Learn how an MSP Streamlined his business with Autotask

so i wanted to thank everyone for for coming to this uh for those of you who who don't know who i am um shame on you uh no i'm kidding um for those who don't know who i am my name's chris i'm from a company called Sondela consulting we are psa and rmm specialists uh you know specializing in helping msps to get the best out of their psa tools and with me today i have my good friend steve dempsey from neotec and steve's going to talk to us all about um you know his journey from replacing a mainstream documentation tool um and and how he streamlined his processes to do everything in in teams and an order task and um you know using the the configuration items so i'm not going to steal his thunder because he's going to go through a lot of that stuff with us um but hey steve welcome to the webinar and thank you for attending thank you happy to be here for my first one good yeah i'm glad glad to have you here so do you want to just uh tell us a little bit about who you are and um you know really what was the driving force behind you changing this and what made you decide to dump your um i.t documentation tool yeah i'll uh i'll get to that just a bit uh you know being in manhattan uh when when covet hit last year uh when manhattan wanted to lock down and uh you know i had a lot of chaos internally with my business and clients like everybody else but what i took that opportunity to basically uh i took my entire business model and threw it out the window last april literally and i went back to the drawing board and just worked seven days a week which i still continue to do over a year later and re-examine everything that i did with just a fresh pair of eyes uh with a definite focus on how much labor we were spending and efficiencies and waste duplicate systems and disorganization and the mistakes and the cost internally of just you know the techs doing things three times over or doing them wrong twice nobody ever able to find anything uh so i reevaluated all of our systems uh fast forward to december uh it was already on my radar probably in october and then i finally decided to turn a new year uh that we were using uh is it okay chris if i go into this yeah yeah yeah yeah you carry on yeah just getting up to to my mentality uh so so in december like i said it was on my radar already for two months uh i started to see uh thanks to chris here actually and his book uh on auto task but she sent me an autographed copy i still have over here thank you chris no problem but i but i read the book okay and that did open my eyes on on how underutilizing uh underutilized auto test was uh internally right so so that was on my radar probably september october fast forward to december i finally realized that with it glue and let me just say here it glue is a great product all right it's awesome but i realized how much redundancy i had between auto task and it was so come december i realized that i can duplicate uh 95 of the functionality in auto task and consolidate and uh a quick backstory just to be transparent here to everybody uh my my it blue was an absolute mess okay beyond recognition it was uh five years of worth of people entering things their own way any organization uh even when i went in there i had trouble finding stuff and you know we estimated that i could have a full-time guy sorry i was just going to say was that mine ringing i i guess spam calls on jeans so i'll try to ignore it but i had to hung up hang up on that one it's okay anyway so come come december okay i really when i looked at it blue uh i just how badly we implemented it and how badly that i had kept it and i just never gave it any attention uh i estimated i could have had probably honestly a full-time guy organizing our you know 80 90 accounts in there probably for the next six months to get it up to speed so it was just it was a decision to put on a chopping block and just move everything into auto test so i just wanted to say i mean you you mentioned earlier on as well about you know it glues a great product and this obviously isn't um you know isn't to say or or any faults with the product or anything right it was purely you and your business as to you didn't set up it glue properly and you were kind of looking for a more efficient way to um you know to do the documentation and to to kind of find more efficient ways to work with all the tasks rather than it being a fault with the particular product yeah truth be told uh well maybe some guys who know me from the tribe okay i'm very direct and i don't waste time and once i make a decision or something i just go with it and i that's it it's done uh so i as a matter of fact to be honest with everybody i did have a small result internally uh when i announced that we were going to decommission it blue uh and and yeah i had a small revolt with uh some of my texts that they thought i was just you know constantly changing things and why are you getting like rid of my t-glue we like it and i'm like okay but i'm like look at how separated these two systems are and i actually did have to have to walk them through my service manager i said but if we duplicate it over here i said that's so much time and labor i said an energy that we're gonna save so no they did not want me to get rid of it but i had the final say so it happened okay yeah and um just in terms of you know getting the buy-in from your team on this process i mean you were saying that they obviously didn't want you to um uh ditch it glue or anything like that so once you adopted this process what was the the buy-in from your team i mean are they are they loving it now is they um you know is everyone kind of on board with the process yeah everyone's on board it did take some training and convincing and implementation i probably spent uh personally as a business owner i think i spent about 30 to 40 hours in total on this transition maybe 50 because i had to go back and redesign in central and duplicate some of the functionality in it glue and our auto task configs were a mess and i had product categories and everything that were in there for years and years i just never you know never bothered so it took a complete reorganization of auto tasks to even build my foundation to get it ready and then once that was done we were off to the races uh so far so good uh on a side note though is uh just this morning i happen to notice that my team was entering uh passwords as standalone config items which i think they were used to from it glue and i had a conversation with my service manager about just this morning because i noticed that was happening i'm like why are they doing it this way and he said that's the way everyone likes it so that's a battle that i i'm gonna lose i'm gonna just give it up and say okay that's the way they want it so be it but i can see the parallels because they find it easier to have passwords as a standalone config versus embedding it in config which is the way i wanted it so that's a battle that um i'm giving up on okay that's cool and and i'm sure you'll you'll kind of show us all of that stuff um in in a few minutes so i just wanted to say if anyone's got any questions if you can use the q a um i am driving this myself today so um if there are any questions we'll do the best to to answer them uh if you have anything directly for for steve um you know i'm sure he will probably get through a lot of the questions that you guys have anyway but if you do have any specific questions then put them in the in the q a um and i'll do my best to to answer them so um steve i just um you know i just wanted to kind of let you uh get on with it and and you know show us how you've done it and show us some of the things that you've you've done in your