We do IT services for 2500+ AED users across 15 firms. Ask Us Anything.

MIKE DONAHUE: So hi, everybody. Thank you. I'm Mike Donahue. I work with Flying Buttress. We are here today, we are not going to be selling. We are not going to be pitching.

Really this class is for you guys, for us to give you whatever information we've learned. We don't know everything. We screw up. We're probably doing some things badly.

But we're happy to share with you what we know. What we know works, doesn't work. Like it said, we're responsible for about 2,500 users across 15, 16 firms, that are all architecture, engineering design firms.

Hopefully this is a chance to pick whatever's left of our brains and take it back. We're going to be really honest with you guys. I used to be head of IT for WATG, a hospitality firm out of SoCal.

I would come to these things. It would always be spin. Or the guy who was up there talking about product x was taken out to dinner by that same team the night before.

It sort of embittered me, so I'm trying to bring truthiness. With us today, we have Graham Henry. Graham, and these, I'm introducing him because they're going to be responding in their areas of expertise. Because I'm a manager, I don't know anything.

Graham is our cloud architect. We're very, very Azure Microsoft centric. We touch Amazon a little bit, but mostly Microsoft.

That's his forté. Jon Howe, here, is probably the most important guy in the room because he does deployments, upgrades, patches, et cetera. For Autodesk, Revit, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Then, Nick Phan is our Help Desk Manager, so he is in charge of front line support and making sure people are happy.

He sees more of what people are hammering on us for. With that, I will open the floor to questions. Yes, thank you. Thank God. Thank God.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: The reason I'm asking is because actually I'm the only one doing their job, all three of their job.

[LAUGHTER]

What's the best practice for deployment? Right now we're using MECM to push it out. But sometimes we do see issues here and there. We're trying to find [INAUDIBLE] that are a lot more streamlined and clean. That's one part. Then the other part is to have a VDI solution for B-Axis for Autodesk applications on the B-Axis system.

MIKE DONAHUE: Right. So I [INAUDIBLE] the first part of that question, not so much the VDI stuff, maybe Graham would be a better person for that. But so I think there's a ton of different ways to deploy software.

We don't love SCCM or some of these older tools all that much. Especially since hybrid work has exploded with response to COVID. I think it depends per client. But we're seeing a ton of folks still working from home currently, and deploying-- [INAUDIBLE].

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Yeah. I'm sorry.

Is this better? Yeah? OK.

Deploying, we need to deploy to a machine and not care about where it is, what network it's on. We need to deploy to people at home. We need to deploy to different offices.

Maintaining physical infrastructure for that, servers and all that, is not really within reach for some of our clients that are a bit smaller, and all that. All that to say, our favorite tool is called ImmyBot. I don't know if any of you have heard of them.

They're fairly small at this moment. They are using a sort of agent-based method of deploying. We install a very small agent onto endpoints all over the place. It takes virtually no time. You can do it with PowerShell. Once that's on there, we can push any package to them.

Including pretty much the entire suite of recent Autodesk software. Which in the past has been it's bulky, it's big, it's complicated. One of the best things is, if you are just doing a vanilla installation, if you're not worrying so much about customization and configuration of it, you can basically use prebuilt packages that they're doing.

They're updating them frequently. In some cases, they're even using something that pulls from Autodesk API. And we'll find the latest version of certain apps.

The script doesn't change. It just is pulling that down from their CDN directly. So you're also getting it basically as fast as possible, localized. And it's downloading at line speed, even for home users.

We really love that. We also like PDQ. I mean, PDQ is probably pretty familiar to a lot of you, if you've been doing any deployment. It's a very easy way to push out software.

It's just, it's not so great for any remote target. If you're trying to hit something over VPN, it's going to be slow. There's that VPN overhead.

But beyond that, it's just, it's not reliable, we find. We like it when we don't have to worry about that piece, if it's just that agent talking to the cloud. Yeah, long story short, we love ImmyBot.

There's a ton more we could get into. It's very nitty-gritty, about how to build deployments and all that. I think most of that's probably better left to if you want to have long-term conversations later on. We can scan each other's badges and stuff, and have some talks about that. I think there's a lot of specifics we can help with.

JONATHAN HOWE: I think, if you can just hold, I think there was a part two to that question about?

AUDIENCE: The VDI, and virtualization of Autodesk. So in case we can't deploy we have a backup solution to provide a virtual machine between the users for doing the VI. We ran into some issues with the VI, so want to see if you guys dealt with [INAUDIBLE] in your work on the multiple applications?

