Your boss, your customer or legal requirements demand that you create IT Documentation?
That’s why you’re now looking for a template or sample IT Documentation that tells you exactly what you need to record and document and how?
I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there is no such ready-made and generally valid document!
The reason for this is that IT Documentation is just as individual as your company and especially your IT. Therefore it is impossible to create a template for IT Documentation that fits everyone.
With a little googling you will certainly come across more or less serious templates. But these are usually always accompanied by a disclaimer, which says that the pattern at hand must be adapted very individually and is not generally valid. Therefore, such a template does not help to answer the question “How do I create correct IT Documentation? In addition, the time required is also enormous due to the many necessary adjustments.
An IT Documentation template cannot solve time problems
In addition, you are supposed to create IT Documentation, but you hardly manage your normal, daily work as an IT administrator. So where should you take the time to create IT Documentation on the side?
Creating correct and complete IT Documentation is very time-consuming. In addition to the above-mentioned laborious, individual adaptation of IT Documentation templates or samples downloaded from the Internet, all necessary data must first be collected, checked and evaluated. Do you know ad-hoc all systems in your IT network? And their configuration, cabling and the software installed on them?
Usually, there are some poorly maintained and chronically outdated Excel lists fluttering around, on which parts of the inventory were recorded at some point. Since then, however, nobody has looked at the lists, let alone updated them. For this reason, a complete inventory must first be taken before the IT Documentation can be created. It should be clear what this alone means in terms of time and effort.
When all the data is finally available, pages and pages of prose text in IT Documentation templates are tediously typed and plans are drawn in Visio for hours or even days. It is almost impossible to forget or twist anything in the process.
But at some point everything is finally done:
The complete IT is inventoried. The IT Documentation templates are individualized and filled. One is finally finished and can hand in the documentation.
But just a few days, let alone a month later, everything is already out of date again and work starts all over again.
IT Documentation only makes sense if it is complete and, above all, up-to-date. That’s why this is a regular job. The basic work has already been done and the existing documentation only needs to be updated, but this is where most errors occur: changes are not entered immediately due to lack of time and then forgotten, the wrong system in the IT Documentation is replaced and so on.
An IT Documentation template will therefore not solve your time problems.
An IT Documentation must be automated
The only way out of this plight is to automate these time-consuming activities.
Why crawl around under tables and in dusty basements to inventory the hardware there, when there is software that can do it for you? In addition, inventory software also makes far fewer mistakes and is more thorough as well as comprehensive. Not only the system names are recorded, but also the installed software, the configurations and also the networking.
If you combine all this with automatic documentation, the manual effort after the initial setup is almost zero. This saves an enormous amount of time and above all nerves.
IT Documentation with Docusnap: automatic, regular, time-saving
The Docusnap software relieves you of all these tiresome and time-consuming tasks.
Docusnap takes inventory of your complete IT network automatically and recurrently: hardware, software, system configurations, communication paths and much more. You can then conveniently view this data in a clear, structured presentation. Or you can use the more than 200 ready-made and automatically generated reports, such as an IP address allocation report, an operating system overview, a software summary and much, much more.
If you need additional documents, such as a network plan, you can have them generated automatically with just a few clicks based on the inventoried data. This means: The tedious process of drawing plans via Visio is no longer necessary.
Even complex documents, such as IT emergency plans, restart plans, etc., can be created very quickly and easily with the help of the numerous templates. Simply drag and drop plans, diagrams and reports into the template and add your own prose texts. That’s it! Docusnap then updates these documents automatically and regularly. Outdated IT Documentation is now a thing of the past.
So automate the tiresome standard work of IT Documentation with Docusnap and use your precious time for more important things.
Here's how it works in Docusnap:
Article originally published on 31.07.2020, last updated on 25.10.2023.
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