Infrastructure

Purpose

Supports management of the client's infrastructure. Which dashboards to they want to use? Which plugins and other licensed products will they need access to??

Help

This dashboard provides a collection of tools that help merging the Back Office dashboards and the products that support them.  It also provides Procedure documentation that documents how to perform that various procedures that help run your business.

Products

This tool has several uses:

1. Identify the products that help support your Back Office.
2. Document the monthly and annual costs of maintaining any licenses these tools may require.
3. Capture support contact information for each product.

Some vendors will provide multiple products. For example, Gravity Perks and Gravity Forms each provide numerous plugins that are used heavily in this site. In cases like this, remove the Product Name from the Organization record and simply supply it for each product you use from that vendor.

Procedures

This tab is where you capture the procedures that you use over and over. For example, every few weeks, it is important for a systems administrator to scan your site and make sure that plugins are up to date. In most cases, they will update themselves automatically; however this is not always true and you don't want to have a critical plugin stop working because it wasn't updated.

Take your time with documenting these procedures. Start simply by naming each procedure document you will have to create. If you already have some available, you can upload them easily so that you don't have to type everything all over.

Once you have them defined, test them and see what works and what doesn't. Then update your documentation accordingly.

Costs

This tool tracks the licensing costs of the various elements of the Back Office.

References

This tab is where you can capture web links of documents that you use as a reference materials. Since everything you enter is searchable, finding what you are searching for can be quite easy.

Any time you come across a web page that contains information that relates to running your business and you want to remember this page, just add a record here.

Additional Tools

Tools tend to accumulate. As I type thins, I have a bunch more tools I want to build and add to the back office. If a tool helps you run your business better, add it to this page.