Transcript
faces coming into the call today. For those of you that haven't joined us before, my name is Daniel. I'm an account manager for Hoodoo and I'm here with Jordan, who is one of Hoodoo's product managers. And we typically, obviously, like to do these monthly trainings in a way that is super interactive. And so we have the chat open and the Q&A open and open for any and all questions today. This monthly training is, I think, like the fifth or sixth one we've done. So we typically like to focus these on different topics. This one is going to be focused primarily on user management. And so as we go through this again, we have some specific talking points that we're going to go through. But as questions come in, we'll make sure to get those answered for you today. So yeah, hopefully everyone's enjoying their Friday as we get close to Thanksgiving here and kind of some of the other holidays. Jordan, anything you want to add here? You know, not too much. As you said, my name is Jordan Hart. I'm a product manager here at Hoodoo. Excited to get rolling on the training and see what we can talk about today. Yeah. So it does look like our numbers have started to fill out today. So we're going to go ahead and jump in. Now, I will say this training on user management, we have, you know, we've essentially, we scheduled this for an hour just to give adequate time for making sure that any and all questions get answered. But, you know, depending on the time, we'll definitely go about 30 minutes here and then stick on and answer any questions and make sure that, you know, again, all those questions get answered. But just to let you know, you know, there may be an earlier ending today, depending on our questions that we get. So I'm going to jump right in here and kind of start talking about our user management side of things. Again, today's agenda introductions, we kind of went over ground rules. We typically say that in these monthly training webinars that, you know, we want the content to be specifically focused on the topic at hand in this instance, user management. So any and all questions about that specific topic, feel free to ask them in the chat or the Q&A. And, you know, if you do have questions pertaining to that topic, of course, we're going to answer those. Anything else, you know, feature questions and everything that maybe doesn't pertain to this specific topic, we'll definitely have other webinars that we host that are kind of better suited for questions like that. We'll go over an overview of our documentation series. Then most of the time today will be spent inside of Hoodoo itself, kind of walking through some of the user management items and best practices that we've seen. And then we'll talk about some resources. And of course, Q&A is kind of through the entire thing. So our documentation series, kind of what is it? Basically each quarter we focus on a specific topic and we release blogs, tips and tricks, some downloadable resources. We do partner webinars and AMAs through that series. And so this quarter has been focused on maintaining your documentation. And this specific monthly training is, of course, focused on user management. So now we're going to jump into the platform and kind of explore some of the both internal user management and external user management that Hoodoo kind of has within the tool. So jumping into the platform here, we're first going to start on the internal user management side of things. So those users that you are directly adding into Hoodoo. As I jump into our admin page here and into the users section, here's where you'll see all of your users that you have invited internally into Hoodoo. Jordan's also went ahead and linked our blog for, he'll link the blogs for managing your end users as well as your internal users. So you can kind of see, you know, if you want to review those blogs and see a little more of what I'm talking about today, this content will stem directly from kind of what we've talked about within those blogs, but obviously shown in a more visual manner. So with our users here, I'm going to jump right into once we've added a user and specified their role levels and everything like that, they'll be in this list view of Hoodoo here. And once I click into one of my users here, we have our user page. You can, you know, see things like what role level they are, what security measures have been enabled, when they, how many times they've signed in and when they were created. And we'll explore kind of a lot of the features and functionality of this page throughout the training today, including groups and permissions and all of that. So starting off here with permissions, because that's going to be typically the first thing you want to do with your user management. And when you're adding users into Hoodoo, Hoodoo makes it really easy to have those group permissions established. As soon as you invite your users in one of our more recent updates, which allows you to do this is going to be the ability to have users be a part of multiple groups. So you can see here that this invited user that we have, we've already assigned them to three different groups, the default group, a level two group, and our previously ungrouped users. Now I wanted to keep this here just to highlight that for a lot of you that may be utilizing Hoodoo, this change added the, this group for you previously ungrouped users. Essentially, this is just the group that all of your users got added to if they weren't part of a group when this update released. So just so you know, again, if you were previously using Hoodoo and a user wasn't currently part of a group when this update released, they got added to this previously ungrouped users group here. So just wanted to mention that as we go through things, but essentially, again, I can go through, I can add this user to however many groups that I want them to be utilizing those groups levels, whether they be, you know, allowing them to see specific companies or denying them to see specific companies. And of course, all of the group restrictions applied. These permissions and groups created, as I jump into one of