The Co-managed Help Desk

BEFORE YOU BEGIN  This feature may be hidden in your Autotask instance because it is not activated. If so, you can activate it on the > Admin > Admin Categories > Activations page. Refer to Activations.

About the co-managed IT business model

Co-managed IT services are a business model where a service provider (MSP) works in a long-term partnership with the in-house IT staff of a customer, or with other external resources who are not employees or contractors paid by them directly.

Customers are looking for a hybrid approach for a variety of reasons:

  • They may want to offer after-hours coverage, but the volume of support requests does not make it cost-effective to handle this internally.
  • They may want to address skills gaps in the internal IT department. The trend to work from home has increased security threats, but customers are without resources to address this, or don't have the skills.
  • They would like to let an MSP handle routine maintenance and troubleshooting, so they can focus on organization-specific issues.

For a deeper exploration of this business model, take a look at an article by Bob Petrocelli, at the time CTO of Datto, in Information Age.

Datto solutions for co-managed IT

Datto offers two solutions for co-managed IT:

Taskfire is an extension of the Autotask Client Portal. It is suitable for customers who have some internal IT, but don't need or want full-scale Autotask with its steeper learning curve. Refer to Overview of Client Portal and Taskfire Internal Help Desk.

The Autotask co-managed help desk is a set of features that allows you to set up selected customer contacts with an Autotask license that gives them access to your Autotask instance with the full power of Autotask, while allowing you, the MSP, to control exactly what co-managing users have access to.

There is considerable overlap of functionality between Taskfire and Co-managed Help Desk. To help you decide what is right for you, read this feature comparison.

Feature Taskfire Co-managed Help Desk

The customers that can be accessed

Taskfire is intended for the customer's Internal IT department. It is an extension of the Client Portal. Access to sub-organizations is supported.

Co-managed Help Desk (CMHD) supports access to multiple customer organizations. In addition to an organization's internal IT, other scenarios such as a customer's external experts are supported.

License type and cost

Taskfire licenses are less expensive than regular licenses.

Co-managed licenses have their own license type that is available at a reduced price from regular Autotask resource licenses.

Configuration requirements

Setup is fairly simple, and Client Portal and Taskfire are easy to use.

The co-managed security level gives the user access to the power and complexity of the main Autotask application, but limits the user to specific named organizations. The learning curve is steeper.

RMM integration

Not supported

Co-managing users can have access to Datto RMM through the Autotask/RMM integration. Through single sign-on, they can access the RMM device record. Other RMM integrations are supported using LiveLinks.

LiveMobile

Not supported

Co-managing users can use LiveMobile if you grant them access. The following features are hidden, because they do not apply:

  • My > Expense Reports menu item
  • New Expense
  • Timesheet > Submit button
  • Time Off Request button
  • Time Off on Create menu

Secondary resources

Not supported

Co-managing users can be the primary or a secondary resource on a ticket. The integration with the MSP's team is more seamless.

Feature access

N/A

Co-managing users have access to dashboards (including the ability to create their own) and worklists.

Configurability

Limited.

Administrators can configure multiple security levels based on the Co-managed license type to meet the requirements of multiple external resources, and use cases beyond Internal IT.

Supported scenarios

This scenario is the basic case that is supported by the Autotask co-management features. The co-managing users work for the customer, and tickets are transferred between the co-managing users and the service provider's resources, based on expertise and availability.

The recommended setup is the one described in the Configuring Autotask to support Co-managed IT topic.

The end customer has an external consultant or another IT professional who is responsible for a specific part of their IT landscape. Many individual consultants may not have a ticketing system, giving the ITSM the opportunity to include them in the support and consulting offering.

This scenario would typically use the traditional configuration as described in the Configuring Autotask to support Co-managed IT topic.

The end customer has a resource responsible for non-IT activities, but no method of managing their tasks.

EXAMPLE  The customer has a Facilities resource who has to address building requests, or an HR resource who needs a ticketing system to track their work. Co-managed Help Desk can give the service provider an opportunity to resell access to a system that can assist those resources.

The key difference to the standard configuration is that every setting and configuration must be created to meet their specific need. For this scenario, it would not make sense to share the same ticket categories, workflows, and security levels.

This scenario should go through additional planning, scrutiny, documentation, and testing. Because of the additional configuration and considerations, this type of access comes with a higher overhead to maintain. Even though this is a scenario that we have seen implemented, we do not recommend this type of external access.

Notes and tips

  • If you use this scenario in addition to scenario 1 or other co-managed help desk configurations, make sure your naming convention for the various configurations and settings are clear.

EXAMPLE  Consider a suffix or prefix of C_SRC (External Source) for departments, locations, workflow rules, etc.

  • For these scenarios billing rates and costs are not an issue as both options would typically bill the end customer directly. Verify that the resources have a internal rate of $0.

Getting started

To get stated with the configuration of the co-managed help desk, review the following topics: