On an unusually warm evening this October, the ManagementStudio Meet-up returned for another year at PATCH St Paul’s. By the time co-founder Justin Pickup took to the stage to welcome our guests, most of the seats were taken and the late arrivals had settled for a spot by the bar – which, judging by how long they stayed there, wasn’t too much of a hardship!
It was good to see so many familiar faces, including a few from the early days when the company was in it’s infancy. When Justin and Richard Hynes started the company 15 years ago, our product – AppTracker – focused mostly on the application packaging lifecycle. Since then, it’s grown into ManagementStudio, and the team, the platform and the people using it have grown with it. The evening was a chance to share what we’ve been working on, show what’s coming next, and celebrate the teams doing remarkable things with the platform.
Behind the scenes
Michelle Hynes, project manager over seeing development, opened with an update on work that most of us won’t ever see!
- Security hardening. As part of our efforts to ensure we provide a secure and robust product, ManagementStudio has recently undergone penetration testing by two CREST-accredited companies, Aardwolf and Sencode. We were incredibly pleased that no critical issues were found, everything that was raised has been resolved, and the retest wrapped up just as the dust settled was settling on the event. We’re also working towards ISO 27001 certification, with the aim of achieving it in 2027.
- An upgrade to .NET 10. It may not be the most glamorous topic, but the move to .NET 10 means we can respond to Microsoft changes more quickly, reduce the risk of downtime, and take advantage of new functionality as it’s released.
- Automated QA testing. Our QA Manager, Lawrence Gorman, has automated around 100 tests, which run against ManagementStudio on a daily basis. Every time we publish a new release, ManagementStudio is run through a growing suite of repeatable tests.
Michelle also introduced Ada, our new AI assistant. Ada has access to ManagementStudio’s large library of feature documents and knowledge guides; great when you have time to read them, not so much when you’re mid-task and need an answer quickly. Ada understands natural language so when you ask “How do I add a user’s name to an email?”, it replies with steps for you to perform and references the relevant knowledge base articles should you want to dig in a little deeper. If you would like to opt-in, you can find out more at managementstudio.com/ada or by speaking to your Technical Account Manager.
What’s on the roadmap?
This is often a highly anticipated part of the evening for many of our clients. Next year’s road map will have a large focus on extending our communication features:
- Microsoft Teams integration. When a UAT test, note or update is assigned to you in ManagementStudio, you’ll get a Teams alert as well as an email. It’s a small change but should make notifications and tasks much harder to miss.
- Email template access in Core. A request we’ve heard a few times, the ability to modify the core email templates is on its way.
- Persona management. Build personas based on what applications people are using – an accountancy team, for example – to see commonality across the estate, create applications stacks, and spot where licences could be saved.
Since presenting this, we’ve also added one or two new features that many of you will be excited about – there will be more on that next year!
New Feature Demo
Ben Cook, one of our Senior Product Specialists, followed by taking to the stage with a live demo of the new and upcoming features.
Attachments you can open and edit in place. Until now, viewing an attachment on an application or user migration meant downloading it and opening it in an external viewer. Editing one meant downloading, editing, saving and uploading it again. Attachments can now be previewed and edited directly in ManagementStudio, with Word and Excel controls appearing at the top of the screen. Ben demonstrated with a PDF design for our custom chocolate bars, which anyone who picked one up on the night will agree was a valid use case.
Markdown in more places. Notes, custom forms, the web portal and emails all now support Markdown, a simple way to add formatting as you type. There aren’t any toolbars to hunt for, instead special symbols control the style: a hash creates a heading, a hyphen starts a bullet list, and asterisks add italics. If you’re in the platform everyday, it’s a small thing that will make quite a difference to how you work.
A refreshed interface. Coming early next year, the UI refresh includes:
- A clean, modern light mode with redesigned buttons and layouts.
- A new dark mode that’s much kinder on the eyes, especially in a darkened room.
- A high contrast theme, one of our most requested features for users with visual impairments. For those old enough to remember, Ben compared it to Ceefax, but it makes key data much easier to see.
- Zoom controls that let you zoom out to fit more rows on a low-resolution screen, or zoom in to 200% when you need to.
Celebrating our customers
Some of the best ideas for using ManagementStudio don’t come from us. They come from customers who take the platform somewhere we hadn’t imagined, and this year, we wanted to recognise the projects, customers, and partners that have used ManagementStudio to do something amazing.
Service Improvement Award: Lloyds Banking Group
For colleagues that rely on assistive technology, a laptop change can be quite a big deal. They rely on costly specialist software that can often be difficult to install, and without it, they simply can’t work. The team at Lloyds created a concierge service that uses data in ManagementStudio to monitor laptops approaching end of life, so users can be migrated proactively before a device fails and leaves them unable to work.
Project Impact Award: BlackRock
As part of a £12 million transformation programme, BlackRock used ManagementStudio as their single view of the truth to return 1,600 devices and retire 8,500 end-of-life devices. Many of those were devices they didn’t know were still out there – we’ve all seen that back office with the PCs no one has touched in years. The result was a saving of more than £5 million.
Partner Award: AppTechnology
As a long-term partner, AppTechnology have integrated ManagementStudio into their core service offering which has helped to deliver large projects for many large multinationals and house-hold names. As he accepted the award, Martin Sweeney was kind enough to say:
“Great product, great roadmap, and probably the best support that we get on any of the vendors that we represent.”
We’ll take that.
Transformation Team Award: Lloyds Banking Group
Projects invest a lot of time building a data set from HR, AD, inventory solutions and many other sources. When the project ends, the team moves on and the data is often forgotten, along with the spreadsheets. The team at Lloyds Banking Group created a centralised project hub instead: a dedicated team uses ManagementStudio to supply data to projects across the group, so it isn’t collected again from scratch every time. They’re already running 16 projects with a 17th on the way, and they’ve stood up a second instance of ManagementStudio to keep up with demand.
Three years, 9 projects, 300 automations
The evening ended with a fireside chat between Justin Pickup, our co-founder, and Monika Blaszczyk from the London Stock Exchange. Monika talked about moving from spreadsheets to ManagementStudio, managing more than 100,000 applications, and why her team stopped seeing it as “a fancy spreadsheet”. There were so many interesting topics covered during their chat so I’ll be covering that in more depth in another post over the next week or so.
One last thing: we’re a finalist
ManagementStudio is a finalist in two categories at the MSP Channel Insights Awards. If you’ve enjoyed working with us, we’d really appreciate your vote:
- Vote for ManagementStudio in Emerging Vendor of the Year
- Vote for ManagementStudio in Automation & Operational Efficiency Innovation of the Year
Thank you to everyone who came, asked questions, collected an award or kept us company at the bar. Events like this remind us why we build ManagementStudio the way we do – for the people who use it every day. We’re already thinking about next year.