MIKE DONAHUE: No. I think our experience has always been if it's on-prem stuff, it's just it has to be Nvidia-grade cards, where I can physically allocate out the GPU. That seems to be the absolute key to performance.

Especially because we're not having this discussion because of AutoCAD or Photoshop, right? It's whatever.

But for us, the real key to having any sort of decent VDI infrastructure, whether it's physical or in the cloud, is having that grid system with the Nvidia workstation licensing, and then making sure that you can physically segment that hardware off to that VDI instance.

AUDIENCE: The VDI works fine. The instant that we're finding out that it's a problem, even without a video card, so far everything is working. The issue is, if a new user might sign in.

If you do a VDI under one application, let's say, AutoCAD. And we do another instance of Civil 3D, another instance of Revit, what we are finding out is if you sign into the first one, everything's fine. You can access AutoCAD, you have your name, user, it pulls all the information.

The issue is when it runs the AutoCAD and Civil 3D on top of each other. Civil 3D does not sign in. It breaks because the Autodesk, the ADSSO, locks all the files because of the first instance. So the second instance, you're not--

MIKE DONAHUE: If you're using ADSSO.

AUDIENCE: Yes. Which is where Autodesk is pushing everyone to right now.

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah, at $300 per user, per year.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

MIKE DONAHUE: Which it infuriates me. Honestly, it should infuriate all of you. The very fact that Autodesk wants to-- sorry, is Autodesk-- hi.

[LAUGHTER]

[SIGHS]

I told them. We had a nice chat yesterday. It was congenial. But the very fact that Autodesk wants to put what is considered now basic security into a premium-tier package is insulting.

You want to charge us more for premium support? Great. You want to charge us for the usage reports that you get anyway? OK. You're Autodesk, you're going to do that. But to charge us for doing SSO, so that we can do our own controls, our own MFA.

We don't have to go into your system to disable a separated user. That's not OK. If you guys can say that to your reps?

AUDIENCE: We have the Identity Forum.

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: I think with our day-to-day activities.

MIKE DONAHUE: It's buncombe. So we have not run into that specific issue, so sorry. Sorry, yes?

AUDIENCE: I was going to ask the question on deployment. So have you guys really dug into Intune and MDM, and what that does as far as Azure? Or you found it just doesn't work as good as ImmyBot.

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah so I think we are using Endpoint Manager Intune, for certain things. We want to roll it out for all of our clients. I think it's going to be a useful tool.

But I think for most of the heavier software, what we need is, we need to be able to target a specific time for a deployment. Usually like when we know people have shut down all their software, hopefully, if they're listening to our emails, so we can't really just do policy-based installations, like what Endpoint Manager's really designed around. Really, with that you're attaching a policy that says this group here, in AAD, needs this software.

Then whenever it checks in, it checks in and tries to do that installation. I think in most situations, we can't do that with a huge package like CAD or Revit, or Lumion. There's also some size constraints.

I think they've maybe bumped it up a little bit. But it used to be that like, especially for a significant deployment, it was just too big to push out. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: If you email their support, and if you yell at them, they will bump it to 16 gigs.

MIKE DONAHUE: Right.

AUDIENCE: I think the AEC installer is like, 32 gigs or something.

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah, if you did the whole deal. Yeah, I think the other part of it is telemetry. What I find when I'm building deployments is the first five, six times I'm trying to push something new out, it doesn't work, for one reason or another.

It's that the silent unattended flags have changed for the installer, or this or that is different. So finding out what that is quickly is really useful. It's hard to do that with Endpoint Manager deployments.

In most cases, I think you'd have to go down to your endpoint, look at the event logs and see what happened there. In general, you don't want to do that. ImmyBot has some very nice detailed step-by-step logging that you can see as the deployment's happening per device, and see what's going on there.

It allows you to more rapidly build an updated deployer. I think the other thing I was going to say though, with Intune in Endpoint Manager, I think what we're going to see that in use for more is a replacement for GPO-type stuff. Generally security policy settings, pushing out printers and maybe map drives, and things like that.

JONATHAN HOWE: Yeah, we're fans of Intune. If you all are not hybrid joined, at least in an AAD environment, you should be looking strongly on heading towards that. Intune's very powerful, and it's only going to get more so, I think.

MIKE DONAHUE: Hi. Good.

AUDIENCE: You mentioned that [INAUDIBLE] is the Microsoft expert on this side?

