February 2026 Syncro Release: Linux Agent & M365 Billing

Kristen Costagliola: Hey everyone! Welcome to our February release day webinar. We will get started in a couple minutes.

A bunch of people are joining, so we’re really glad to have you here, and excited to cover everything today. We’ll see you in a couple minutes.

Thank you all so much for joining. We are going to get started in a couple of minutes, as a bunch of people are still jumping in, but we’ll see you in a couple minutes. Thanks for being here.

Welcome, everyone, great to see all of you, and thanks for putting all the welcomes in the chat. We’re gonna get started in one more minute. We have a couple of people still filtering in, so, thanks for being patient. We will get started in a minute.

All right. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our February release day webinar. I’m Kristen Costagliola, if you don’t already know me, Syncro CTO. I’m really happy to be here with Andy. Dee is around, she’s just a little bit busy, so we’re going to cover the webinar this month.

And, we’ll be able to answer all of the questions, so make sure you put your questions in our Q&A module. We have a number of exciting things to cover with you today, and then we’ll take a bunch of time for questions, so please feel free to put those in as we’re going forward.

And with that, we’re gonna get kicked off. So…

First up, I’m going to cover all of the things that we released this month, and I’ll say February is an incredibly exciting month, so I’m super happy to be able to share all of the things that we have. First up is our Linux agent. Our Linux agent is in open beta, so thank you to all of the partners that did all of our work in early access and a number of testing with us.

We have released Linux Agent to everyone in open beta. You should have access to it directly within Syncro today.

You can do all of the core monitoring and management, so you can view presence, you get system information, all of the installed applications. You also have one-click Splashtop for remote access, and you get all of the support for Bash, like, Bash scripting and the scripting module as well. So, you have a bunch of the different pieces that you can do within the Linux agent. We’re keeping it as open beta for now, because there’s a lot of additional work that’s going on, that’s in progress, and we wanted to get it into the hands of all of you. Excited to see that some of you have already started using it. As you know, this is working… this works for both Red Hat and for Ubuntu, and it supports both Intel and AMD and ARM. So, really exciting to hear your feedback on that. We have some upcoming pieces on this with some native performance monitoring with CPU and disk utilization.

And we’re also gonna be working on AV detection and some additional work on the asset-saved search support. So, there’s some things that are still in progress. And then, planned, and some of the work that we’re thinking about in the future is some work on our network monitoring, so SNMP monitoring, agent support, and then, making the Linux agent being able to be a network discovery node.

We know that a lot of you have those set up as kind of servers that are set there, and being able to use that as a node would be really beneficial. So, really excited to see where that’s going.

Next, we have our reporting and data extraction updates. And really, these are some reporting pieces that I want to talk about. We call things data extraction for stuff that you’re getting out of Syncro in different areas, kind of across the platform. And so, first up is some improvements on our billing reconciliation.

We have, we added filters and ticket subject to the ticket time entry report. Our goal here is to give you context. We got a lot of feedback from people that, as you were pulling things down, that the ticket ID, didn’t actually give you all of the information that you needed, and you wanted more of the subject, so you can actually quickly scan and see what was this ticket about.

And then the same to the pending ticket charges report. You’ll get the ticket subject, you also have the created date and the technician columns, in that report, so you’ll be able to better look at, kind of, the data there.

Additionally, in some of our reporting pieces, you now can export directly from the asset list page, and it’s your custom of whatever columns you have available directly on that page. So, you’ll be able to, you can see here on the right side that you’ll be able to export any displayed columns that you have set in your asset saved search, and that will pull down directly to a CSV.

The one that I’m really, really excited about, that’s some big improvements, is that we added the Windows patching dashboard and the details to the report builder, such as the executive summary report, so now you can showcase that directly to your clients and all of your customers to show where they need to take, where they’re out of compliance, where they need to take action if they need to reboot, if there’s pieces that they need to do.

So, really exciting on that. You can add those as new modules directly within your existing, reporting… reporting builders there. And then… you know, as we are doing all of these things, we’ve been focusing a ton on our API.

And so with that, we’ve added all of the asset patching details in the Syncro API. It’s a new API endpoint, and you’ll be able to get all of that data there, specifically in case you’re using something like Power BI, so you’ll see a lot of that in our Power BI templates, and also, if you’re just doing any custom reporting, you’ll see that there.

On the Syncro Cloud Backup front, we have released the European region support. That was one of the big things we heard from all of you, is that you want… you have customers in Europe, and you want to be able to backup them in Europe, so now you can do that. That’s an option when you set, when you set up a new customer, and I highly recommend, if you have not checked out our cloud backup, you really should. It’s one of the best that I’ve seen across the industry, and I’ve seen a number of them, so definitely go check it out. We also have a bunch of improvements, kind of in the back end around GDPR and compliance. There’s a ton of things here. We’ve done some really great webinars on cloud backup if you have any questions, but go check it out, do the trial. It’s a free trial. You might as well see how it works. Set up one of your customers and go from there.

Andy Cormier: We’ve also launched our new partnership with IRONSCALES, that one is now in production. For those folks not aware, IRONSCALES is an email security product that leans heavily into AI, and it’s very similar to companies like Proofpoint or Inky, if you’re using any of those today.

What’s very cool about IRONSCALES in particular is that it’s 100% API-driven, which means you can actually have it sit right on top of whatever you’re using today within minutes, while in, like, a passive mode, then you can see exactly what IRONSCALES is catching that your current provider is not. Personally, I always love to see companies that will put their money where their mouth is, and that’s exactly what IRONSCALES is doing with this type of approach. And unlike the vast majority of our vendors in our marketplace, you can go directly into our App Center and provision yourself a new account, or if you are already an IRONSCALES customer, you can migrate your existing account over to Syncro to take advantage of all these integration benefits.

There’s no minimums or time-based commitments to meet here, either. You simply pay for what you use, and you’re not locked down in any other way.

