We explore the Who, What, When, Where, Why, & How of IT Documentation in this recorded webinar.
Video Transcript

Allen Edwards
All right, I want to go ahead and get started. Because the few people in Fargo who know me era, extremely prompted almost hurts sometimes. But they are recording the session. Hopefully, they’ll be sharing his tape. And we’ll be able to share it again later in its entirety. This, I should share my screen so you can see our slideshow next. I shared a show of hands just as a practice for using zoom meeting. Who can see my presentation labeled it documentation the industry by the top sheet, you can find that show hands icon.

It might even be under the more option. With that. That’s a few people do see that. Great. And you found that option. So that means the screen is sharing. I’ll keep going if you do have a question, raise your hand and I have legal Peterson you’ll see her as a co host sitting right next to me, in case I get one track voice. She will interrupt me and say hey, we have a question and I’ll find a stopping point. And we will unmute you or locate your chat window and check your questions feel free to interrupt at any time. This is one of the interactive discussions with the employees. This webinar is let’s say envision and hosted by the it documentation users group. I assume most of you get an invite from that group member. We had decided after some debate that a few groups that we would start off with what structure should my documentation take. And this is our first ever uses webinar. It’s also my first time hosting a webinar ever. You can ask Tracy you can ask her leave it here super nervous and practicing all day, you could probably use some work planning tools and such. And I will look forward to your feedback at the end of the conversation as well. So first off, I’d like to do a little bit of history on which group, we’re going to let Tracy introduce herself and tell us why she founded it.

Tracy Hardin
Hi, everybody. Tracy horn here from Lexington, Kentucky. I started the group. The it documentation group start off as the it glue users group. This past year because I went to look for some help on how to use it glues a new user in I didn’t see it in the online help. So I thought well, I’ll go to the user forum looked and there’s there’s no user form, I figured limited one. Then I realized there’s like no form at all. There’s nothing even on Facebook. So I decided to go ahead and create a group for using it glue. Over the summer, I realized that there’s a lot of other documentation groups out there. And I’ve been it glue didn’t meet quite all my needs. And I’ve had to use some other products as well. So I opened up the group for more products got a lot more members. I got to learn know about Alan over the summer, we met through a Facebook group we had in common. And I knew Alan Dave worked a lot with companies on processes and procedures. And so I invited him to co am in the group, because he actually had more experience in this area than I do. So pretty excited to have you guys here and our first formal webinar on this. So I’m eager to learn about documentation today, Alan,

Allen Edwards
me too. I’m not the only one getting in the class, you guys are going to help out on this chart quite quite useful. or interesting. I should say. Tracy first started this group in May you always start from here, right and sugar the group’s over 150 on their own. I think about the time she invited me in August, she had been of her hands. Okay, this is a this is difficult, not quite getting what I wanted out of it. She invited me and we both prospectively did nothing for sure for your time, we figured out what we wanted to do better to add a plan before you start walking right. And then I want to say around that October time frame she went to a conference that kind of believe it was and I went to a conference it nation. And then I’m also assuming we hit some sort of threshold after that because now the latest poll and where you guys found the group bomb. We started seeing them showing up in searches and Julia Jessica suggested groups instead. So membership is strong. We read 447 earlier today, and we’ll be unsure at 500 by the end of January. Thank you for all your support because the more eyes and ears we have in the forum, the more likely you are to get a fast answer and a lot of cool ideas. Please keep in writing.

Tracy Hardin
All knows there’s a lot of people like me who don’t know what to do with documentation how to start to keep it going.