blueprint and i know you were kind of keen to show show that to us so um yeah do you want to um go ahead i'm sure you've you've got access to share your screen now sure oh yeah okay that one i think so our f4 monitors like i confuse myself sometimes all right so you see you guys uh chris you got you guys see and central yeah okay uh so i'll go through this uh relatively quickly because i don't want to put anybody to sleep and and i know we're all i.t guys uh but i'm just gonna before i begin this i'm just going to go back to my my original biggest point of why i did this is it really came down to to labor and the massive disorganization that i had internally which i fully admit to uh when i looked into autotask you know i had records all over the place and i had uh categories that didn't make sense uh even my device classes and then central on the regions and central here uh they were being mismatched okay and then i went into it glue and then i had more assets i'm sure you guys weren't talking about they weren't being synced they weren't being matched i had to match them i had staff you know entering things their own way all right so it really for me as a business owner it just came down to money okay let's be honest here so you know why why have somebody spend three hours uh cleaning something up when i can reduce that to one hour and and not have to hire more staff and then just make you know more efficient use of what we have uh versus me just as a business owner just seeing dollar signs fly past me you know all the time and energy that we were spending just maintaining these two systems when there was a lot of redundancy okay so all right so in my in my informal uh document that i posted to the tech drive which i'm happy to to share with anybody um the first thing that i did start with uh was organizing my classes in central all right as you can see here because originally what i had uh was like the switch router for example which is two different devices and that was being mapped to the same product and auto task all right which will in turn disorganize everything you know down the line from there all right so i wanted to end central and i created new classes on the back end and i don't know if you can do this on other psas i have no idea uh but i i re i redid my classes uh in end central so that they all had a one-to-one mapping and auto task like the same thing with laptops mac and windows i think we only had we only had one class for a laptop all right and that showed up in auto task there's just one laptop one category and that's how i so i separated it out here uh to start from the rmm so that was step one so uh chris are we taking questions like as we go along or towards the end um yeah i think if there's a a question that's relevant to the topic um of what you're talking about then i'll stop you um and uh and ask the question then but so far there aren't any questions so that means you're doing a great job so far all right all right so so yeah like i said i started the classes and i had to we had to spend half a day reclassifying all these devices and then central okay but it was well worth the time investment uh to get the foundation correct all right so let me jump over to my auto task here all right the configs okay here we go uh another the next step that i did uh was as you can see i i created all new item categories uh for what uh for what we had if you notice here uh i tried to keep it uh simple okay and i didn't go crazy and oh you see that active yeah okay so i so i kept it uh in line with with categories in in the true sense of the word so i didn't get i didn't break it down here for example like manage switches or unmanned switches or whatever the case may be uh my my mentality here was was to keep this these categories as top line uh items so that i could have it around you know as you can see i have 24 configs a couple of them are inactive because they're systems uh but i kept the 22 configs i didn't want a great number okay so that was that was the next step that i did and i color coded everything and all that good stuff okay uh once i have my config category set up let me show you i think this this alone took me like like 10 hours okay uh once i had all my config categories set up i went into the details here of the config and i hid a lot of the stuff that auto task keeps its default and i think this is one of the things that makes auto task uh hugely powerful all right so i went in here and hit stuff and created my own fields and as you can see a lot of these things are hidden that's because they're using other configs all right but that's i i customize each config according to to what i had uh and another example is that's why i called it network gear because i just didn't want to break this down you know into five configs and just have a have more of a mess on my hand and that's the thing so for anyone who's watching this i mean that's one of the nice things about um you know configuration item categories and in the same way as as ticket categories is you know you can really customize the information that you want to display on the um on the system so you know for example like you can see with steve there he's got you know um a whole bunch of different user defined fields and you can base that specifically on the um on the item category so um you know in the case of network year you can say these these user define fields only show up for that specific category okay all right next thing next item that i have to was my products okay my product categories uh this which i will fully admit to everybody okay this was another four years of me not knowing not how to use auto tasks correctly never really looking at it never organizing it uh so i spent a bunch of bunch of hours on this and as you can see it's nice and clean and then here's where i went down into the categories and i created once again top line products uh for all of our items so like here like on the network here you know i separated down to firewalls and you know fully managed and network attached storage and storage devices so so think of these as top line uh or i should say maybe second line sub categories i didn't go into brand names or anything like that uh and i put it under uh the matching configs over here so security printing and that's how you have to organize it on this end of steve i just have a product categories need to be lined up as well sorry chris sorry i just got a quick question from uh from norb um around what were the main um customizations and deletions that you did uh so and on the product categories what i had here i think before i i see the nice organized uh screen that you see i had all like the brand names i had like mobile servers you know model numbers and then dell computers and so on and so forth i had nothing in categories so yes i was using product categories to make for example lenovo workstation or lenovo think center series and things like that okay so that's you know when you do that you're going to end up with probably which is what i had uh a whole mess and probably 20 pages of scrolling of all these different items so that's why i organized everything to very simple top category which is very generic network gear and then the subcategories once again uh is is generic but everything that i have is going to fit into one of these subgroups so that's your question yeah um sorry he said well that was actually sent during the conflict item screen um okay so sorry um steve i think i was a little bit delayed in reading that question i think norm was actually talking about during the config item screen um around what were the main customizations and deletions that you made on that oh okay gotcha gotcha okay yeah i'll just uh all right i'll go back into