The way IRONSCALES handles trials is actually pretty cool as well. They don’t put your entire account into a trial, per se. What they do is every time you create a customer underneath your tenant, you have an option to put them immediately into production, or a two-week trial state, meaning even if you’re fully onboarded with IRONSCALES, and a year from now, you have some customer that would like to trial it, you can still set them up on a trial at that time. So that option’s always available to you.

Now, unlike the vast majority of our marketplace vendors, you don’t need to bring your IRONSCALES support to Syncro first. That’s just a waste of your time, so all IRONSCALES support is provided directly by IRONSCALES, and you can trigger those requests right out of your IRONSCALES tenant. And then finally, this integration is fully compatible with our universal billing functionality. For those of you that don’t know what that is, I’ll be showing that off here in a few minutes.

And then, this integration is available today, the partnership’s available today. Anybody wanting to learn more, we’re gonna have a webinar that I’ll be hosting with the IRONSCALES folks on Wednesday, February 18th at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. Caitlin’s gonna be dropping a registration link into the chat here for anybody that wants to attend that.

And then next up, we’ve got our quality of life improvements. Every month, we roll out a healthy dose of these, and this month is no different. I’m not going to go through them all, but there are several improvements here that I know a lot of folks have been after in particular. In regards to our API, we made some significant performance tweaks, particularly to the heavier API calls. We also added an endpoint specifically for grabbing ticket comments as well. Made several improvements to our Mac agent. I know that one of these in particular with the offline alerts was bugging folks, where the Mac agent would show up as offline, when in fact it wasn’t, so that’s been resolved. Again, I know that was a big one for folks.

We fixed a nagging issue on the mobile app that, actually, this one was pissing me off in particular, but I know I’ve heard a lot of you folks, mentioning this one as well. It was basically logging folks out much sooner than was intended, so that’s resolved now as well.

There’s a few miscellaneous fixes and improvements here as well, like we’ve added a new security group permission for ticket automations, which didn’t have in the past, and I know we’ve been getting a lot of feedback around that one in particular. And then, just a quick reminder, when we’re speaking about feedback, I just want to call out that the vast majority of everything that you guys see on this list every month is coming directly from your product feedback. Not too long ago, we actually added the ability to submit product feedback right inside of Syncro when you’re logged in. So, if you look in the header, there’ll be a little question mark, and if you click that, there’ll be an option for product feedback. And so fill that out, tell us how we can improve. This is literally where all of these items came from.

So that’s everything that we’ve released this past month. Next up, we’re going to talk about what’s moving into Early Access, and we have just one item for you this month, but this is a hell of a good one.

So, for anyone who hasn’t heard me talk about universal billing before, this is a new framework we introduced last year for the vast majority of our marketplace vendors, like IRONSCALES. This allows you to map Syncro customers to your customers in IRONSCALES, for example, and then from there, we start pulling that usage and mapping it to the customers every single day. You can map that usage directly into your recurring invoices, which means as your license counts in those platforms change each day, so do the quantities on your recurring invoices. That means you can literally set your recurring invoices once and just forget about them moving forward. We will handle all of the counting for you. Which is awesome.

Now, one of the most popular feature requests we had coming out of Universal Billing was the need for this exact functionality with Microsoft licensing. So we’ve been hard at work building a ton of Microsoft-centric functionality you’ve all heard about in these past webinars, things like taking actions directly out of the Syncro platform, like resetting your passwords in MFA, revoking sessions. We’re now monitoring security baselines right within Syncro. We’re also now backing up all of your M365 data right within Syncro. Well, now we’re extending that functionality over into billing, which was a natural progression of where we’ve been taking things. So, we now grab this data from any synced Microsoft tenants, meaning we already know what customer they’re mapped to, which means setup is as easy as adding this as a line item to your recurring invoice.

So… I’m gonna try to do this live, bear with me for a second here, let’s make sure this works.

Alright. So, here we’re on a recurring invoice for our cleverly named Peter Parker’s Web Solutions Company. We’ve got just one line item on here, this is our monthly service agreement with this customer, they’re paying us $3,500 a month, and now we want to start adding in our Microsoft licensing and billing for that dynamically. So we’re going to go to the vendor usage counter here.

Anything that you’ve got enabled, synced up with Universal Billing, will appear here, so we’re going to choose Microsoft.

These are the products that we currently see licensing for. I don’t care about my Business Basic, but I do want to bill out my business premium. And then what we’ll do is we will map that to a product, so I’ve got our business premium license as a product in Syncro.

And then, I’ve got all my pricing and everything in here, and then, by default, we’ll bill for all units, that’s what you’d expect, and if you look here, you see 1 slash 1. Well, that’s if you want to bill for just consumed units, and the difference is that if I have a license in IRONSCALES, I’m just paying for it. Regardless, there’s instances where you may have licenses in your Microsoft tenant that aren’t allocated to a user, and for whatever reason, you only want to bill for those allocated licenses. If you want to do that, you can check this option here, Consumed Units. If you want to bill for all units, this will bill for everything, even if it’s not allocated within your Microsoft tenant.

And then we also have this option, to bill above a specific amount. So if part of my $3,500 agreement is that, hey, you’re gonna get 50 licenses, as part of your monthly service agreement. then great, I’ll say only bill for units above 50. So if they happen to go above that, maybe I’m charging them for everyone before that, or excuse me, after that, but anything 1 through 50, we’re gonna go ahead and not charge them anything for. So that’s available as well. So there’s a lot of flexibility here in terms of how you can now bill out these licenses that we’ve never had in the past, which is pretty exciting.

Let me bring back the deck here.

