Recap of our Special End of Q2 Fireside Chat – And the Biggest News of the Summer!

We loved seeing so many of you at our recent Fireside Chat, giving us a chance to talk about what’s been happening in the first half of 2019, our recent customer success stories and some big news about what’s coming this summer. If you missed us live, here’s a quick recap.

From Waterfall to Agile

Atera has been releasing rapidly over the first half of 2019, but it wasn’t always like that. We used to release a new version once every 6 months. We weren’t in sync with the demands from the market. We decided to go on a risky and exciting journey to move the company from Waterfall to Agile or Scrum methodology. It wasn’t easy, and many of you might remember the long periods we had where we didn’t release anything, while we were preparing the infrastructure and teams. It was worth the wait! Since the beginning of 2019 we have been releasing new major features and changes every three weeks.

One of the most important things for us with this change, is to know that you can give us input and now that we’re fast and tuned in, we can give you what you need in just three weeks.

As a result, we’ve released 9 versions in the first half of this year! Here’s what we’ve done.

Custom Fields have been added to the system, allowing you to extend the entity and customize it as much as you want with details about your customers. We have improved the MSI Agent Installer, so it can automatically be put in the right customer. We added two additional remote connection tools for our system. If you love to use ScreenConnect and TeamViewer you can use these with ease. We’ve added 2FA, so that logging into the system becomes more secure, as well as ensuring that each new agent installer demands .Net 4.5 rather than 3.5.

We’ve added support for billing with multiple taxes, as well as a software inventory report, making it easy to explore what software your customers have installed. Registry editor allows you to remotely explore the registry changes or add values and modify without taking control of the machine. When it comes to reports, we revamped block contract report and added a filter for retired devices on almost all reports, which means for example that offline machines can be excluded from reports. Lastly, we upgraded patch management for Mac machines.

Understanding Feature Board

We want to optimize the creation of features moving forward alongside the people that matter most, you. For those who haven’t got acquainted with it yet, let’s introduce Feature Board.

Here’s how it works. Once you’ve clicked on Feature Board, you have three things you can do.

1. Ideas: See what features the community has proposed, and vote on them. The more votes, the more it will push the product team to put it in the next sprint.

2. In Progress: These are things we’re already working on, due in two to three weeks. Watch this space!

3. Launched: Here are new features that have been launched recently. Take a deep dive and check out the release notes, or make sure you haven’t missed an update.

The feature board gives you a view of where the product and development team are at. The more feedback we get the more we can work on what’s important to you. Learn step by step how to use Feature Board here.

Our Latest Customer Success News

We have a whole lot of new webinars added in 2019, from walk-throughs and RMM and PSA tutorials, to PSA Master that shows you how to design tickets billing and reports. We also have a reporting webinar, and a new features webinar, highlighting what’s new each sprint. If you’d like to register for these webinars, email [email protected].

We’re also releasing brand new training to help you grow your business and optimize your workflow. Let us know which training you want to see the most here.

If you have any problems at all, remember that tickets get answered on average within 2 hours, and both email and chat are great ways to get in touch with us. Social media is fun to hang out on, share ideas and ask questions to other MSPs, but when you reach out for support on Facebook – this might not be seen for a while.

As soon as there’s a bug, we escalate this to Tier One, and our Dev on Duty is there exclusively to support anything that needs fixing and deploy that right away.

What’s Coming this Summer?

Sharing our road-map for the next few sprints, we’re going to be integrating back-up solutions and anti-virus third party integrations, allowing you to bring the tools you love to Atera, or choose our new fully integrated solutions that work seamlessly all-in-one. We can’t say much more about brands at this point– but don’t worry, it’s what you were asking for!

We will be enhancing our agent installation process, adding automation to make it more convenient and streamlined. Look out for optimizations to Splashtop and an expansion of the feature set of our RMM. You should see a big improvement in performance within a few weeks.

Some of you might have seen File Explorer in Beta, we will soon be launching this and adding File Transfer, too. We’ll also be adding functionality to Tickets, adding automation to close tickets if a customer doesn’t respond in a certain time period, for example. Stay tuned for these updates and a lot more over the next few months.

Alongside all of these updates, we have one pretty big innovation that we want to share with you, helping you optimizing your workflow and grow your business. Drum-roll, please…

Introducing, Network Discovery!

There are three ways that you can use Network Discovery to grow your business and identify new revenue streams with new and existing clients.

1. Detect all devices and create reports. Run a quick analysis of the network, sit with a new client and discuss what they have in their ecosystem, suggest pricing improvements and more. For existing customers its great for quarterly business reviews. With the click of a button, you can see what needs changing, upsell or increase engagement in an effortless way.

2. Documentation. Network Discovery holds onto the baseline report, and all network devices are automatically documented. When changes happen, for example new devices are added, or removed, the system is updated and you can receive an instant alert.

3. Network diagram. This is the third component. You can see what’s inside your network, troubleshoot problems, identify unsafe communications or traffic flows, help with security decisions such as building a plan for micro-segmentation, or use the diagram as a system of record.

We’ve already started working on network discovery, so you can expect to see some new screens in the system within the next few days. From version to version we will be adding more features and updates to this exciting new tool, so make sure to give us some feedback so we can accommodate what you need! To get early bird access to Network Discovery, email [email protected].

Lastly… Atera will be releasing a mobile app!

We’ve been working on this for a while, and soon you’ll be able to manage tickets, contact customers, and see customized notifications all from the app. We’ll be putting ticket management, device management and both alerts and remote connection on our app road-map, so watch this space!

That’s all for this quarter – thanks to those of you who could join us, and we’ll see you next time!