Autotask 2021 1 Updates

um so just a very quick background about me um and what this is going to be about i'm going to talk about the autotask 2021.1 uh updates um just to put a caveat out there this is brand brand brand new i've literally only seen this in the last couple of days so there may be some things i don't know um and obviously i don't work forward to task or i don't work um you know for data or for the company anymore so there may be some things i don't know the answers to this is just my take on this um just having a very very fresh look on what's coming um and how things are gonna work so um just a quick i know some of you guys already know who i am um certainly as you most of you are all in the tech tribe already but just a quick rundown about who i am um i ran an msp business i sold that business in 2012. um i then went to work at autotask in the uk and i headed up uh the technical team so the pre-sales and the post-sales implementation team and then i started as an independent consultant back into uh in 2017 uh and i recently wrote a book uh which is a book called psa profitability and it's available on um on amazon it would be good if i could spell the word available um so what i'm going to go through today is to kind of talk a little bit about some of the new stuff that's coming out in in this new release and there's there's one or two oops there's one or two things that are um that are coming out in this new release and i just want to um just want to go through what those are so there's a new crm screen um you know company categories kind of very similar to what you have in um in ticket categories that kind of thing then we also got configuration item versioning and rollback um some other updates i wanted to point out to you and then you know some of the widgets all the task has this this thing called help me choose or or show me or something to that effect so i'll kind of show you where they're going with that and then just some of the um some of the other updates and then and then we'll take some q a i am hosting this myself today so if there are any questions in the uh that you guys have just put them in the q a panel and i'll do my best to answer them i may not be able to come straight back immediately but i will get to them um so just a little bit about me if you want to contact me um you can either contact me through psaprofitability.com or through our consulting website which is sundelaconsulting.com so that's enough for the powerpoint let's kind of get on and start to look at some of the stuff that is coming out so this is a a brand new release as i said um and it's literally gonna be um as far as i'm aware it is probably gonna be coming out i think next week uh in in the us although i have heard that it's it's been halted for a week or two so it might it might be later on this month but it is an imminent release um so the first thing i wanted to go through was to kind of talk about the new company screen so when you click on the plus button and go into the account one of the things you'll notice in here is the uh way in which you create new accounts has completely changed um and obviously for any of you have been using audit tasks for any length of time we'll see that this is exactly the same as the uh you know the ticket screen the configuration item screen where all the task is going down the reach of having account categories um and then you can completely customize any of this information in here so you know for example you could say if this was a lead or a prospect you know and based on the type of category it is will determine what information gets filled in here one of the other things you will see is that you now have the ability to create a contact like this so rather than in the old way of doing it or the current way of doing it i should say um you know there was there was the uh information there to fill in the um contact um and now this is something you actually have to check and say it's and you can see it says it's optional so you don't have to create a contact and the same thing with you know creating a note or a to-do you can just check these little boxes and away they go so let's have a look and see what actually happens when we actually have created the account and what information we see on the screen so here is some information about this company i've created so you can see that it's a using the standard category so i've just left everything here the same the address is now nicely formatted down the left-hand side so very similar to what you would have on on the ticket and the same thing in um you know same thing as you can do with ticket categories is you can completely move and change these around so if you wanted you know this tax region or tax information to be near the top you can simply move that um to wherever you want it to be the other thing they've now started to do is very similar to what you got with tickets here as well so um you know any any tickets for this customer are listed here now um the same thing with configuration items so again instead of having that little drop down here next to the dashboard where you find all of this information it's all along the top here in in tabs and then all the other stuff that you're doing as well so invoices and um you know all the other good stuff that used to be here or that is kind of currently here in a little um drop down arrow it's all been moved to over here now okay um and then we also have the ability to um you know to see some information about the account history so any changes that have been made on this account um again very similar to what you have with tickets we now are able to see all of that information in here okay so it's kind of really cool i quite like it um i think it looks pretty cool and looks pretty funky okay so the other thing i wanted to wanted to show in in here is something else that's coming up in the system is what they