[50] – Autotask Documentation Manager

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts, Rae-Ann Buccianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rae-Ann Buccianico. Hey, Rae-Ann, how are you doing?

I'm doing great today, Chris. How are things over there? I'm very well, thank you. Still nice, sunshiny summer's days here in the UK, so all is good with the world. Still rainy and miserable over here in Florida.

Yeah, I noticed you wearing a long-sleeve jacket, so I'm feeling quite good that I'm in a T-shirt and you're in a jacket. So yeah, world order's being restored, right? So Rae-Ann, what have we got on the agenda to talk about today? So now that we are done with ... Well, we finished up our implementation series a couple of episodes ago, but one of the things that we never really spoke about, I think, was the documentation manager inside Autotask.

Have you been using it? Because we've been using it here in-house for about seven or eight months now, probably even longer. Are you using it? Absolutely, and guess what I'm going to say about the documentation manager. You will never, ever guess what I'm about to say.

It's my absolute favorite thing in the PSA tool. Of course it is. Of course it is. I should have known that you're using it already, too. Yeah, absolutely.

So what is the documentation manager? I'm sure there's many people out listening to this now saying, I didn't even know there was a documentation manager thing built into Autotask. So do you want to kind of explain it to the folks what it is? Yeah. We were using a different documentation platform.

It's a very sticky subject, but we decided ... Once we heard that Autotask was coming out with this documentation manager, I thought, well, let's take a look at it, because our needs are not incredibly sophisticated, but it was ... We needed a place where we could store things like passwords and procedural documents and tie things into our configuration items. And since we're already using Datto RMM and the configuration items or installed assets or whatever you call them already comes into Autotask, so then we can take that and we tie it into the documentation manager. So when we're looking for something, whether it's a password or a document or an IP address or the name of a contact, we can go to that one place and everything we've decided is now in documentation manager.

And here's the best thing. I don't have to leave Autotask and open up another portal, which was probably my biggest complaint. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know what, Ryan?

That's exactly why it's my favorite thing, and that's exactly why I use it all the time as well. And I'm sure most people who are probably now frantically, if they're sitting in front of their computer, trying to find this documentation manager inside Autotask, it doesn't exist out of the box. It actually has to be turned on. So you've got to contact Datto and ask them to enable the documentation manager. And then as far as I'm aware, at the time we recorded this, as far as I'm aware, it is free, but you have to get them to enable it for you.

And then all you would simply do is, you know, you would just click on the little burger menu at the top and under the section that says home, you'll see documentation manager. And that's where you can then start to go in and actually create documents in a very similar way to what you would get with other documentation managers, because there are a bunch of them out there and allows you to kind of document everything that's on your customer side. So I thought that what we could do is maybe just go through some of the features of it. And before we do, can I just tell you how long it took me to find that underneath the home menu? The home menu is one of those menus that I just don't even consider a menu, right?

It just happens to be the first bar on that burger menu. And I've never even considered hovering over it. So there's actually quite a few things inside that menu, like the knowledge bases in there too. Who would have thought to go there, but anyway, it's on the home menu. Exactly.

I guess the home menu is the place where kind of everything else goes that doesn't have a place to go anywhere else, right? It's the kind of dumping ground for everything they couldn't figure out where else it's supposed to go. We'll just call them the redheaded stepchild, right? Exactly. Yeah.

And actually, just so you know, it can be accessible from other parts of the system as well. So things like directly from within a ticket and directly from within a customer on the CRM, you also have the ability to access the documentation manager directly from those modules as well. So what do you do, right? You get into the documentation manager and you enter in the name of the customer, your customer or your client, and the information that is already available appears. Now from there, you can add additional documents.

You can put in attachments, you can put in checklists, you can enter a URL, and that's where your story comes in really handy here, Chris, about how you use your documentation manager. Because I can tell you how I use it, but you were just telling me this offline and I think it's a great story that you should share. Absolutely. So the way I use it is I create documents. So every time I speak to any one of my customers, I document everything that we talk about inside the documentation manager within Autotask.

So things like logins, usernames, passwords, those kinds of things I put into the documentation manager. But the other thing I do is every time a customer signs their contract with me, I put those PDF copy of that into my SharePoint. And then what I do is I link the SharePoint into the documentation manager within Autotask. So when you build a new document, you'll see there's something that says reference link and that just allows you to put a URL in there. So I just simply put in my SharePoint URL, which means when I go to that customer record in the CRM and I click on documentation manager, it then presents me with all the documents I've got for that customer, but it also gives me a link directly to my SharePoint where I can go and access any of the other documents I need.

