Sean Wallbridge
What
Over the years, we have used dozens of management products. They’ve all tried to shoehorn us into delivering IT “their way”. You know, Managed Services, MSP, blah blah blah. Well, Victoria has demonstrated repeatedly that they don’t want this type of service (and in this Cloud First world, nor do many others up to a certain size or shape).
So What
At itgroove, we strive to “get it working for you” in regards to business and our customers. And because of that, we’ve built our own systems (in SharePoint and Office 365) to manage the day to day (increasing) volume of information we need to store. Further to that, we’ve been very careful in selecting systems that allow us to do our job quickly, reliably and completely under our control.
Today, we’ve added the last piece to that system – Power Admin. It now completes our “big picture” and replaces some systems that would have it “their way” or the “MSP Way” (um, no thanks).
Here’s what we have in place and why:
The Orb
Anytime anything requires someone’s attention and has some urgency, we light up the Orb (think of it like a Bat Signal)
SharePoint
This is our hub of information. Everything goes in and out of SharePoint, with a little help from Nintex Workflows
Yammer
Empowers our people to communicate and stay in touch about issues so everybody knows what’s going on, at all times. We even send notifications to Yammer from our 3rd party systems (such as Power Admin)
Screen Connect
We have our own platform for connecting to our customers servers that is 100% in our control and 100% easy for our customers to use
Servers Alive!
This one’s an old guilty pleasure of mine. We use this for “outside looking in” monitoring. I’ve been using this since 1999 when this (At the time) $99 piece of software beat out HP Open View ($50k!) to meet the needs of a customer at the time
Power Admin
This is our “inside calling out” platform. This is for calling home and ensuring our customers systems are up, running and 100% under our control.
Now What
Here’s a brief visual tour of some of these bits plugged in and tied together to create the synergy we have in place now.
The Heads Up Display
Here’s our Dashboard (powered by SharePoint of course), pointing out everything that matters. We’ve baked the systems uptime stuff (Power Admin and Severs Alive!) right into that thang)
Light It Up!
Yep, there’s the bat signal. This tells us to check out the system because something ain’t right – and then we’re on it
Mobility
Always on the phone these days, might as well know what’s going on there too eh?
Real time health on the phone. Prognosis good!
Team Work Out Loud
Yammer and our “Yammer Notifier” gives us the ability to discuss/collaborate on each issue, from wherever we are on, whatever device or platform we are on. Everyone is plugged in.
All Tied Together
And finally, it all comes together in our Portal. Someone starting with us today would know how to get started right away. Everything is there. Giddyup.