that real quick uh as far as the config item categories the only thing that i had here before i think was was the default standard yeah that's all i had here was the one standard category uh so so here i'll mine i'm going from memory here so you're gonna guys have to forgive me but let's go to power management um so i kept things in common with all the config items the sop docs these are links okay these are links uh up to three uh because i can't see us ever having more than three sops for one config and if we do i'll just add another field uh there are links to my teams microsoft teams documents so like the sop docs section for example that's on every single category uh the credentials are in common with most of my categories the location i i felt it was uh you know for this okay but let me show you see if i can get one um it looks like most of those are customized i mean they like say i mean it's you know there's the standard out the box stuff but it looks like you've either changed or customized um yeah so so here's a good one so like our remote access config as you can see like i don't have credentials in here i don't have sop links in here i took all those out so in this config or you're gonna see are these items let me hide that yeah all you're gonna see is that so yeah i did i did massive customizations for each category based on what they were and took out anything that i didn't need so another great question actually from from norb um he says are you worried about keeping credentials in 80 nope not at all uh because an at you can actually which i didn't know it could do this and lock them down all right yep so you can you can protect the field and you can encrypt the password field exactly so that's correct i i had no idea autodesk can do that up until like january when i started this project uh so for example my experienced liaison does not need any passwords all right so she's not part of that security group so she's a user in auto task and she can come in here and peruse all this information uh but she cannot um excuse me sorry she cannot uh yeah so norb says at support has access to the data i believe in protected fields in protected fields they can probably see it but you can encrypt those fields as well knob so um if if you then encrypt the the field then um then obviously autotask support doesn't have any access to that yes so uh so yeah sorry distracted here so so back to like my very experienced liaison valerie she has full access to auto task and configs but she can actually see any passwords she does not not need access to passwords uh and as you saw we use keeper security so i do have links to the keeper security records for uh for config items like let's say microsoft 365 tenants that require the 2fa so okay all right that's good all right we're good uh one moment here all right organizing the product categories okay that was the next step that i did uh eugene yeah i don't we don't use auto task mobile at all so i couldn't even tell you i so i believe you can see the um the udfs in the config items on um on the mobile app um so i so i think i think you can because you can see the the categories as well so um but i'll have to check that but i think i think it is possible to um to see that okay ah okay all right let me um all right let me bring down my document the one that i'm actually looking at here this this is the one that i created by the way uh so the next thing that i did was the i.t blue export and i so my mentality was to clean up the export obviously because cleaning up the actual records in it blue was just impossible uh so this was my it glue export uh everything with uh spreadsheets and so on and so forth so basically i went through my export and i just decided what i was going to keep and what i was not going to keep i think like most of the uh like all like the contact spreadsheet out the window deleted and i just kept like most of my config items and things like that uh obviously like the photos and that's what i decided well i was going to bring in so think of it as if you guys were doing a data migration for a client and if you were migrating their server for example to a cloud server right you know chances are you know you probably going to leave some data behind old data whatever the case would be i did the exact same thing i just went through my export decided what i was going to keep and just got rid of the rest so that was that all right so go to my next one configs all right let me go back to my configs uh i think the one on the point that i make mention on the config because i do make a point of saying it in my my blueprint here is i quickly discovered uh that i needed to have two credentials one for the config and one for the user and i've i have to look to my notes here and i'm trying not to waste anybody's time but if memory serves me correctly i think we were not able to tag um and i don't want to read this whole page and keep everyone waiting i don't think we were able to tag a config to a user and a config item right so that's why i think i realized right away that i had to separate them out so that i could just for config i can actually tag it for example a read-only password for a firewall would be a credentials record for config so i can check the firewall uh if i had a remote access credentials um let's say you know some kind of remote software let's say splashtop right and the user have their own credentials then that's when we create a credentials for users so we can actually tag the user that makes sense that's why i needed to activities okay and then as the input fields uh we covered let me see here one moment sorry yeah so who is this okay yeah so this goes once again i didn't know and i discovered this along the way when i was doing all this i i had no idea that auto task like had these fields available with the multi-line and the single line and the url the url was awesome because that allows me to for example link my my word my documents in microsoft teams to the configs so i use this extensively with the urls and then the list the single and multi which once again allows somebody to tag uh you know different config items or user contacts or something like that so i so we made extensive use of these field types i mean i know it looks simple but there were actually enough for me i didn't really i wasn't uh felt that i was lacking i know by the way as far as the password protection uh so here's the the items for that so you just click on that and then you click on encrypted okay and then that's how we had we made other password fields and i think the private was the one that we use for our security groups i think chris right is it is the private you have to check and then that regulates i think according to the security group yeah it does yeah so there's um so again you can choose kind of who well it's protected as well so you can choose who sees protected fields and private fields and um and then encrypted is obviously means it's encrypted in the database as well so um and just for those field types where you you had the the url are you using that then to link back into teams to access the document from a config item and ticking stuff okay are you going to be able to show us that do you have some stuff that you can show without kind of revealing any any sensitive data or no so uh so yeah so just to close this up i i had no idea how easy it was once again to make passport fields and auto tasks and the field types i i didn't know it was here but once i started to utilize this i quickly realized that i can reproduce what i had in the other system you know with very little effort so all right um trying to think of who um trying to think a moment oh so yeah there we go all right i'll just show all my clients