[LAUGHTER]

But you are thinking about just, your shot showed the endpoints of it. But there's so close to the MLD, to the suite, the Outlook and all the software around that. I tried to implement all the amazing tools there are there, [COUGHS] because the suite is big. And nobody was even using Planner, or not even the basic thing.

But I'm trying to sort of put that together and in platforms for each project, and management, basically communication. Is there any advice or something that we should take into account when using these tools? Do we have an advice on how to use these, or what not to use there?

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah, I think where Intune really excels is two places. A lot of the issues that Jon brought up, about the size, and the larger deployments as well, we'd like to go elsewhere. But the two things that we really like about Intune is the management of the Microsoft Suite of applications.

Because Microsoft obviously manages Microsoft the easiest. The office deployments with Intune are lightning fast. You can push it and configure it very easily, via the Intune apps. It's kind of got a built-in Office suite package, in addition to the Defender and other built-in Microsoft products that it manages really well.

The other thing that we really like about it, and I don't know, this really didn't get brought up earlier, but that's the autopilot piece of Intune. Which we're just getting rolling with our clients now. We've got a few that are fully onboarded with it.

The ability to DropShip computers directly to people from the vendor, from Dell HP, whoever we're getting these PCs from, and send them directly to the user, is something that we'd really like. Our ideal, or I guess our goal deployment, would be to deploy the ImmyBot agent with Intune. So we can use the ImmyBot piece to manage the larger, more complicated deployments, like Jon had talked about, and everything else, especially Windows Patch Management, which Intune does wonderfully.

Policies, getting away from group policies, moving to Intune-based policies, especially for frontline techs, it's a lot more intuitive than group policy. And everybody knows group policy really well. But you can take somebody that's very green and look at your Intune policies and they just makes sense.

You know, printer deployments, you type in printer, there it is. You can find your printers, things like that. We're using that in conjunction also with Azure Print Services, so we can get rid of our print servers everywhere we can as well. That's another thing that we really like the Intune piece for.

JONATHAN HOWE: I don't know, I felt like your question was maybe a little bit more client facing, So I just have one response for you. That is Teams. Microsoft is, by hook or by crook, whether you love it or don't love it, everything is going to be funneled through Teams.

It's going to be your central place for Planner. Even all your third-party apps are going to have a significant Teams presence. If you're looking at toolsets, if you're looking at what's on a new project creation, what resources does that new project team get? I would look very strongly towards Teams, the Microsoft 365 groups and the tool sets that natively come along with that.

AUDIENCE: I think I heard something, maybe by accident, but like, we could have also, something that help us set up batch projects in a way, or we have templates.

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Because we are starting projects already, but we are a third-party company. So we are working for many clients and we are opening a new project pretty much every day.

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah. So I promised no sales.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: No problem.

MIKE DONAHUE: Teams does have a templating component. It's not the easiest to use. There's also ways with PowerShell and PowerShell scripting, to automate a lot of that.

There may or may not be a product coming soon to market for design firms, that will do a lot of that automation. Where you just punch in the project name and number and all the other subcomponents are automatically created for you. That's the rumor.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: I'm glad that I wasn't so wrong. Because when I started digging into that, I found out that everything, everything went pointed to Teams. It's like, just open one thing? OK, we got to open Teams from here. OK, OK. So everything points you to that direction. Which is fine, I think.

MIKE DONAHUE: I think Teams is just a typical Microsoft product. Version 1.0 just sucks.

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

MIKE DONAHUE: Right? Version 1.5 is a little better. Version 2.0 is ugh, I guess, right?

Now, honestly, I think Teams is a good product. It's not great. But it's a good product.

Teams Phone, we've got a number of people, I don't know, my guess is the majority are either ShoreTel or ex-ShoreTel folks. Seem to be pretty dominant in our industry. But we've done a number of ShoreTel 2 Teams voice migrations.

It's one of the better things, one of the things also our clients like, is the Teams voice. If for no other reason, that the Teams voice has the best mobile client of any of the clients I've ever seen. The ShoreTel mobile client is trash, Mitel. Sorry.

[LAUGHTER]

Sorry, was there a Mitel person here? OK, sorry.

AUDIENCE: It's OK.

MIKE DONAHUE: Teams, the Teams voice is good. It works. Again it's Microsoft, driving you, pushing you back into that Teams corner. Yeah. Question. Oh, good. OK.

