2021-02 February Roundup Newsletter

AND - CUT!

The month of February has passed in a complete blur! It seems like just yesterday when we were trying to remember all the things we did in January so we could get them posted to you. Despite being in "warp speed" we still have a lot of things to announce, although not as many changes to the community overall.

Here are the higlights: 🙂

  • Spotlight on Immybot! Vendor Spotlight is a program created by us so that we can continue bringing high-quality educational content to the community in the form of Geekcasts. This month is provided by DarrenDK from Immybot, and our very own Gavsto. Read below for more information.
  • To Slack, or not to Slack... The admins are still debating on the best step to take here. The mini-survey we released is still open, if you haven't seen it please take 30 seconds and fill it out here. This is for us to help improve the community for you. The more responses we get the better we can decide on the right step for everyone.
  • Channels, channels galore. MSPGeek is now multi-lingual! More on this later! MSPGeek would also like to welcome several new vendors to the community! Vendors who come and engage with us do so with the understanding that they come primarily to help not sell! We appreciate their willingness to be a true partner to Service Providers and are looking forward to their community contributions. Please be sure to check them out.

New Vendors Welcome

NinjaRMM (#v-ninjarmm) is a vendor everyone should be well familiar with! Jonathan Crowe who is very active in all areas of the community has joined us on MSPGeek and we are eager to see the impact NinjaRMM continues to have on the MSP world. (If you missed it last month, check out the NinjaRMM Security Summit!)

Datto (#v-datto) is another vendor that by now everyone knows! DattoRMM and DattoPSA (Autotask) are generally accepted as one of the most popular platforms, and depending on your position are considered to either be alongside, above, or just below Connectwise. Kelvin Tegelaar (Cyberdrain.com) has done our community a huge service by acquiring representation for Datto on MSPGeek. 

QuickPass (#v-quickpass) is a full management toolbox for customer identify and password management. From their website testimonials, it appears they'll fit right in to help improve the community with a culture focusing on open communication and partner success.

Multi-lingual WHAT??

This month MSPGeek opened a new channel, in an effort to be a true multinational community -without one "ring" to rule them all, we've opened a (#c-germany) channel that caters to our German Speaking brothers and sisters. This has allowed MSPGeek to pivot nicely into expanding our ability to provide exceptional content and support world wide. Keep an eye out for more channels like this, as we determine required regional areas with specific laws or language barriers that need to be overcome. Willkommen in unserer deutschen Familie! 

In addition to this, a UK specific channel (#c-uk) has been opened to help facilitate questions that are market specific or that relate to any regulations that are required to be follow there. 

Both of these are exciting additions for MSPGeek as we expand to meet changing demands of our community.

Vendor Spotlight

If you recall last month's newsletter, Vendors are offered a chance to enroll in the Spotlight program, where they will have one month being front and center on our website. To qualify for this they must submit the details for a Geekcast session that will be held by MSPGeek on the third week of their selected month. 

DarrenDK, owner of Immybot, who started off as an MSP facing challenges just like every other MSP was selected as the lucky vendor for the February Vendor Spotlight! Darren has done amazing work, and has one of the most popular vendor channels in our platform. Additionally, Darren can be seen in many of the general channels such as cw-automate, powershell, and others as he provides volunteer assistance to anyone he finds that he's able to help. Darren is also extremely friendly and will happily forget about running his business to shoot the breeze about anything he finds interesting.

Titled "The Sound of Silence", Darren and our own Gavsto take you through the process of identifying, and suppressing various noisy installers so you can properly script install them. You can catch their Geekcast from February here and see the Immybot listing on MSPGeek here.

This Month in Security

Solarwinds Orion's compromise called "Sunburst" is still going strong, although as of this point the news is all political, we're going to touch only lightly on this, specifically to again call out Please make sure you've reviewed the list of affected vendors so that you can determine if you've been inadvertently affected.

North Korea appears to have had some success in its social engineering attacks, actually catching several security researchers in their net and exfiltrating ongoing projects they were working on. This just goes to show, no matter how good you are, you must stay vigilant. Security Awareness Training for users is a must, if seasoned security researchers fall victim, what chance do our users have?

SonicWALL has come out this month announcing major vulnerabilities in their SMA Remote appliances, bad enough that it seems they themselves had a breach last month.

Please note there were two patches released for this, one in the beginning of this month and one towards the end. Be sure your systems are fully patched to receive the latest in security.

Community Shoutout!

We'd like to thank everyone, vendors and MSPs alike, for actively engaging the community and helping make us who we are today! 

We are always focusing on bettering the Information Technology field by improving the quality of information in all three pillars; Technology, Business, and Customer Service. 

We'd especially like to thank Kelvin Tegelaar, notorious CyberDrain, Microsoft MVP and all around community leader. Kelvin put together a MSP Capture the Flag event that was a smashing success! Kelvin's ongoing posts on his blog continue to drive forward automation and scripting to improve the operating efficiency, security, and documentation of the general MSP. Kelvin has also personally appealed to several vendors, including Datto and Microsoft for representation within MSPGeek. Thank you Kelvin! Please keep doing what you do 🙂

Other miscellaneous announcements...

For those of you who weren't around for the announcement, we do maintain a community calendar for Vendors to earmark webinars and events on so that you can view them (for all participating vendors) in one easy place and select which ones you'd like to register for. Additionally, these events get announced in the Slack channel #vendor-events-announcements be sure to join that channel and enable Alerts for all messages so you can stay in the loop if you like.

Please be mindful of unsolicited messages, vendors are under strict agreement for no solicitation (check our Code of Conduct) however just like any other social media platform there could be other nefarious purposes for someone messaging you (see the above mention regarding North Korea). As a reminder do not give out personally identifiable information or information that can lead back to your systems.  

This is a free public community and we want to make sure to remind you occasionally that security should always be your first thought, even when trying to get help. Also, if you get any suspicious DM's or requests for information please do a /adminrequest command and an admin member will reach out to help you. All Admins are identifiable by name and are listed on our website About Us page.

Thank you for the being the community we love to serve,
MSPGeek Admin Team


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