Allen Edwards
And I think the bottom line, this today’s presentation will be that there is a lot to it. No matter what system you use, think about letting go of a lot of us. So I’m Allen Edwards, I joined the it documentation group early on back in May. As I mentioned, Tracy invited me in August and help rather than the group. I’ve been in it professionally or as a billable resource since 1994. And I earned mail and it turns from 2002 to 2011. So if you don’t, Listen, I’ve been there, I had some of the shovels we made to break fix transition to MSP actually sold the business, which was exciting. And then I got to go join two other msps between them. And now where we are, Google is chatting by more than double in the short time. And I found that my company has a good process, beginning of I guess it’s two years ago now 2017 January. we consult with it firms basically on process and leadership, we really Charlotte connectwise, manage. In fact, some examples that you’ll hear me say are from my connectwise manage experience. But a lot of those clients also have high achievers very popular I have on the SharePoint. So I have a couple of different perspectives, I can also share, and really looking forward to hearing from you guys on what you guys are doing or what questions you may have. So the structure of today’s meeting about documentation structure, the five W’s and H, I really wanted to arrange them as we were taught in grammar school who, what when, where, why how are we always say them in that order for some reason. But it didn’t make sense in our presentation. So put them in this order. Let’s talk about what we document First of all, and again, I strongly encourage raising your hand at any point in time or sending a chat to ask a question. I do think interactive will be better. So let me know how that goes. Or if you have questions. First of all, what document I came up with these categories, trying to look through what my clients are doing. One, we have to document what we have for our clients anywhere from assets, such as workstations, servers, firewalls, equipment, network diagrams, maybe even notes about the special Okay, this key is important notifications, or whatever the case may be. We also have our internal processes such as how to work in ticket, how do we invoice for managed services, those processes should exist in the stored somewhere. We have internal processes that are client facing maybe you have instructions about how to submit a ticket, or how to pay an invoice, how to use connectors user interface tools. We have, I think a lot of us as technicians, we tend to focus on quiet documentation technical processes where all right if I’m going to set up a 2016 server, the secondary the server, how did I do that, click by click, that could be a technical process. We also occasionally have technical processes that are client facing in general, for example, how to set up outlook with Office 365. And you can also have something more specific to the client Well, great. However, we have enough client or influence at this point client that we want to tell them exactly how to connect to the sonicwall. VPN, click by click the link software. That’s also from the document share with them. And then after going through this slide presentation like five times. I’m like wait a minute, what’s the one thing that I’ve been documenting all day long time entries? journal, what could I do for this client? What we were felician. So those are the what nobody has a 32nd break to figure out. anybody has questions about what we document that I miss something. clarification on what category something belongs on to. Okay, I’m going to keep it if you do come up with a question. Even if it’s a couple of slides together, I’ll try to post it on the back and grab those. So after that, what I try to organize these in a fashion that we have to know what we’re documenting before we can know who’s documenting sometimes.

So I have these three ideas on who documents. There are certainly people who say, hey, if this guy’s job to document, hopefully, they’re not the only one writing documentation, or the only one thinking of ideas but they like to have a gatekeeper so that one person is responsible within the documentation together and publishing. Obviously that can vary as you get larger You don’t have that skill set necessarily one person for all the what’s your document, what becomes more common as you integrate documentation into your business and you have areas of responsibility, for example, your technicians to participate in writing the technical recipes, what the clicks in order to make things happen, are all under standards. Each department they have somebody responsible for handling the documentation, but departments commonly wanted to do CLC for writing the sales process finance or finance, the service manager is typically doing the internal service processes on the text, the technical SNPs. Something else to keep in mind. And I’ve seen this last that my company’s been waiting for it to happen. There’s somebody posting for approvals, change management, like, Hey, can we do this? What is that process for the whole company? And that can be delegated in any number of ways. Of course, once you have everybody responsible for some area of your documentation to cover all the work, now you’re working in a culture of documentation. I’ve definitely seen some MSP where the first question anybody asked is the document and if not, crap i document. And then think about it, they don’t think about getting in trouble. They just know that documentation is what we do. And they appreciate the fact that when we are working on something for the first time, you might have some help the house notes say that before. Again, I’ll give you guys 15 seconds to raise your hand if you’re about to move on to the next one. The next one being really document. Somebody’s gonna get clever and realize that my breaks are less about questions and more about drinking water. All right, so how do we structure the when your documentation, there are always two things that are brought up to me. And when I’m talking to folks about documentation, it’s catching up and keeping an eye and I’m just going to cut to the bottom line without a lot of detail and see if this makes sense to you. There is no such thing as catching up. Documentation will always be needed is always something we missed. But if you will work on keeping up, or you will eventually catch up. Let’s do an example. A common one is, hey, we’ve worked hard, we’ve had team meetings, we’ve decided exactly what we want to document about firewalls. So whether you’re an IT group and flexible asset using a config in Connect wise manage, or you have a special folder, or maybe a blank Word document or Excel spreadsheet, if you’re using SMB or file structures, you feel exactly what information you have to have, and what information you may like to have about a firewall, nigga, man, we have 100 firewalls out there, it’s going to take, you know, 18 man hours to get all this information. We’ll never get there. And my answer is you can’t have everything. But you can’t have one thing. And if you if you focus on one thing along the left, you can have everything. So next time in touch your firewall documented, yes, it’s going to cost you an extra 30 minutes to an hour depending on how much data you need on your firewall. During that one ticket. However, the next time you touch their firewall, that technician is gonna be that much more efficient at figuring out, oh, here’s all the information that I need, I can afford to every time you touch your firewall, you are spreading out the cost of documentation, and you will catch up. As a matter of fact, I might even retire a few firewalls before you touch it means getting the documentation anyways, in this one case. So keeping up is catching up with anybody like to challenge my point. And maybe the something I hadn’t thought about wrong. Is there something you just have to catch up on? While you’re possibly raising your hands? quick story. I did have a client and let you know, well. We absolutely need ISP information because our techs are still getting called at night, when we least expected a three year old son to have to figure out how do we contact the ISP to help get the client back up. The good news is fees are not so technical, as much as paperwork and billing and can call and ask questions. They assigned the dispatcher and office person today knock moves out in one fell swoop potential. They have the resources available. And they use it. Yes, they still have 80 other flexible asset type sites to catch up to that identify one important one. And that focus helped me move along quite quickly.

All right. Let’s talk in a Word document. And I think these last two questions are where you guys are going to have a little more interest. This was the result of a survey As of early this morning that I posted on our event page asking you guys What are you using to the to document, it was multiple choice. So several of you, including myself, had multiple answers. Or you could digest this data for a moment. I’m not surprised that I should move on top. I’m not saying it’s the best software, or even the most popular. But having seen the history of the group, I do know that we still showed a lot of ijebu searches. And a lot of our regional members are from there. So it certainly makes sense. I also wasn’t surprised to see SMB and file folders at the top of the list. It’s not a bad system, it can work out quite well, yesterday’s features that other things bring to the table. But it’s a it’s accessible to everybody. It’s shared, there are security controls. These days, it’s searchable. It’s not a bad solution. I think the most interesting to me, even though I have never used it to use, I keep reading the name I heard it mentioned, even in the last 24 hours on our forum, I had no one in this event, listed it versus the reason. This is interesting, though. I am super curious about the 16th notes and paper process. Anybody wants to share please raise your hand. Let’s talk a little more about the pros and cons of the various systems you’re using. For this, I try to categorize them in three ways. Versus the general what I mean by General is it’s not designed to document displays our IT system, and it isn’t designed to be customizable document systems. That’s your typical take, I know what’s going on. And you will actually find me knocking that type of behavior. Having in your head is absolutely the most efficient and effective way if you have a good life isn’t the case, and the only one who needs access to information. And those two things are you that is probably the best system for now. As soon as you don’t have the mind, gender, all the stuff that you have too many clients, writing it down sticky notes, paper, those types of things can be a great second place. And if it’s just you, a filing system of last news on top make sense, which is what my desk looks like. And then as you keep growing, moving, sorry, we have a network, I can write these things down in a Word document or Excel document or any other type of document or insert them into folders. And people can find their information that way. This can also be quite effective. But as the amount of documentation grows, you may find managing security is hard. finding things are hard, not knowing what you don’t know can also be difficult. I really have a list of specialty applications. I just grabbed the ones that I saw from the poll. And these are designed specifically for it documentation benefits, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, they’ve already worked with thousands of other msps, maybe hundreds in some cases, and gotten the system to work. And usually the stuff that you can customize yourself, they seem to be in your industry, the cons would typically be a little more expensive. And, and maybe you can’t customize that as much as you like who designed that one thing in mind. And then we have the customized solution such as Confluence, we had a node for internal wiki. I’ve seen one that SharePoint views myself. The pros, of course, are well under maybe they might be tools you already have such as OneNote SharePoint. Obviously, it’s highly customizable. You can make those things do whatever you want them to do. Of course, that’s also the disadvantage. You have to make those things, do whatever you want it to do. So it’s going to cost you possibly IT resources, server resources, research time, it may take longer to develop, if you want to use it the site portal or it will pass portal. You buy it in the two days you’re on board, and you can make it work within two hours. Again, I’m not saying any of these are better or worse than the other. I just said they all have their pros and cons. We’re going to move on to y next, which is going to require some user participation. So before I do, do we have questions

like mandatory what I’d like to begin All right, moving on to Y variable reasons I thought of these four, I’m actually going to tackle them and no particular order. And I do hope you have some questions at this point.

Before we hit that one last question on how my number one is easy one, we’ve probably covered a belief systems about wiring such as billing. We are documenting our time throughout the day, typically as technicians, so that we can see an accurate bill to our client, on a big gun, this is valued at big finale, legendary, fixed, it doesn’t always had the most values and the documentation and what we did make a huge impact. Let’s go on to shorting the learning curve. And my favorite is when you get into too technical, so yes, there are some things you never want your tier one Help Desk doing. However, somebody some things it might not know how to do that if you just show them what order they click on, and they follow that system. And they can do those things for you. Maybe it’s password resets easy enough to teach them, yes. But what if you didn’t show them or that I’ve seen people take it as advanced as once they have an approval system in place, even opening a port in the firewall, if approved. On those things can even be like firewall level, those things can be documented how to execute those in the firewall system. And in passing down more high level Technical Services, down to the low level to make your organization more efficient. Even onboarding employees that aren’t technical, if you’re hiring a new dispatcher, or new salesperson, the more things that are at their fingertips that they can look up on their own, the better. The matter of fact, when we have a successful employee onboarding, they mostly work for it firm. And they see this documentation available to them. They’re like, Oh, I was I couldn’t remember how we needed to add a company and connectwise manage. But I found the article how to do it. And I created the company. And I don’t mean the replacement for university or training. I mean, how we set up companies, the types that we use, and all the customizations that we do to make our workforce that actually begins the culture of documentation when they realize how valuable that was to them. So that when they go out and learn something new, maybe it’s how to set up automatic invoicing and QuickBooks. They want to document that so that they don’t have to in the future, they can teach somebody else to do it, or business overnight on a napkin or something so they can hire more quickly shorten that cost of acquisition. And I mentioned the owner. There’s that term, I’ve already forgotten which look it comes from but it is used heavily in genomic Ben’s book, us, I’m pretty sure it came from somebody else. Feel free to chat, that tendency, remember it from it, which is delegate and elevate anything that is repeatable, but doesn’t require a lot of decision making, you should be able to make that into a process into your documentation in hand that there’s somebody else to do somebody at a lower pay grade. Work has to get done. So why not maximize where you are best at? Any questions? Before we go to the last question about how to document structure and I see Peter physically raising his hand, I love this approach. Can we unmute Peter, once I get this nice person webinar? There you go. Can you hear me? I sure can. Okay.

Unknown Speaker
One of the things that I’ve learned over the years I’ve been in this business for 30 plus years is that we’ve we’ve had a few instances where competing msps are pretty cutthroat sometimes and some of our markets and

Allen Edwards
you know,

Unknown Speaker
unbeknownst to us, let’s say one of one of their sales people tends to, you know, connect with some manager and one of our company on our, you know, companies and, you know, next thing, you know, there’s a meeting and, you know, they’ve, they’ve decided that somehow we’ve we’ve failed on some front. And one of the biggest things is if you can document everything you do, that’s your ammunition, to go back to say, Now these guys are full of it. It’s basically maintaining your position as a competent partner for your clients. And we, you know, we’ve been questioned on things like, you know,

Allen Edwards
I don’t know,

Unknown Speaker
why doesn’t this machine have antivirus? Right? And, you know, it was something that happened just recently and I checked through our documentation, that machine wasn’t listed, some employee went out and bought it at Best Buy, right? And so that type of thing happens. And we can look through the documentation say, Well, the problem wasn’t on our end, it was unbeknownst to us. Or if there is a problem, it can identify issues, but it kind of solidifies your position as a valuable partner. And I think that’s, that’s one of the keys to maintain that relationship with your clients. That’s all I wanted to add. Thank

Allen Edwards
you. Oh, an excellent point. Just to add on to that, while maybe the original purpose reduction, many I might have listened to under billing, um, yeah, it creates that, that paper trail that accountability. And for those of you who do or want to do quarterly business reviews, or any other period, the distribution, I’ve had a lot of people say, oh, all the supporting and all this data we’re collecting, documenting New Orleans that and I’m like, that’s fine. I don’t want them to read it. But I do want to dazzle them by the power. I want to show them that we are doing all this stuff, all this effort to this value, all this data we have collected. And it’s complicated. So it continues to trust us to do my job. And it will continue to show you the way that we do. Excellent point here. Any other questions? All? Right, we’re going to go on to our second the last slide. So I hope there’s more questions coming on the how you structure the data, I actually have the least to write down about this. And that was more than a blank slide coming. When I felt wouldn’t negotiate or start the biggest arguments conversation, I’m kind of hoping for some black guys, maybe some barroom fights on how to organize this. And I didn’t tell Trisha, and I’m gonna pick on her. But let me go over the slide real quick. And I’m gonna call on Tracy so you can prepare to tell us your organization system. Our first of all, tell you that Tracy actually sorted by accounting numbers, which is, for those of you that is new at the finance side. Sometimes accounting codes have all sorts of parents and children and labor by words, usually an assistant or alphabetical, and you’re like, how do I find anything? So people develop accounting codes, where maybe the hundreds place the type of account on the 10th place and the sub account in the ones place with the detail of that this is an example of how Kevin codes your accounting. And it can be that’s no different than putting in a folder structure and your SMB or file folder shares. Some things that you have to consider with whatever you decide to store or however you decide to store those things. Is it what are your requirements for searchability? Meaning and looking for something? Where is it? Or discovery meaning I don’t quite know what I’m looking for that I need to be able to be pointed in the right direction. And then I have a system I will share after Tracy shares about accounting numbers are related to connect wise managers type subtype and item, which I usually IP and SharePoint so far, I tend to tell us about accounting numbers, if anybody else wants to raise your hand, I will also call you configure systems though.

Tracy Hardin
Well, yeah, I took the inspiration from accounting. Although my own QuickBooks is not organized like that. But what I did is basically as an example, the 4000 series articles are all human resource articles. So 4001 may be the employee handbook. 4002. Is the vehicle use policy? 4003 is maybe policy, we have a policy on the laptops, how do you on our company laptops, the reason I picked the numbers is that I wanted to group numbers so that related articles will sit close to each other. And also, if I refer to another article within an article referred to it’s number, or I can tell one of the guys Hey, look up article 4002, you’ll find the answer there. And they can just go into glue and type 4002 and boom, you’re there. It’s real precise with I go into to glue and look up the word handbook or guide I might get, you know, half a dozen different responses. But if you have a number, boom, you’re right there. But I like how the numbers put the related articles together, the 6000 series, maybe all the articles on how to do stuff in autotask because I’m not a test person. And 60 to 161 99 is all about building contracts in autotask. And again, it just groups them naturally together on how to do contracts, contracts. renewals, and I have tons of articles on how to do those things in autotask. So that’s how that’s why I use the numbers and I find them helpful. And then I reference numbers within other articles. And then in glue, you can relate articles to each other. So I do that as well. So that’s kind of, that’s reason I did it.