All right. So that’s universal billing for Microsoft licenses. It’s now available in early access, so Caitlin’s gonna be dropping a link to that for anybody that wants to sign up for that. I know there’s just got to be a lot of billing admins who are extremely happy on this call, because even from my own time as an MSP, billing for Microsoft licenses has just been a literal nightmare from day one, and that’s never really gotten any better in this space until today. And then, by the way, I was all ready to leak a new quality of life feature for next month, and then Bobby, one of our product managers, just sent me a note, like, an hour ago that we just pushed this live, so it kind of ruined my fun here, but at any rate, the little toggle I just showed you guys, where you’re allowed to bill only if it goes above a certain quantity. We just added that to all of our counters. So if you go on your recurring invoices, in the templates, that’s live right now. So this means that you can now use that same logic with our asset counters, with our contact counters. It even works with the, we’ve got a counter for your work-from-home remote access licenses for your different customers, if they’re using that. It’ll actually count those dynamically as well as part of this. So, again, it’s live right now, so go ahead, you guys can start playing with that right now.

So that’s it for what’s in Early Access. Next up, I’m gonna pass it to Kristen to talk about what’s going on with the roadmap.

Kristen Costagliola: Thanks, Andy. So, for the roadmap, first, I’m just gonna show the roadmap, the quick roadmap themes. Andy, we can’t see… we’re still seeing the… Maybe it’s your Syncro instance instead of the slide.

Andy Cormier: Sorry, hang on. There you go. You got it?

Kristen Costagliola: Yeah, perfect. Alright, so our product roadmap themes for this year, just as a reminder that these are the areas you’ll see us continue to lean in, and as you look at the roadmap, and our goal is to be as transparent as possible to show you all of the things that are coming. So, first is automating the work and amplifying your team. So, as doing as much automation and leaning in on the AI as well for more routine tasks, and making your self-service for your end users a lot smoother.

The second is hardening the environment, so this is our security, compliance, making sure we’re doing a bunch more on endpoints and for Microsoft 365 tenants, so you’ll continue to see some themes in that area.

And then, probably the most important and the foundation across all of this is quality and simplicity. So, Andy talked about the quality of life and that track that continues to move forward, so how do we reduce the clicks across your workflow? How do we make things simpler for you? And making sure that we’re focusing on quality for speed, performance, usability. So you’ll continue to see those showing up. We didn’t cover absolutely everything, there’s a ton more on our release updates page in our KB, if you want to check that out. But.

What are the things that are shipping soon? So, we’re continuing to do those quality of life feedback items. Like Andy said, submit your feedback within the product. We look at them. That’s exactly where we pull from the list. So, when you run into something and you say, hey, this is frustrating, or hey, this is more clicks than it should be, please submit that directly within the product. We take those and we collate all of them together and figure out the areas specifically to focus on.

The Linux agent, we have this on here, even though that is in open beta and available to everyone, but we have it on there, to make sure that everyone knows you continue to… that you can use it, and we are continuing to do some updates specifically around some of that monitoring.

We have a Microsoft 365 baseline expansion that you’ll be seeing very soon, so we’re adding a huge number of new rules, a whole new baseline, CIS-aligned baseline, specifically Implementation Group 1 for you to take a look at, and that you can apply to your tenants so you can keep those secure and up-to-date.

And then, I know one of the big things that always comes up on these webinars is our Stripe ACH payment options. So, and I’ve already seen some questions around some of the things on that side. So, you’ll be able to use integrated ACH payment. This has been in progress. You’ll see something by the end of the quarter in EA. So, excited about that, where that’s coming.

Things that are in progress, we have kicked off some work on a new ticket search engine, so our goal is to update our ticket search so that you can search ticket comments, labor logs, a ton of other ticket attributes that you can’t actually search today. So you’ll see that that started, and started to kick off. We also, in our mobile app, you’ll see asset user assignments, so you’ll be able to see the end user assigned to a specific asset, and search for assets based on those end users.

In our continuation of work on project management, we have ticket blueprints. So this will allow you to set up all of your projects for any type of ticket, and you’ll inherit all of the ticket settings, as that are configured in your ticket blueprint. So all you have to do is apply the customer information. And then you can have a whole project, whether it’s parent-child tickets or even just single tickets, you’ll be able to do all of that there. And then script change logs. This will track who’s run scripts, and all of the detailed time logs and audit history of what’s happening on scripting.

So those are all the things in motion across the team. And then, we have a bunch of things that we’ve added new into On Our Radar. Some of these you’ll have seen before, but, we’re putting together some work on one-click remediation, so this is within your Microsoft 365 baselines. You’ll be able to enable or disable for us to actually automatically and do some remediation, quick remediation on your behalf.

We have some work on Mac Agent that we’re gonna be doing specifically around support for backgrounding tools. Easy App Uninstall, we’ve talked about. Your ticket view exports into your CSV, so being able to take, a ticket view that you have and directly being able to export that out into a CSV and being able to look at that.

Our end user portal ticket summary, so exposing a bunch of information from a project, manage it, specifically on parent-child tickets, that, so that you can see that delineation in the end user portal, so that you can communicate clearly on the status of the projects that are happening to your end users.

Additional recurring billing filters, so we’ll have, some work within our recurring billing to exclude tickets based on issue type or link type, meaning whether they’re a parent-child ticket, so that you can exclude project tickets directly from your recurring invoices, and you can invoice for those separately.

And then we’re adding additional filters and views on your ticket views by date range, so that you can filter them by created date, due date, last update, resolution date, in addition to all of the things you can already filter today. So we’re going to continue to build out that ticket views. We’ve also been working very hard on performance of the new ticket view page, and have a lot of exciting things coming up there, so there’s a bunch of work in progress on that.

I’ll turn it over to Andy to talk about Community Script.

Andy Cormier: Sorry, I was saying a bunch of good things, and I realized I was muted.

So we’ve got our… we’ve got just a couple things going on in our community we want to mention briefly. There’s a community script submission contest going on this month, and there are some prizes you can win for that. You can find out more details on the submission process in the post over in our community forums. And then I know for a lot of our customers, you know, you really like helping out the community with your script submissions. There’s several quite famous ones in our community script library that have been there for years that were submitted by folks, so this is your chance to get recognized for that effort, and we will be picking a couple winners out of that.

