IT Glue™ partner Jordan Silva, Director of Technical Services at Integration Technologies Inc., was in search of a suitable documentation management solution for his MSP. After carefully looking into other available solutions he took the leap and jumped into a trial with IT Glue,  here is his evaluation 45 days post implementation.

IT Glue – A 45 Day Review

IT Glue has been on the “shiny and cool toys” list for a lot of MSPs lately. If I am honest, I struggled making the leap. The demos look like many other documentation management solutions and when I checked them out at IT Nation in 2015, I really just wasn’t sold. However, a few months went by and I still didn’t have a document management solution I was happy with. We had tried Nilear, because in concept, the ConnectWise tools are awesome, but in practice, it was too slow and did not give us the solution we were looking for.

So looking for further proof, I went hunting for anyone who could sell me on this tool. I found a good video of an MSP who was doing a rundown of their “stack” and part of it was IT Glue. From that point on I was sold.

1. Customizable solution

The single best feature any tool can have, in my opinion, is the ability to acknowledge they don’t have the answer to everything!  IT Glue have included a way for people to build in what they want. IT Glue has lots of cool default things, but using only default configs doesn’t make you great at what you do — it makes you average. So step one for us was tearing into the defaults, changing what we felt would not work for us and building it in a way that would. Simple stuff, like custom fixed assets to make data more readily available, adding/removing fields, changing what fields mean or are linked to, etc.

Our Process: 

• I spent some time (okay, a lot of time) reviewing and aligning everything with what I thought we wanted and developed standards for how to enter data.
• We then had everyone come in on a Saturday so there would be no interruptions, we did a one-hour training session. After that, everyone picked a couple of clients they knew a lot about, and for the next 4 hours we sat as a group and filled in as much about those clients as we could.
• My main focus during that period was to make on-the-fly changes to any formats we didn’t like, answer questions about how the data should be entered, and if there was ever a standard that was needed we would all pause, collaborate briefly, set the standard and move forward.
• It got everyone engaged in the process, they took ownership as they had a say in implementation, and we started building momentum with getting client data into IT Glue. 

2. Creating a documentation culture

3. Related items are key

4. Put everything in IT Glue