And I was working with a customer, in fact, the other day, in a lot of the stuff I do with clients is we put everything into Excel. So we have a little kind of project list that we run inside Excel and on things that we need to do and whether we've done them, we can do those in the checklists, which we do to some extent as well. But we were working with Excel in this particular instance and I put that Excel document onto my SharePoint and then linked it into the documentation manager. I then shared that document with the customer directly from Autotask and they were able to see all the documents that I wanted them to see and also were able to then access and collaborate on that SharePoint link as well. So one of the things you can do with the documentation manager is you can share it internally and you can also share the documents directly with your customers so they can access it from the portal.

And it's funny you brought that up because I was literally the next place I was going to go is that, you know, you can keep these documents internal and secure just based so that only your team can see it. But if you wanted to publish a list of, say, contact information or computer documentation, whatever, you can publish both of those to the customer portal so the customer can log in and see all of the documentation. No need to run a runbook, you can just simply give them access to all of the documentation that you want. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing that the documentation manager does, it actually links into the knowledge base and it also links into all of the configuration items as well.

So when you're talking about all of these things that you can share with the customer, all sorts of things like information about the configuration items, which have usernames and passwords and all these kinds of cool things in them, you can also have all of that stuff inside the document and document every configuration item and everything inside the documentation manager within Autotask. Yeah, and it's like one less place that you need to go or one less click or probably five less clicks, quite frankly. But if you're in the documentation manager and you want to check on one of the installed assets or the configuration items, there's your list of your configuration items with the names and click on the link and up pops the asset with all of the information. You can also show the domains and the SSL certificates. It really does a lot, even though documentation manager itself might not appear to have a lot of features and boxes for you to fill out, but it does link directly to those configuration items.

And that's where all of the real data is on each one of those pieces of hardware. Yeah. And, you know, the thing is, I know a lot of people and certainly a lot of people I've spoken to are using some other kind of third party documentation manager and don't want to switch to the Autotask one because they're using that. And that's great. To be fair, the third party documentation managers are great products.

They have been around for a long time, got a lot of features, and the one that's built into Autotask can look a little bit simple or, you know, very basic, but it's actually a very powerful system because it gives you the ability, as you say, to kind of keep everything in one place, everything inside your PSA where you're already working, as well as linking to all of your standard configuration items or installed assets. All of that kind of information is there inside the PSA. And I think it's only a matter of time until Datto actually develops that out to be a much more fully fledged documentation system, similar to some of the kind of the bigger ones out there. And like you said, the third party documentation managers, they are very powerful tools. And I know so many MSPs that just live and die by them.

And for my needs, I just didn't need something all that powerful. And I ended up using maybe 5% of the documentation manager that we were paying for. And I hated it. And the only reason that I hated it was because if I just needed one piece of information, I had to open up another portal, log in to a FAA, get in, find the customer, find the information I was looking for. It took me longer to actually get to the piece of information I was looking for than what I needed it for in the first place.

But having it here, everything right inside Autotask and it's all linked together, to me, that was better than sliced bread. But you did mention something, Chris, about being able to tie it into the knowledge base. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you tie it into the knowledge base? And maybe we could even just chat about the knowledge base because I bet there's a lot of people out there that don't know that exists either, or they just forget. Yeah.

So, I mean, the knowledge base and the documentation manager are actually very similar. They are very similar. They kind of have a very similar function where you could create a whole knowledge base article and share it with your customer directly through the documentation manager without even going into the knowledge base. What the knowledge base is good for is, for example, when you update a ticket, you can actually take that information from a ticket and directly create a knowledge base article from that and then reference it back to the ticket. And then because you can then link the ticket and the knowledge base article into a document, you then have the ability to say, if from a ticket, you've created a knowledge base article from your resolution, so there's actually an area inside the ticket that says append to resolution.

And what that append to resolution will do is that will create a section where that will become the resolution on your knowledge base article. So when you then, from within the ticket, click on new knowledge base article, it takes the description of the ticket and whatever you've got in the resolution and that creates your KB article, which again, you can share with customers, you can link to the tickets, you can do all of those kind of things. But it also forms part of your documentation. So now you can have that as a document within your normal documentation manager built into Autotask. So yeah, the knowledge base is great.

It's a great tool. And I think reading between the lines, because they vary similar and they kind of do almost the same type of job, I think it's only a matter of time until they become one and the same thing anyway. You're probably right. Can I just ask you one more question about the documentation manager? There's a number of things that you can do and I just, I wanted to have a conversation about how MSPs might use these things.

So for instance, when you're creating a new document in the documentation manager, you can attach it to certain tickets, hey, this document is related to this ticket or these five tickets. I can see how that would be really helpful when it comes to the customer, if it's set up for a specific customer. But there's another box underneath the related items and it's related clients. Is that just for parent and children or is this a generic internal document that could apply to multiple customers? I mean, what's your take on how that might be best used?