And then, last thing, we have a very special Power Hour coming up later this month with yours truly, as well as our Senior Sales Engineer, Daniel Hedges. This is going to be the first time, this is going to be a much less technical power hour than what you’re used to seeing, and it’s going to be much more focused on the business of being an MSP. In particular, we’re going to cover best practices for billing models, common pitfalls we see MSPs running into here that really stymies their upward mobility. And, how to leverage Syncro to scale those models as your business continues to grow. A lot of this is going to be based on my experience as an MSP and experience in business in general, so definitely we’ll have a heavy focus on profitability, so if you like making money as much as I do, this will be one you don’t want to miss. So I know Caitlin’s going to be dropping the sign-up link for that one in the chat as well. With that said, that’s all our prepared content for today, so we are going to move on to Q&A. Kristen, do you have anything queued up you want to start us off with?

Q&A

Kristen Costagliola: I do. So one of the first ones that I have is, will there be terminal support coming for Linux? I use all headless, Ubuntu, and Debian servers, so Splashtop doesn’t provide any use, but getting a shell would be great.

Yes, this is one of the things directly on our list. Our goal is to bring backgrounding tools to Mac and Linux agents, within the next, like, within this year, and that should give you the opportunity to use, terminal support directly on that. So, look forward to that coming, and we have the Mac Agent one on our roadmap. We’re trying to bring Linux in there alongside.

Then there was another question around cloud backup of, can we migrate regions from… for existing customers? We don’t have anything set up directly today for migration, but feel free to reach out to your… to your sales rep. We… we’re happy to talk to you, at least to understand some of the details, but we don’t have something set up automatically to… for migration.

Do you want me to take one more, Andy, or do you have some you’re ready for?

Andy Cormier: Oh, go ahead, I think I’m good. So, a couple of questions about the M365 stuff.

Folks are asking, is it going to conflict or interfere with their Pax8 sync? It will not. It’s a completely different mechanism, so we’re pulling that, as you, sync your Microsoft tenants to Syncro, that would be for, like, the Entra ID sync, bringing your contacts in, all that kind of stuff.

So no, it won’t interfere with that at all. Dylan’s asking, would love for the ability to add only bill above this amount to Syncro asset counting. Is this already a thing? Yes, that’s what I was talking about. As of, like, 5 minutes ago, it officially is a thing. So if you go into your recurring invoices now. For asset counters, contact counters, and the remote access counters, that should be there, and you should be able to do exactly what I just showed you. So yeah, that’s there for sure.

Does universal billing work with the set number of users and devices included in the proposal based on end users in the organizations or customer fields? So, the way that Syncro handles contracts is slightly different than what you would see in the more, like, legacy platforms that try to lump it all together. So. Contracts in Syncro is really two elements. It’s the contract, which is more for defining what’s billable and what’s not billable as far as your ticketing goes, and the hours of operation, all that kind of stuff.

And then recurring invoices is really… it’s really where you dictate what is and isn’t going to be billable by quantity, so that’s where you would put in you know, we’re going to include 10 servers, 5 workstations, whatever it is. If they go over this amount, we’ll bill for that. So, normally, that’s where that’s defined. So, it will work within the confines of that. It’s not going to look at your contract, though, and then move that into your recurring invoices. It’s basically like a two-step process, and that would be included in the second step, if that makes sense.

Leonard’s asking, can you map the Microsoft licenses to line items that are bundled with a Microsoft license included?

Do you understand that? I don’t totally understand that question, Kristen. Are you following that one?

Kristen Costagliola: Sorry, I was reading a bunch of questions to figure out ones to answer.

Andy Cormier: Is there M365 licenses that are, like, bundles that include other ones that I’m not aware of? Because he’s saying, can you map MS licenses to line items that are bundled with a Microsoft license included? Unless, Leonard, maybe ask a follow-up question. Maybe you mean, like, we’re including it as, like, our own bundle, and not something that came natively from Microsoft. Maybe that’s what you’re asking, so just reiterate that for me, and I’ll grab that question when it comes out.

Kristen Costagliola: Yeah, I think they’re saying, can you bill for a bundle in Syncro that’s based on a license? Like, Microsoft license count? Like, could you map a Microsoft license count to a bundle in Syncro?

Andy Cormier: Got it. Okay, so if that’s the question, what you can do is, you can map it to any product that you have in Syncro. I need to see, I need to look if you can actually do this to a bundle. Bobby, if you’re in the chat, let me know, but you should be able to map it to anything that you want that’s a physical product that you’ve added to Syncro.

A couple other questions about Pax8, but yeah, if you are using Pax8, this doesn’t interfere with that at all, so you’re good to go there.

Syncro does not do prorating for M365 licenses. It assumes that you’re going to bill in full, for each allocated license.

Andy Cormier: I think that’s the bulk of those, Kristen, if you want to grab a couple others.

Kristen Costagliola: Okay, there’s a bunch of questions around the Stripe ACH, specifically. So, one of them, is that… will the Stripe integration have two… full two-way sync with the processor, so if there’s a chargeback, we’re notified in Syncro, and will we have the ability to issue refunds via ACH through Syncro? Yes, you will be able to do that. It will be a full two-way sync, you’ll have a bunch of notifications, we’re building all of those things in there today. And then there’s a question on for Stripe or the payment processor for payment profiles for automated billing, yes, that will be supported as well. You’ll have full payment profile support. I saw a question somewhere around being able to add a line item around the credit card processing fees.

This would be a later project after the initial integration on our Stripe ACH is completed, so that’s not exactly planned today, but we know that that’s on the list, we have heard from all of you how important that is, so that is on the list. It will not come out in the initial release, but it will be, it is something that’s on our list for the future.

Andy Cormier: Hugh’s asking where you can find information on the cost of the work-from-home remote access licenses. So, Hugh, those are $5 per contact, and that would enable them to access one of two things. It’s permission-based. It would allow them to access every endpoint that they are assigned to, and it’s just one $5 cost for the contact, doesn’t matter how many endpoints they can access.