call configuration item versioning and rollback so let's say for example we we have a configuration item so i'm just going to close some of these down um so from this company we'll access our configuration item so here you can see we've got a dell workstation now what i can do at this point if i click onto this dell workstation any changes that get made now get logged um and under the tools option here i have the ability to do a configuration item history and i can also do the version history as well so if i look at item history this is showing me you know the um the configuration item was created at this point um and also then the serial number was changed and it was changed from blank to something um so what i have the ability to do if i click on versions now i can say well actually um you know i want to use this version now to be my new configuration item i want to roll back to to any change or actually i want to roll back to here where i created it because i don't want this configuration item serial number anymore so i can simply click on the date here and then what this will give me the ability to do is i can click up here and say you know roll back to this version so this is now allowing me to say i'm just going to go ahead and roll back so if i do that then what this will do is it will go ahead and it'll roll back to that version and then i can just say finish rollback and now that configuration item without the serial number is is now my you can see it's now removed the serial number that was changed okay so this is one of the the really cool things so if somebody goes in and makes any kind of change anywhere um to a configuration item then you have the ability now to to do that roll back and to you know to make these changes it also does the same thing in the documentation as well um this doesn't actually have the documentation set up on this test environment so i'm not going to be able to show you this from from a documentation perspective but um it's the same thing if you have a document you're going to be able to go back and and roll back that document okay so a couple of couple of other things that i wanted to go through and show you um when it comes to doing widgets uh so once you've got a you know an empty space on a dashboard to create a widget you'll see there's actually a brand new feature down here now called show me um so this is basically saying instead of you having to start with a new widget or choose a widget from the widget library you can simply go show me and you can use a bunch of these pre-defined ones that all the tasks have determined needs to be here so for example you know show me my total revenue build last month or show me my contracts expiring soon so very quickly in here you can say you know show me my contract's expiring soon click on next click on finish and you're good to go you now have you know all of the contracts that are expiring soon so whilst these have already been on the system somewhere else uh you know all the task is giving you the ability to kind of use this so that you can start to um you know get the stuff that most people will want to use okay so i think that's that's pretty cool and quite funky um so you have the ability to kind of very quickly go and and create those as well um now actually going back to the configuration item sorry one thing i should have shown while i was on the configuration item screen there's actually two things that have changed a little bit so with this versioning there's now an insights tab here that actually shows you what those versions are so i don't have to necessarily go to the tools and go to version history what i can do is simply just look at these versions here um and then just do exactly the same thing so click on the version and then i can roll back so you have the ability to to add this version inside and this is added in the same way you add anything else or any other kind of thing on the system so any other kind of insight and that is you go to the features and settings and then we go to configuration items um configuration item categories and let's just pick the standard category at this point and then one of the things is now if you click on insights um you can see you know here's here's the version insight which um which i can just add and then of course um you may not know this but with these insights you can just move them wherever you want them to be and then it just shows the version information um at the place that you've moved it to okay the other really cool thing about configuration items that i noticed as i was playing with this is when you actually create a configuration item now um in the past you've had to have a product already set up for the configuration item so you would always have to choose a product in here um so what autotask now does is they have the ability for you to go in and actually create the product at the same time as the configuration item so here you know you can just go in and add whatever product you want so um you know let's call this hp server you would simply come in here add whatever you need as far as this product is concerned and then and then you would simply save and close and now you can see it automatically adds the product there so in your current version you won't see this you will have had to already had the product and then go and click on it from there so that's a that's a really cool change that uh that all the tasks have made as well okay so one or two other little bits and pieces i wanted to go through this isn't a massive huge release there are a few um little things that i wanted to point out um but one of the things you will notice for any of you that have ever been into the admin module um we used to have admin and then features and settings and if you look up here we have a whole bunch of different things now so what they've effectively done is they've broken up all of these things into uh into the different categories so accounts users or account settings and users is now in its own category um features and settings is still there but it only includes some of the stuff and then we've got things like activations um automations um you know and and things like workflow rules fall under automations ticker tagging auto forms that kind of thing and then um you know all about your organization and the users fall under this particular section here so just gives you the ability to um to kind of you know see it it grouped differently um and a completely different um look and feel to the way that it was before okay so um there are a few other little um little changes that i want to go through um so one of them is when you click on your name you've always been able to change your profile but there's a slightly different preferences tab now when you click on preferences it will give you the ability to do a bunch of things and one of them is you can now open tickets and task entries um inside a window so instead of opening it up as a separate window or a separate tab it basically just docks it inside the ticket window so again a real cool change and one of the other things that um that all the tasks have done as well as far as the theme is concerned um you now have something in here which is the um which by the way i literally hate um but is the datto rmm theme for those of you who are using the data rmn with the new interface um i i don't particularly like it only because i don't like dark mode but this gives you the ability to actually now theme autotask in the same color scheme as the data rmm stuff as well so and you can go ahead and just change completely how your theme looks and you'll be able to see that it's now kind of looking very similar to the same colors as the data rmm stuff which doesn't look very nice to be honest um so there's there's not a huge amount of updates in this particular release they are i guess fairly significant updates especially around things like the um the company and contacts information um but you know there's just that really and the the um configuration item stuff so if you wanted to know a little bit more about these and what's coming out from multitasking you can actually do this now in in your own version as well if you click the little question mark and then oh even that's changed now that's the first time i've actually seen that so if you click on 2021.1 um what you'll now see is that um it shows you what the release notes are and here you can go and have a look at all of these these things that have changed in the product um what this will also do and should also be doing is telling you when the new one is coming out and i think because it's already released um it doesn't show it to me on there but if i go back in and i actually look at let's just look at my older task in here and if we said 2021.1 this will give us an indication as to when these releases are coming out um and if i click into this so we can see here um uh you know uk limited release is coming out on may the 12th america east is may the 26th um and for those of us in in the uk we're gonna have to wait until june for this release to come out so what you should see for those of you guys who are in the us um you're going to start on may the 26th uh you're going to see all of these new things being added to to the product so and i know we've got one or two people i think on the call from australia so our friends in australia are going to have to wait um not too much longer than we are in the uk but june the 9th is when these things are coming out so i see there is a question i'm just going to go to the questions on here so tim mcbride is asking with the new account creation screens a process is there any indication that existing auto forms will break i use an auto form hidden on my website for new customer creation that's a great question tim i i don't have an answer to that for you i wouldn't have thought so because um you know it's just going to write into to those fields so um i guess where it may break is um if you've got user-defined fields that the autoform is writing into and then there's a company category that doesn't have those user defined fields it may break at that point um but like i said when i first started this this is literally brand new i've only seen this in the last day myself um i've only just got access to this release um but that's a great question i can test that for you tim and i will come back to you as soon as i can okay um so i know i'd sit this thing for for an hour um it's not a huge massive release um i just wanted to kind of go through and give you guys a very quick rundown of um of what this is all about and how it works and at least from from my take on it so if there's any other specific questions that anyone else would like to ask i'll do my best to answer them um otherwise i'll wrap it up early and then what i'll do is give you guys um a copy of this recording uh obviously i would ask that you don't sort of distribute this outside because um you know this is such a brand new release right now that um uh you know i i've managed to get access to this database uh with these new releases on them um just so i can learn and and and play with them but um you know by all means have a look and and uh you know go through it yourself so if anyone else has any questions oh i think there's another one no i think i've answered that cool okay well i hope that was useful um and i'm sorry i rushed through it really quickly like i said it was um i've only just seen it so i'm still trying to learn a lot of the stuff myself but i think it looks quite nice i think there's there's some good stuff and you can certainly see the way all the task is going with all of these screens um they're all going to kind of look very much the same you know very soon so i hope that's that's been useful to everyone and thank you for coming on the webinar you