Pia adds new PiaPacks, prebuilt automations for MSP service desks, to its library on an ongoing basis. Three shipped recently: Traveling User, Office 365 Mail Trace, and SmartForms: Add or Remove Users from Groups. A zero-touch template and five self-only SmartForms are also covered.
Most of what lands in a service desk queue in a given week is work someone has already done before. A travel exception. A mail trace. Another group access change. None of it is difficult; all of it is somebody's afternoon.
The PiaPack library exists to take that work off the queue. Here's what's landed recently.
Automation Hub is where PiaPacks live. Each pack starts with a real MSP workflow, either something a technician built to survive a busy week or a request a partner brought to us because their clients kept asking for the same thing. It gets built properly, secured, and tested before it reaches the library.
You browse the library, deploy a pack to a sandbox to inspect the full workflow logic and code, then install it once you're satisfied. You don't need to raise a request before you can see how a pack works; it's open from the start. Pia maintains and versions the packs from there, so when one's updated, you get release notes and apply it when you're ready. Full detail is in the knowledge portal.
PiaPacks are built to be duplicated, so building the next one is faster than building the first. That’s how First Focus rolled out new user and termination SmartForms:
“Without having to build everything from scratch each time, it has cut down the time to launch these automations significantly, meaning we’ve been able to provide this service to an additional 20% of clients than originally forecast.”
Their team went further on the same foundation, building ticket automations that check whether a ticket is in scope for a security agreement, confirm a failover test passed, and verify a backup health check. Across that program they’re saving over 500 hours a month, about four full-time people.
Three linked automations that set a temporary exception to the geo-blocking rules in Conditional Access for a business trip.
A technician can run it from inside a ticket, a client's own admin can grant it for any of their people, and the traveling employee can set it up themselves. Two of those three paths never reach the service desk. The ticket's still raised and closed, so it stays in reporting and in the audit trail. It just doesn't cost anyone an afternoon.
The part that earns its place is scheduling. A trip is known in advance, so the exception can be set to apply for the travel window and lift itself at the end. Nobody has to remember to turn it on, and nobody has to remember to turn it off. An access exception that outlives the trip is exactly what turns up in a client's next security review.
A technician runs a mail trace directly from inside the ticketing system. No detour into the Microsoft 365 admin center mid-ticket, no losing the thread of what they were doing to go and find the answer somewhere else.
It's a small automation with a large multiplier. Mail traces are one of the most requested checks on a service desk, and each one usually costs a context switch, a separate login, and a few minutes of hunting. Running it in the ticket keeps the answer where the rest of the conversation already lives.
A client's own admins manage their internal groups directly, and the service desk gets that time back.
For security-conscious clients, this is worth more than the speed. Group membership is access, and access changes are what an auditor asks about. Going through a SmartForm means the change happens inside a defined form with validated inputs, and it lands in the ticket with a record of who asked and what changed. Compare that to an email requesting someone be added to a group, actioned by whoever picked it up. Same outcome, very different paper trail.
It's also the adoption argument. The clients most reluctant to hand work to a self-serve portal are usually the ones who care most about control, and this is the case where the portal is the more controlled option.
This one's a worked example. It's a SmartForms automation that runs the moment a client submits the form, with no technician picking it up first, and it's built to be taken apart.
If you have someone doing automation work in-house, this is the thing to hand them. Pull it into a sandbox, read how the trigger, the validation, and the run conditions fit together, then use the same shape for your own zero-touch workflows. It's a starting point.
From September 21, five SmartForms also come in a self-only version, where the person filling in the form can change their own account and nothing else:
The admin versions of all five already exist. The self-only version is what makes them safe to hand to every user at a client, down to the person who just needs their own out-of-office set, because there's no route to anybody else's account.
The password form covers changing a password before it expires. Lockout recovery stays a separate path. Each form can be enabled per client.
New packs land in the library on an ongoing basis. If you haven't been through it lately, five minutes will tell you how much of your queue is already covered. Browse the PiaPack library