Or, if they’re, like, a management role, they can access every endpoint under the customer. It’ll be one of two things when they log into the customer portal. So, there’s a little checkbox there under each end user where you can turn that on for them. It will tell you about the cost, and that’s where you would enable, like, their portal user and the permissions that you want to assign to that, and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, Leonard followed up, and he’s saying, yeah, if I bundle it with, if I have, like, my own bundle product within Syncro, can you link counters to that? Leonard, I’m trying to find out, I know you can normally link it to anything, I’m just trying to figure out if you can do it with bundles too, so as soon as I know, I’ll… I’ll shout out an answer for you there.

Alright, Mike’s asking… oh, go ahead, sorry.

Kristen Costagliola: Oh, Kevin, I know you asked the question around what are the fees going to look like for a credit card, specifically for interacting with… I don’t know the answer to that off the top of our head. We’ll have a lot more data and information for you, as that gets closer, especially when it gets into early access.

There was also a question around, are we thinking of an MCP server? Is MCP server on the radar? That would be valuable. We’ve been starting to do work on this, we just have worked on one internally, and have an MCP server internally that we’ve set up, so I… there’s some work to do that we would make that production ready, so it’s something that we’re working on right now. There’s a lot of improvements we need to do on the API and integrations and access to the data, so you’ll see a lot of continued work in that side, and yeah, would love to hear, Jonathan, maybe pop it in the chat, or feel free to reach out to me. I’d love to hear what your use case, how you would use the MCP server, directly yourself. That would be really valuable, if you don’t mind sharing.

Andy Cormier: There is a couple questions around Stripe in regard to, does that mean we have to switch from WorldPay? It does not. Stripe will be an addition, too, and we’re looking for general parity with what we do in WorldPay today. So if you prefer Stripe, you already use Stripe, any of those types of things, then obviously that’s your motion. If you already use WorldPay, this won’t affect you.

Mike’s asking, when is the vendor counter available? Mike, that’s available today. That’s been available for a while for most of the marketplace things. We, we sell the Microsoft piece is Early Access, and then for the asset and the, contact counters, remote access counters, those are available as of today.

Kristen, there’s a question… sorry, this thing is, we have a lot of questions today, so it’s scrolling faster than I can keep up.

You had a… they were talking about the script history. Do you have any more details on that? They’re asking, does this mean that we’ll have a, like, longer history of our script… script runs on devices that currently… I think it’s just… we have the most recent 5, or is this more like you could report on whatever you wanted?

Kristen Costagliola: That’s a great question. I don’t know if I know it off the top of my head, but Lindsey is here, so Lindsay will maybe come back to that in one minute to answer that. I know you’ll have a bunch more data on the number of scripts that have run and all of the access. I don’t know if you’ll have… I don’t know how far back you’ll be able to look in seeing all those pieces, so we’ll come back to that in a second.

Andy Cormier: Brandon’s asking, if we’ve already mapped Entra ID, will there be a need to remap customers for universal billing? There won’t, so… one of the nice things about universal billing with Microsoft specifically is that because you’ve already done the mapping, you don’t have to worry about the customer mapping piece at all, it’s kind of inherent in what we built. So you just go to your recurring invoices, you can go right now, and you should be able to see that usage once you’ve got that, early access enabled. So no, you don’t have to worry about remapping anybody.

Kristen Costagliola: There’s a… question around why are product bundles not a higher priority? And all I can say is that we go through the list based on all of your feedback, what we hear from you. Dee sent out a survey recently as well, where we have people rank. I think there’s… everyone has different priorities of the different pieces, and we have our team working on multiple different areas across the platform. So, we do our best to prioritize things from your feedback as much as possible, and if there’s something that’s really critical, please feel free to reach out, but just know that we’re aggregating the feedback across everyone, and it’s, you know, something we try to do as well as we can. We know we’re not perfect in getting the exact things right, but there are some things that we try to get done and layer in as we’re going forward, so… product bundles, we know it’s on the list, we know it’s important, and we are hoping to get to it as soon as we can. I wish we had unlimited people to work on all of the things.

Andy Cormier: Don’t be bothered.

Kristen Costagliola: But we don’t.

Andy Cormier: Mike’s asking, how do we get the Microsoft listed under the vendor products list? So, Caitlin, if you don’t mind, can you just drop in the chat again the link to the early access for the Microsoft billing? As soon as you sign up for that, we have it enabled for you, as long as you have at least one tenant mapped, and we’ve got usage for that, then it’ll show up there for you. So, and I assume you’ve already done the… you’ve already got the Entra ID Sync and everything, going, so you should be all set there as soon as they enable that for you.

Kristen Costagliola: There’s a plan… there’s a question around, are there plans to improve the backgrounding tools shell experience? The lack of interactivity is a major obstacle. Curtis would love to hear more, and maybe we can connect you as well with some of our product team to go through that and get your feedback. We are planning, again, to work on backgrounding tools and bringing that to other platforms, so would love to hear some improvements that you’d like to see there, and where we can continue to focus and add value on that. We know that backgrounding tools is really valuable, so, would definitely, definitely work towards that.

Andy Cormier: Got some updates from the product folks. So, on the question of whether or not you could use your Microsoft accounts to bill out for bundles, you can do that. In fact, I’ve seen people bill it out for multiple things. It’s not just a one-off counter, you can add it multiple times if you wanted to, and have it counting against different products that you resell. So bundles is fully supported there.

And then, on the script thing, they are looking into handling historical lookbacks on script runs per device, as well as the additional logging that’s already on the docket. So I do think you’ll see some improvements there in terms of how far you go back, or it might even be a little bit better of a flow where you don’t necessarily have to go to the endpoint to find the script history. You can probably pull that in a better report.

