ITBOOST, the former standalone managed services documentation solution that officially became part of the ConnectWise software suite for MSPs last week, has gained new functionality aimed at enabling it to serve as a single pane of glass for managed services technicians.
ITBOOST’s founders, who now head up the ITBOOST product group within ConnectWise, discussed the updates with ChannelPro during the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect partner event in Orlando last week.
Effective now, techs using ITBOOST’s incoming call response feature, which automatically displays detailed configuration and status information about help desk callers, can open a ticket in ConnectWise Manage from directly inside that screen.
“There’s a button right there to create a new ticket. Once he saves it, he goes back to what he was doing before,” says Ali Peracha, formerly CEO of ITBOOST and now vice president of product at ConnectWise in charge of that system. “He doesn’t have to now leave the tab, find Manage and whatever screen that he’s at, go into a particular board that he wants to go into, go find the customer, create a new ticket, find whatever he’s looking for, and make sure that ticket isn’t already open.”
A similar update lets users remote into end user devices via the ConnectWise Control remote access solution without exiting the ITBOOST interface.†
“They can just click on remote control and log into the machine rather than now going into Manage or [ConnectWise] Automate or any other system that integrates with Control,” Peracha says.
An enhancement to ITBOOST’s synchronization functionality, meanwhile, lets users import new or updated information from ConnectWise Manage in near real time. The system could upload changes to Manage almost immediately before, but downloading revisions required more time.
“It took about an hour to two hours for that cycle to run,” Peracha says.
ITBOOST now automatically synchronizes data with ConnectWise Automate once a day as well. In the past, technicians synched data manually on an ad hoc basis. “Now it’s going to be every 24 hours,” Peracha says. The process takes place overnight, he adds, to minimize disruption for users.
Finally, technicians working in Manage can now view near-real-time data from ITBOOST via seven new “pods” that show information about an endpoint configuration, for example, inside the PSA system’s interface.
“If they’re looking at that in Manage, they have all the linked items, all the notes, all the attachments that they’ve done in ITBOOST [and] they see that directly within Manage,” Peracha says.
ITBOOST has security-related updates coming as well in the next three to five months, including the addition of data encryption at rest. “That means every field that goes into the database is going to be encrypted,” says Peracha, adding that the new capability is scheduled to arrive in December.†
Another forthcoming addition to the system will split the key needed to decrypt customer passwords into two halves, one of which will reside with ITBOOST and the other of which the user will control. That will make accessing encrypted passwords impossible for anyone but the MSPs responsible for them.†
ITBOOST competitor IT Glue added similar functionality to its platform during IT Nation Connect last week.
Coming next year is a major new release of ITBOOST, version 4, that will feature a completely remodeled interface based on Google’s Material Design theme as well as a new API layer that vendors and MSPs can use to create custom integrations and automations.
Now that ITBOOST is part of the ConnectWise product family, channel pros can expect to see deeper links among those systems in the future. Peracha points to an integration with the ConnectWise Sell quoting solution now in development as an example. Technicians viewing information about an asset approaching an expiration date will see a renew button on the screen. “You click on that and it automatically creates a quote for the customer [and] attaches all the configurations that it needs,” Peracha says.
Peracha and his fellow ITBOOST co-founders, Omer Khawaja and Raza Rafiq, have long aspired to make their product the primary entry point to most of the functions technicians perform during the workday. According to Peracha, the ConnectWise acquisition hasn’t changed that goal.
“We do want techs to kind of start their day in ITBOOST,” he says, indicating that ConnectWise shares that objective, which ITBOOST discussed with them during pre-acquisition negotiations.
“When we sent our slide deck on our value-add over to ConnectWise, they came back saying, ‘that exactly matches what our vision is,'” Peracha recalls. That vision doesn’t challenge the central place ConnectWise Manage occupies in a tech’s workflows, however, he emphasizes.
“We’re not replacing Manage in any way,” Peracha says.
Other solutions acquired by ConnectWise, including the LabTech RMM system, ScreenConnect remote access system, and Quosal sales quoting platform, all received new, standardized names at an IT Nation event three years ago. Peracha doesn’t anticipate the same happening to ITBOOST.
“We have no reason to change the name,” he says.