there for my my hand hit the keyboard okay no one no one steal any of steve's clients okay so that's okay uh unwritten thing on this webinar anyone who's watching it's not allowed to steal any of steve's clients i'll i'll try and edit that part out anyway steve before we uh yeah i know my hand yeah hit the key all right so this is my my company and uh we don't other clients will have categories here that are very extensive um but oh let me see i don't think we have it in there sorry guys yes it's gonna be might be difficult because i don't have it linked okay here we go yeah okay so here are my sop docs okay i don't you know obviously i have nothing here but in order for us to link a microsoft uh documents which is you know what we use or an excel spreadsheet or anything in microsoft teams i'm just going to edit it and i just literally just put the url in there and then yes it is a clickable url so that you don't have to edit so i just put the url in there and then save the document and then if i need to pop it sop i click on it and then it will open it up in microsoft teams or sharepoint whatever the case may be so okay so you're using those udfs rather than using the built-in documentation within autotask correct i'm not uh i'm not really a fan of the built-in documentation i mean obviously it has its benefits uh you know you can link to tickets and all that good stuff it's just uh i i just i i don't like the editor too much personally and you know also you know as a team it might be a little difficult for us to go we have extensive documentation of microsoft teams in word right so that format and obviously words you know word is the best right uh versus maybe a plain vanilla editor in auto task uh so i didn't want to deal with two different formats so i couldn't even tell you what the documentation system can do in autotask i don't even know i didn't even look at it i just went with let me just link the sops that i had now uh and since almost all my sops were in teams anyway i had no intentions of copying things over and spending weeks trying to get them into autotask i mean so it was just easier for me just to create a link and put into teams so it works very well for us no complaints because you can do the links actually in in the documentation manager in order task anyway so um you know instead of using them through through uh use the fine fields like you got there you can use the documentation manager and actually link that to still link it back to sharepoint or or teams or what have you so um so there is that there is that option as well but i kind of quite like this this way too and this is um this is kind of the way i i would be doing it if if i was to add these things in and i've got one or two um user defined fields that i'd be very similar things with but on the whole i would use the the the documentation manager so there's multiple ways to do it for anyone who's you know on on the call who's wondering um you know you can use the built-in documentation manager that's built into all the tasks to do a lot of the stuff all right uh let me [Music] see all right so once the next thing is uh for those of you that are using a password manager we're using keeper security and you know i i don't want to for obvious reason that i want to open up clients on that but let's see here [Music] okay so i created this and this is an example of email platform uh obviously we have a lot of clients on microsoft 365. so i made a udf a keeper security record and this is for our uh you know the login and the password but more importantly the 2fa all right so you know autotask can't have 2fa code in here so i just simply got around that by just creating the url field for the keeper security record and then uh making that just available to all the techs because obviously if they don't have a if they have access to key for security uh you know they won't get to it anyway and then what we did was i just put the url to the record uh for the you know that the username and the password and the 2fa code once again it works very well it's just a couple extra steps but really has not been a hinderance whatsoever so okay all right next thing guys okay um so another important point is i took advantage of no not it wherever it is by trying to show you an example all right yeah sorry i'm tripping on my own feet here trying to find it on the fly um chris maybe you can help me out here uh but but auto task uh in their configs all right you can have default selections so that when you selected uh that category that i was already gonna give it uh and i got products all right so maybe maybe i could show you in all right yeah so exactly so if you pick um yes if you pick that it should it should allow you to into the product so actually um and and by the way in the you can see there the product is is a required field so in the new release it's coming out in a couple of weeks time in the 2021.1 release um from what i've seen i believe that that product will no longer be a required field so you can actually create a configuration item without a product okay i'm sorry guys i i apologize this is my first webinar i am a little nervous all right i'm trying to try to do this on a flight too so sorry about this don't be nervous take your time it's it's all good here's the example that i was getting to uh what i did set in the conflict categories as you saw when i picked lan okay it filled in my my item type which is for the big info and it tagged the product all right so i made sure that was uh i went through that a lot to make sure that was set up one it saves your team uh time and two right you avoid this organization because this way when they select land these two items get filled in filled in nobody should think about it it's just done and it's done correctly and that's why so i made heavy use of that one appropriate all right so then i go into more of the configs okay product items all right and then the next thing i did [Music] was uh the product items let me see if i can go find my subcategory here yes i think some of these are lot of them are inactive okay yeah this is yeah this is probably too generic uh okay but another item that i had to address when you go into your product uh your products all right is the default item type which was here right and then also the default i uh item category so i had to create uh i had to go through our products so this is actually a good example of what you can see what we had with you know watchguard routers we haven't touched those in years and so on and so forth and i think actually yeah here we go so here's a good example uh so ubiquity usb pro what i had to do uh for all these products once again took hours and hours and hours but it was worth it is i i set a default configuration type and then also a default uh category so that once again that kind of filled it in uh once you use it so uh what is a big time saver and it just it that's how you get it organized also in this uh let's see here yeah so that's how you're gonna get it organized in this list you see to the left like under the network here so you have to set it you have to set this category so one second that's the train and actually um steve on that product category so if you just want to go into um into your list of config items if you can without revealing anything um it's it's actually the product category itself that that categorizes the um the configuration item so if you go into on the bigger menu at the top um oh okay or you can go that way uh yeah i mean no i meant a list of actual if you go back to your neotech company where you um where before yeah and then just click on yeah so you can see there where it says server azure and server on frame oh you had it um no i lost the uh go back to oh sorry no one's going to see that company i'll edit these out steve all right um yeah so if you go to config items and then you so you can see that list that's going to come up now so where it says desktop windows endpoint protection laptop windows those categories are actually product categories that it it actually categorizes them at that point um so you know so when you were talking about those those product categories for anyone wants to know those are not um you know configuration item uh categories in there that's the actual product itself yes that is correct that's why i had yes thank you for reminding me that's why and that's another reason why i said all that out uh because when i wanted the config items once again like if you mimic it glue right that you have your config items and everything's category categorized under whatever you know passwords firewalls which is whatever the case will be uh this section was also a complete mess for most of our clients and as you can see now it's it's totally organized under categories um and then also let me show you i think if i can find it really quick here um yes so i made a dashboard and auto test just so you guys can see i mean whatever i'll just explore out these names uh later it's it's all good uh i made a an auto task dashboard that breaks down all the config items meaning their categories so i can actually come in here and and see you know everything by category and pull it up if i want to i don't refer to this too often but uh once again just duplic you know functionality that you can have that's readily available you just have to just invest in time to build it uh i also had a dashboard that doesn't seem to be probably somewhere else who i haven't used in a couple of weeks and drawing a blank um [Music] but i did have a dashboard that showed me the uncategorized configs because every once in a while a tech will enter something uh it'll show up as other all right and and also even from and central sometimes they will show up as other so i made a filter to show me all those where i could just come in you know once a month or i think i have somebody else do it and then find all those other uh config items and then you can properly categorize them once again just you know with the goal of just keeping your system organized all right yeah the config item dashboards uh which is what i'm showing you now um oh okay and then let me pull up something else sorry pull my teams over here all right so whatever you guys are going to see what you're going to see um but this is our microsoft list which what we've been using extensively i absolutely love lists of microsoft teams and we have you know hundreds of documents in here probably around 250 give or take maybe 300. all these urls that you see and here a lot of these are referenced uh in those auto task sop fields that i showed you before so when they open they just open up in teams so after i had spent uh 40 or 50 hours getting everything organized see i think it's gonna open it up in okay there we go okay so the one thing that i wanted to make absolutely sure okay after spending a week of my life doing this is that i was not going to end up with another's organized mess in six months uh so what i did was i made this list and it's called auto task input uh that i you know trained my team on okay and i think this is actually very important so i created this index so that when my team has to input a credential uh or something else as you can see info being inputted uh like a good example is like local ip information plan right and then it tells them right here that this is only a single config item rather than creating let's say three right and then in six months now you're gonna have three lan configs and then and four of these and five whatever so i created this list so that everyone can refer to it my team internally so whenever they input information into auto task they refer to this list it gets inputted correctly and uh you know here we are five months later and i would say we're 95 spot on i mean there's the occasional mistake i'm not going to deny that but uh we we reference this list that stays organized it goes in the same way and then when it goes in the same way everyone can find it the same way so any questions about it i don't know let me just see if there's any questions so norb how do you keep track of config items that has a mac address for land uh wireless lan and cellular you can just create custom fields for that i mean that's you know that's the beauty of big items you can you can custom make those fields for any you know anything so just make a config item uh well not make it but under like your network gear config item just just make a section with a text field that's gonna say uh mac address so and then he's saying um and he's saying does n central automatically put that information into your udf uh it it will but let me go back to i don't it will not put it into those fields that you make all right so yeah so it puts it somewhere else but yeah right exactly it'll put it uh just i think in the in the description or something like that so no it's it's not going to do it as far as i know so i think yeah it should put it kind of into there although um yeah so you with with things like the data rmm you can you can have it the data rmm map um uh you know user defined fields or custom fields as they call it into the user to find fields within the psa but yeah i don't know about any of these other um yeah it puts it in here and then also while we're on here uh this related items all right was i had no idea once again that this was even here january and i'm like what's this related items uh you know section and then i realized i'm like oh i'm like this is awesome i'm like this is you know we could tag other assets and this also uh you know pushed me over the edge to say okay that's it i'm like we are going full in into auto task because now i have a config item i can go to related items and add a related item and that's how and that's how we're tagging uh like you know the password credentials item config items and things like that and that's how we're relating things internally so which is awesome that related items is is pretty cool um like i say i mean it i guess it's designed as well that in um you know in the old days when i guess everyone used to build um custom-built pcs you can kind of go hey you know this is this is the motherboard and this is the the hard drive that's hanging off it and this is the memory and you kind of they're all related together to make this one one config item with all these these related items so um so yeah it's pretty cool it's actually been in the product for a very long time um and you've always been able to do it but they they've kind of just made it more prominent now and put it as a as a tab it used to kind of be hidden away a little bit so uh and then the other item yes this one okay uh and once again i'm just i'm being transparent because i'm not hiding anything i didn't i had no idea that auto task kept version history uh because it goes back to my original point of we were using auto task you know 20 of its functionality and i was using auto i t glue 20 of its functionality so these are things that i just didn't look at and then when i started this transition i was like oh wow i know i can do this so you guys are might be afraid hey you know i t blue does uh all the auditing which it does very well uh but as you can see autotask does the auditing as well and it tells you uh who looked at those private fields for example and it will tell you who looked at the passport fields and it keeps a complete a trail of who looked at what and who edited what so you can you can see just as much history as you can as as the other