AUDIENCE: Whoever asked the VDI Question, VI's been one of my passions for a number of years. I know I heard you guys say you're mostly Microsoft-centrics earlier. I'm a VMware shop, and I always liked the way it worked with servers.

They really hit the dead end. They're one of the first ones to dead end commercially well, I think. But then, I've been struggling with desktop VDI and actually use a good use case.

Because it messed with a lot of Azure, the cloud, trying to get that to work well. Without costing an arm and a leg. Just, I don't know if you guys got any suggestions, or if there is any one answer fits at all type thing, for VDI?

MIKE DONAHUE: If you're a VMware guy, Horizon View, right? So you can do that. And again, I think my only thing is as long as you're making sure that you're using grid on the back end, right?

You're just, you're making sure you're allocating properly for those high knowledge workers, who cares? As long as you're allocating those resources properly, whether it's View, or whatever it is. I think the problem, and I know Workspot, and there's some others that were super popular. Mostly, I think, because they were giving away Switches.

[LAUGHTER]

Right now, we are still seeing, for an appropriate production, what we consider a production, Civil 3D or Revit, we're still looking in the $250 to $300 per-month cost, for a true virtual cloud-based box.

That's just a general price point, I think. Don't hold me to the wall on that. That's still expensive. That's $3,600 a year, when you can buy a Dell Precision 5820 for $3,500 a year. You're literally at 3x the rate.

That's if your firm does three-year refreshes and doesn't try and milk it out for two to four years, or even five years on the desktops. My gut is that until those price points really start coming down into the sub $200 a month range, for that real true-class performance, it's going to be a while before we see massive adoption of cloud workstations. I could be very much wrong on that. But that's our gut take, right now. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: For your clients who are adopting VDI, are most people going with thin clients? Are they going with laptops? Or with both?

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah, they're all over the place. A lot of it depends on the philosophy of the firm. Each one of our clients has handled hybrid work from home differently.

There's ones who say no, everybody's coming back. There's ones that say, you come back if you want to, the two day a week, the three day a week. I think what the firms struggle with on the thin client side, is that you're looking at that extra expenditure.

Not only are you buying that $3,500 desktop for in-house, for their touchpoint. But you're also spending $1,000 to $1,500 on top of that, for their laptop, basic, functional laptop. We're not seeing any real true quote, unquote, thin clients, like a wise terminal or stuff like that. We're not we're just seeing very low-powered laptops, for the Citrix session or the RDP session, or whatever.

But that's the hiccup they have. Then, the thought becomes well, let's just pay $3,500 for a really beefy laptop, so we don't have to have both devices. They can just have their laptop when they're at home. They work from home. When they come to work, they work at work.

The trouble that we have there is that if they're not fully BIM 360, then they're trying to access Revit models across VPN. Which is usually crap. Then they get all mad, because Revit's slow. You just got me this super big laptop and it's slow. You guys suck.

[LAUGHTER]

My home, I've got a 20-megabit connection. And my four kids. But that's OK.

[LAUGHTER]

If I had my druthers, I think the lighter laptop and the beefy ONPrem or COLO, or wherever device is probably the best flexibility fit. But again, a lot of it has to do with the culture of firms, believe it or not, And What leadership wants to perceive as measuring productivity or being in house versus out of house, et cetera. Oh, my favorite.

AUDIENCE: I try to not keep asking all the questions. Somebody else asked me, but what have you guys found, at least in terms of cloud storage? I know we've mentioned BIM 360. But that's not at fit all for everything.

You've got SharePoint options. I've actually worked on trying to build my own storage up there, and just couldn't find that it was accessible without a lot of trouble, I guess.

JONATHAN HOWE: Yeah. We've gone down that same road. We've looked at like Azure files, things like that, which is really interesting. I think it kind of ties into what Mike was saying earlier. I think they're going to get there.

There's some problems with that, if you're not doing domain-join machines. If you're not using full ID, or trying to move to AED, or things like that, it's a real roadblock. We love Egnyte.

That's something that we've used very successfully for cloud storage. The end users absolutely love it. We love it. So far, the way it does caching versioning, it is really just a great product for this industry so far, from what we've seen.

Maybe one of the best received products on the end user side. Because it mimics so well what they're used to seeing. It's got that map drive, that they're used to seeing. It follows them home. You know? It follows them everywhere.

As far as cloud storage, that's really where we're happiest. And comparatively speaking, versus Azure files, which if you really get into Azure files, you have to almost do everything from a machine connected to Azure files that's on-prem, like a workstation, for instance. And then, manage all your file permissions.