Allen Edwards
So you’re using it good. And you’re using article numbers for more direct access. Yes, per sign for group. And for grouping them alphabetically by how they relate alphabetically by number on how they’re related.

Tracy Hardin
They’re actually titled by number, the number comes first. So it will save 6001 NCT employee handbook, but it starts with the number. So when you go and glue and you look at your files, naturally related articles are grouped together, just naturally. And I’ll put gaps between them. So I’ll get them so that you know, I signed 100 articles to just autotask contracts alone. I’m not using them all, but I will kind of leave that open and them in the future too.

Allen Edwards
But I’m just curious. It Google search features pretty powerful and fast.

Tracy Hardin
Forward lot of things unrelated. In I like the real precise, it’s 6001 is the article, you know, so I’m gonna

Allen Edwards
I was gonna choose you. And I suddenly remembered a document and my business was advised that I’m actually gonna put it on the shared screen injury fragment side. I’ve been slowly trying to template a ties, any process that I think is reusable, and I hope to share your screen, see what it is. And I suddenly I suddenly noticed that the basically I have the similar concept, I have letters and numbers off to the left. Yeah, I can always go to the Jaguar. I can’t remember if I named it work type or connect, like manage work types or types. Or what you know, I know, it’s, it’s what, and I used to, I used the letters to give you some categories to help me remember what the numbers are second generation, I taught us the same things over and over again. I very nice that somebody else have a title to talk about.

I will add my two cents. For a system like that recommending a lot. Most of my clients are using it glue. I do love it. And has its works. As any system guys, I saw a demo of it based on my personal opinion is quite ready to replace my clients, you might have already have it, but those Getting Started might be a great product. I personally use file structures. I’m just a one man show right now. But I like to use and I believe you can use your other systems as well that I’m familiar with Connect wise manage process, when you put a ticket in and manage it can have a type a subtype an item. And those things are like a nested tree. So pipe has multiple subtypes, subtypes, you know, multiple items. And what I do is when I type some type of atom item that matches So, to me, this is any SAP that has a URL, so that can be SMB it goes to SharePoint, maybe one note, I haven’t tried site promo yet how that works for them as a URL, you can do this, I then have an auto ticket template, fired, meaning type, some type of item matches, apply this ticket template. And some of the things that I apply in there is name of the SAP and the URL to get there. So as soon as it’s coded a technician or save a URL is added to the internal notes of the ticket. That technician can then click that URL and see vsmp. I’m going to keep talking about that process because that’s great. But Alan How would you get those frps in there is a lot of work to have on the public also piece. So this like I mentioned before, process, a culture of documentation or culture cross with either call it actually have a type some type of item. And so to be lowercase, you have alphabetizing things with numbers right? Put to the bottom of the list. When they select that it goes to a report that a manager sees. And anytime there’s a request for a new type some type of item and they have an automatic note pop up that says hey, what type some type of item should this be? And what’s the it glue or SharePoint article you created? Like here’s a CW administrator everything they need to create that link. So the technician actually created the SMP whoever ministers CW just hasn’t called those two things together, and then everybody is linked to the process. So that really helps them to the Every part in that case, especially for those starting with type subpattern, for the first time, if it exists, it has an SI P, and if it doesn’t exist, that there won’t be in the list. So they know Ah, I’m not going to find that. Let me create one. So that’s one way of figuring out what you know. And what you don’t know, at least on the technical s up front. Who would like to ask some questions? And this is our second last slide. We asked some time remaining. Okay, all right. Do you see it on? You’re

Tracy Hardin
on? You’re on what you just said. So you got these URLs in there, but those URLs are going to change? Isn’t that a problem?

