Guest IDC Blogger: Matt Arcaro

As we approach the halfway point of 2024, IDC continues to see the increasing role of AI in both our personal and work technology personas. In many instances, AI will merely remain a technology enabler powering a capability or feature. More importantly, in others, AI will become deeply entrenched in the product development and engineering life cycle, delivering new experiences and improving user engagement, visibility and productivity. However, the road leading to this AI-driven future is not straight and predictable but rather winding, including frequent stops, starts and failures. Avoiding these AI adoption and integration pitfalls is critical, so IDC offers insights into five of the more prominent AI myths that arise in discussions with technology buyers, suppliers and the technology ecosystem at large

Myth 1: Organizations have already adopted AI en masse.

Reality: Although AI has become a key part of how everyone talks about the progression of today’s technology, the reality is that only 59.3% of 361 global CIO and IT leaders in IDC’s “Worldwide CIO Sentiment Survey” (October 2023) indicated that they have adopted and deployed AI in their environment. Although this may be the majority of organizations, a large continuum remains in one of the technology pre-deployment phases of research, experimentation, procurement/vendor selection, building, testing, prototyping or validation of AI solutions. IDC views this current mixed state of AI adoption as a reminder for technology buyers and suppliers that deploying AI is not a switch to turn on but a multi-pronged effort spanning technology, processes and people.

Myth 2: All AI initiatives deliver strong ROIs.

Reality: AI has delivered transformative capabilities, features, experiences and insights to a range of organizations. Yet organizations, especially those new to AI adoption, have not seen the quick payback results they may have hoped for. For example, in IDC’s “WW Future of Operations Survey” (August 2023), only 28.7% of the 864 respondents indicated that their AI data initiatives realized a rapid payback. This is to be expected and highlights what technology suppliers and buyers often forget: AI is not a panacea but a purpose-built tool with strengths and weaknesses. Technology suppliers and buyers must prioritize strong governance and use cases to determine where and when to position and utilize AI and establish metrics to ensure that it is delivering measurable value.

Myth 3: Traditional AI is going away. GenAI is all that matters.

Reality: There has been a wave of technology suppliers and buyers asking us about GenAI in the last year. The LLM advancements and multimodal models largely driving GenAI growth have forced organizations to rethink how and where they can utilize AI, especially for unstructured data tasks — but this isn’t the entire story. Many of the advancements underpinning GenAI have led to improvements in the use and applicability of traditional, predictive, and interpretative AI. In IDC’s “Worldwide GenAI Arc Survey” (September 2023)of 1,304 technology decision makers, respondents indicated that they expected 80% of their overall AI investment budget to be allocated to traditional AI initiatives versus GenAI. This makes sense, as traditional AI, although less talked about today, is better understood and often aligns better with organizational edicts to move the needle via productivity, visibility and data insight improvements.

Myth 4: Organizations must always build AI solutions themselves.

Reality: There are a range of benefits for companies in building or customizing technology solutions with AI. These developed and deployed capabilities may deliver something unique that can act as a moat to defend against existing and emerging competitors. The challenge to this approach (as referenced previously) is that building and deploying AI is not without risk and can be costly, time-consuming and unsuccessful. IDC suggests that in many cases, especially for IT and operations functionality, a more practical approach would be for organizations to leverage AI capabilities included within their supplier’s technology and product offerings. This serves two purposes: it reduces the level of effort required to bring AI-powered features into an organization and it facilitates and builds internal experience and alignment to better understand the ins and outs of AI.

Myth 5: AI is AI. The technology supplier building the AI-powered capability doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

Reality: This is one of the more interesting myths that we a lot about. Although the high-level approaches of competing vendors may integrate and utilize AI in similar ways, IDC argues that a vendor’s approach matters more now than ever. This is driven by a few different principles, most critically the amount, relevancy, and diversity of data a vendor uses to build a given AI-powered feature. Remember, not all data is created equal, and technology suppliers may lean into AI models’ “black box” aspect to deploy capabilities that may work but are not (defensibly) enterprise-grade. In other words, IDC tends to see more success stories when technology suppliers build AI-powered capabilities into their products and services that focus on solving known customer and/or business problems. These suppliers utilize an outcome-first lens to build and extend customer trust through AI that leverages a progressive, use case-by-use case strategy.

IDC strongly believes in the power of AI, but much like any new technology, the market’s hype often obfuscates some of the nuances and realities as its use continues to grow. Hopefully, the five AI myths and realities highlighted above help you better understand the current state of AI and enable you to navigate AI’s complexities more effectively to drive tangible business outcomes.