Or you don't have the server to go, really, unless you're all in Azure. Which hardly anybody is full Azure. We've got a few clients that are. But the smaller ones, most are still hybrid. So you're dealing with that two-set permissions that are tricky to deal with.

AUDIENCE: Can you repeat that please, oh maybe so I can say that to my boss?

[LAUGHTER]

'Cause I have been trying to sell that one to him now, for a while. You know, if we are the same. It's confession time, right?

JONATHAN HOWE: Right, that's right.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: We are using SharePoint and OneDrive as if it was a server, in a way?

JONATHAN HOWE: Yes.

AUDIENCE: These guys-- we hope to get past, and so on. Of course we are using fully BIM 360 on the charging cloud.

JONATHAN HOWE: Mhm?

AUDIENCE: All right, so fly through that, it's going to work [? perfect. ?]

JONATHAN HOWE: Yeah, yeah.

AUDIENCE: Not only part of it, you know? File sharing, everything.

JONATHAN HOWE: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: --I agree with you.

JONATHAN HOWE: I think that scenario for Office files is great. You could do your map drives, just like people are used to. Map to a SharePoint library, for instance. Anything above a few megabytes, and yikes.

AUDIENCE: I believe there are some integrations, right? That you can use with Egnyte? [? As written in Egnyte? ?]

MIKE DONAHUE: Jon might know something.

GRAHAM HENRY: Yeah, no I was going to talk about other good stuff about Egnyte. But yeah, no, this is a good collaboration within Office 365. It has an integration where you can do co-editing in real time with your fellow staff members.

That works pretty much the same as it would if you had it in OneDrive. But with the added benefit of your working off a file system that you can manage it just like you would on-prem server. In fact, that's the other piece is for those of us that are actually managing the file system, the auditing tools, the built-in search is just so fast.

It's so much easier to manage than NTFS permissions on an on-prem server, that I think we all want to move everyone off of on-premise servers whenever we can. I think the argument is making less and less sense. Unless you need incredibly fast storage and you have high-performance workstations with 10-gig networking to a SAN or something like that, and you just need that for whatever very high-end project that is. But outside of that, I think Egnyte covers so much.

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah. And the searching and auditing tools I think, are really sort of the killer. How many times have you gotten this project folder is gone? Or this subfolder is missing because somebody dragged and dropped it somewhere else, right?

In the NTFS days it's like, now I've got to go search for that. So D search. You're hoping that you're searching for the right keywords. In Egnyte, you can find out exactly who moved that, and where they moved it within 10 seconds. It's crazy good.

Hopefully there are some Egnyte users in here that are OK, are you happy with it, stranger?

AUDIENCE: Full disclosure, I know the company that sold Egnyte to us, they happen to be presenting today.

[LAUGHTER]

But no, it's been a great tool for us. We were a little bit cautious, so we actually put our marketing department on it first to test out how it went. And it was adopted very quickly, within weeks.

Now what we're doing is working to see how far we're going to push storage for non-Revit files and BIM 360 and ACC Build. The jury's still out. By the end of the year, we'll figure that. Then whatever we can't post there, we'll probably expand our Egnyte licensing and manage the other files there.

One of the things we're working through right now is, if we have the two repositories, how are we going to do archiving? How are we going to pull all that data back together and looking at creating flows from Egnyte, on project finish back into BIM 360 or ACC Build for archiving?

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah, so we're on dangerously-close sales territory here. So I need to be very careful. We do resell Egnyte. But that's not why. We only resell two vendors, Microsoft and Egnyte.

Everything else, we're 100% agnostic on. We only resell Egnyte because I got sick of Panzura and Nasuni. Just, the checks that were written to Panzura kill me.

Yeah, just, I don't want this to be an exact sales pitch, by any means. But Egnyte, there's the Autodesk Connect tool, or the Autodesk API tool, that allows interaction. So you can have bidirectional events, that happen either in BIM 360 or on the Egnyte side, that transfer actions between the two.

Egnyte also has an archive product that's cheap for a lot of storage, but only very limited user access, for long-term cold storage stuff. Yeah. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: Because he hasn't spoken, so I was going to ask about that--

AUDIENCE: I'm good. [LAUGHTER]

MIKE DONAHUE: Nick is perfectly happy too.

AUDIENCE: Because like I said, I do all things. I have to troubleshoot the Autodesk. And what's the best way to actually one, troubleshoot Autodesk for various issues?

