#Altitude20 Day 3 Recap: Delivering on the Promise of SaaS

Tired of product updates? Neither are we!

Our chief product officer Jim Brennan took the stage again on Day 3 of Altitude to discuss BetterCloud’s latest investments in our Manage and Secure platforms. These updates focused on improving the product in three key ways.

• Increased integration support
• Streamlined management through better automation
• Enhanced visibility and control

You can still register for Altitude 2020 to view this keynote and the rest of the week’s previous sessions. But let’s take a quick look at how BetterCloud improved our existing products.

Increased integration support

In the time since we announced the BetterCloud Integration Center, we’ve added support for apps such as Dropbox, OneLogin, and Microsoft 365. Today, we offer over 60 integrations and over 900 actions and alerts.

Based on my conversations with IT admins, I’m pretty confident in saying that’s a lot of integrations. But Brennan says that those integrations were just the beginning.

Today, Brennan announced that BetterCloud is integrating with apps across a full SaaS stack, focusing specifically on the following categories of apps:

• Identity. To support the growing number of Microsoft-based SaaS environments, Brennan announced that a new Azure AD integration will be available in Q4 of this year.
• Productivity. With the explosion of remote work over the last few months, BetterCloud will support Google Shared Drives. This was one of our most requested features and is currently in beta; it will be more widely available in Q1 of 2021.
• HRIS. Since HRIS systems have quickly become the source of truth for all employee information, BetterCloud will start supporting Workday by the beginning of next year.

Brennan says there are also some key integrations coming over the next few months, including Microsoft Teams, Slack, and ADP. BetterCloud is also working to enhance current integrations with apps such as Zoom, Workspace One, and ServiceNow.

Streamlined management through better automation

Integrations are only as powerful as the automation engine behind them. Michael Marks, Director of Product Management at BetterCloud, announced some serious upgrades to our automation tools, including:

• Workflow templates. It’s no secret that automated workflows save IT a lot of time, but building them from scratch can be daunting. BetterCloud’s new(ish) Workflow Templates are way more powerful than a typical template; these are based on best practices based on analysis of millions of workflows run on the platform, interviews with customers, and feedback from our Expert Advisory Group.
• OR conditions. BetterCloud users often create duplicate workflows that produce the same output for several different teams. With the new OR conditions, those days are over, especially when it comes to onboarding, least privilege access, and group settings.
• Custom triggers. Marks announced that the new Custom Triggers feature enables you to kick off any workflow in any application you want to. These workflows will kick off based on events in your HRIS, ITSM, and other tools. According to Marks, this grows the number of triggering events from around 100 to “virtually infinity.”

The layperson’s way of looking at this is, “Cool, I can do more things!” But as your options increase, how do you keep things from going haywire?

Enhanced visibility and control

Three years ago, we introduced the idea of a User 360 view, in which you could see the apps each person is using, their files, and their group settings. Senior Product Manager Harit Patel announced that we’re delivering on the promise we made to you last year at Altitude—which means User 360 is getting a major overhaul.

This new User 360 Profile Overview shows you a lot about each user, so let’s break it down:

• Personal information: This includes each user’s name, job title, email address, and location, among other demographic information.
• Applications: Here, you’ll see the apps used by each employee—and more importantly, whether or not those apps are sanctioned by IT.
• Files: This new card offers new insights about the type of storage each user relies on (internal, public, external) and how that person utilizes the sharing permissions in each platform.

The real game-changer? The Primary Attributes page.

There are quite a few things you can do from this page, but Patel says the most groundbreaking update is the ability to look at each user’s configurations and settings within each app. Patel also says this new User 360 profile will be available by the end of the month.

You already know this, but the product demos in today’s keynote went much deeper than I did in this post. Check out the full session, which includes an interview with Conde Nast’s Craig Holland, by registering for Altitude 2020 here.