HotDocs is a document automation and assembly software product, acquired and now supported by AbacusNext since 2017.
$25
per user/per month
IT Glue
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
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.
It is well suited in the organisations which deals with lots of paper work like legal, teaching, research, etc as they need similar kind of documents again and again. In a typical office set up it is of great use by human resource, marketing and legal department. Hot docs is not suitable if you have a proprietary or solo business as it do not caters to them.
It is best suited for an MSP but it is also best not suited for an MSP. It is well suited for folks with a minimal knowledge of a client and are attempting to learn what they can. Perhaps just bumbling about and can find the same thing consistently. At my particular work, we pay somebody full time to manage the system. I feel this is unnecessary.
Personalized training. We were able to get an expert on a video call who walked us through solutions to each of our unique problems (i.e. all fifty states have different notary blocks, how can we auto-populate it when the state of the deal is selected?).
Team access. Multiple people can work with the templates at once, thus allowing the members of our team who deal with financials to work on their documents while others focus on the organizational and legal documents.
Once you have successfully drafted your templates, it runs incredibly smooth (barring any minor hiccups that happen with software updates) and efficiently.
The UI has been set up perfectly, there is a sub-menu for every possible bit of information you wish to store.
There are a number of excellent features such as the autohiding passwords and quick searching from anywhere on the page.
The recent addition of the IT Glue is also an excellent feature, it features online self-guided courses to become a certified IT Glue user.
You can create and group custom documents together.
IT Glue can be integrated with a number of platforms such as Autotask.
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.
Like many other MSPs we had the majority of our SOPs and KBs in Word docs. The best case scenario would be to simply drop those files directly into ITG without having to import them into the ITG documentation format. The import function is so broken as to not be an option because it completely ruins formatting and tends to drop images. Thus we have to manually copy/paste text and individually upload each image.
They marketed the product as having true branding but that is stretching the truth. SSL is not an option so client-facing documents will give security errors in browsers. ITG does not appear to be concerned about this even though security is a major concern for all MSPs.
Easy to train and use. Everything is in the same place. Multi factor authentication and access from anywhere make secure and convenient. Can do my job with out it. It also has a free read and paid write option for the client. We up sell this option making it a money maker as well.
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 haven't had to contact HotDocs very often for support. I suppose I rated them mid-level simply because I would like to see more online training options or white papers to view to assist with learning. I want to understand how to do something versus having it done for me.
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.)
I haven't evaluated other products. We are so used to HotDocs that it would be difficult for us to switch to something else. We continue to use HotDocs because switching cost is high once you have already started. Be careful before beginning to use this program, as it is hard to breakaway.
We chose IT Glue particularly because it's tailored to IT documentation. As a managed IT service provider, it's perfectly in line with what we were looking for. The flexibility and tagging in particular were the kind of features we were looking for. Confluence is very good, and can be used for a number of things, not just IT documentation, but IT Glue shines for that.
