RapidFire Tools Inc. has added an entry-level documentation system named InDoc to its Network Detective Reporter product.
An add-on to the Atlanta-based vendor’s Network Detective IT assessment solution, Network Detective Reporter lets technicians view status and vulnerability information about customer environments. InDoc, which is available immediately at no additional charge, equips the system with a web-based portal hosted in the Amazon Web Services public cloud. Technicians can use the portal both to view reporting information on their mobile devices and to store client- and asset-specific notes, remediation procedures, passwords, checklists, and more in an encrypted database.
The result is “lightweight documentation tool” and entry-level alternative to more sophisticated products from vendors such as IT Glue and Passportal Inc., according to RapidFire Tools CEO Michael Mittel. Unlike those systems, he notes, InDoc imports and automatically refreshes network health information from Network Detective. Beyond that, however, it’s a fully self-contained solution with no outside connections to third-party RMM or PSA solutions.
“Most documentation tools rely on integrations to other people’s platforms,” Mittel says. “In ours, it’s all encapsulated in the same platform.”
That makes it a strong potential fit for newcomers to managed services that have yet to deploy a complete set of management solutions, according to Vice President and Head of Development Win Pham.
“There are quite a few people that do not use a PSA, for instance,” he says.
Mittel, who expects many managed services beginners to employ InDoc as a starter documentation system, envisions introducing a formal upgrade path to more comprehensive offerings eventually.
“A more closely aligned partnership with some of the other companies out there would make a lot of sense to us,” he says.
The introduction of InDoc comes in response to feedback from users of Network Detective Reporter. Until now, that system provided reports in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint format only.
“We’ve had a lot of customers say that they’d like to have that information more readily available at their fingertips,” Mittel says. According to Pham, users wanted a way to capture metadata about their clients as well.
“We didn’t have a good way of doing that inside of our application, and a printed report is not exactly where you want to put all this meta information,” he says. “It made sense to turn this into a portal product.”
Current Network Detective Reporter users can download InDoc as a free upgrade. Future users will receive it as a pre-installed, value-added feature.
InDoc’s debut is the second time this summer that RapidFire Tools has used functionality upgrades to an existing product as a means of expanding into a new and broader product category. In June, it employed a series of feature enhancements to turn Detector SDS, a virtual appliance for spotting suspicious activity and insider threats, into a more fully-featured “cybersecurity-in-a-box” solution named Cyber Hawk.
Just as Network Detective Reporter now offers smaller MSPs an affordable way to collect and access basic documentation, Cyber Hawk provides some of the alerting and vulnerability scanning functionality associated with SIEM and SOC solutions at a lower cost and with less complexity.