Yeah, so related accounts is basically, so when you publish this document, it does give you the ability to say publish to internal account or publish to internal and account. So you could actually publish this to either all customers or you can publish it to certain customers on that particular documentation. So all that related area down to the bottom is saying is, which accounts does this document relate to? And even if it was an internal document, you could say, you know, this could be a document that says, okay, this is how I set up this particular router or this is how I set up this particular telephone system or whatever the case might be. And we've got it installed at these five customers.

So these are the five customers that this particular documentation that we are, whatever this thing is for, these are the customers that this is relating to, just these five customers of ours. The related accounts and the related tickets gives you the ability to say, what is this document? Which entity is it related to? And then what you can also do from within that is you can then share it out to particular customers. So you can then go and say, you know, if it's for ABC Corporation, then go and share this document so that ABC Corporation can actually view the document.

Whereas the related accounts is kind of very much a case of it's my internal thing to say, which accounts does this, whatever this document is that I've created, who does it refer to and relate to? So when you're sending this document, though, you're required to put in a customer at the top, right? You create a new, you have to put in a customer, but you can relate the same document to multiple customers if it applies. Yeah. Yes, you can.

So, I mean, I'm just doing that now as we speak, and it's kind of giving me the ability to say, even though I've got the account entered as one of my particular clients, I'm saying this actually also relates to all of these other customers as well. That's what I was getting at, because I wasn't real clear on that. I don't know how much information I want to share between customers, but if we're talking about a procedural document, this is how to troubleshoot a Unifi appliance, then I could publish that to all of my Unifi appliance customers, right? Sure. But this related accounts is not necessarily you allowing those customers to see it.

This is you internally saying, okay, yes, it might be set up for this one customer at the top because it's kind of a document for them. And this could be where you might put your own company name in the main company at the top and say, okay, this is for Cendela Consulting or ABC. And then you can say, okay, well, now the same document also applies to all of these other customers because there's whatever it is, the Unifi device or a Draytek router or whatever is also at these customers. And I also need to access that information against those customers. All it means is that when you then go into the documentation, so from the CRM, there'll be a button against each customer that says documentation manager.

And if you click on there, it'll show you that document against that customer record in the CRM. Right. So you could put your internal procedural documents in underneath your company name and then almost tag, not really tag, but under the related customers or related companies, pick up all of the companies for which that procedure applies, right? And, you know, one of the other things I wanted to talk about on this is one of the things we missed out on here when it comes to setting these things up, and I use these all the time is tags. So the ability to actually tag the documents as whatever you want.

So if it's to do with Unifi or Draytek, or even if it's just this is how you guys set up this 3CX phone system, for example, you can tag the documents as all of those things. And then when you search it, you can go ahead and search for all of those tags as well. And Autotask has a whole bunch of tags already built in. So, you know, you can click the little finder thing and just looking at it now, there's, you know, there's 7,000 tags for the documentation that are built into the box, but you can actually create your own as well. So then it just allows this whole document to be completely searchable, again, across all of the clients and across the entire system.

So really, really good thing if you're not using tags. And actually, I would also just kind of jumping out of the documentation module, I would also recommend actually starting to use those tags in tickets as well, because it just gives you the ability to kind of really hone in your searching and allow you to search very, very specific terms for tickets, for, you know, documentation, for knowledge base, for all those kinds of things as well. Yes. Can I just throw in there that you should not be using serial numbers as a tag? You don't want to use one-time items as your tag, right?

Because there's other better places in the system to enter in your serial numbers and other one-time pieces of information, use a UDF or something like that. But don't gum up your tag list with a bunch of serial numbers or things that you will only ever use once. And equally, don't store any passwords actually inside the documentation manager. What you should be doing is using configuration items for those passwords, because then the fields that are inside that configuration item, you can actually secure and lock down those particular fields. So you could have a password field in there that can then be locked down and also only have access to certain people within the company.

So this is why you can link your configuration items into the documentation manager. So I always tell my clients, use the documentation manager for just general documents of how do I do this? Like you said, this procedural document, how do I log into this particular service or whatever it is? And document all of that information, but reserve your usernames and passwords to be stored against the configuration items, which are accessible from inside the documentation. Right.

You can link directly to that configuration item from inside the documentation manager. You don't have to go through a big, long cycle of find the customer, find the contract, find the configuration item, then click on it or anything like that, or even find the customer and go straight to the installed assets. If you're already in the documentation manager, you can go straight to the item, the asset, click on the link, and it's all going to be in front of you in a matter of seconds. Absolutely. And I mean, I'm just looking through mine now, and I literally have this.

So I have a documentation in here that talks about, actually, just looking at it now, it's the 3CX integration and how that works with Autotask. And I've linked that to a bunch of customers because I know that they are actually using that integration. And when I try and access the document, it then gives me the ability to say, do I want to, because it's actually stored on SharePoint. So one of the really nice things with this as well, if you've got the external link in there, like for SharePoint, when you click on the title of the document, it'll ask you if you actually want to go and look at the document inside SharePoint, or if you just want to view the document as a document inside Autotask as well. So you get the ability to do both.