system so and actually steve you'll be probably quite happy to know that in the in 2021.1 release there's actually rollbacks now as well so if you've made a change and you've messed something up even inside of your fanfield you can you can just roll back to a previous config item so it kind of does all the versioning history and the rollbacks um and that's coming i think the 2021 release you guys might even have it over there already i think it's now yeah in two weeks i saw the announcement two weeks yeah yeah i know they delayed it for a little bit but yeah so that's going to be cool and i think that'll certainly help with what you're doing because you're using the config items quite extensively so being able to roll back when somebody made a mistake or or what have you that's going to be a really cool thing for you yeah if you if you really drill down into what i did with the config items and the complete categories and then one i will say it once again okay glue is a great product uh but if if you properly utilize the config categories like i did uh you can duplicate that functionality almost 100 in auto task and other than just it being a little different you're not losing any productivity at all so yeah yeah absolutely i mean it seems like you've definitely um you know leveraged the configuration item um side quite extensively within within all the tasks and a lot of the stuff that um you know that you could do in it glue especially from keeping the configuration items and um and that kind of stuff yeah i mean all the tasks is very capable of doing it you just have to customize it and configure it to to do what you wanted to do uh and then the other item uh that we started i knew was there but i never used it was the site configuration as you can see here okay and you know this still is a work in progress uh but i also customize our site configuration as you can see it is pretty simple uh so i have not gone crazy with it what i like about the site configuration is that it shows up in the uh in the configs right so when you when you pull up like a computer convey you can just see the site configuration and see you know what their hours of operations are and this is stuff that i built uh personally uh it probably just needs a little my attention i i didn't go crazy with it but it's i just like having to be able to input these these top level items for the client's site and then i do believe it shows you on the right hand side in the view or maybe i have that view turned off um yeah i think i have that turned off but you can you should chris you should be able to go to the site configuration right from the config item right yeah you can go from yeah so you can do it from the company or if you click on if you scroll all the way to the top on that screen um yeah where it says oh there it is yeah yeah yes that's so that's something i liked uh we don't have it filled in because this isn't you know i'm looking at neo tech this is internally but we have we have the site config filled in for all our rest of our accounts uh so i did like that functionality that just looked a big item i can just come in here and just get a top level view and as you notice i also by design i kept those categories in the site config this i kept this very top level i did not get any granular or detailed or anything like that um yeah i was going to say so the site config for those who wanted to know that it's slightly different from normal configuration items where it's it's more relating to the specific sites um so you know you know the company as a whole so things like you've got their you know hours of operation and ad structure and that kind of stuff that's that's relating globally to the whole company rather than to each individual item as a as a conflict item mm-hmm uh anchors you you'll be able to blur out like a client name right later on yeah yeah i mean so for those who've asked people have asked about the recording obviously out of respect for steve because he is showing company names i i'm gonna um edit this before i actually send it out to anyone i'm not just going to send the link so um this is where my my skills in camtasia or final cut pro are really going to come into their own um so yes i'm asking is i want to show everybody i mean not that you'd be able to tell anything but here's a more very well developed uh as this is what i wanted to show everybody so as you can see they're all categorized in here uh yes i do have apparently one yeah the watt box so i don't know why that showed up as other hardware uh but but as you can see this is very other than that one uncategorized item okay this is very very organized my team likes it like this if they can just go in here and then just pull down you know the one firewall you hear the credentials okay what all the credentials config and just drop it down it's organized it works as you can see i got there in three or four clicks it's easy and uh you know we love it and the other thing which i'll touch upon uh once again i'm sorry to be the dead course here it's just as a business owner i always always had sync problems or i should say uh disorganization because i was i had a three part team right i had from end central going to auto task from central going into it glue and then i t glue and auto test trying to sync with each other so i always had items that were either not syncing properly not match properly something there was always something because it was a three part chain and then once i turned this down to a two-part chain or i just go from my rmm in my case and central to a quarter test i mean i'm telling you the cost savings of labor and your mental energy of just being able to match things nicely it's i wish i did this way sooner so absolutely yeah i mean you've you've done an awesome job i mean this is this is brilliant i've i've actually um uh you know i've not seen anyone else's order task as as good as this and you know with with as much effort put into it so and it's really nice to see it's kind of good that you know you're actually leveraging the configuration items um you know to their fullest and um and and using those user defined fields um you know really nicely from from a configuration island perspective so it's really good to see yeah and i get and also we get the best of both worlds because i i get the full uh linking to my microsoft you know the team's documents we're able to keep the team structure uh i have not had a single regret in the five months that i did this and i can't think of one single item that i like oh man this was almost a deal breaker i mean it's just all it's just a little different but same functionality same searching all that good stuff if not it's even better because i eliminated all that extra work in this organization and just trying to everything match up it was a it was a nightmare and actually i think as autotask builds out the actual documentation manager i think this will get a lot better as well and a lot easier so um you know i know you keep a lot of your documents in or all of your documents in you know teams and sharepoint at the moment but you know i think once um you can see on on the top of that screen there's a documentation manager tab and that's really button even and that's really where um you know this is going to start to to be able to say those actual documents that you have as sops stored in in teams or sharepoint one of those things you're going to actually be able to store them directly inside autotask as well so um you know and i think then then you can start to bring everything into the same system without having to to to jump out into a different product to to access any of that information yeah and i mean that that's pretty much it in a nutshell i mean i uh chris