Version 3.0 of their software will significantly enhance ease of use for the company’s MSP and VAR partners, and also will facilitate white labelling of the product.
Colin Knox, Passportal’s founder and CEO
Calgary-based Passportal, which provides password protection services to MSP and VAR partners globally, has announced Passportal 3.0, the latest version of its software. It features significant enhancements to ease of use, and also will facilitate white labelling of the product once Passportal launches a “Rebrand and Resell” program in several weeks.
Passportal provides companies with online password management services which, unlike enterprise solutions on the market, are designed for MSPs rather than a single enterprise, and are priced at a level smaller MSPs can afford. It is more secure and effective than using Excel spreadsheets or PSA systems to store passwords, and is particularly valuable when someone leaves the company, and all the passwords need to be changed.
“The enhancements in version 3.0 are mainly about usability and convenience,” said Colin Knox, Passportal’s founder and CEO. The 2.0 upgrade was back in June 2013, with several minor releases since then, so for this release Passportal hired a human factoring expert, who studies human reaction and response, to suggest enhancements that today’s users would expect and prefer.
“The result is that things are more readily available now where people would expect them to be by nature,” Knox said. “People are used to left side menus now so we added that, and they are used to finding an Office-like ribbon along the top, so we added a floating top bar as well.”
Another more intuitive restructuring is that making user permission changes is now done under the User section instead of under a global setting, as before.
Knox is confident that because these changes are intuitive, existing partners won’t be confused by the new interface.
“We did beta testing with our partner advisory group and had no issues with people finding things,” he said.
Import, export and reporting capabilities, particularly around industry compliance standards like PCI, HIPAA and SOX, have also been enhanced.
“We have also optimized the entire system for performance,” Knox said. “It’s much faster now.”
Passportal plans to launch a “Rebrand and Resell” program that lets partners white label their offering, and the back-end work to facilitate this is all part of version 3.0
“We have made the interface fully white-labelled capable now, so people can start playing with it,” Knox said. These enhancements extend beyond the ability to brand, and include cross-platform and cross-group password sharing, single sign on and one click log ins for web based applications and services, and building in the personal passwords and portals so that they are fundamental vaults within the system, and not simply a tool the MSP would use.
Passportal’s partners will get automatically updated with the new software for free, although Knox indicated that if they want, they will be able to use the old platform for a period until they are fully comfortable with the new one.
A major component of Passportal’s strategy this year is to extend their reach by partnering up with additional platform vendors. They had previously been partnered with Autotask, and earlier this year they announced a new integration with ConnectWise.
“We are now a certified integration with ConnectWise, and we have also teamed up separately with both Autotask and LogicNow to host some training webinars to the partner community,” Knox said. These demonstrate the business value of using Passportal to partners.
“We are also in discussions with a couple more RMM players on integrations and mutual partnerships,” Knox said.