Kristen Costagliola: Alright, there’s a question around what we’ll have on the last modified date or uploaded date for files or scripts, and, that are scored in the Syncro tenant, and maybe a reversion history. We won’t have the revision history, but we will log the last modified date and the user that made the modification in the release of the script log changes, so you’ll be able to see that that is coming, but we won’t have the full revision history. We’ve done a Power Hour in the past, and one of our partners, Jasper, showed his connection to GitHub and how he stores all of his scripts on GitHub and then pulls them down, so if that’s something you’re interested in, I don’t have that directly in front of me, maybe I can see if Caitlin or someone can find that and pop it in the chat. But, John, if you found that interesting, there’s some really cool things you could do of how you can reference GitHub and pull the script in automatically when it’s time to run. And then you get the full revision history and all the pieces there.

Andy Cormier: Kristen, somebody’s asking, and I don’t know the answer to this, is there any way to do MFA resets without Microsoft 365 Premium?

Kristen Costagliola: MFA resets for, like, within Microsoft? You can. You have to purchase… I think it’s… there’s a specific… Microsoft likes to make these things, I think, a bit more challenging. I think it’s the Entra ID P1 or P2, so you might have to do an additional P1, someone says in the comments, thank you. So you need to add the Entra ID P1. That’s an additional add-on from what you might want to have, but I believe you can purchase that potentially on its own. I don’t know the cost off the top of my head, but that’s what you could set up.

Andy Cormier: This is more for the product folks in the background. Ashley… hey, Ashley, by the way. She’s asking for quality of life, can we please, change the keyboard shortcut from Command-K to some other letter that doesn’t interfere with native shortcuts? Yeah, I know that’s something that’s already a native shortcut on a Mac, so just a note for you guys, if we’re… as we’re improving that, if we could look at changing that, the search shortcut there.

Gary’s asking, is there any plans to improve the login for the customer portal? Some of my customers are saying it’s too difficult. Gary, do me a favor, because I’ll just watch for this. Just submit the product feedback from the Syncro app. I don’t know of any issues specifically in terms of logging in, but if there’s something, like, you would like to see extra, or something it’s not doing that you want to see it doing, submit that product feedback so we can take a look at that and see, specifically what you’re looking for there, so we can prioritize that.

Kristen Costagliola: Around, are there any optimization services Syncro provides that help workflow or help improve things? We have a really awesome new training program set up that we talked about last webinar that we called, I think it was called Syncro Unleashed, but you can check it out on the Getting Started Guide directly within our… it’s docs.syncromsp.com, but it… you can go directly in the KB, it links from the product. And it’ll walk through a bunch of your optimizations, how you get set up, what you should focus on. So feel free to check that out, and then use our… we’ve been spending a lot of time to improve our KB and our doc center, and I think you’ll find that the search on that page is good. You can also ask questions directly with the question mark in the lower corner. Feel free to utilize that.

And then if you have any questions, you know, our support team is around. You can ask questions, they’re more than happy to answer and troubleshoot any of the things with you as you go to set those things up.

Andy Cormier: Is there any plans on the roadmap to show historical logs for asset, online, offline, and see when assets go offline?

Whitney, one of the things you can do is… and one of the product folks checked me in the background, but I’m pretty sure there’s an asset activity audit report, and on that, you can see all sorts of things that we log on the asset, including when it went online and offline. I’m pretty sure you can even filter for that. But you can also, obviously, if you’re tripping alerts when something goes offline, you could also, obviously, filter for those as well. So you should be able to do that today.

Let’s see what else we’ve got…

Is there any… Kristen, at this point, is there any plans… I’m seeing a couple questions about Chromebooks, basically. I don’t know if you have any comments you want to mention there.

Kristen Costagliola: We don’t have any plans right now on Chromebooks, please feel free to tell us how you feel about Chromebooks and how important they are, because we don’t have it directly on the list today, so, but… our roadmap is built around what you all tell us, so tell us if Chromebooks are critically important, what you need, how you need to support them, and happy to… happy to add it to the list as we get feedback from all of you. But it’s not on the list directly today.

There’s a question around, how long are you able to stay logged into the mobile app? We don’t know that question directly off the top of my head, so I’ll… we’re… we’re digging in on the background to see some of the pieces. And, if you do have IP allow lists set up, it does, that you are required to have it before the session is enabled, but then once the session is established, it does not. Yes, we are tracking that, and we’re working with people specifically around IP Allow List on the mobile app in general. We get… we’ve heard a lot of feedback specifically around IP Allow List, and not needing it for the mobile app, or having a more lenient way you could access the mobile app, so there’s a bunch of good feedback there on things that we’re tracking. For that.

Andy Cormier: This is more of a… just a suggestion, I think it’s a good one. They’re asking if there’s an ability to add, a method to globally exclude certain drivers instead of having to set drivers to be installed manually. You could… actually, maybe you know this, Kristen. Drivers, do they actually have a KB, or they don’t have a KB? Like, can you… you can’t block an individual driver as of today, right?

Kristen Costagliola: I don’t think so.

Andy Cormier: Okay. Derek, I’ll relay that to the product folks. I don’t know if there’s a way to maybe do it by plain text or something. I would say that doing that might also be dangerous, because it… it may impact other things that you wouldn’t want to block, but I’ll ask them and see if there’s a way, but I… I think the issue is that we can block by KB, and I don’t think drivers have an associated KB with them, so that becomes problematic.

I think that’s the bulk of them. Do you have anything else that you’ve got in flight, Kristen?

Kristen Costagliola: I’m scrolling, thank you for asking all those questions.

There was a question around, can Syncro sync Windows updates with Intune updates? We are actively tracking, and it’s down the line of doing potential and integration with Intune. I know, whoever submitted this did not submit with their name, would love to chat in what you’re trying to do with Windows, with kind of patch management, and in Intune, and how you’re managing those things as well. Heard from a number of people the value of pulling some of that Intune in, so it’s something that is farther down the line, but something we’re talking to.

Andy Cormier: Josh is asking if ThreatDown will eventually be detected as a managed antivirus in Syncro. There’s… we have a section where we show if you’re… if we’re managing something for you, like, through our marketplace, and the answer is yes. As an ETA, I don’t have that for you, but yes, we’re definitely going to have that in there.