i you have my my the blueprint right so you can share with everybody um i i don't have it to hand actually have you got it that you can show yeah i mean this is uh i know i think there's a few people here uh in the tech tribe and this is what i've posted on the tech drive but it's it's not private at all okay and i'm happy to share this with anybody it's not private uh but this is the tutorial i made with screenshots of what i did with explanations of where i started uh and considering just uh what an absolute mess that i had on my hands like i said it took me 40 or 50 hours to to do all this because i started from scratch but depending on on how large you know your you guys uh your the number of your assets and things like that and plus i i designed it for you all right so you probably do in half amount of time uh and also on a lot of these things in in my blueprint here i had to go back uh probably three or four or five times and tweet them because you know once we went live uh it was like oh you know i have no place to enter this or i made required fields and didn't really think about you know cases that there was nothing to put in those fields and all that good stuff so anyway so but this pretty much documents exactly what i did and how i did it and how i got everything to line up and if you follow this i mean you know you could probably do it in 10 to 20 hours yeah absolutely and i think um what if you if you don't mind steve i can um either i can put a link to this in the in the show notes and send it with it or um you know if if anyone wants to speak to you they i know a lot of people just looking at the the names most of the people are on the tech tribe so they probably know who you are anyway um but we can you know i'll make sure that people get your details anyway and they can reach out to you if they need to and get a copy of this document so all right so i see norbert's question here uh yes so we have uh let's see here like i am like like obsessed with like teams and lists i'm obsessed with lists like the last couple of months uh but um yeah i've not actually used lists before it looks pretty cool yeah so as you can see this is still being filled out okay but yes the answer to the question is in microsoft teams we do have a list as you can see a client sop index which are which are sops for individual clients and then yes those are linked back to um back to uh uh auto task and also like we made a list for this right because i did speak the auto test about this uh once again uh chris you'll have to uh blur this out later okay but i did speak to auto test about this and i they didn't have a dashboard uh they don't have the functionality to make a dashboard to show me all the recurring tickets uh that we were in the process of making so then when we made a microsoft list as you can see uh there's a master ticket number and i think it just reproduces and adds on to that but you know very quickly i just made a list to show us all the recurring tickets so i can just come in here and see what's going on uh because unfortunately all of house does not show you that until the ticket is created so yeah absolutely wow that's that's amazing there's um there's some really good things and i'm sure that everyone that is um is on here i know norb has been the get gets the prize for asking the most questions which is great um i think i think we should give him the um the prize of of the the most most asked questions uh yeah yeah the most valuable question asker i guess um so uh norb i've just decided that you've won the prize of my free book and you've probably got it anyway but i'm going to send you a free book anyway just just for for you um asking so many questions um which is really good so you know really appreciate that um to answer your question orbit is is this list is manually yes this this list is manually generated we we have to you know just come in here and add the records uh uh and to answer your second question is yes ms project is fully implemented on my side uh also integrated somewhat with auto tasks so maybe chris we can have a we can have a second webinar on that subject of of microsoft projects and auto task which we use i made kind of a hybrid on that one green auto task and teams so absolutely very well yeah i think that should definitely be a follow-up um session on here and um you know i think we'll have a a lot of people coming to that one and definitely a lot more people um uh you know this there was a lot of people looking at this one today so i'm sure we'll get you know most of the autotask community coming to that one for sure uh uh ian yeah we don't uh we use uh cloud radio so they uh we the client sees our clients anyway see absolutely nothing from auto task reports or even the organization that i showed you they just see what they just see what's in cloud radio which does not reproduce those categories or anything like that so yeah that answers your question yeah cool awesome steve you got anything else no i'm going to send you this documents to share with everybody uh if anybody uh as as some guys know on the tribe i i do try and help as much as i can because i've been in this business for a long time and i would say up until the three year up until three years ago i actually didn't know i didn't know very much because it was just me and two other people so anyway uh if anybody wants to answer or ask me any specific questions i am very happy to answer them whatever you want to know if you want me send you screenshots just ask me and if anybody wants to talk to me i am very happy to schedule like a 30 minute call you know to be clear i i don't charge i don't ask for anything in return i ask nothing of anybody actually so if anybody wants to know anything i'm very happy to share it or jump on a call if you want to know more no problem yeah absolutely and that's what i like about steve you know you you're one of those guys on on the tech tribe that you know just gives freely of your time and answers freely um uh you know all the questions that people ask and that's why i kind of asked him to come on this this webinar because i thought you know steve's got so much knowledge to share and um he's so gracious with his time and giving away um all of this free information so um you know by all means reach out to me reach out to steve um steve do you wanna give them um maybe your email address or something so people know how to get hold of you yeah uh do i just type it into yeah or if you um you can just type it into the uh maybe into the chat and then i'll make sure that everybody gets a copy of it so just make sure you you send it to all panelists and all attendees and then i'll also put it into the show notes of wherever we end up putting this this presentation um oh here we go if i found it i don't normally use zoom too much stuff and if anyone's got any good experience in doing things like um you know blanking out names in these sorts of things let me know i have a little bit of experience in it but hopefully somebody out there knows how to do it so um oh somebody's asked questions if you want chris i i cuz i posted videos on the tech drive where i've had to blow out yeah by client names and stuff like that i mean you know i just wait yeah exactly i'll figure out but otherwise yeah i'm gonna send you a recording anyway and then you can download it and do what you need to do so um eric had a question all info about tech tribe is new for me we're just in the process of onboarding okay so could you explain what the tech tribe is steve you've been on the tech tribe for a long time do you want to explain what it is oh okay so uh all right i'll just i'll just touch upon that briefly on my backstory and that's why i actually referenced three years okay