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)
Smallpdf
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Made in Switzerland, Smallpdf is a company that offers a suite of document management tools for everyone-for work, for home, for life. Founded in Switzerland in 2013, Smallpdf provides what they describe as a simple, secure, and reliable answer to the world's PDF challenges. Smallpdf boasts serving over a billion users in 24 different languages since 2013, and in every country in the world.
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.
I would suggest Smallpdf for simple needs in terms of PDFs management that can be [easily] resolved such as: size compression, deleting of pages and file conversions. This tool is very user-friendly and easy to use, it is available online so the user doesn't need to download any software. In case of heavy files compression, the tool isn't appropriate since it doesn't support heavy documents.
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.
One of the best things that Smallpdf does is pdf conversion both to and from pdf. It is especially great to transform pdf tables into Excel documents.
PDF splitting is really great since allows for cropping large files and just keep the information necessary; something that comes really handy when presenting information to your supervisors.
PDF merging also works wonders, it allows for mixing several different pdf documents into just one of them. It is extremely easy to set up.
This a really fast pdf reader, it feels really fast compared to other options that tend to feel clunky. Its workspace is super comfortable and well organized so finding a tool you need is always a simple task.
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.
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.
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.
Its usability in my work is very important. I have to share various documents with my clients very frequently and most of the documents I send them are in PDF format only. So I use this software very much to convert my Word and Excel files into PDF. And whenever I need to send large file to my clients, I convert them into PDFs and compress them with this tool and then I send those files to my clients.
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.
1.- Because it is easy to use and each function is duly indicated so you can not go wrong. 2.- Its service is fast, it takes only a few seconds to transform the files and in less than a minute it is downloaded and you can occupy it without problem. 4.-This IS online so you do not install anything, which is very useful because you can also use it from a tablet or your mobile
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.)
Everything is so simple and works so well, you shouldn't need support, but on the one occasion in several years that I needed it, support was quick and courteous.
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.
As per my understanding, Smallpdf stacks up against the above tool because it is easy to use, the targeted goal only for pdf, handy, and one more thing is that small pdf has created the application for android and iOS. I really found Smallpdf helpful when using it on the fly. Small pdf not only provides for the PDF it also provides the different functions for the other files like excel, HTML, doc, ppt, and many more.
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.
From an initial cost perspective, we've gone from a collection of free and freemium software products that we used in combination to do what we wanted, to paying Smallpdf's per-user license fee.
We estimate that creating the same final product with our old method took about 30 minutes per 1-100 page file. We are now down to approximately 10 minutes, if the input material does not require much manipulation.
Around 50% of tasks used to require advice from a highly-technical user to fix unexpected errors. With Smallpdf we estimate we are now down to less than 20%.
For things that Smallpdf cannot do we find ourselves falling back to old methods which can sometimes create wasted time when we only realize that Smallpdf is not up to the task in the middle of the job.
