This is an introduction to the key concepts of IT Glue: Core Assets, Flexible Assets, and Documents. These are the foundations of the design and optimization of your entire account structure.

With IT Glue, you have a way to take the information that may be cluttering up other systems and structure it properly inside IT Glue, to provide a more effective organization of information to your team. You can think of IT Glue like adding a flexible shelving system to a cluttered home office. By organizing and labeling the shelves in a logical way, you're improving efficiency.

In this guide, you'll learn how to create a structure that can be easily navigated, which will help you eliminate the most frustrating aspect of any system: not being able to find information. You also don't want to run the chance of creating more information than is needed, spread out all over your account, by not spending any time designing the structure. If that happens, your team won't be able to find the information they need. Plus, with a well designed navigation system, you won't have the training headache later since the structure and the way information is stored will be very intuitive.

In this guide, you'll learn:

Core Assets are used to build and support the applications and services you manage for your clients. Core Asset forms and fields can't be modified or changed.

You can populate the configurations, locations, and contacts using your PSA.

If not using a PSA, the configurations, locations and contacts can be manually entered or imported from CSV/spreadsheets or your RMM.

If you need configuration items and other information to appear within distinct sub-organizations, you can easily create this parent/child relationship in IT Glue. Generally, you will want to reflect this structure in your PSA and RMM, if integrated with IT Glue, before making changes to IT Glue.

Note that if you are bringing in information from other systems, make sure you sanitize it as much as possible. Also, whatever you bring in to IT Glue should be information you need to support your current clients.

Core Assets are the building blocks of your account that you document before anything else. Once they are captured in IT Glue, you can make a structured, logical arrangement of this information (plus add more information) using flexible assets.

In other words, you can apply the glue that will stick it all together!

The Core Assets can be linked in a way that will create relevant and logical relationships. These relationships keep information retrieval time down to a minimum (to just one or two clicks away), which creates efficiency, increases billable hours, and ultimately drives performance.

The key to building these relationships are the custom fields and forms known as Flexible Assets.

Flexible Assets are used to document information about the applications and services you manage for your clients. Flexible Assets can be completely customized to fit your team's information needs at the current stage of your organizational maturity. They are also the cornerstone to standardizing documentation across every organization you work with.

Things you might capture in a Flexible Asset to support your team:

Several templates are available for download within the app, including:

Remember these templates were designed with input from MSPs. However, you're very welcome to design your own Flexible Assets. A best practice is to always ask yourself "how will my information be best presented to my team" instead of asking "how does IT Glue need me to document information."

Once you have your Flexible Asset forms and fields designed the way you want, Flexible Asset data will need to be manually added. If you have a lot of previously created data that you want to add as Flexible Assets, you can also import information from CSV/spreadsheets.

Take a look back through what you've done with your Flexible Assets and admire what you've accomplished so far. Make sure you have checked off all your structured documentation needs and wants. Your Core and Flexible Assets make up about 70% of what is needed to make your tech team efficient. The remaining approximately 30% will be in the Documents area of IT Glue.

After you have your Flexible Assets fully designed, you can focus on how to design a Knowledge Base structure for your documents. The Developing your internal knowledge base topic is useful reading to you at this stage.

Documents are where your team will access your processes and procedures and any other long form documentation that needs to be created. This can be internal documentation that probably only your team will look at, or external documents that can be shared with non-authenticated users. Once these documents are created in IT Glue, they are fully indexed for search and can be linked to any asset where there is relevant context.

The sidebar on the left-hand side of the screen when you're viewing an organization is displayed consistently for every organization. If well designed, this will increase standardization and save in search time. Consider how to arrange the assets in the sidebar to support your team's efficiency. We generally suggest that core assets are grouped under a Core Assets heading and the Flexible Assets under an Apps & Services heading. For more information, see Organizations sidebar.

You have one other navigational aid you can use. On the right-hand side of the screen when you're viewing an asset is the Related Items section. This feature can be used to help your team navigate between closely related components. Our Relationship mapping (related items/tagging) article has a good explanation of how to use this section.

As an example of how to document one of your services, here is a bare bones overview of the steps to take to document an email service from start to finish:

Core Assets

Flexible Assets

Documents

Now that you know how to use the key components of IT Glue, you’re on your way to documentation nirvana. Creating an easily navigated structure is not only helpful to your team on a day-to-day basis, but it also helps you become a more efficiently run MSP.

As always, if you have questions about anything in this guide or IT Glue in general, we’re always here for you.