Squidworks launched Plugins 4 LabTech web services portal

A new one-stop-shop for LabTech plugins has arrived with the latest launch of plugins4Labtech.com, developed by Squidworks. The new user-friendly shop offers both free and paid plugin tools for the most popular remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool in the market place. It’s specifically designed for IT managed service providers (MSPs) and offers powerful tools all in one place.

The new plugins4Labtech.com site features some of the more popular premium plugins like Chocolatey for LabTech, CCleaner for LabTech, Patch Remedy and a new plugin released today—Backup Windows. It also features free plugins developed and honed quickly to meet the growing needs of IT professionals and MSPs like Office365 Manager, Agent Status, Flu Shot and PowerShell. What’s more is that the plugins are created by an experienced systems engineer with 20 years in managed services and a multi-system developer, Squidworks (a.k.a. Cubert), and tested by a user group made up of MSP engineers affectionately called the Squid Squad.

The site offers links for support as well, including helpful support forums where users contribute to the development of new plugins like the one hosted on plugins4LabTech.com.

For more information on the site or to find and provide feedback on the latest tools to help you with LabTech, visit the online forum at plugins4LabTech.com.

Backup Windows for LabTech

Integrated LabTech Backups

Squidworks released today the most cost effective backup solution integrated with LabTech available, coming in at a whopping $1 per agent!

If you are like me, then backups are pretty costly at an average of $40 dollars a server license. If you have a 100 servers to backup, then your monthly bill is $4,000.00 per month; at 12 months is $48,000.00 dollars a year for backup software. What if I told you we can do the same thing, with even more built-in LabTech features and at just $100 bucks? Yes, $1200 bucks a year is all it will cost the average MSP with 100 server agents to backup every server they manage. For those occasions where you need more, $125.00 bucks get you unlimited agents! Backup every Windows 7 to Windows 10 system and Windows 2008 to Windows 2012 R2 you manage for a single flat fee. Have all the power LabTech can give you with mass management to control and monitor your backups. Get great logging, metrics and history from our intuitive gauges and graphs or see in just a single click where you stand with the safety of your clients files. No guess work needed!

Take command of your backups again!

Here is a peek at what they been working on. Everything you see done here is done inside LabTech never touching the end PC.

Backups a system in four steps

Restore a system in 4 steps

See and access available restore points

See available event logs relevant to backups

See your global statuses fast and easy

Easy to understand metrics

See individual and global restore point time lines

Get the plugin at

Chocolatey For LabTech Gets Trusted Repositories

Chocolatey is now moderated

Chocolatey has been a major contributor to automated package management for several years and has been used by thousands of MSP to quickly deploy and maintain common user software like Java, Flash and Adobe. Up until just recently the public repository of software was not managed and the software available went un-vetted. This made using Chocolatey some what risky as you could introduce a poison pill into your networks, this has all changed with Chocolatey’s introduction to moderated public repositories.

The community feed, which is found at https://chocolatey.org/packages, is a moderated feed. That means all new versions of packages are human reviewed prior to approval to check for safety, quality, and correctness. There are alsotrusted packages, which only go through automated moderation review and bypass human review as they are coming from trusted sources and/or the software vendors themselves.

We have the software

With over 3500 unique software packages available for deployment Chocolatey is by far the largest repository of Windows software and updates available. Over 35 million downloads makes it one of the fastest growing Application Management platforms in the world.

Chocolatey works in LabTech

Squidworks has developed LabTech plugins to use with the Chocolatey Framework that allow for the fully automated management of software installs and updates. Visit http://www.plugins4labtech.com for more information on LabTech integration.

Paying big bucks for AppCare or Ninite?

How would you like an easy flat fee approach to deploying and managing your clients software? Paying per agent fees to deploy software will get expensive with these solutions but ours takes the pain out of your pocket book. Check out Chocolatey for Labtech and get unlimited agents for a single and inexpensive flat monthly fee.

Monitor Administrator Security Group In LabTech with ADMON

Who’s in and out of your Security Group?

