IT Nation 2014: Bellini & Team Outline New & Upcoming ConnectWise Features

By The Business Solutions Network

IT Nation attendees last week were treated to a sneak peek of new and upcoming features and enhancements to the ConnectWise platform. The company’s CEO, Arnie Bellini, and his team spent time walking the 2,400 attendees through the most significant enhancements of version 2015.1.

Here’s my quick overview:

• There are navigation enhancements to allow users to more quickly perform common functions such as creating tickets. Also, there’s s new “recent” button that lists the last 30 screens accessed so users can quickly jump to particular pages.
• There’s an updated user interface that is configurable to allow users to hide/display the fields they need most, re-order fields, and more.
• ConnectWise continues to bring more functionality to the browser level to allow mobile and Mac users the ability to use the software.
• Functionality has been added that allows actions to be taken by included key phrases in an email. For instance, a tag can be included in an email that will cause the system to automatically create a ticket, add the email to notes, and add the email contacts to the ticket.
• ChatAssist is ConnectWise’s new chat add-on ($30/user/month) that takes communication between MSP and users to the next level. Tickets can be created out of a chat history with a few clicks and users on both sides have the ability to see when the other is available to work on resolving an issue. The result of pilots is 60% of tickets being closed within 24 hours and an increase in customer satisfaction.
• ConnectWise’s investment in BizDox continues to pay off as the company showcased new auto-generated network diagrams and detail on network assets.
• On the project management topic, ConnectWise illustrated new workflows that allow users to modify/update items from the work plan screen without having to actually open the entire ticket window. Also, adding resources to multiple tickets can now be done from one screen. The result of both is time savings for users.
• Mobility is a big focus of the new update. Mobile users have new functionality when it comes to time keeping, adding expenses, and submitting expense reports.  In fact, the live demo showed a stop watch function for accurate time keeping, using the phone’s camera to record a receipt, and everything being auto submitted to the home office with a click.
• Mobile users can also now capture client signatures via their phone’s touch screen. No more waiting for a signature to begin work.
• Finally on the mobile front, support for Windows phones is imminent.
• New dashboards were also shown. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, but it appears as if between the new reports, existing ones, and a new report writer, users should be able to view important data in whatever way they want.
• ConnectWise also has a lot of integrations, but a lot more are planned. On a related front, the company has expanded its team dedicated to its API to turbocharge that effort in 2015.
• ConnectWise has added active directory integration which allows you to quickly import users into the system (while avoiding duplicate entries).
• There are some cloud enhancements to Quosal (quoting software) that allow quotes to be generated based on your company’s best practices (e.g. standard configurations). Also, your sales team can quickly embed video messages into proposals.
• ConnectWise has some pretty cool cloud migration options now baked in. The on-stage demo walked through the process of migrating a customer’s local Exchange server to the cloud (pick your service provider). Within minutes, the customer was migrated, tickets were created, and billing was updated.
• Marketing tools have been added to help busy IT pros send custom email campaigns using templates and forms.
• Finally, ConnectWise teased Sherlock, it’s new artificial intelligence search engine that will be able to interpret your plain language questions and present you with the data you want. So, you could ask “How many open tickets did we have last week?” and that data would be displayed.

A lot of updates, eh? Accord to Bellini, this much innovation is a direct result of the company’s 2014 shift to an agile development system. That said, we was quick to point out that such agility hasn’t come at the cost of quality. He reports that there currently exist no bugs that are older than 90 days and the company has a 95% satisfaction rating from customers. Last, but not least, Bellini revealed that the company plans to invest somewhere in the neighborhood of $139,000,000 in 2015 innovation.