our groups here, you'll see that it takes me to that group where again, I can manage the companies that that group has access to. I can set specific restrictions, you know, on the more broad scale of things like removing access to specific asset layouts, company passwords, my vault, et cetera. I can also set login schedules for that group. And I will say that in addition, I'm not going to be talking too much about permissions today, but if you, if we haven't announced it yet, our next quarter focus is actually going to be on security. So a lot of those items like permissions and other security related items and who do will be addressed more in the next quarter. Again, no more than happy to answer any questions about this today as well. So again, as it's a best practice is definitely to have these groups created and we recommend what we see frequently that is helpful is setting groups by similar user role level. So if you have specific technicians that all pretty much are going to have, you know, the same kind of role level within your company. A lot of the times it makes sense to have a group for those technicians. That way, as soon as you maybe add a new technician, they can just funnel right into that group's permissions. And it makes it super easy to ensure that those users are only accessing the things that you want them to. Now, one really nice thing who do offers is the ability to impersonate a user. So of course I can set these group permissions and make sure that you know, I think that I have a good idea of what this person can access, but impersonating that user will actually show me what that user can access. You see now that I don't give this user access to the global KB. They don't have access to the admin tools here. When I jump into companies, you see they only have access to one company that we've provided them here. So again, it makes it super easy to see what this user can truly see. As I jump into the company, now I can see exactly what they're able to view. They don't have access to some of the things that I have given to them. Like if I jump into passwords, maybe some passwords are different here. A password folder is missing because of the permissions that we have applied to that user. Jumping into a little more on password folders, because this is going to be another big part of user management. One nice thing who do allows you to do is set passwords at password folders at a global level, making sure that you can apply those group permissions at that folder level rather than the password level themselves. So if I have a admin password folder that I don't want anyone under that role level to see, I can set that globally and then easily just move in the passwords to that folder and the permissions are already going to be applied. As I jump into that folder itself, you can see exactly which groups have access to that folder. So that's kind of some security and permissions related things with your user management. And I will touch a little bit more on some of the other things that you have on this user page here. A couple other nice things that you're able to do with your user management is archive users if they ever decide to leave your company and reset their password as needed. So again, this makes it very easy to manage your users when they are when you are offboarding them or anything like that. You can do those things. You can edit the user if you maybe have a user get promoted and have a new role level within your group. And then you can also of course see the leaderboard for what documentation they are actually accessing, editing, being a part of. So the leaderboard can be a really great way to kind of gamify your documentation. In our admin section here, one of our documentation tools is going to be that leaderboard where I can see each of our users inside of Hoodoo and what they are doing within our documentation. I can see all time that Michael Scott is the leader for our documentation with the white shirt coming in a very close second. And Creed is falling a little behind here at third, typical Creed fashion. I can also check the last 30 days and the last 90 days as well. So again, this can be a great way to apply some gamification within your internal users. We've seen some companies do a reward system for documenting, and this can be a great way to kind of keep track of that if you're doing a monthly or quarterly basis for that gamification. Last thing I'll touch on with internal user management is going to be our activity feed and revision history with inside of Hoodoo, because this is definitely a part of internal user management, making sure that your internal users are doing the things that they need to be doing as well as making sure that those changes are logged. So within your global activity logs here, you can sort by company, action, user, and IP address. So for instance, if I wanted to see Creed for instance, and I wanted to see each time Creed has deleted a password, for instance, I can see that maybe this test data password, for instance, we get a ticket come in and there's questions about that password or anything like that, and we can't find it within our instance. Well, we can then go sort in, see those deleted passwords and see that Creed deleted this password on this specific date. Again, having that full log of all of the activity within our documentation platform. The revision history component of things will apply to passwords, KB articles, networks, racks, and assets. So if I want to see the changes that we have within this article, I can scroll down on my right-hand sidebar and the update side of things is going to be that revision history component where I can see each time this article has been changed. So again, if I see something weird and I'm like, why does this article look the way it does? I can jump back to any previous version that has been inside this Hoodoo instance, see who made the changes when they were made, and even compare those differences as needed, seeing the code of the article, allowing me to see exactly what was taken out and added in from that previous version. So that's going to be a lot of