The post Setting the Record Straight on Five Key AI Myths appeared first on IT Glue.

In this blog, we’ll explore the different Microsoft integrations available in IT Glue and how you can leverage them to generate a single source of truth.

What is Microsoft integration?

While most organizations have a diverse range of mission-critical applications in their IT environments, one of the biggest challenges they face is bringing the information stored in multiple apps under a consolidated and unified view. This challenge can be overcome with an IT documentation solution that integrates with tools you already use to simplify and amplify the efficiency of information and data extraction.

Considering the ubiquity of Microsoft 365 tools in today’s business organizations, you need an IT documentation solution that can integrate with multiple Microsoft solutions and bring all your Microsoft data to a centralized platform that is easy to access and understand. Not only do you need to consolidate, but you also have to structure the information to understand the data.

Why is Microsoft integration important for organizations?

Many MSPs and IT teams depend on Microsoft solutions for their day-to-day operations. Microsoft offers many solutions for mission-critical tasks in the cloud, on-prem and hybrid environments. If an organization cannot integrate its IT documentation with Microsoft and bring Microsoft data under a centralized platform, this could severely affect its growth.

Microsoft solutions have specific purposes in an organization, from identity and access management to providing mobility management. Microsoft also offers many productivity apps that are widely used across the world. Despite offering many solutions, Microsoft does not have a consolidated view of all your data in a centralized platform. 

Microsoft integration helps you understand your Microsoft environment as a whole. By seamlessly integrating with leading business applications like Microsoft, you can supercharge your IT documentation, including asset, license and user management.

Microsoft data integration

Now that we have established the significance of bringing together Microsoft data in centralized IT documentation, it is time to explore how you can achieve that. You need a documentation solution like IT Glue to integrate multiple solutions and bring information together.

Connecting multiple Microsoft solutions into a centralized IT documentation platform like IT Glue enables a seamless flow of information automatically and accurately to supercharge your asset, license and user management. Since the information flow is automated, it stays updated at any given time.

IT Glue comes with templates that make Microsoft documentation a breeze. These templates are deliberately designed to make users understand the documented information easily. Most importantly, these templates bring structure to your otherwise cluttered documentation and make your Microsoft data easy to understand. When paired with integrations, you get one structured, consolidated and automated IT documentation.

Here’s a list of documentation items you can view in IT Glue through Microsoft integration.

Azure AD documentation

Azure AD is a Microsoft identity and access management solution that simplifies various validation processes, including single sign-on, MFA, conditional access and more. Since access management is critical to today’s cybersecurity infrastructure, Azure AD documentation is vital for MSPs and internal IT teams.

With IT Glue, you can now view Azure AD information under one roof and get a consolidated view of your IT environment. You can leverage information, such as status, last login, last password reset and password expiration, from Azure AD and Active Directory to enforce your company’s security and compliance policies.

Active Directory documentation

Active Directory allows organizations to manage various infrastructure components and systems with one identity per user. Active Directory forms the basis of many components like NPS, VPN access, DNS and more. Since it is central to so many systems in an IT infrastructure, the information documented here must be accurate, consistent and up to date.

Intune documentation

Intune is a mobile device management solution from Microsoft. It provides information to the identity system on device states during the authentication process. IT Glue’s integration with Intune allows organizations to pull their mobile device data into a consolidated platform, where they can combine other integrations like ServiceNow, Jamf and many other leading business applications to view a consolidated view of all details of the assets managed.

IT Glue also enables you to automate the Intune documentation to pull in information such as device name, model, serial no, compliance status and owner type.

Microsoft 365 documentation

Microsoft 365 is a suite of productivity solutions that help you create, edit, review and share information on the go. Businesses of all sizes use a range of Microsoft 365 solutions for their everyday business operations.

You can also leverage the Microsoft 365 integration to add additional information about your users to consolidate all the critical information from Active Directory and Azure as well, including mailbox sizes.

By leveraging the Microsoft 365 integration, you can pull in Microsoft 365 license information, including active, consumed and unused. This information helps you monitor your licenses and avoid overspending on unnecessary or unused licenses. As a result, you can ensure the optimal utilization of resources in your environment.