ADMON is a LabTech plugin used to monitor and restore changes made to your local administrators group. Many viral attacks end up trying to add or change the users in the local administrators group of an infected PC. Sometimes these subtle changes go un-noticed and end up causes very expensive repairs and loss of data. ADMON will alert you to the changes, create tickets and if set to auto restore will add time to ticket and restore the admin group back as it was, before closing the ticket out. If your clients need to audit who has what privileges across the PCs in the network, you can use the simple export tool provided in the plugin to get a detailed list of computers and the users with admin rights into Excel.

Have a peek at what we are doing!

We provide a master on / off switch for easy control over the plugin and a control to set and manage the scanning interval for greater flexibility.

Each client has a “Admin Group” tab at the Client console level that displays key information on each PC scanned for that client. You have a master enable switch to enable each client you want to provide the service for. We provide the ability to monitor both additions and removals individually which will create alerts only, or if you add the ticketing box it the plugin will also create tickets for you. You can set the system to auto restore any changes as part of the monitoring (2 way monitoring needs to be set). If you opt to auto restore and also select ticketing, the system will open a ticket, add 10 minutes, auto restore the group and close the ticket completing the required repairs. Select any machine and right click to reveal a menu to manage alarms and to manage the Administrators group. Use the export to Excel tool to get the data out of LabTech and into 3rd party applications like Excel.

The View Alarms popup reveals who has fired off alarms and what was delivered (alert or ticket) Once a system has alarmed or has been ticketed no new alarms are sent until cleared. To clear double click the selected item.

Selecting a computer from the main screen and right clicking for a menu to manage the administrators group will lead you here. This tool allows you to add or remove users to the administrators group directly from LabTech. See the commands execute in near real time inside the console window provided.

Current Version 1.0.0.76

Download the DLL to install via LabTech Plugin Manager

Squid Squad makes a splash

We want you on our Plugin Development Team

Squidworks announces today the forming of a new team of engineers, developers and LabTech geeks to work on the development and testing of software for the Labtech RMM platform. This new team called the Squid Squad will be able to directly influence the direction of current development and creation of plugins for the LabTech system as it pertains to Squidworks.

We are looking for an exclusive network of IT service leaders who are committed to the continuation of innovation in automation and a willingness to test the edge of technology. If you would like to be apart of a team dedicated to the creation of tools and automation for the MSP market place then please visit http://support.plugins4labtech.com and send us a request. You will need to included your forum account name on Squidworks Support Forums, Company Name, Email, Address of your MSP along with the request.

All members will receive access to the Squid Squad private forums, Access to all free and paid plugins at no charge during betas and free or reduced cost for production (paid) software after all betas have ended. You will be part of a unique and special group that has access to Squid Squad special events held at Automation Nation and gifts of swag as we go along.

Membership is not free and is limited to a small group so you will have to work for it but I promise we wont work you to hard. As a member you will need to be able to install and use plugins developed by Squidworks on your Labtech RMM platform. You will need to exercise the features and functions of the plugins in Beta and report back any findings, concerns, feature requests and so forth. You will need to participate in the forum discussions and in any direct communications with the development team.

If you are one that gets excited when new technology arrives and want to see more out of your Labtech environment then send us a request to be one of the few that get to be on this exclusive team.

SurfLog – A Browser Metrics Plugin for LabTech

Websense, Inc. the makers of a leading Internet management solutions announced that “Internet misuse in the workplace costs American corporations more than $178 billion annually in lost productivity, this translates into a loss of more than $5,000 per employee per year.”

Squidworks wants to help companies regain a hold of some of this lost time and revenue. They have released SurfLog version 1.1.1 out to the public today after months of work updating and streamlining the plugin. A new site has been launched with this new version to help support and promote the use of SurfLog in LabTech environments.

Some of the new features include plugin permissions, improved graphs and charts, admin controlled collection schedules and much more. Now built and ready for LabTech 10.5 and Cloud hosted platforms so every MSP using LabTech can take advantage of this great tool.

Get the Metrics

Metrics provide a insight into mass amounts of data making it easy to understand the ebb and flow of the clients users browsing patterns. Compare information on browser types, surfing volumes at different times of the day and user patters as the compare to other users under that client.