the internal user management components of Hoodoo. Again, the really important ones that we see are having the ability to impersonate that user and kind of see those group permissions, making sure that those internal users only have access to the things that you want them to have access to. Jordan, anything you want to expand on with any internal user management or anything along the lines that I've talked about today? You know, I think you covered a lot of it, kind of circling back maybe to the password folders, those also, as well as like organizing what your users can actually see, those end up being a great method of standardization for your companies. You can create, like Daniel mentioned, those global password folders, those will appear in any company that is already created or will be created. So it's a great way to standardize that organization for both what your technicians are able to see, as well as create some organization within the company for your passwords. We will be having a similar feature come into the knowledge base as well, so that you could actually organize that and that should be in a future update. Yeah, thank you, Jordan. And what he's mentioning with that is right now, this KB structure here, we're going to have that, you know, have those similar permissions capable with these folders and subfolders within your KB organization. So that's going to be really focused on the internal user management side of things. Now, of course, that's only one side of your user management within your documentation platform. The other side of that is of course going to be your external user management and really making sure that those end users only have access to what you want them to, but again, giving them insight into some of your documentation is a great way to establish that touch point with your customers, um, making sure that they see exactly what you are doing for them and the items that you are tracking. So the most comprehensive way of kind of storing and sharing documentation for that end user is going to be through the external portal. The external portal, again, is the most comprehensive way of storing and sharing that documentation for the end user. And within each company's external portal, I can configure different assets, passwords, KB articles, and more for the end user to view. View portal shows me what these portal users can see. So again, any KB articles you want them to have access to, maybe you want to give them access to all of their employee information that you have documented for them or specific passwords, whatever those may be, where they can go in and access the passwords you have stored for them that apply to their company. Again, this is all customizable and you can do this at a bulk level or a one-off level. So again, if I want to go configure, um, an asset layout, and I want to add all of my assets from that people asset layout that I showed earlier, then I'm able to do that here at that bulk level with inside of a company. Now, maybe there's certain, um, scenarios where you just want to add, you know, maybe one specific, uh, contact information here. Well, I can jump into that specific asset within who do, and here on my right-hand sidebar, I have the ability to add to the portal. If I go ahead and add this user to the portal here, it'll now show that they are a part of the portal. I can pin them, I can remove them, but again, just showing that I can do this in that one-off method, or of course I can do that at the bulk level as well. So that's going to be how to add that kind of consistent documentation where, um, again, those end users are able to access the things that you want to share for them, but who do does have a lot of one-off sharing methods as well. If you ever need to quickly share out a password link, I can do this in that one-off method. Again, maybe somebody just needs to access to a quick password, but we don't want to continuously give them access to this password. I can share when I want this link to expire, include what is needed, write a note for the password. I can create the link and then share with them by either copying to my clipboard or sending via email. If I want that link to expire before the hour is up, I can go ahead and expire it at any time. Similar functionality for our KB section here. If I ever need to share out a KB in that one-off manner, I can create a public share link and share this with whomever I need. And then if I ever want to, you know, maybe that article is out there and I want to limit the access of anybody who has it, I can just go ahead and regenerate that share link as well. So anybody who would have access to that KB, say I want this to expire per se in a day. Well, the next day I can just come in and regenerate that share link for the KB article. The other method of one-off sharing that is super handy is going to be the processes section. If I ever want to create a real-time status update of our processes, I can create, I can copy this to my clipboard, go ahead and share with whoever's needed. And this will live update for them as steps are completed, giving whomever you send this to a true live view into this specific process. This can be really handy to, again, establish another touch point with your customers. Some best practices that I've seen is maybe a ticket comes into your PSA and you have a process built out for that in Hoodoo. Well, maybe the first step within that process is going ahead and creating that real-time status update and sending that back in the ticket. That ensures that whoever you send it back to can follow along as steps are completed. Again, providing that other touch point with your customers. Now, the other side of external management, this is obviously, these are all kind of your free methods for external sharing within Hoodoo. Another thing that we've seen some of our customers do is actually provide those external users with licenses inside of Hoodoo. We have, nothing in Hoodoo to say that you can't charge for this. You can also obviously give this for free, but this would be an additional license in Hoodoo. It's just something that we