Allen Edwards
It can be one, design a system like the first time, which never happens, right. But then it Google document numbers or their URL do not change unless you change organizations they belong to. So there’s kind of a sticky link for the document number, but I did find that the full document number is a organization number. And I’ve seen that change. Again, and I see a lot of my clients would put general documentation either under their own company, or catch all company. And then client specific documentation goes on and the client themselves. I’m sure you follow me on profits and SharePoint Yes, that’s a nightmare. Okay. Yes, Peter. Real quick. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker
I have a question for those who use smps. And, and whatnot. sources that say you can’t really readily share. Let’s say for example, you’ve got an outside contractor. And they require, you know, an account on the web server, they’re going to do some some development or whatever. What, how do these people share passwords with outside, say, subcontractors, if they’re keeping things in a spreadsheet, for instance, or in an internal wiki mean, you’re not going to necessarily give them go through all the hassle of giving them a VPN account to log into your network and, you know, give them access to a full spreadsheet. So you’re gonna literally probably just send it, I would assume in an email, I know I’ve got processes for it, but I’m wondering what others do.

Allen Edwards
And I’ll look for a show of hands from anybody in group you’d like to weigh in on their thoughts, ideas of what you’re doing, I’ll buy 30 seconds and tell you my thoughts, which is a big one. A lot of people that I’ve seen are first of all, separating the documentation and password systems. A lot of that’s not necessarily the content to keep them separate. It’s just that whoever has been good at one hasn’t been good at the other. My favorite horse race to watch right now has been passed portal and it Do you know, one one the documentation system, the other the password system, and they’re both facing into the others market right now. And and they want is not over to the other one we had a lot of people still use both. So it’s definitely a concern.

No show of hands, which are two or three texts that are our security experts. If you haven’t read a lot,

Tracy Hardin
I would just if I had some I was subcontracting, I would just tell them of course, I’m not much for emailing or putting anything digital with a password and much more rather talk to them on the phone or face to face and given the credentials they need for said job. But that’s me, I rarely outsource that type of stuff anymore. Now that I have staff, I used to not have staff, it was just me now I would work at my work with the head, his own company, he was independent as well. And we would, you know, often work side by side. So that wasn’t as much of an issue. But you know, with it glue, you can just set up a read only user or light user and share passwords that way. So it kinda makes it even easier.

Allen Edwards
I can see it now, Peter. Yeah, the password is capital B at sign exclamation mark to yada yada yada for 1800 characters. Yeah.

Tracy Hardin
We didn’t make them quite so complicated. It was not as big a deal back then. And I say back then I’m talking seven or eight years ago before I had staff and you know, we had complicated but they were That complicated now they’re more complicated. There’s definitely a drive for more of that. And two factor authentication, though, is still my favorite, I still love turn that on and using it whenever I can. And that presents a new challenge, because basically, if you’re going to have somebody else logging into your systems, you have to set up their own account so they can do to fa.

Unknown Speaker
So

Unknown Speaker
nothing to share there.

Allen Edwards
All right, I don’t know if it gave you a whole lot of info, Peter, but I’m gonna share with us now. Well,

Unknown Speaker
I mean, it’s always a challenge. You know, like Tracy was saying, you do your best. And you’re right back. In fact, in the day, if a password was simple, you could just tell them over the phone, but I mean, I’ve got 3040 character pad complex passwords, some of my systems, and most of my systems, actually, and, you know, using, for instance, the tilde character, right? And, you know, you get people going, sorry, what, what’s that, you know, shift. You know, it’s just, it takes forever sometimes to get something across. And I use, and I can’t remember offhand what there’s a couple of different services out there that allow you to send private encrypted messages. So sometimes I’ve used those services where all I’ll send them some information like with one subcontract, I’m thinking of, that’s how we did it with him. And so I sent the passwords, the credentials, set up a temporary account, sent it all to him, he clicked on the link, he confirmed his identity, and all of a sudden, everything was there. And it was, you know, it worked fairly well. But he didn’t have access to any of my credential systems, obviously. And it’s kept him at arm’s length from that. I haven’t used it glue or any of its competitors. I keep everything internal. So I was just curious what others do.

Allen Edwards
Also, I would strongly encourage you to see if we have any answers for your post that onto the forum, if you haven’t already, and to others are doing as well. Maybe as we approached by our members or somebody with the answers,

any other questions, or show and tell or share? Moving into our last slide trigger a little more interactive this.

