020: A statement from Jason Magee on COVID-19
Dear Partners,
As we are all carefully watching the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) situation, ConnectWise is actively taking steps to ensure the safety of our teams and the continuity of our operations. We’ve had disaster preparedness and business continuity plans in place for events such as natural disasters and pandemics for some time, and we designed our business to withstand these occurrences with minimal impact to you and your end clients.
As part of our ongoing efforts to keep you informed and aware of any changes to our operations, we have created a new page on our Security & Trust site dedicated to business continuity.
Here, you will find details on our strategy, pertinent updates as it relates to our operations and information about any impacted events through our IT Nation Community. We’ve also included resources on relevant topics like remote working and security during a crisis to help aid your own continuity plans.
In regard to our IT Nation events, we are assessing each location and event to determine safety and need to postpone, cancel or move to a virtual format. Updates on specific events can be found on our IT Nation updates page.
We want to assure you that while we do not anticipate significant disruptions to our operations as a result of the Coronavirus, our products are cloud hosted, our teams have the ability to work remotely and we have redundancies across our offices should any location be impacted.
Additionally, all ConnectWise offices are following CDC and World Health Organization recommendations on hygiene to prevent infection and travel, encouraging teams to limit non-essential travel. Below are links to the CDC resources.
• COVID-19 Prevention
• CDC Travel Recommendations
I understand that the rapidly evolving situation is causing uncertainty and I am encouraging all of our partners, employees and community to put their health and wellbeing first so that we can continue to operate effectively and help prevent the spread of disease.
Stay healthy,
