IT Glue has unveiled a collection of product upgrades designed to streamline technician workflows and enhance collaboration with end users.
The documentation and network management software maker, which is a unit of IT management vendor Kaseya, showcased the updates at its annual GlueX partner conference, which took place online yesterday and today.
Chief among the added features, all of which are available immediately, is a new ticketing experience in the flagship IT Glue documentation platform that gives MSPs access to live data from Kaseya’s PSA and RMM solutions directly inside the IT Glue interface. The new functionality lets users create, update, and close tickets; view the latest details about endpoints; and execute remediation procedures all in one place.
“For a lot of use cases, they’ll be able to completely resolve the ticket right inside of IT Glue,” said Nadir Merchant, IT Glue’s CTO and general manager, in a conversation with ChannelPro. The goal, he explained during a keynote address at GlueX yesterday, is to reduce the amount of switching administrators must do among PSA, RMM, documentation, and other systems when diagnosing and resolving technical issues.
“This workflow has a technician jumping from tools three, four, five, six different times, ultimately creating a lot of waste,” Merchant said. “Our data suggests that those technicians waste 40% of their time jumping between these tools.”
Users who prefer to spend most of their time in BMS, Kaseya’s PSA application, can also draw on existing integration with IT Glue to view portions of relevant documentation within that system’s interface. “It’s not as robust as being fully in IT Glue,” Merchant observes.
Also introduced today is a new asset archiving feature for IT Glue that lets users move outdated asset records out of view without deleting them altogether.
“A lot of MSPs have been using IT Glue for a long time now, so they’ve accumulated a lot of information in there and they don’t always want to see everything at all times,” Merchant says. “Archiving gives them ability to clean up their documentation.” The feature is one of the most frequently requested additions to the IT Glue platform in the vendor’s online suggestions portal.
In a further example of cross-platform integration within Kaseya’s IT Complete platform—which in addition to IT Glue, VSA, and BMS, includes products from security vendors ID Agent, RapidFire Tools, and most recently Graphus, as well as backup vendors Unitrends and Spanning—IT Glue data is now available in Kaseya’s Fusion mobile app. The new feature will show field technicians heading to a customer office details like the Wi-Fi password and door codes they’ll need when they get there.
“We wanted to build a workflow to help users who are going onsite to visit the customer be prepared for that visit,” Merchant says. IT Glue’s dedicated mobile app, which also displays that information, will remain available to provide a deeper look at documentation records.
An update to the MyGlue password management tool announced today lets MSPs add a customized help center with reference information to that system. Though MyGlue wasn’t originally designed to provide help content to end users, IT Glue partners have been employing it for that purpose by posting how-to guides and other instructional materials in the app on a client-by-client basis.
“Now we give them the ability to share this read-only documentation with everybody, with one click,” Merchant says. Unlike the improvised information MSPs posted to customers before, he adds, help center documents reside in a dedicated, easily identified location. “The customer who’s consuming this documentation knows exactly where to go, and it’s not intermixed with their own documentation.”
The addition of help center functionality to MyGlue reflects the product’s unanticipated evolution from password management tool to multi-purpose end user collaboration platform.
“You’re not just sharing passwords but important documents using MyGlue, and your clients are sharing important information with you,” said Merchant in his keynote. “We didn’t realize that this would become the most popular and most powerful use case for MyGlue.”
Further enhancements to MyGlue now on the roadmap will turn the system into a potential replacement for PSA-based end user portals. Customers will eventually be able to open and view tickets without MSP assistance, for example, or manage approved software deployments.
“You’ll be able to install new applications, uninstall applications, and update applications,” Merchant said. “We are going to make MyGlue a full-service portal for the MSP’s customers.”
A new integration between IT Glue and Kaseya’s Unitrends MSP data protection platform will let users generate customer-ready reports showing which of the client’s servers are currently being backed up and which aren’t. BDR products can’t provide that information on their own, according to Merchant, because they’re only aware of the system’s they’ve been configured to protect.
“They know what they’re backing up, they know what’s failed, but they don’t know the systems that they don’t know about,” he says. “IT Glue does have information about those systems through our documentation.”
An upgrade to the Network Glue network management system revealed at GlueX today lets MSPs collect documentation about Microsoft- and VMware-based virtual machines automatically.
“We document the hypervisor, if it’s Hyper-V or VMware, and then we document all of the hosts on those hypervisors,” Merchant says. “When you have a cluster of VM hosts, often the VMs move around and it can be very annoying to figure out which machine is actually hosting a given VM at a given period of time.”
IT Glue has been steadily augmenting Network Glue’s automated documentation capabilities in recent months, said Merchant in his keynote, noting that the system now collects details about switches and Active Directory contacts on its own. Automated documentation of Active Directory security groups and file shares is slated to arrive in the future.
Also under development and set to arrive before the end of the year is a new user roles feature that will let MSPs assign varying levels of administrative rights to different groups of technicians in Network Glue, MyGlue, and IT Glue.
Of the product news announced today, according to Merchant, the ticketing integration with BMS and VSA best illustrates IT Glue’s long-term aspiration to turn its documentation solution into a centralized, multi-function console that technicians can use to perform most of their day-to-day work, from researching tickets to resolving them.
“We are building a platform to provide end-to-end service to IT professionals,” he says. “The ticketing integration that we built is the next big step in this regard.”
Since the last GlueX event in September of 2019, IT Glue has grown from 7,500 partners to almost 10,000, Merchant noted in his keynote, and from 150,000 users to more than 200,000. That growth has continued this year, he added, despite the coronavirus pandemic’s massive economic fallout.
“We’ve actually added 15 staff in engineering support and our sales organization,” he said. “The more we grow, the more talent we can hire, and the more we can hire, the more we grow.”