So I normally say view document, then I can see all of the information about what that integration is about and how it works and all these things. And if I need the document, it gives me much more information. I can click on continue to site, and then it'll actually go to my SharePoint site and access that document. This was an interesting conversation. I know that there's lots of people that have been interested in the documentation manager, probably don't trust it because it's a brand new feature of Autotask.

And of course, you do have to specifically request it from your Autotask rep, but you can do that right inside your system now, right? So if you go to the support, but you just need to add on a feature, there's a little option in the dropdown as to what your support ticket is about. Yeah. And basically, there is an option that when it gets enabled, if you click on the burger menu and go to admin, and then you've got activations, and you can actually click on the little box as to which one of those features you want to have activated. So you can turn on and off certain things once they've been activated from Autotask.

So Autotask will set them up in the background and turn on documentation, for example, and then you can choose to actually have it activated or not activated on your systems. And the other thing is, you say about a lot of people are kind of looking at this, and I would really recommend everybody to at least reach out to your Datto rep and get the documentation manager turned on. And the reason for that being is that firstly, it's free, right? So it's a no-brainer to kind of at least investigate and at least look into it. And secondly, I think over time, Autotask is eventually going to, or Datto is eventually going to develop that out, and it's going to become a much more powerful documentation manager like some of the third-party ones out there.

And why would you not want to have that built into your PSA tool where you're working every day with tickets, with customers, opportunities, all that kind of stuff? Why would you want to go into your third-party documentation tool to do that when you can access it directly from Autotask and it's free? So it's kind of a no-brainer, really. Yeah. And it's, you know, since it's automatically connected to your configuration items, at this point, you could really just give your team members the option.

If they just need information from the configuration item, they could pull it straight from the documentation manager. If they need information that is only in your documentation third-party tool, then they can always go out to that portal. But there's going to be a lot of information that's automatically already in the system because, you know, it's already in your PSA. Exactly. And that's the point, right?

Is because it's free and it's built in and it's just a matter of them flicking a switch, I would absolutely say that everybody should at least have it turned on and at least start to have a look at it. And, you know, who knows where it's going to go eventually. So, yeah, I mean, what a great topic to talk about. And if anybody that's listening to this wants to speak to us about Documentation Manager, they can either reach out to you directly or reach out to me, or they can reach out to us through the website. And this leads me into, you know, saying if there's any MSPs out there that want to come onto our podcast and talk to us about how they're using any part of the system, right?

Whether that be, you know, the documentation manager, have you actually started using it? If you have, how have you implemented it? How are you using it? We'd love to hear from you. And I'm sure there's many other MSPs out there that would actually love to hear how other MSPs use this product as well.

So, you know, call out to anyone that is listening that wants to come on our podcast. I would love to have a bunch of MSPs come on and join us and just, you know, tell us how they're doing things. Because that's what this entire IT community is about. It's sharing the information and doing things better and helping the next guy do something better. We learn from each other.

I've been learning from this IT community for the last 20 years. And every day, I'm always amazed that I learned something new. Actually, you know, it's quite funny you say that because both you and I are consultants. We've been working with the Autotask and Datto products for a very, very long time. I pretty much feel like I've grown up with this tool and I've used it since, you know, since its inception.

And I was actually talking to a client the other day about something and they actually showed me something in Autotask I didn't actually even know was there. And I was like, you know how cool that is to actually be on a call with a customer and then saying, actually, did you know it can do this? And I was like, wow, I didn't even know that there was a particular thing. Well, I knew it was there. I just didn't, I never sort of used a particular feature.

So I didn't realize how it worked. And actually, one of my clients actually got me onto using the documentation because they were saying, have you got any experience in the documentation manager? And at the time I said, no, I didn't really know much about it. They were telling me about it and how they started using it, which made me investigate it further. So now I can go out and help other people about that.

So that's what I love so much about this industry. And that's why I'd love to get some MSPs on here and prove us wrong, right? Show us stuff when we might've said something in previous episodes that there might be different ways of doing things or there might be other ways that, you know, you can do things a lot better than what we've said. We'd love to hear from you and we'd love people to come on and have a chat with us. Absolutely.

Yeah. It wouldn't be the first time somebody proved me wrong. Probably not even the first time today. Absolutely. Absolutely.

But what a fun episode this was. And I love everything PSA, as you know, I think everyone who's listened to this will know that every aspect of the system is my favorite thing. So, you know, it's been great talking to you again, Rayanne. Yeah, absolutely. And all I can say, like always, is your PSA is the key to your MSP success.

So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris. Cheers. Thanks, Rayanne. Cheers.

Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners.