An open letter to ConnectWise

ConnectWise,

After years of being your "partner," an independent consultant upon your products, and what used to be a motivated force for change in the community, I am now giving up and putting my frustrations to the court of public opinion.

I have no complaints about Control; the worst thing you did was change its name to something that may have elevated SEO results but made it less convenient to find information about the product itself. This is unpleasant but forgivable.

Manage? Manage is still a very sticky product. Once someone has integrated their entire business around its tentacles (or perhaps vice versa), it is an excessively big ask and an invested endeavor to switch. It is for this reason, and for this reason alone, that I expect you haven't seen much loss in Manage accounts despite the lack of major revolutionary features in the past 2-3 years. Critical functionality (Outlook Calendar Sync, I'm looking at you) remains spotty. Dark mode doesn't exist. Though, it is a product that entrenches itself so deeply that the stickiness often outweighs the frustrations.

Now, we get to Automate. As you have confirmed ( as per the known issue viewable only after authenticating to ConnectWise Home ), there has been a bug in all recent versions of Automate since version 21 patch 10. This bug causes all available connections to the database to eventually be exhausted and, once that threshold has been met, all automation, alerting, and ticketing stop - SILENTLY. I personally noticed the trend, as I manage multiple Automate instances, and have been attempting to raise the alarm about the issue since at least 4 January. By the first week of February, you were gracious enough to have myself and other members of the community on a teleconference, where you acknowledged that this was a critical issue and it would get every bit of attention until it was resolved. You also stated that an official communication would be drafted and sent to ALL Automate partners warning them of the issue, if for no other reason than it could be monitored for.

You have failed to respond to this issue appropriately.

It took 10 days for an official communication to be issued; part of the delay was because the execs that needed to approve said communication were having a steak dinner after Right of Boom. Curious, did any of the execs at that dinner say "let them eat cake?"

You were made aware that communication, the one promised to be sent to ALL Automate partners, made it to a small fraction of its intended recipients. At least a dozen prominent and well-known admins in the community advised they did not receive the communication and we were told "we're working on it."

The communication has yet to be resent; in fact, the most recent communication about the release of Automate v22.2 didn't make it to the people that *used* to receive such communication.

The known issue states a fix is slated for v22.4. If that milestone is actually reached successfully, that will mean a P1 issue that can cause a silent and total loss of functionality in a core business-critical will have taken 6 months to identify, remediate, and release. On what planet is that considered acceptable?

Here's some facts:

The community was promised improved communication back in August of last year - https://mspgeek.slack.com/archives/C01JBB1ER1U/p1644973696802099

And again https://mspgeek.slack.com/archives/C01JBB1ER1U/p1629319490002300?thread_ts=1629317665.002000&cid=C01JBB1ER1U

Here's one from March of last year with a CW rep acknowledging the need for improved communication and efforts to exact such https://mspgeek.slack.com/archives/C01JBB1ER1U/p1615832807484200

Here's one from February of last yearhttps://mspgeek.slack.com/archives/C01JBB1ER1U/p1612280342109900?thread_ts=1612232564.090800&cid=C01JBB1ER1U

So, in over a year, you can't get a mailing list to work properly? Not even one to advise your paying customers of a potential issue that could cost them customer accounts and confidence?

This post is my last attempt to get someone to see the field for what it is and take definitive action. The delay in notifying "partners" is suspicious at best. At worst, it is either carefully planned to keep panic-worthy issues quiet, or sheer incompetence.

Your partners have begun voting with their dollars, at least as far back as a year and a half with the Control security debacle. Ninja and Datto are eating your lunch, and instead of solving the problem, you're dumping more and more resources into regurgitating a platform (CWRMM) that was outdated even when Zenith Infotech introduced it as SaaZ.

The ball is in your court. Fix your commitment to "partner" success, or stop hypocritically preaching it and make way for other vendors that truly want to innovate in the space. It's completely up to you.

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EDIT: Since the time of my original post, ConnectWise has responded definitively to the biggest pain point expressed - not getting communication out to all potentially affected partners. Today, an explanatory post was emailed out to a corrected contact list, and openly posted in CW Home. u/amyluciaCW was also kind enough to give me forum to directly communicate my experiences, and she left me with the feeling that if there was anyone that could successfully make order out of the current chaos, it was her. I was also made aware of some exciting changes, but I am still confirming exactly how much of that I can share. Looking forward with hope...