Raw History

When you need the raw data, it is available to you. You can export this data out to Excel for use in any number of 3rd party programs or to provide to human resources.

How do I get it?

Visit Http://www.plugins4labtech.com for more information and to download a copy to try for yourself.

Near Real Time PerfMon Plugin for LabTech

We have created a simple tool that we query the counters on a Windows device and return that information back to the system console in near real time. In our current version we pull Disk IO, CPU, Memory and Network usage stats every few seconds until requested to stop or you close the console. With each refresh you will get the request count and current request time followed by the counter statistics for the selections you made. This application will poll for the counter and continue to refresh the information displayed every couple of seconds and will allow you to jump to other tabs and back without losing a beat. Leave the window up in the back ground and it will give you continuous counts until stopped or closed.

Version 1.0.2

Enjoy

Cubert

Patch Remedy WUA Manager Plugin for LabTech

Patch Remedy is a tool used to help manage the Windows Update Agent. Microsoft’s Windows Update Agent (WUA) is an agent program that works in conjunction with Windows Server Update Services to support automated patch delivery and installation. Labtech uses this agent to help determine what patches are needed by each Windows system and deploys them. Microsoft often updates the WUA which increases the detection of missing patches more current than the installed version of WUA. This can cause you to get a perception that your patching is up to date when in actuality you are massively behind.

That’s where we come in, Patch Remedy automatically scans all windows systems for their current WUA versions and OS type and stores that inside LabTech. It uses that information to perform automated updates of WUA for Windows 7 and 2008 R2 systems. It also takes a look nightly at the number of recent failed hotfixes and updates.

We offer several manual tools to help manage problems seen with WUA.

There are several lists of data about how WUA versions are deployed across your environment. In these lists you maybe able to operate functions to resolve common issues with WUA. There are 2 types of repair for WUA, Normal and Aggressive and there are 2 types of Updates for WUA, Latest and KB3083324.

Repairs: (Normal and Aggressive) Based on KB971058 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/971058.
Normal Excludes step 4 and Aggressive includes Step 4 of KB

Updates:(Latest and July 2016 Rollup)
Latest: Can be run on any Windows 7, 8, 2008 or 2012 system and will attempt to update the WUA to the most current versions available.
This update is run silently and with the /noreboot switch so should be safe to run at anytime without affecting end user.

PatchSuccess

We have several automated tools to assist with keeping WUA up to date and the patch push status cleared on over attempted patches and hotfixes.

Auto Update: looks for online systems that have earlier versions of WUA and tries to update them to 7.6.7601.18979

Clear Pushed: The “Pushed” status for a patch means that LabTech has tried twice to install the patch and it didn’t succeed, so it’s not going to try to install it anymore. This function will clear the “pushed” flag from [hotfixes] out so that LabTech may reattempt them.

wuaVersion1

We also provide some insight into what is going on with WUA so you can visually see problems with your WUA environment. Get graphs and charts that show the different deployed versions of WUA and how effective your patching is.

Overview1

Patching alone is not going to keep your clients up to date, adding Patch Remedy to your LabTech patch management system will improve your numbers hands down. Get the most out of your LabTech system with Patch Remedy.

We want to thank BGags of Easthampton, MA for his inspiration and help with plugins concepts. To get more information on LabTech and WUA from BGags go visit his blog post at

http://www.labtechgeek.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2123

The automated services are on a 4 times a day schedule of 8 am , 12 pm, 4 pm and 8 pm. After installing the plugin and restarting the DBagent service on the LT server you will need to allow time for this service to kick in and run the scans. Once completed you will see the data in the plugin.

The plugin has a master off switch that you will need to turn on before scans will start. you can use this switch to turn off all automated functions on this plugin if needed.

We have added some basic permissions to the plugin. Super Admins and “Patch remedy” class users can open and manage the consoles. Add the User Class “Patch Remedy” to any user in Labtech to allow them access to the management console.