Automate Microsoft data integration with IT Glue

IT Glue integration with Microsoft’s suite of products is all about providing you with a consolidated view and ensuring smooth operations. This also helps improve visibility into your IT infrastructure and make knowledge-based decisions on critical factors. You can set up Microsoft integrations in just a few minutes. You can check out our knowledge base for step-by-step guides on various integrations.

In addition to Microsoft integrations, IT Glue has dozens of integrations, an open API and an automated network
discovery tool. You can leverage these integrations to boost efficiency in your process, eliminate human errors and take your documentation to the next level.

In IT Glue, you can also link related items together so that there are zero degrees of separation. This helps you combine various parts of the information, how-tos, passwords and more to completely understand your IT.

To learn more about how you can make the most of IT Glue integrations, request a demo.

The post Microsoft Integration: Documentation for Azure AD, Active Directory, Intune and Microsoft 365 appeared first on IT Glue.

In this blog, we’ll talk about the significance of Intune in today’s mobile-first world and how you can solve your problems related to data security and access management with the help of Intune.

What is Microsoft Intune?

Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based solution that helps organizations with enterprise mobility management. It enables both mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM) and helps IT administrators control the mobile devices in their environment. This is especially helpful when you have business or personal mobile devices that deal with corporate data.

Intune belongs to the Enterprise Mobility + Security suite of Microsoft, and it is designed to integrate with various services of Microsoft to provide comprehensive mobile device management. For instance, you can integrate Microsoft Intune with Azure AD to control the users who have access to your data.

Intune vs. Azure

Azure is a cloud-based computing service offered by Microsoft. Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is an identity management service that leverages a cloud platform. When integrated with Intune, you can monitor data privileges in your network and determine who gets access to critical information. Additionally, features like single sign-on offered by Azure ensure security when managing user access.

When combined with Azure AD, Microsoft Intune can provide you with complete control over your organization’s devices and ensures seamless access for your team members. This allows your team to be productive from any device.

Intune vs. SCCM

The System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) was introduced by Microsoft in 1994 to manage various devices including servers, workstations and mobile devices. SSCM is still used by various organizations to manage their on-premises devices. It can come in handy during complicated application installations or when detailed reporting is required.

For modern IT infrastructure with cloud-based tools and mobile devices, Intune is a better choice. Intune also enables users to leverage conditional access policies to control access management. Intune and SSCM can be used together under a configuration called co-management. Here, both tools work in a complementary fashion to handle workloads in an IT infrastructure.

Intune vs. Endpoint Manager

Microsoft Endpoint Manager combines the features of Intune and SCCM in a single platform. It can be integrated with various Microsoft products and can effectively manage the Windows ecosystem. It can also be used to manage devices running other operating systems like Android, iOS and macOS.

This makes Endpoint Manager an ideal solution in today’s corporate world where devices are becoming more diverse and employees carry out various tasks using their mobile devices.

How do I get Microsoft Intune?

Microsoft Intune is a part of Microsoft Endpoint Manager. You can visit the admin center to access Intune and other settings related to device management. If you don’t already have an account, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial and check out Microsoft Intune in a test environment. Intune is supported by different operating systems including Windows, iOS, Android and macOS. If you are in a Windows ecosystem, you need at least Windows 10 to support Intune.

Once you have successfully signed up, you will have a new tenant, which is a dedicated instance of Azure AD for hosting your Intune subscription. Here, you can configure additional users and groups, and assign licenses based on their user privileges. Users can enroll their devices now and choose the apps required for their work. After setting up all the key details, you can configure various policies and begin the endpoint management process.

What is Intune used for?

The primary use of Intune is to remotely manage mobile devices and mobile applications in an organization. When you use Intune, your workforce can securely access organizational data and stay productive from anywhere. Since Intune is integrated with the Microsoft 365 suite of products, your users can securely deploy apps on all their devices to access data and networks.

Let’s check out the key functions of Microsoft Intune.

Mobile Device Management (MDM)

In Intune, you can use different approaches and set up protection policies to manage your mobile devices. You may also have different policies for company-owned devices and personal devices of your employees. With company-owned devices, you may have full control over various aspects including security, features and settings.

While full control may not be possible with personal devices, you can still enforce protection policies like multifactor authentication to secure organizational resources and apps.

Once your devices are enrolled in Intune, you can configure your policies to make sure they all meet your security standards. Most importantly, you can see the list of devices that can access your organizational resources and set or remove permissions as required.

Mobile Application Management (MAM)

This is used to secure your organizational data at the application level. By managing your applications through Intune, you can keep them up to date and configure settings to be enabled when an app starts. You can also add or remove your apps to the devices of specific users or groups.