wanted to talk about because we do see this utilized quite frequently, where again, you can actually invite those users, whether you want read-only access to their entire documentation within their instance, or maybe you actually want to give them the ability to add documentation in your instance. You can invite them just like you would another user. Then of course, with our group settings, you could actually create a group for that company, making sure they only have access to their company's documentation with those user permissions and group permissions that have been applied. The other form of sharing documentation out kind of in a one-off method, and this is more true for maybe something that is not a password process or KB article, but you want to send them a secure note. You can do that here on this company page, this little paper airplane icon that says, send secure note here. If I want to add a secure note, I can type whatever message that I want to, choose one that expires, have it expire after their first view and encrypt and create. This is going to be zero knowledge encryption as well. So again, if you ever need to send out a secure message to one of your end users or somebody outside of your Hadoop instance, this can be a very great method for doing so. Jordan, anything else that you'd like to add in terms of the external user management side of things? The biggest thing would just be exploring the options that make the most sense for your company and your clients. Like Daniel mentioned, there's the free method of the share portal, or there's the option of actually adding them in as a user, which can be a really good selling point for your clients. Typically, we do see that the MSPs are charging their clients a small fee to pay for that license, but the clients are seeing a huge benefit because they actually have access to their documentation. They have access to either, like Daniel said, a view only, or you could give them editing permissions if they're maybe a senior tech at that client office, and they have that full window into what your MSP is doing for them. So it's a really great method to share that documentation, keep the client involved in the documentation, and just provide them an entire documentation interface for viewing their information. It is their information, so we typically do believe that they should have access to a lot of that information. On the other hand, that share portal is a pretty comprehensive way to share all of the information back with them for no extra cost to add portal users within Hoodoo, but it does have its limitations and you cannot share everything to that share portal. So that would be the case of if they just want a quick view, need access to some minor materials that you have within potentially sharing over some knowledge-based articles and creating a knowledge-based repository for them. We see a lot of utilization of that share portal for things like that. Other than that, just pulling up maybe some Reddit questions on things that we've kind of talked about is going to be going back to the permissions. So we had a question come in last week that was surrounding how do you do kind of conflicting permissions if I need to give them access to a couple companies, don't want to give them access to all of them, but then also have additional restrictions like removing the global knowledge base from these users. And so I'll have Daniel kind of walk through that, but the biggest thing is with this newest permission update, like Daniel mentioned, users can be added to multiple groups. The way that works is that those permissions work together and we do work on a deny kind of trumps all allows. So you can go ahead and create those configurable or customizable permissions to accomplish pretty much anything within your Hoodoo environment. You could create a company where three companies are allowed to that group to see, and then you can create another group to go ahead and deny the global knowledge base or any other actions from a particular group. And those two groups will actually work together to give you that configurable permission set. So yeah, it'll just like Daniel showing you can choose the restrictions tab and choose what they have access to that can be to passwords that can be to the knowledge bases or specific asset layouts. Yeah. And one other thing I'll mention kind of a feature that this, the more so adding the external users as a license in Hoodoo. One thing we get the question of a lot is like a end user password manager. So the password manager, like personal password manager in Hoodoo is going to be this section here. It's going to function the exact same way as, you know, a company's password section would look where I could go into the my vault and add in those passwords for my personal password use. So this can be another method of if you were adding those users in as licensed users in Hoodoo having that, that ability to have their own personal password manager utilizing the my vault can also be a great selling point as well. We see that kind of utilized pretty heavily in general as well. Now, the only other thing that I wanted to touch on today is going to be something that's a little, little less user management, but something that we talked about in this quarter as well that, that we don't see many people utilize, but a lot of it is because it may be a little bit hidden, um, is going to be the QR code generator for assets. A really good use case of this is if you have those, you know, physical devices, um, or, you know, items in a server rack or something like that, that you have technicians on the go for creating a QR code, printing this out and attaching this to an asset can be a very good way to allow your technicians to easily be able to get out their phone, scan the QR code and see the documentation that relates to that asset as they're out in the field. Um, so this was something that I just wanted to show as a, you know, additional little tip here within this training, um, just because it does have a little bit to do with user management, of course. Um, and just making sure that of course, the