IT Glue, a Kaseya company since the December 2018 acquisition, is an information management platform that allows for efficient storage and retrieval of all the documentation an organization needs to help their MSP run better. By integrating PSA and RMM data, the vendor says they can help increase efficiency, and reduce onboarding times.
$29
per month per user (5 user minimum)
M‑Files
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
M-Files is a platform for knowledge work automation. M-Files helps knowledge workers to find information faster, work smarter, and achieve more. M-Files features a metadata-driven architecture, embedded workflow engine, and advanced artificial intelligence that enable customers to eliminate information chaos, improve process efficiency, and automate security and compliance. By embedding automation and GenAI into its core, M-Files' platform not only increases efficiencies…
IT Glue is well suited to any size managed service provider that requires a secure central knowledge base. IT Glue also integrates well with N-Central to automatically populate the configurations tab with all the relevant Workstation, Printer, and Server information making client on-boarding a breeze.
M‑Files is great for companies with multiple locations. Drive letters can become cumbersome to use and collaborate with colleagues and M‑Files fills that gap. The check out/check in system is great and allows only one editor at a time. This can be good and bad depending on the situation.
Flexible Assets are custom questions or forms that you get to create to keep the kind of documentation that *you* want. Our team has done this, and have developed a comprehensive system in our documentation that is better than anything we've ever had.
Tagging. This feature is so helpful when interlinking related items in the documentation system. IT Glue makes it so easy to tag other configurations, including printers, firewalls, phones, etc.
Public sharing of knowledge base articles. Often our clients need to know how to do something. We can add pictures, step-by-step walkthroughs that save us and them a ton of time.
iFrame embedding. There's some flexibility to the web pages that have been helpful for putting other things, such as Cognito Forms in.
So far we have enjoyed the functionality of ITG with one exception:
The search feature is severely lacking. We have thousands of articles in this knowledge base but the search window is about 1" wide and only shows the first few words of each article. Within our system, those first few words are often the same "SYSTEMS: How-To...". If we are searching for a system, we will have no alternative but to manually try to find this document by browsing through folders within ITG.
Unfortunately ITG has not responded to a flurry of enhancement requests around this feature, that go back quite a while.
The functionality that would make this a killer app for us would be a dedicated search page that displayed results like a Google search page.
Ability to export all client documentation if the client moves to another provider.
More user friendly customization options that do not require knowledge of coding/scripting. For example, prompting the creation of a new document from a template in a workflow.
When using the 'insert property' feature in a Word doc, I would love to convert dates from a mm/dd/yy format to be written out (such as September 21, 2018). Or possibly even just to pull the year or the month from a selected date to insert into a document.
I've often wished that I could find more detailed tutorials online for some features.
Overall IT Glue meets every need that we need it to. IT is easy to use and convenient and we have not had very many issues with it since the inception. I would easily recommend it to anyone who needs this software.
M-files meets our almost all needs, we dont have other option to replace m-files. it saves lots, like Hardware because of Vault Feature means we can create many vaults (mini-servers) in m-files in other solutions we need more hardware for more installations.
The interface is excellent and very easy to use. As long as the text you input into the system can be easily read, you will have no problem finding it with all the different categories offered. Sometimes, the slider on the right can blend in with dark backgrounds, making it hard to see.
It is a powerful system that can locate content fast and effectively. The system takes quite some time to setup initially. It can be hard for M-Files support to know how businesses operate and how they want to use the system in a way that works for them. The customization makes it great for companies to cater to their own needs. Once the system is set up in a way that makes sense for the business, the user experience is positive. There is room for improvement in the notifications, workflow, and support areas.
Other than a few access outages, ITGlue is always up and available to us. Their ability to export Playbook, that contain our customers data, and securely send those over to them is amazing and are produced pretty fast. We have IT Glue linked with several other services and software and we have not found that it slows anything down.
I noticed some lagging with the integration with Microsoft Office but not so much that I would not use it. It has gotten better with updates. to be fair the issues were when Office 2013 first came out.
No problems with support when needed it. Their answers on how to handle DR/BC situations when ITG is down are not stellar. They don't seem to get the business risks of their suggestions to just give the xls backup to engineers (aka give all passwords of ALL clients to engineers in an unencrypted flat-file where it is easy to copy, print, etc.)
Usually when I need help from them I got support and it was very good and focused to solve my problem. I didn't have so many problems, but when used it worked. I just would like to have a support in my native language, but I can understand that sometimes is hard for the companies.
The key insight is that the most important thing is to have a open mind. The application is easy to use, but if you have a company with different views and it is not aligned could be a huge problem. So the company transformation is required together with the application. Ensure to use as much as possible the capabilities of the application helps to have best ROI.
Currently, we are evaluating using Sharepoint instead of IT Glue as documents and items are searchable within the document instead of by title. We feel that by only searching by title and the type it hinders the speed at which information can be found easily.
I've compared recently with Box, but they still predicate their storage on WHERE instead of WHAT, which means if it isn't in a specific folder, you won't find it. Some documents may relate to multiple projects. In M-Files instead of putting a copy of a file in many folders (thus having many copies) you can build out the relationships, so there is only 1 copy of a document which prevents multiple "originals" from being developed separately.
We've had a number of false starts on getting all of our clients' assets documented. The culture shift just has not happened yet and there is a general lack of trust in the data.
It's nice to not have to go hunting for information about client assets anymore. We can be much more productive this way.
The price we pay for M-Files is about one third less than the price that we were paying our previous vendor plus we have a custom-built amazing dependable system with great support.
From a compliance and legal standpoint, our policies are always available to end users including easy access to previous versions.