When you use Intune along with Azure AD, you can create app protection policies to isolate your users’ personal data from organizational data while working on their personal devices. Intune also provides additional security to resources accessed with organizational credentials.

Device compliance management

To protect your organizational data, you can use Intune to set forth certain requirements to be met by devices and users in the infrastructure. These requirements are compliance policies. These policies outline various rules, and any non-compliance can alert the concerned personnel to safeguard data.

Detecting non-compliance is just one part of device compliance management in Intune. You can also incorporate various actions that can apply to devices that don’t meet your compliance regulations. For instance, you can send a warning to the user about the issue or even remotely lock the device or user account in case of serious violations.

Device security management

IT administrators can use the Endpoint Security node in Microsoft Intune to configure their security policies. These policies help you identify at-risk devices in your ecosystem and restore them to a more secure state. These policies can help you mitigate security risks in your IT infrastructure by:

• Reviewing the status of your devices
• Enforcing compliance policies for devices and users
• Establishing baseline best practices for device security
• Managing security configurations for various devices
• Integrating with Microsoft Defender to remediate security issues

What are the benefits of Intune?

The most important benefit of Microsoft Intune is that it ensures data security while allowing your team to be productive. It also comes with a lot of flexibility in terms of asset management as it allows administrators to set policies for enhancing security based on their unique requirements. Let’s check out some of the common reasons why businesses use Intune.

• Secure access to on-premises data: Even in this digital age, a lot of companies still use on-premises servers for a variety of reasons. With the help of Intune and a standard proxy server, you can provide your team with secure access to all their on-premises data.
• Control user access to critical data: By controlling user access to critical data, you can ensure better security management in your IT infrastructure.
• Transition to cloud services easily: For organizations looking to transition from on-premises to cloud, Intune is the best way to do it. With the cloud architecture, you can scale easily and have peace of mind due to the security offered here.
• Have centralized control over your IT: With Intune, you can manage your entire IT environment from a single console. This helps you have better control over the security of your devices and applications.
• Gain more value from Office 365 solutions: When you already have Office 365 solutions in your IT environment, you can benefit a lot from Intune. In addition to protecting your corporate data in multiple apps, you can also provide a secure browsing environment for your team with an Intune Managed Browser app.
• Flexible licensing policy: Microsoft offers a flexible way to acquire Intune for your IT environment. You can get it as a part of the Enterprise Mobile Suite without worrying about per-user or per-device costs.

What can Intune not do?

Despite its multitude of benefits, Microsoft Intune is not without its share of limitations. Some of them are as follows:

• With Intune, you will be missing the following information about your IT environments: Inventory, what they own, how many laptops, desktops, software, etc.
• Intune will not provide any support or troubleshooting for native mail apps or third-party apps such as Gmail.
• The initial configuration is complicated here. During the deployment stage, you have to do quite a bit of discovery by asking your clients a lot of questions about their IT environments.

How can IT Glue help?

IT Glue is an award-winning documentation solution that comes packed with powerful features. With our latest update, you can now automate Intune asset and Azure users’ information into IT Glue.

IT Glue’s integration with Microsoft Intune helps you automate asset management. You can now have a full inventory of all your assets, who has your assets, where your assets are, etc., all in one pane, alongside passwords that you need to log on and how-to guides to give you step-by-step instructions on how to troubleshoot.

To learn more about how you can make the most out of IT Glue and Intune, request a demo.

Get your demo today!

The post Microsoft Intune: Overcome Security and Access Management Challenges in Mobile Assets appeared first on IT Glue.

In this blog, we’ll explore all the critical aspects of Active Directory Management and how you can use it to manage user access.

What is Active Directory?

Active Directory is a directory service offered by Microsoft for those using the Windows Server. Active Directory is the de facto directory system used in over 90% of the enterprises today, where it acts as a user identity repository.

The core function of the Active Directory is to help organizations manage their user access and permissions for network resources. For instance, when a user logs in to a network, the Active Directory validates the username and password provided by the user against the information in its directory before authenticating the entry into the network.

Another key function of this directory is to restrict user access based on the level of permissions they have. A network may have hundreds of user accounts. When these users request access to critical information, approval is provided only if these users have the right permissions to access resources.

The Active Directory stores its data as objects, and these objects are organized as users, groups, applications, devices, etc. User access to devices in a network is determined based on various factors like job titles, passwords, connected network, phone number, etc.

What components can you manage through Active Directory?

The Active Directory is a database with critical information about various objects in an IT environment. The two main objects you can manage with the help of Active Directory include users and devices. Let’s discuss how these components contribute to the security of your IT network.

Managing user accounts in Active Directory

User accounts can be created and stored in the Active Directory Domain Services as objects. You can create, edit or delete user accounts whenever you want, as required. Organizations can create internal users manually or automate user provisioning with the help of a different tool. These accounts are mainly used by human users to log in to a computer. Sometimes, even system services require their own user accounts to gain access to a computer.

When a user attempts to log in to a computer, the system compares the account name and password provided by the user against the object stored in the Active Directory server. If the account is found to be valid, the server creates an access token for that session. This token contains data about the user identity and the memberships associated with the user. This token also has a record of all the processes executed by the user during the session.

Anyone who wants to access the shared resources in an IT environment must have a user account in the Active Directory server. A group may contain multiple users and other groups. These groups can also be used to manage user access in an organization. Sometimes, it is much simpler to assign permissions to groups instead of individual users.

Once you have created user accounts, you can group them based on their job roles and functions to provide them with access privileges applicable to the whole group.

Managing devices in Active Directory

Active Directory has a feature to domain join all the devices in your network and manage them all through a group policy. Once you have joined a computer to an Active Directory domain, a computer account is automatically created to manage the device and to identify it as a part of the network. You can use the group policy to update any changes and use the user list in the Active Directory to manage who can access the device.

You may deliver commands to devices using Active Directory Users and Computers. To see the commands available, right-click the device listing and choose All Tasks. Shift-click and Ctrl-click can be used to select multiple devices. The device gets unenrolled if the commands are muted.

Mobile devices are not supported by default in the Windows Active Directory. You may need to use a third-party solution or switch to Azure Active Directory. Azure is a cloud computing service offered by Microsoft. Microsoft Intune, a mobile devices management solution, is already integrated into Azure AD, and this enables mobiles device management in Active Directory.

Types of Active Directory environments

There are three different types of Active Environments and each of them can be deployed in a different way for different purposes. Let’s find out the differences between them.

On-premise Active Directory

This is the default Active Directory system used in most organizations across the world. It stores various objects including user identities, devices, applications, groups and more. This provides centralized administration of all user accounts, and it is ideal for managing user access to shared sources and providing authorization for internal users whenever required.

Azure Active Directory

To overcome the limitations of the on-premise Active Directory, Microsoft came up with Azure Active Directory, which is a directory service hosted in the cloud. It is mainly used in organizations that use a myriad of devices including mobile devices at work. In addition to being the authorization mechanism for Office 365 and Intune, Azure Active Directory can also be integrated with many third-party user authentication systems.

Hybrid Active Directory

What if you have legacy software as well as modern tools in your IT network? This is where the Hybrid Active Directory comes in. This helps you synchronize your on-premise Active Directory data with Azure Active Directory. Rather than using two different sets of credentials, you can use an onsite domain controller to replicate Azure AD and manage all your internal user permissions.

Benefits of implementing an Active Directory network

Active Directory can enhance security in an organization by providing users only with the right level of access. As a result, it makes life easier for IT administrators. Let’s check out some of the key benefits of implementing an Active Directory network.

• Centralized, policy-based management: Administrators can control all aspects of user management and network access. This prevents unauthorized access to critical data in a network.
• Seamless user experience: Once authenticated, users can seamlessly access any shared resources in the network. This enables better collaboration with multiple stakeholders in a project.
• Single sign-on: Active Directory also features single sign-on for users to access network resources in the server once they have logged into the domain.
• Better representation of the network: With Active Directory, you can plan how your organization’s network can be organized. You can customize your organization’s data and manage everything as per your requirements.
• Management of resources: Network administrators may use Active Directory to manage and store data about user accounts, machine settings and resources.

Active Directory documentation with IT Glue

Managing multiple environments is challenging. While some of your clients or sites might use hybrid, some may use the cloud. You need to centralize all your Active Directory users and devices alongside SOPs for user provisioning and de-provisioning. IT Glue can help you with that.

IT Glue is a robust documentation platform with a strong Active Directory integration. Active Directory (AD) data collected by Network Glue can help create new IT Glue contacts or enrich existing contacts by automatically matching them to AD information. This allows you to easily automate and manage all your AD user documentation directly within IT Glue.

To learn more about how you can leverage Active Directory user data in IT Glue, request a demo.

Get your demo today!

The post A Guide to Active Directory & Active Directory Management appeared first on IT Glue.

In this article, we’ll explore the significance of infrastructure and culture on your MSP growth. We’ll also discuss the different steps you can take to enhance the work culture in your organization.

The Need for Healthy Infrastructure and Work Culture

Work culture is tied directly to your organization’s success. With a positive work culture, you can motivate your employees to do better. When employees are engaged, they deliver higher productivity and come up with innovative ideas that can take your MSP forward. However, a negative work culture results in disengaged employees who only do the bare minimum without putting in any extra effort.

Your infrastructure also plays a major role in driving organizational performance. The systems, programs, policies and processes you create in your organization have to be executed efficiently every day. Unless they all complement each other, it will result in utter chaos. Most importantly, your infrastructure provides the parameters by which your managers lead and your employees work. That’s why you need to create an infrastructure that transforms your business goals into action.

Steps to Enhance Your Infrastructure and Work Culture

Powerful work culture isn’t something that happens by chance. It should be thoughtfully planned and executed by the concerned stakeholders. When you purposefully develop and implement your infrastructure and organizational culture the right way, you can boost employee retention, reduce turnover, boost efficiency, increase growth and more.

The following steps can help you create a powerful work culture:

• Invest in the Right Technology: The technicians in your MSP need the right tools to perform their tasks and achieve the desired results. When they are left with legacy tools to perform complex tasks, it leads to inefficiency and low productivity. It also causes employee frustration and contributes to poor work culture. Always update your tools and make sure they can be easily integrated with one another.
• Promote Team Collaboration: A study by McKinsey estimated that work collaboration can increase productivity by up to 25%. You need to come up with innovative ways to boost collaboration even when your team is scattered across the globe. For instance, a simple documentation tool can facilitate easy information sharing and boost collaboration across your team.
• Create a Vision: Your employees need to take pride in their work. Otherwise, they will start questioning the purpose of their work, and this leads to dissatisfaction. You need to create a vision that clarifies your business objectives. Let your employees know what they are working for, how they have helped other companies and why their work matters. By constantly reminding them about your business goals, you can create an organization where employees are aware of their significance.
• Reward Hardworking Employees: There is nothing more frustrating than hard work going unappreciated. When you fail to reward hard work, your employees’ productivity suffers, and this affects your business in the long run. You need to create a culture where hard work is always rewarded. You could offer bonuses, extra vacation days, pay rises, etc., to let your employees know they matter. Also, try to get creative when rewarding your employees.

Benefits of a Positive Work Culture

A positive work culture can benefit you in more ways than you can imagine. It helps you create a holistic organization that is reward-centered and communicative. Some of the key benefits of positive work culture are as follows.

• Higher Retention: Finding the right talent is very hard in the MSP industry. You don’t want to lose your existing talent due to poor work culture. A positive work culture that provides the right work-life balance and focuses on employee well-being can help you retain your best talent.
• Boost Productivity: When employees feel their work matters, their overall productivity increases automatically. Employees who are valued at work are often ready to go the extra mile when it comes to job performance.
• Business Growth and Profitability: Companies that value their people are always rewarded at the end. When you take care of your employees, they take care of your customers, and this enables you to achieve business growth and profitability. Creating a positive work culture may take some effort, but it always results in a great financial outcome.

Building the Right Infrastructure With IT Glue

As a leading cloud-based documentation platform, IT Glue can help you automate the documentation process and promote team collaboration. IT Glue’s SOC 2-compliant documentation platform features an immutable audit trail, multifactor authentication and next-generation password management engine, all of which are fully integrated and linked with all your documentation.

To know more about how IT Glue can help create a positive work culture, request a demo.

Request a Demo Here

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The post How Your Infrastructure and Work Culture Can Help Scale Effectively appeared first on IT Glue.

IT infrastructure documentation can be broken down into three key elements:

1. Documenting the infrastructure

2. Contextualizing the documentation

3. Using the documentation to achieve business goals

That’s right, folks. It’s not as simple as just manually transcribing lists of assets into a spreadsheet or SharePoint. That’s doing it the hard way, because it takes forever and then adds no additional value to your business. In other words, a net loss in terms of ROI.

IT infrastructure documentation should always be an investment in your business. Here’s how. Start with the first step, documenting the infrastructure.  Automate as much of this as possible, using your PSA, your RMM, network discovery tools like Network Glue, and being creative in terms of leverage APIs to pull in information from other key sources, like Active Directory.