biggest thing about user management is you want your technicians to be able to have the easiest time doing their job as possible, generating these QR codes and attaching them to the physical assets can be a great way of doing that. Um, Jordan, anything you want to add on that? Uh, I don't believe so. Awesome. Um, so as I mentioned, when we kind of started this training today, I had scheduled this for an hour, but we really only, um, had that kind of 30 minutes of content, which is where we're at about now. Um, obviously again, we want this to be as interactive as possible. So if anybody has any questions, Jordan and I'll stay on for a, uh, you know, as long as needed to make sure all of those questions get answered. Um, but at this point, if you, you know, want to hop off and get, get 30 minutes of your day back, that is completely okay. Um, within these monthly trainings, we just want to be as helpful as possible. So again, making sure that any of those questions get answered, but of course that, that is kind of all we had today for our user management side of things. So, um, feel free to again, hop off, get 30 minutes of your day back, or of course, and, uh, ask any and all questions that you have in the chat, in the Q and a Jordan and I are more than happy to, to, you know, expand on anything we've talked about today or, um, or talk about anything additionally as well. Um, if you are, you know, hopping off today, again, thank you. Thanks everyone for joining us. We'll post this recording as well. Um, so anybody that, you know, if you're watching this online later, um, make sure that you have access to that and, and get the training materials. Um, but yeah, that is, um, pretty much everything on my end, Jordan, anything else you would like to add in terms of that? You know, I don't think so. Haven't seen any questions come in yet. Uh, again, we'll stay on for a few more minutes just to, to make sure we can get any of those questions answered. Uh, please feel free to, to throw those out to us, uh, or reach out to us afterwards. We're happy to answer questions on, on other things as well. Um, so. Yeah. And again, um, I'll go ahead and, uh, type my email in the chat here. Um, for those that are watching later, my email is daniel.nelson at hoodoo.com. I'm more than happy to always, uh, you know, if you ever have any questions or want to hop on a call for any other training purposes, you can always reach out to me more than happy to do that with you. Um, and yeah. So let's see here. It does look like we've had some people go and enjoy the rest of their day and we don't have any questions here as it is. So I think, yeah, we'll, we'll go ahead and give you back 30 minutes of your day here. Um, look out for the, um, as I jumped back into the, um, as I jumped back into the slides here. Um, oh, we do have a question here from Michael, where do you access the recordings and are there any other past video recordings we can access like this? Yeah, Michael, great question. So yeah, as I mentioned at the start, um, of the webinar today, uh, we do typically at least one of these a month and we focused on different topics. So we've done trainings on asset layouts on, um, processes and KB articles and, and many more. Um, the best place to access the full repository of all of our webinars is going to be on our website, hoodoo.com and then going into our resource center. Jordan, if you wouldn't mind linking that, um, in the chat there as well. Um, that's where we'll post all of our webinars, both monthly trainings, quarter recap, webinars, um, partner webinars, all of those, um, will be posted within the, uh, the resource center there afterwards. Um, and then of course on, on areas like Reddit and on our socials, uh, LinkedIn and, um, Facebook and X and all of those, um, we'll also post, you know, recaps there as well. But the central repository for that is, is what Jordan linked below our resource center on our website. Um, so feel free to take a look back at, you know, whatever monthly trainings may, um, you know, be, be useful to you, um, and look through those or, or any other webinars that we may have. Again, they'll continue to get posted there on that resources center. Yeah, no problem, Michael. Happy to, uh, help today. And of course what's coming soon, more blogs, more tips and tricks, more training sessions. We're going to continue doing things like this, making sure that you kind of have all of the resources that you need with Hoodoo. So again, a lot of these things have been, you know, done in the past and recorded, feel free to access whatever is relevant to you there. Um, we definitely, you know, one of our biggest goals with Hoodoo is just to be, um, as, as easy as possible to work with and make sure that we're providing those resources that are going to be valuable to you. Uh, where to go for help? I've kind of mentioned this, but of course you can reach out to us. You can reach out to our support team. Those communities are great places as well for, um, you know, asking questions, uh, you know, finding other information as well in addition. Um, and then same thing here for new releases, especially, and these blog content that we talked about at the beginning, um, that Jordan linked in the chat. If you want to stay up to date with that, uh, you can subscribe to our newsletter, um, and, and get all of that information as well. Uh, so again, thank you all for joining. Um, I think we are going to wrap up here today. Um, just as most of our, our attendees have hopped off at this point. So, um, again, give you back some time out of your day. Thank you everyone for joining us again. Um, and we look forward to seeing you hopefully in some, uh, monthly trainings that we have in the future or some other webinars and, uh, cool things coming up. Uh, again, reach out to Jordan or I or our support team. If there's anything else that we can help you with as well. Jordan, you want to sign off today? Yeah. Thanks everybody for joining. Uh, it was fun going through, uh, your user management and, uh, hope to see you next month for the next training. Take care, everybody. Have a great day.