Tracy Hardin
I had a question directed at me. And I’ll just repeat what he said in case anybody else who’s confused. I had somebody ask if I was using the data RMM. And in which field in installed parts do you use for placing numbers? I do use that RMM. But I don’t use the numbering system in the arm in the numbering systems for my actual slps that I have in glue, the standard operating procedures, I think but how I use autotask how they were defined our handbooks. We got a bunch of HR the onboarding system setting up how to set up different contracts, we numbered those articles, not actually items in my RMM. So yeah, it’s it’s for documents, not for devices. So I just want to clarify.

Allen Edwards
Thank you, Tracy. And whoever asked that Tracy available 24 seven on her cell phone. All right, so what’s next, this is kind of our our first foray, we were asked to chase you back a few times, and they want to do something like part of the group that didn’t webinar, I stopped providing more active content, and Tracy’s a go getter. And honestly, I needed something, I will create the platform on which to get the information that I lead to, which is an excellent job of doing. So what I’m going to do later today, maybe tomorrow, is I’m going to try and get as surveyed all you guys. So I assume that I will actually post that on the it events page from the forum, I’ll post some survey. Please fill it out and I can take it I want to know how I did what I what I can do better. And then what we as a forum also can do better to provide information to you guys and to encourage participation, which is always hard. All of us can be in it background and we’d like to absorb information that might give you the one point in time. I did attempt to record this seminar and see record button still active on it. So I assume that works. And I will check that out later today as well and attempt to post that if you want to just share it or preview a statement later. The bottom line question that I will ask in the survey and I will probably ask them the form itself as well as New Zealand. To do something like this, again, I felt like this is a very broad topic. I think the purpose was to appeal to as many people as possible, we could get some initial participation. However, the meat is in the details, right? So perhaps we need to focus on Manage or autotask, or ITV or custom systems or SMB. And we can certainly do those things. I think between all of us, we have the brainpower to make it happen. It doesn’t always have to be me presenting either. I’ve already had had one of you guys reach out to Hey, I would love to help sharing participate on the next one. So we’re up for that as well. I do look for the survey links and recordings. My contact information is at the bottom of the slide. As he heard from your clarification on feel free to call or email or ask a question. We’re there to respond. I’m going to gloat a little bit and let you know that my surroundings aren’t beautiful, but I am calling you from Cozumel, Mexico, where I’m staying, it’s once your time, so you guys can enjoy whatever crime it’s minus one. And I’m super happy that the internet held out the entire time. That is certainly a issue while in Mexico. I’m reading one question real quick from somebody. Ah, she’s discussing alerts from datto RMM. So the alerts that I am not a huge attached users to bear with me. And let me know if I can unmute you to the microphone. Got it. Read that part now. I’ll read it to Tracy for you. Someone’s asking they have alerts going from data RMM which are assigned to tickets in PSA. I think it’s going in as checklist items. Family is not working with it group doc. Do you know that we can watch Tracy tickets I

think as

Unknown Speaker
dogs.

Allen Edwards
Or I’m not sure what your

Tracy Hardin
goal is? I mean, we have our RMM creates alerts on our pa makes tickets to the PSA but I’m not sure we don’t tie it back to glue that way. I’m not sure I understand the question. I

Allen Edwards
think. Jonas if you will. Message Tracy, your email address. Maybe you guys can exchange contact info and start the conversation that way?

Tracy Hardin
Yeah, I need to know more. And I’m not a data Armand guru, we just switched back in November, so we’re kind of learning it a bit. So I’ll try to answer the question. I can

Allen Edwards
if you want to post in the forum as well and feel free to tag Tracy volunteer for anything. I will take a look and see what we can find out collectively.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.

Allen Edwards
Any other questions? Well, I’m gonna sign off from beautiful Cozumel, Mexico. I wish you guys the best of luck finishing up your weekend and not all over chasing I have been approving and disapproving members from all over the world lately. So I there is a various time zones going on. I appreciate everybody who made it. Look for those surveys and recordings and feel free to comment in the event itself on Facebook or in the forum. I look forward to working with you guys on going on did everybody thanks, everybody.

 

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