IT infrastructure isn’t flat, so your IT infrastructure documentation shouldn’t be flat either. Contextualized documentation creates links – users connected to endpoints, connected to infrastructure. Then connect your documentation to process tools like checklists, flags, knowledge base articles and notifications. Get your documentation linked to your workflows to streamline your team’s work, cutting out inefficiencies wherever possible.

When you can see how everything is connected, working tickets becomes that much easier.  Projects flow more easily. Onboarding time is reduced dramatically, and your techs are able to perform at a higher level much faster than they used to.  The best IT teams think strategically about how to use documentation to achieve their business goals. Whether your goal is to grow a business rapidly, or if your goal is to do as little work as possible, having automated, structured documentation can get you there.

If you’re ready to take the next step and get a better sense of what to look for in an IT documentation system, why not use the IT documentation buyer’s guide.

Yes, please, I’d like my copy of the Buyer’s Guide

The post IT Infrastructure Documentation 101 appeared first on IT Glue.

So how do you get the onboarding time for new techs down to under a month?

Self Service

If it takes forever to get a tech up to speed, and your senior techs are spending time training them for months, your entire business will suffer. Self service is the key to not only efficient training but to freeing your senior techs from the burden of constantly hand-holding the newer ones. A full library of SOPs makes it easier for new techs to learn how to perform their tasks exactly the way you want them to, every single time. Master the art of writing process documents and you’ll be better able to build a high quality training library.

Document Everything

If a tech has to learn everything in an ad hoc manner from other techs, and those other techs are the sole source of truth for their clients, that is going to add months to new hire training. The more of your clients’ environments you have documented, the less your new tech needs to learn up front. They just need to learn the processes (see above) and then repeat those processes for every ticket or project, rather than learning about each environment from scratch until it finally sinks in. By focusing learning on a handful of repeatable processes rather than memorization of details, you’ll cut the learning time down dramatically.

Define the Onboarding Process

Onboarding techs in less than a month, especially when you’re presently taking much longer, is not easy. To make sure that the process stays on track, you’ll want to project manage it a bit. Have onboard templates and checklists to guide you and the tech through the process. If each person in the company knows their responsibilities and time frames, onboarding becomes a matter of getting into a rhythm, hitting milestones regularly. Formal structure is important to maintain a consistent onboarding experience that hits the one month target routinely.

Set Expectations

For the new tech, the job could be overwhelming. They might feel that they are being tossed into the fire when they are told “here’s some SOPs. Get to it.” So, it’s important to set expectations on both sides. If the tech knows what is expected, and you make it clear that you are there to support and troubleshoot, then they are more likely to identify when something is taking too long or is getting too frustrating, and will ask for help. If you also have visibility, you can step in as well. The absence of clear expectations can mean the tech doesn’t get there as quickly as you’d like.

It’s not reasonable to cut down onboarding times instantly. However, great documentation makes it easier for new techs to learn, and the hack of teaching them how to learn means that they don’t need to absorb nearly as much knowledge up front. This alone will allow you to see gains right away, and as you refine your onboarding you can get it down to below a month.

IT Glue’s award-winning documentation platform allows for efficient storage and retrieval of all the documentation a managed service provider needs to increase efficiency and streamline operations. Watch a demo today!

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The post How to Onboard a New Tech in Under 1 Month appeared first on IT Glue.

As they say, many hands make light work, and now this is true when working within Microsoft documents. Simply navigate to a given file, and click on the office icon which opens the file in a new tab. All edits are automatically saved and synced back into IT Glue, and the latest version of the document is available wherever you are, and no matter who clicks into the file.

IT Glue introduced GlueFiles last year to enable easy and secure uploading and storing of files, including several Office file types, but the process for editing and updating those documents has been somewhat cumbersome. Up until now, you’d have to download the file and make desired revisions before re-uploading the file. Not only did this entail multiple steps that ate up time, it also acted as a barrier to keeping documents up-to-date.

IT Glue is all about saving time and making your life easier, and this new feature is a big step in that direction. An added benefit is that you’ll also be able to leverage the styling and formatting capabilities of Office Online right within IT Glue.

Office Cloud Editor is available on IT Glue Enterprise plans, and also through MyGlue—extending the collaborative features of Office Cloud Editor to your clients. This addition is made possible by our joining the Microsoft Cloud Storage Partner Program, and we’re really proud of our developers for incorporating this functionality into IT Glue. A big round of virtual applause goes out to them!

