IT Glue has announced four new features to their product, at the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect event where ConnectWise announced the acquisition of ITBoost, one of IT Glue’s competitors.
Nadir Merchant, IT Glue’s General Manager
ORLANDO – At the IT Nation Connect show here, IT Glue has announced four new features to their product. The most important of them, Office Cloud Editor, enables the editing of Microsoft Office documents within IT Glue. Efficiency is also improved by a new feature for the company’s Network Glue product, which provides MSPs with more visibility into the structure of clients’ networks. The two security features are Vault, which introduces host-proof hosting that gives the end user full control over encryption, and a new password rotation feature designed to keep passwords fresh.
“We are going after two big themes with this feature release,” said Nadir Merchant, IT Glue’s General Manager. “One of them is operational efficiency, which is a constant concern and includes the Network Glue and Office enhancements. The other focus is security, and how we can make this the most secure platform possible. That’s where Vault and the password rotation come in.”
The new Office Cloud Editor feature which enables live online editing of Microsoft Office documents. It extends the GlueFile capability that let users upload, store and manage files within IT Glue.
“The limitation with GlueFiles was that there was no way to edit files in IT Glue,” Merchant said. “Now you can make edits and they are saved back to IT Glue at the same time. This is really about driving operational efficiency.”
Merchant said that this capability is a direct result of IT Glue becoming a Microsoft Cloud Storage Partner.
“We started development after getting into the program, but development wasn’t done until September,” he noted. “At that point we were waiting final from Microsoft’s stringent approval process, and that has now been given.”
Office Cloud Editor is a premium feature available to all IT Glue Enterprise partners.
“We have three tiers of IT Glue – Basic, Select and Enterprise,” Merchant said. “The Enterprise tier features unlimited integrations, while the integrations on the lower tier plans are limited. – We think of this as similar to an integration.”
The other operational enhancement is to the Network Glue network documentation product, Network Glue that the company announced in May. It adds ‘New Port’ and ‘Connected To’ fields within IT Glue configuration documentation.
“What these will do is help to solve a network-related problem, where you want to see what port and what devices it is connected to.” Merchant said. “This allows the network to be scraped so you can figure those things out. This is something that we always wanted to do, but just took some time to get to after we launched Network Glue in May.”
The security enhancements begin with a limited release of Vault, a new feature. Vault introduces host-proof hosting, and gives IT Glue users the exclusive ability to decrypt passwords at the endpoint level with a user-specific passphrase.
“This gives the end user full control of encryption,” Merchant said. “IT Glue has no way to get at it.”
The other security enhancement is password rotation, and comes from an integration with North Vancouver-based startup Quickpass [who is also at the IT Nation Connect event, at Booth #705].
“Quickpass launched earlier this year, and focuses on password management for Microsoft Active Directory,” Merchant said.
The new password rotation feature increases security by keeping passwords fresh with randomly-generated new ones, and updates passwords automatically so that techs do not have to do it manually.
IT Glue has been a long-time ConnectWise partner, since they initially launched at this same show back in 2015. Since then they have been acquired by ConnectWise competitor Kaseya, although like Kaseya’s other acquisitions over the last two years, IT Glue has remained separate in its structure so as not to imperil its non-Kaseya business. One of the highlights of IT Nation Connect this year was ConnectWise’s acquisition of ITBoost, a Dallas-based competitor of IT Glue, which is much more junior in its growth trajectory, and which is being directly integrated into the ConnectWise portfolio.
Merchant doesn’t think this will have much impact on IT Glue’s business with ConnectWise MSPs.
“IT Glue is an open platform, and we integrate with 18 RMM vendors and 5-6 PSA vendors,” he said. “We have no plans to change that. We are actively strengthening our ConnectWise integration, integrating the REST API. ConnectWise partners have really embraced us since we launched here in 2015 and we don’t expect that to change.
“ITBoost has between 200-300 customers, and we have 7500 now,” Merchant added. “They have a lot of work to do.”
IT Glue is one of the event’s Platinum Exhibitors, and is at Booth #605.