Well, listen guys, we got about 15 minutes left, so if you guys will wait a couple minutes and see if any other questions pop up, now’s your… now’s your chance to ask if you’ve been sitting on anything.

Kristen Costagliola: Updates on Mac agent backgrounding tools, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but yes, it’s on our radar, we’re finishing up a lot of the work on the Linux agent, and then you’ll see some improvements start to come on the Mac agent backgrounding tools, and ideally Linux as well.

Andy Cormier: John’s saying, if we’re already using the Pax8 integration, would you… would you suggest switching to the Microsoft 365 Universal Billing you showed, or can we use it with the existing Pax8 integration?

There’s nothing wrong with continuing to use the Pax8 integration, that integration works fine. You wouldn’t get some of the advanced stuff, like the bill for all units, or the… even if you just wanted to bill for what’s allocated versus, including what’s unallocated as well. So there is going to be a little bit more functionality if you did it through us, but there’s no… I mean, if you have it working exactly how you want, and you don’t need any of the extra functionality, there’s no… no reason not to continue doing what you’re doing now.

Let’s see, there was another one I was gonna ask. Oh, Kristen, you probably know this better than me. Is there any intent to update, third-party patching to eventually support WinGet in any fashion?

Kristen Costagliola: I don’t know that it’s on our short list of things, it’s something that I’ve thought about a lot. I’d love to do that down the line. There’s pros and cons to WinGet versus Chocolatey, and who’s better at what, so… right now, I don’t think it’s on the list within this year, I wouldn’t say it’s… I’m probably not on something this year, but is something that we’ve actively talked about a number of times.

Andy Cormier: Okay, and then another one for you. Sam’s asking, is there any other planned distro support on the horizon for the Linux agent? I know it’s early to name that, but I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to mention there.

Kristen Costagliola: Sam, what distros are you looking for? We’d love to hear. You know, there’s a really long tail end, I think, of all Linux… Linux distros, so let us know what you’re trying to support, and, happy to see, you know, how it runs, or what kind of work it would need… be needed to get it done.

Andy Cormier: Thomas is asking one that comes up from time to time, and Thomas, I don’t think there is a plan for this right now, but I’m gonna have the product people listening in the background here, see if we can maybe add this to, like, a quality of life thing. He’s basically saying on… when we put out quotes, we would really like to signify whether a particular line item is, like, a monthly recurring charge, if it’s a yearly subscription, or it’s, like, a one-off charge specific to that quote, and some ability to section that within the quote would be helpful. I totally agree, Thomas, we used to do that in our building at my MSP all the time, so I get the value of that. So, product folks, if you’re listening, that would be a great, I say quality of life, I’m gonna assume it’s bigger than that, but we’ll try to stick it in that bucket if we can.

Let’s see, what else?

Proxmox would be huge. I’m gonna assume huge is good, I’m old, so I don’t know all the lingo, but…

Kristen Costagliola: He said huge. He came in right after and said huge, so…

Andy Cormier: Got it, okay. Okay, well, so let me know about that one.

Okay, is there any plans for… this comes up from time to time with people that bill out VoIP, and VoIP, for those of you that don’t resell it, is an absolute nightmare with taxes. So they’re asking if we have any plans to add multiple tax line items per product category, which is an interesting one.

Do you know anything on that one, Kristen?

Kristen Costagliola: I don’t know the answer, I just asked, I just asked the product team in the background to see if they knew.

Andy Cormier: Yeah, because I’m curious about that, too, because I do get that VoIP is just straight pain when it comes to billing. It’s even worse than Microsoft licenses, probably the only thing that’s worse.

Kristen Costagliola: Hard to… hard to imagine. Daniel asked, are there any plans to integrate with Google Workspace, just like we did with Microsoft Tenants?

Right now, we have a number of things on the Microsoft side to kind of continue to drive forward. We know Google Workspaces, we hear it a lot, especially for education, for schools, and a number of pieces. So right now, it’s not on the short list, but I say the more that we hear about things, the more, you know, that things come up, so keep asking, and we’re happy to make some changes there. But right now, we have a lot of work to do, I think, on the Microsoft side, and continuing to make that easier, and so Google Workspace isn’t there yet.

Andy Cormier: Richard’s asking, will billing ever prorate on a light item based on the date of entry? As of today, no. I would never say never, that’s something that we are hearing from time to time, specifically around Microsoft, not too much with other stuff. But as of today, no.

Kristen Costagliola: I’m typing the answer to this one, but, people ask saying, I’m new to Linux, is there a tutorial of how to deploy Syncro, the Syncro agent? Yes, check out our doc center, it’s docs.syncromsp.com. Again, I’m gonna type this in the response there, but it has all of the details specifically for you to check out. It walks you through all of the pieces. I highly recommend looking at it. I use it a lot, actually, and there’s the question mark in the lower right-hand corner, that if the search doesn’t work for you really well, you can, just ask questions there, and it’ll pull up all of the documentation that might be associated with it.

Andy Cormier: Justin’s asking, when is the ThreatDown Phase 2 integration happening? So, Phase 2 is where we’re gonna have policy-based deployments, for ThreatDown, as well as some alerting baked in, like we have for some other vendors, like Bitdefender. I believe that is second half of this year, but I’ll double-check on that for you. In the meantime, if anybody needs to deploy through asset policies, you can do it. We’ve got a script we wrote, and it’s in the community library in conjunction with Malwarebytes, and you can add that into your setup scripts, which will deploy as soon as your agent comes online, or you move it into that policy, and it will deploy the agent for you. So you can also do it that way as of today, while you’re waiting.

Avner, no plans as of today for a physical desktop app. We’ll always be web-based.

