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.

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?

Yes, sign me up for a demo!

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.