so up until three years ago it was just me and uh two full-time techs all right we were not an i.t company i was based we were basically three guys that were just fixing stuff uh you know and i had revenue you know uh close to a million dollars a year uh how i did this with just me and two other people i i don't know it's still a mystery to this day all right because i do have now uh i have almost 20 full-time people working for me today uh in those three years time and i'm still not even able to keep up sometimes but anyway to get um getting sidetracked is up until three years ago i really didn't know what i was doing i didn't really have any direction as a business owner uh i had no sales marketing strategy nothing whatsoever somebody uh mentioned the tech tribe to me and i joined it and that was three years ago and i can truthfully say uh and i'm not associated with a tech tribe i'm just a member and i pay for a subscription like everybody else all right i can truly say that the tech tribe fundamentally changed my business because i learned so much uh in the tribe as far as business marketing strategy standardization technology uh even a year later like even my view on my own business had changed dramatically from the tech drive uh and now fast forward to today uh that i've just i've learned such a tremendous amount which is part of why i do this because i actually want to give back because if i didn't join the tech tribe uh i'll be honest with you it may still be me and and like you know three or four three full-time texts because i had no direction it was just i was just you know a small business owner just you know making you know making making money cash or check right and that was it and the tech tribe fundamentally changed my course as far as my professional life yeah absolutely and eric it's it's basically a um i guess it's a community an online community where you can get training resources and workshops and um you know marketing materials that kind of thing and once a month they do an expert q a call um where you can just kind of jump on and ask a bunch of questions um steve's very active in it i'm very active in it um so you know you can you can go to the tech tribe or i'm sure steve do you have an affiliate link you want you can give him if if he needs to i i don't even know if i have one i just posted the url okay um eric then if you don't mind i'll send you um if steve doesn't mind i'll send you my affiliate link so you can join up on the on the tech tribe um and uh yeah so we'll i'll i'll touch base with you afterwards eric and we can talk about it in more detail there's an affiliate link in the tribe i had i had no idea you didn't know that i i'm okay with this thing i i recruited a couple of guys from linkedin on the tech shop i wish i knew that three months ago all right you gotta you gotta speak to the big man i know it's okay it's all good have a chat with a big man he'll send you um he'll send you an affiliate link so um and just full disclosure by the way if if you do have an affiliate link um you anyone who signs up and stays a member for uh for more than three months then if if you sign up with one of our affiliate links then then we just get a little bit of um you know money every month back from the tech tribe so um it's kind of worth it um and anyone who's a member by the way can get an affiliate link it's not just something that you know only certain people gave um so and then ian had one more question as well uh he said do you link the config items to contracts in order to task for billing purposes oh so uh so yes yes because uh that's another that's another item that i'll touch upon which goes back to actually end central okay uh that was another huge mess i had on my hands up until literally december of last year is i would have texts uh on board computers and and not tell me and i had no idea all right and i had one contract for example uh where one tech was you know work with them for a long time i think we were building them out building them for something like 23 computers uh when the reality is they had close to 40 and and he was never telling me that he was adding these computers on because we had no checks and balances in place and i you know so on and so forth uh so anyway in in central you can it does have a functionality that if you link it to auto task contracts you can configure it so that it updates those quantities so i have ours now configured for laptops and desktops that on the 25th of every month it will update the contracts and auto task based on the numbers in n central so now when we onboard computers i don't need to ask anybody nobody needs to tell me it just happens automatically uh huge huge labor saver and obviously uh you know from a building point of view it changed a lot so and actually autotask has changed it now they've got something built-in called billing items or billing products which basically allow you to do exactly the same thing so it says when a you know when a configuration item is added from any source you know in central or data rm whatever the case might be then go in and add it as a billing product to the contract and automatically bill for it every month so um so that's actually now built into the product um so wherever you're bringing in your configuration items you can create them as building products um and then create billing rules inside your contracts to go and and bill for that stuff every month so um so yeah it's a fairly easy thing to do um and any and again you know i can touch base with you and and and go through that in more detail if you want to know how to do that yeah but uh overall you know i'm just going to add this overall as you know as a business owner i invested a lot of time uh of my time you know in january but uh five months later i can truthfully say that now that everything's organized and put the time and effort in uh the labor savings the cost savings the time savings my my mental energy our productivity has probably increased tenfold since january but you know by fully utilizing what auto tasks can can really deliver and thanks to chris and his book right for five years i only saw auto task as a ticket system that's the only way i looked at it and never read his book i you know hitting like a bulk of lightning i'm like wow i need to go look at autotask again so and i'm glad i did no regrets good well thank you for that um steve i will i'll send you the check later for uh for saying um good things about my book so appreciate appreciate that a lot um so steve really appreciate this as well um and i um yeah i mean you're just you're just an awesome guy and this is brilliant what you've done so really appreciate it and i'm sure everyone on on here has got some really you know valuable um insight out of this so really appreciate it and yeah let's do the next one on projects oh kevin wants to know the name of your book yeah who wants to know the name of my book kevin kevin wants to know the name of the book okay oh well book is called psa profitability um so it's all about all about psa profitability i guess um so it's about kind of understanding how to get um the system set up in such a way that you can get profitability information out of it so talks about burden rates talks about contracts and billing um all of that kind of stuff if you want any more information you can either reach out to me directly or you can go to the website which is psaprofitability.com um and there'll be some information on there on on the book cool all right all right chris i'll email you the document and then you can i guess post plus on the webinar however you're gonna work it so yeah awesome great i really appreciate it thanks steve and thanks everyone for coming and really appreciate it