I got put into Autodesk two years ago. So I'm learning it from nothing to full troubleshooting.

[? [INTERPOSING VOICES] ?]

AUDIENCE: What is the best track? Since I'm going to be getting some new people that don't know Autodesk, what would be the best situation to help train them to help along with that?

JONATHAN HOWE: Do you have a CAD manager?

MIKE DONAHUE: Oh no. [LAUGHTER] This poor man. Someone buy this guy a drink. [LAUGHTER] Wow, yeah. So I think maybe we'll tag team this.

Gosh. I mean, that was one of the things I was thinking about last night before we had this talk. I think there's this weird Venn diagram between BIM and IT, and there is definitely overlap. Where we cut off that is we're not going to be in there trying to, I don't know, manage line weights. And what's the example you use? How to drop a--

JONATHAN HOWE: Circular staircase in Revit.

MIKE DONAHUE: --circular staircase in Revit. We don't know that. And we don't want to know how to do that. It's beyond our--

AUDIENCE: Yeah, move away from the phones.

MIKE DONAHUE: Right. What I found, at least from the deployment side is-- and I know you're asking him specifically about troubleshooting, but I think what I've found is that there really just needs to be very open lines of communication between whoever your BIM person is, those experts, and IT. It has to be a collaboration.

I think unfortunately, even at this show, we've seen a lot of people have been telling us there's adversarial relationships between those two wheelhouses. I think it just can't anymore, especially when it comes to deployments. It has to be a back and forth. It has to be an interaction.

In terms of troubleshooting, honestly, we're most of the time just googling and looking for knowledge-based articles. So I think it just really depends on what side it's in. If it's a DLL error or something like that, we'll be like OK, there's something wrong here. We know that certain things might be a graphics card thing for CAD, or something like that.

Outside of that, I think there's a lot of AutoCAD stuff that we just don't do. We push that to a BIM expert. I'm sorry that you have to do both.

GRAHAM HENRY: Yeah. Everything basically is through Google. Or we push it off. There's not much we could do for specific CAD issues though. And we knew this question was going to come up. And we just didn't want to let you down. Yeah, there's no way about it.

AUDIENCE: I've been having that perception, that I should separate. But probably that because you're in IT, every question funnels back to IT. Doesn't matter what it is.

You think, oh, this little button doesn't work on Autodesk. Oh, back to IT, because they're the troubleshooters. That's where I'm seeing the issue is where, should I even learn the software, to even troubleshoot it?

JONATHAN HOWE: No.

GRAHAM HENRY: No, you shouldn't.

[LAUGHTER]

JONATHAN HOWE: In order to be good at it, you have to be working in it every day.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. That's why I realized that beforehand. But the issue is that we don't have the real structural in the who can be that other layer. So you might want to think about identifying experienced users and calling them super users.

Start using them as an internal CAD resource or Revit resource. They probably won't appreciate it. Hopefully you do that in collaboration with them. Get them a t-shirt. Buy them coffee once a month, something like that.

But you need to get that off of your plate. Because if you're not in it 8 hours a day you're just not going to be able to adequately help them, I don't think. In terms of tools, there is a remote connection tool that you should all be using to get into your users' desktops.

MIKE DONAHUE: Mm, yes. Definitely. The only other thing I wanted to add was-- maybe you want to go back to that, because that is important-- is as much as you can, hopefully you have a good ticketing system that also allows you to maybe save known fixes because once we have a BIM expert come in and say, look, I know how to do this, I think in IT, we don't need to understand all this, but if they can give us, here's how you resolve this, and it doesn't involve getting into the very nitty-gritty of CAD or Revit, I think we should be willing to implement that. So there's a lot of things that once we know what the problem is, maybe we can script it, maybe we can help with it. But I think where we have to draw the line is being Revit experts or CAD experts.

JONATHAN HOWE: Yeah. You should know and you should understand how what role do PC3 files play, where are my AutoCAD config files located. You know, where's the standards library, et cetera, et cetera. That sort of thing, you should be familiar with all the plug-ins that people have.

If you guys have any custom LISP routines still-- God, I dated myself there. That, but that should sort of be it. Then Nick is going to talk about Screen Connect. Because we like Screen Connect. Because we like Screen Connect.

NICK PHAN: Yeah, Screen Connect is basically the tool all of our Help Desk Tech uses to remote into a user's PC. Basically, with this, once you're in there, it supports dual screen.