To learn more about Office Cloud Editor, please consult the IT Glue Knowledge Base.

To learn more about how IT Glue can help streamline risk management at your MSP or internal IT team, we invite you to demo our full documentation platform. Are you in?

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IT Glue is an award-winning documentation platform that allows for efficient storage and retrieval of all the documentation you need to help your MSP run better. By integrating PSA and RMM data, we can help increase your efficiency, and reduce onboarding times by even more. By eliminating wasted time from your business, IT Glue gives you more time to focus on what matters – growing your business.

The post Feature Release: Office Cloud Editor appeared first on IT Glue.

With this integration, not only does it improves visibility by having all Office 365 tenant information easily accessible, it provides detailed Office 365 usage information across all tenants to help optimize reporting and utilization, all from within IT Glue.

How does this work?

In IT Glue, if you’re at the Manager level or above, you’ll be able to run a manual sync of any asset you’re currently viewing, as well as compare data between IT Glue and Office 365.

Our Office 365 integration has also been updated to allow you to sync O365 tenant licences to IT Glue as flexible assets. As well, you have the ability to tag a contact if a license is used.

Given the large number of Office 365 users a typical MSP has, there is little doubt that this integration will provide an immense amount of value for your organization. Up until now, most of you were probably entering this data manually or toggling between IT Glue and Office 365 tenant accounts to find information, so this new integration will generate immediate time savings.

Given that, let’s skip straight to setting up the integration, which you can do by following the steps that have been laid out in our Knowledge Base. Update: We have added licenses to this integration. There is a separate Knowledge Base article that explains how to set licenses up for integration into IT Glue.

Office 365 integration counts as a data source, and is available immediately on all plans.

To learn more about how IT Glue can help streamline your documentation, take a quick look at a demo:

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Founded in 2013, IT Glue is the world leader in MSP documentation. Our integrations with leading PSA and RMM platforms, along with other communications tools, allows information to flow seamlessly throughout your organization, reducing the friction that creates wasted time for your techs. By eliminating this waste, IT Glue helps you improve your bottom line.

The post Announcing the Official Office 365 Integration appeared first on IT Glue.

Re-invention adds value

The reason you want to think about how your company is set up is because when a lot of companies start becoming lean, they immediately jump into looking for obvious waste reduction opportunities. But after all the low-hanging fruit is out of the way, the gains become more incremental in nature, and the law of diminishing returns sets in. That’s when the biggest improvements aren’t from process tweaks or new tech, but from a more comprehensive re-design of your organization to meet a specific objective.

If you started now, what would you do differently?

Once you’ve been in the business a while, you know what works and what doesn’t. If you think about how you’d like to have built your business, that’s actually what you need to start doing now. What will your business need to look like in order to compete going forward? Once you’ve determined that, it’s time to start structuring your firm that way.

Some of the factors you might want to think about:

• Streamlining your stack
• Documenting all of your key processes
• Training all employees to have the same high level of competence
• Being more selective about your clients
• Optimizing your bundling and pricing

Align the factors

It is worth considering that all of these factors can be aligned. If each part of your firm’s infrastructure supports your overall strategy, it will be more efficient just on that basis alone. If you want to be that high volume, low cost, ticket-crushing, password resetting machine, then everything you do should be designed with that in mind. If you want to be the master of a specific vertical, same thing – design your business with that in mind. Any aspect of your company that does not fit with this more focused version of your MSP should be on the chopping block.

Firm infrastructure also means things like the physical space in which you work, the human resources function (who you want to hire and how you’ll onboard them), and finance (making sure that whatever strategy you implement delivers the margins needed to thrive).

Think about what your numbers look like today, and what they might look like if you could go back and re-build everything from scratch. That’s your target, right there. Keeping aiming for that target, even if it looks like a dream. Why bother? Because a new company can easily come in, set themselves up in that perfect way, and place pressure on your business.

Adjustments to a firm’s infrastructure aren’t always easy, but in the long run, you’ll be leaner, more competitive, and more profitable.

Get a Demo

At IT Glue we are committed to the principle that when our partners succeed, we succeed. So we want to do what we can to make your MSP the best possible. That means providing you with a constant flow of product upgrades and value-added services, a Knowledge Base over 150 articles strong, and an entire team committed to your success. Let’s take this journey together.

The post MSP Value Chain: Firm Infrastructure appeared first on IT Glue.