Current Version can be found at http://w ww.plugins4labtech.com

Enjoy

Cubert

Announce Maintenance Plugin For LabTech

Cluck Like a Chicken

Do you have to remind your clients to keep their systems on for maintenance and patching to run each week? Yes me too, I almost have to remind them every week before they go home. Do you know how many hours on the phone that would be if I had to call each of my users to whisper “Hey, Don’t forget to leave your computers on!” I would have to say way too many to count, so I made the Announce Maintenance Plugin to do that for me.

Let me explain how it works.

In you LabTech Console’s main menu select [Tools] menu and slide down to [Announce Maintenance] sub menu. That will launch the configuration manager to allow you to create the message, set the time of day you want it to launch (Window) and the Title of the Message Box. You can then turn it on or off for all clients by selecting the On /Off switch.

The announcement will only run once in or around the Window time (+/- 6 minutes) the “Eve” before the “Workstation Patch Day” and only for Locations that are set to “Enable Patching Workstations”.

If you have your patch day set to Thursday and your Window set to 3PM then on Wednesday Afternoon at 3 PM the announcement will go out to all “online” workstations at that location.

Enjoy

Cubert

Version 1.0.0.2

Plugin Innovation can be found in the most absurd places

The Domino’s Pizza Plugin

This last year, Squidwork’s Geek, Shannon Anderson, a Sr. Systems Engineer; software developer and RMM platform Integrator spent several days at the LabTech Synergy boot camp where he was immersed in the operations of the LabTech platform as part of an integration overview. The idea, LabTech wanted Integrators to come away with at this boot camp, was Integration can come in all forms. With Integration we can have a great impact on the business we support.

This was never more apparent then when during day two of the boot camp they had a pizza luncheon with the Sr. Development team from LabTech and the attendees at the Synergy boot camp. The organizers had miscalculated the amount of pizza a room of technical engineers would consume and so they found themselves a little short on substance.

Innovation can come from some of the oddest places and for the most bizarre reasons. Not having enough pizza to go around a room of engineers started discussions about how innovations could solve problems like this. The room of engineers threw out different ideas that reached across the spectrum of possibilities, even for pizza. It then came down to “There should be a Domino’s Pizza Plugin for LabTech” , not just a web page on a tab but a more analytical approach to pizza delivery.

The question arose, how can a RMM platform make a better “mouse trap”, or, in this instance a better pizza delivery service? You could look across the room and see the “gear heads” toiling with the idea as they started spewing out different features this plugin would need. It had to be automated; it had to be simple; it needed to calculate and understand how much pizza would be needed; and it should follow up with management to provide some layers for determining progress of the pizza to be delivered.

The Domino’s Pizza Plugin was born. This plugin would use the RMM platform to calculate how many people at a client’s company were actively logged in to PC’s to determine the gross pizza that was needed to be ordered. It would then send out a notice to each workstation requesting feedback as to the toppings and then take that feedback to determine how to slice up the orders so that everyone got the toppings on the amount of pizza they were to consume. It would then need to order the correct amount and to pay for it via the corporate credit card. It should calculate the distance the driver would drive to cover the tip as well. There would need to be a scheduler that could be used so that if the company opted into a “Pizza Friday” this could be scheduled automatically. There would need to be a manual launcher provided that would allow “one off” orders for these special occasions that prompted for a pizza lunch and the ability to add offline users to the order. We had to take in mind, that a company is not always at the same location. The plugin would need to determine all company locations and the amount of active employees at each location to carve up the order so that each location received the allotted amount pizza. Of course, we would need some metrics sent back to the management team like costs per order; number of orders per month and year; the most popular toppings ordered; and how much each employee consumes regularly. The plugin should show how its ROI is doing and the amount of man hours it has saved the company by automating all the duties of coordinating a mass pizza order for the company. Now we could see the untold hours each year it would save a company who otherwise would have to take on such costly tasks, and of course, all the happy employees with full bellies.

What is seen by this demonstration in engineering prowess is that Innovation can be found in the most absurd places, they can also have the most impact. The next time your company orders pizza ask if there is an APP for that.

Shannon Anderson

a.k.a Cubert