We can see all the user screen. Or we could just see them into one screen. We could File Transfer from their desktop to ours. Or if we have a software we want to upload, we could just push our files onto their desktop. It's very easy.

There's a chat function. I'm sure most IT, any time we remote in we'll always get permission first. It's not something.

Then they will know when we remote in. And within this, if it's frozen, we can do a reboot from here. Or shutdown. But shutdown is not something we want to do, because we still want remote back into their machine. But it's a very easy and quick tool to use.

AUDIENCE: Does it go through Remote Desktop? It's got its own, right?

NICK PHAN: No.

AUDIENCE: If someone remote desktops, this can jump right into the receptionist?

NICK PHAN: I can, yeah.

JONATHAN HOWE: If they had a remote session up, you could watch that.

AUDIENCE: Oh, you can?

JONATHAN HOWE: Yeah. It's its own.

AUDIENCE: We're right now using the dual screen, depending on their session. Remote Desktop, we've been using it as a remote desktop shadow. We jump into their remote session to view.

During the telecommute, we were looking for tools left and right, because of all the different situations of what telecommuting brought us. We weren't using various tools, depending on how you're connecting. VPN we use one tool. Remote desktop, we use another. Screen Connect, we use another one of our own [INAUDIBLE].

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah. There's a lot of tools on the market like this. There's Splashtop and a bunch of other stuff, GoToAssist. I think now it's called ConnectWise Control. It's inexpensive, like ImmyBot is also very inexpensive. It just works. And it works well.

AUDIENCE: Does that help that ticketing system with it too?

MIKE DONAHUE: You have to get into the bigger ConnectWise umbrella for that. And the ticketing system is currently--

JONATHAN HOWE: We did not love that. We thought that the integration would be great.

MIKE DONAHUE: Oh, man.

JONATHAN HOWE: It wasn't a great experience for us. We've been using Zendesk for our ticketing. And it's been much faster for us, and more nimble.

AUDIENCE: It just went from Go to Assist. Now it's Go to Resolve.

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: I don't even have problems with it. The integration was [INAUDIBLE].

MIKE DONAHUE: Some other nice things that you can do with Screen Connect is you can hop in on their existing RDP session if you want to. There's also a backend mode, where you can run simple commands in PowerShell without interrupting the end user, which can be nice in some contexts. Yeah.

JONATHAN HOWE: One of the things that I think Go to Resolve does that Screen Connect does not do is mobile device support. So if you have to get into someone's iPad or phone or something, I would probably lean more towards Go to Resolve for that.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, the difference between assist and resolve is like, with resolve, you can actually, before you even jump on their screen, you can see the performance of what's going on with their computers and see across [? platforms ?] what's hanging up and stuff like that, before you even talk to the person.

MIKE DONAHUE: Right.

JONATHAN HOWE: You get that you get a blurred-out view of their screen. Because obviously privacy, right? But with Screen Connect, you also get that. You can view the services.

AUDIENCE: Gotcha.

JONATHAN HOWE: You have a every-30-second update of a blurred. Yeah.

MIKE DONAHUE: Another thing ImmyBot does as well, since we're pimping that as well, you can look at real-time processes as well and run commands directly against it look at performance too. I think depending on what we're doing, we'll use a combination of Screen Connect features and that.

GRAHAM HENRY: You're saying you're trying to look out for an all-in-one integration. We tried that with ConnectWise, with automate and Manage It. It just didn't work well. That's why we switched.

Once we switched over and just saying, you know what? Your arm, your remote session in one, your ticketing system in another, that, to us, was just more streamlined. And Zendesk works great for us.

AUDIENCE: That third round was done.

GRAHAM HENRY: Yeah.

MIKE DONAHUE: I was told there'd be hard questions.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: I have a follow-up comparing ConnectWise to LogMeIn Rescue. If you don't have experience, I don't know if anybody in the audience does.

JONATHAN HOWE: We do.

MIKE DONAHUE: Me.

AUDIENCE: I think the only reason I ask, I think we did something, like we were logging in a customer, just trying to find the right price for that.

MIKE DONAHUE: Well, I can pretty much guarantee you that the ConnectWise Control is going to be cheaper. The LogMeIn Rescue and the GoToAssist, also do.

ConnectWise does it, but it's not their strength. That whole sort of I'm going to send you a link and you connect. I think Screen Connect really shines when you have the ability to deploy the agent.

