How to Simplify Software Documentation

Documenting hardware is pretty straightforward, at least if you’re using IT Glue, integrated with your RMM. Add a little Network Glue, some other plug and play integrations, and voilá, you’ve got your basic hardware documented.  But what about software documentation?

Software Documentation in IT Glue

In IT Glue, software applications are almost always documented as flexible assets. By using flexible assets, you’re able to document software using the fields that you need or want the most. The software itself can be documented as a Vendor, with fields for such items as type (SaaS, on prem, etc), Status (active/inactive), importance, business impact, compliance certifications, risk level and further fields for things like account manager contact info or support information.

You could have fields for the department that uses the software, or the software champion – the latter linked to that specific contact.

A copy of the vendor contract can be held within this flexible asset, or it can be in a separate Contracts folder and linked back to the Vendor asset.

User Licences

There’s probably a couple of approaches to user license documentation. For applications that are used by everybody, perhaps the easiest thing is to set up SSO. If you use Network Glue, it has automated documentation of Active Directory users as Contacts in IT Glue, and those contacts will double as licenses for software that’s been deployed company-wide.

For software that is only used by a few different users, it may be easier to set up a field in IT Glue to note which users are covered under the license. Those users can also be linked to the flexible asset – either the License asset or the Software Application asset.

Passwords

IT Glue’s Passwords feature is also a powerful way to make sure that only the right users have access to each piece of software. Let’s say you have only a single license for a piece of software, but multiple users will need to access that. Set password permissions for that software accordingly, so only the people who need access can have it.

If you need your client to have access to a piece of software that you also require access to, MyGlue will ensure that all the right people have access to the application in your client’s organization, as well as among your team. That’s collaboration-as-a-service in action.

Automating Software Documentation

Obviously, the best approach to software documentation is to automate it. Typically, that will require a script build with our API that brings that information into IT Glue (and ideally keeps it up to date). Check out our Git repository for a handy Powershell wrapper and contributions from our user community.

The ability to create flexible assets and scripts that meet your unique needs is one of the most powerful attributes of IT Glue, along with the ability to relate different assets together – so knowing which users are using which pieces of software, for example. To learn more about how IT Glue simplifies software documentation, or any other type of IT documentation for that matter, our demo video reveals all.

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