Kristen Costagliola: Kevin asked, is it realistic for full Stripe support, to be live this year? Yes. I think that is definitely… well, it depends, I guess, on what you mean by full Stripe support, but, what we’re working on with Stripe ACH would combine both credit card and ACH payment, so you can have both of them there specifically, and you’ll be able to support both sides, depending on what you want to do. So, like I said, we have that, you should see that in Early Access in the coming months, and then we know that there’s additional, there’s an additional work to be… to be done on some of the additional, like, pieces you might want with credit card fees or other pieces, but, Kevin, unless you meant something else with what full Stripe support means, yes, it should… it should be live this year.

Andy Cormier: Baz is asking, will there be a vulnerability tool integrated? So, one of the things that I don’t know if, if you’re aware of this, Baz, but we just released, a month or two ago, Syncro Snapshot, which is for looking at vulnerabilities or allow for better hardening of your Microsoft 365 tenants. This is a free scan that you can run, and you can even show it to one of your customers prior, if you need beer at your QBR or whatever, and it will show vulnerabilities that you may have in the tenant based on your current config settings. Is there anything else you want to add to that one, Kristen? I know you’ve got way more details on that one than I do.

Kristen Costagliola: The report that comes out of Snapshot is really awesome, and it’s free, so check it out, it’s directly on the website, you can use it. It does not require you to save any access directly, so it’s not setting up a… it doesn’t store its credentials within your system. It’s not an application that lives forever, it’s a very one-time run vulnerability assessment of your Microsoft tenant. We partnered with CyberDrain on building this. And it’s awesome. I really recommend at least trying it on your own tenant, and then you can send it to customers to check out, too, and you can use it as a prospecting tool. There’s a bunch of pieces there that’s really interesting.

Andy Cormier: Mike’s asking if, when we enable Stripe, will that allow for surcharging? So, it’s not necessarily linked to Stripe, we could theoretically do it with WorldPay as well. That’s been one that… it’s being looked at, and I think we’ll probably wind up doing it, just don’t quote me on that, primarily because there’s always been a significant number of changing laws around that, and it goes by state, typically, where you can do it, and it also sometimes is right in your agreement with your credit card processor, whether or not you’re able to add surcharges onto your normal credit card charges. So I do think it’s… we are looking at that, I just don’t have a solid answer for you yet. But actually, that is something that I’ll raise at the Power Hour if you show up to that later this month, because I have some pretty strong feelings on ways to get around that, and you guys really shouldn’t be doing that. But again, if you need to for some reason, it is something that we’re looking at.

Kristen Costagliola: Yeah, it’s something we’re looking at. There’s a lot of regulatory pieces associated directly with that, but it is something really on the list, but we need to get Stripe ACH out, the full Stripe integration out first, is the big piece.

Andy Cormier: Yep.

Kristen Costagliola: Neil asked, you mentioned M365 management tools were based on a partnership with CIPP. Is the long-term goal to have all of CIPP’s features? No. Actually, one of the reasons that we have a partnership, so everything that we’ve built directly in Syncro of the M365, we have built natively ourselves. We have worked very closely with CIPP in understanding what are the critical pieces, and we know that there’s a tremendous amount of value that Kelvin, his team, and CIPP brings. We are not planning on bringing everything from CIPP into Syncro. Our goal is to do things to help you all automate. CIPP is huge, and there’s a ton of pieces that… that we’re not gonna go down. And so, we’ve talked to them about integrations or other things that we could do together. So we work very closely with them, kind of in the back end, and making sure that we’re building things, and we… Kelvin has such a wealth of knowledge on that side, and his team is excellent, so we’ve worked together, and then we’ve worked to come up with new products like Snapshot. So, our goal is just to continue to work together and potentially bring things that are really important, like the baselines and other stuff, into Syncro, but not to do the entire CIPP functionality.

Andy Cormier: Harvey’s asking a question, we need to introduce EDR across the board. We had hoped Bitdefender EDR would be the way. What’s the real cost per desktop for Bitdefender EDR versus others? So for Bitdefender, you’re probably going to be right around, off the top of my head, $3, for your Core AV up through EDR. Another option is taking a look at ThreatDown. They bundle things a little bit differently, so the core package that includes EDR is only $1.50 an endpoint. When you move into MDR, which is either of those services, having real humans monitoring your environments for this kind of stuff 24-7, they’re both at $5 an endpoint. So, if you, if you want to go all the way through MDR, it’s the same cost, it’s just what product you like better, but all the way through EDR, there is a decent amount of savings that you’ll see on ThreatDown specifically. So definitely check that out if you’re only looking to go through EDR, manage that threat hunting stuff, primarily yourself.

And then, Kristen, this is a good question. I’m gonna assume yes, but I don’t know. Someone’s asking, if you want to use WorldPay for credit cards and Stripe for ACH, would we support that?

Kristen Costagliola: I… it’s a great question. I was asking the same question in the background. Products team? Does anyone know the answer to that? No.

Andy Cormier: Okay. The answer as of today is no. Sorry, big capital now, so definitely no.

Kristen Costagliola: Which honestly makes sense. You have to have the agreement in place with that vendor, and it would be… I think it would make more sense for you as a business to go with one specific person for your payment processing.

Andy Cormier: We’ve got about 2 minutes left, Chris, and you got any other ones you want to grab quick?

Kristen Costagliola: Yeah, Peter asked, hey, have you thought about an end-user brandable Syncro app that shows end users their tickets? Peter, if you’re talking about a mobile app, we have not necessarily put together… thought of putting together a mobile app. We have the end-user portal that’s brandable that you can check out. We released the full new branding about a year ago, and some big updates. We’re continuing to put things in there, but I’m guessing you mean mobile app? And so, no, we have not had that on a… we haven’t heard that, actually, as things, for us to… to do.

Andy Cormier: All right, I think that’s about it, then. Thank you guys for the questions. This was great. We butted right up against the hour here. Thanks everybody for attending, and we will see you guys next month.

Kristen Costagliola: Yeah, thank you so much. Look forward… send… submit your product feedback in the product in the course between now and then, and let us know how things are going. Thanks for joining.

Andy Cormier: Take care, buddy. Bye.