Then you just work off the agent basis, rather than having to say please go to this website and punch in this key code. Yeah, if that's really important to you, I might stay with rescue. Yeah. Ugh, this side. Oh! There's a whole other side to this room.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: I was curious, mostly on compliance reporting, what are you guys finding the best point one for not just your Microsoft patching and that sort of thing, but application deployment? Are you using Intune for all your reporting? What's actually gotten installed and what hasn't?

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: ImmyBot?

NICK PHAN: Yeah, I think it's a combination of things. We like Defender for Endpoint, and that whole security portal for a lot of things. That can give US views of compliance, in terms of aging software and all that.

In fact, it'll give you a really nice view of the number of vulnerabilities for, say, your browsers which tend to be the things that are most targeted. You'll look and see so-and-so has Chrome from 10 years ago and it's got a scary number of vulnerabilities. So you can prioritize that. In terms of actually pushing out the updates, I would defer back to ImmyBot.

I guess one other thing that I didn't really talk about, how they do things. Their whole model is actually around desired state configuration. I'm mostly using it for sort of ad hoc point-in-time updates. But they want to do Intune style, policy-based installs, for a lot of things.

What you can do is set up a group of software policies that are assigned to a set of devices. Then it will look for the latest version of all of those and you can just let it loose. It'll just run a bunch of things all in succession, including driver updates.

If you have Dell or HP or Lenovo, it will pull from an API. It'll talk to you, Dell Command update, and run as many reboots as it needs to do those kind of things. That can cover a lot of your keeping your software up to date.

AUDIENCE: Is that like a competitor PatchMyPC? We use that.

NICK PHAN: Yeah. I'm not so familiar with PatchMyPC, specifically. I think of it as a cloud competitor for PDQ Deploy. That's how I think of it, personally.

It has some aspects of inventory. It has some aspects of PDQ Deploy. It is a little bit more complicated if there isn't. With most MSI installs, you can actually just upload it and it will auto detect any silent flags, unattended stuff, and it'll just go.

With executables, it'll try to figure out the wrapper. It'll kind of auto assume. Say it's a WiX wrapper or something like that. It'll know how to do that.

It can get a little more complicated if you need to get into the back end and start scripting things. You need to get a little bit more comfortable with PowerShell, if you aren't already.

At least that's something that obviously I think everyone is aware of. PowerShell is everywhere. Microsoft is not going to abandon it. It's becoming more and more important.

There's a lot of things you can only do with PowerShell. I think at least you're not wasting your time in learning some code that won't be useful elsewhere.

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah I would say, in general, that that's really part of the overall shift that we're seeing, where software imaging or disk imaging is going away. We're moving from imaging into provisioning. That desired state config, vanilla, and then +++++, rather than trying to keep images up to date, trying to push out massive images over the LAN or WAN.

If you guys are responsible for making sure a lot of machines, or a lot of new machines coming in, provisioning is really the way forward. I don't think we'll be talking about disk imaging three or four years from now. Yeah. Oh hi, miss. Oh sorry, sir. Yeah. Sorry.

AUDIENCE: Me?

MIKE DONAHUE: Yes.

AUDIENCE: Question about licensing. What's going to happen in a company start reviewing maintenance for a virtual network [? prefered by user. ?]

MIKE DONAHUE: Completely depends on the software vendor. In Microsoft world--

AUDIENCE: Autodesk.

MIKE DONAHUE: In Autodesk, if you've moved completely off of maintenance and you're on pure subscription, in your subscription, I think there's a 30 or 60-day grace, and then it stops working.

AUDIENCE: What it leaves it perpetually? For the life of it?

AUDIENCE: Perpetual, you just stop it. It's the maintenance, that you stop it.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, you just keep using the same version.

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, you get version 2022, and you stop maintenance, you're stuck at 2022. It's the last version you stopped maintenance on.

AUDIENCE: But we have it every day another one, the user doesn't how to do it.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: [? You keep you arm in there. ?]

AUDIENCE: We have that too. So we try to isolate it.

AUDIENCE: It depends on the project. Project before, they have 2017, and '21, they stopped maintenance.

MIKE DONAHUE: In '21, they stopped maintenance?

AUDIENCE: Yeah. That'd be the last version.

MIKE DONAHUE: So you can run '21.

AUDIENCE: We have 2006, so yeah.

AUDIENCE: Some still have 2017, connecting to that professional server.

MIKE DONAHUE: Yeah, I will say that the first Autodesk employee who stopped by our booth to talk to us was all about license enforcement.

[LAUGHTER]

And like, so do you guys do license checks for your users? We're, they're all named users. what do you want?