ManageEngineforIncidentManagement

Analyst – Vawns Murphy

Irish mum of 3. ITIL V2 Manager (red badge)

and ITIL V3 Expert (purple badge). SDI

Managers certificate. Further qualifications in

COBIT, ISO 20000, SAM, PRINCE2 and

Microsoft. Author of itSMF UK collateral on

Service Transition, Software Asset

Management, Problem Management & the

“How to do CCRM” book. Reviewer for the

Service Transition ITIL 3 2011 publication.

When not being pelted with brightly coloured

balls in the name of ITIL, I am a senior analyst

for Enterprise Opinions.

Executive Summary – ServiceDesk Plus

Overview • Solid Incident Management tool • Available as SaaS and on premise

Strengths • Free PinkVerified Incident & Knowledge Management tool available via the ManageEngine website

• Pricing model is by number of technicians, end users do not take up any licences

Weaknesses • Some user interfaces slightly dated

Primary Market Focus

• Small & medium customer accounts

Independent Review ManageEngine has been around for over 10 years, has over 120,000 customers and is the only ITSM toolset provider that enables customers to carry out Incident and Knowledge Management for free. It’s always nice to see a tool vendor give something back to the ITSM community so this is a great way for students, charities and non-profit organisations to access Incident and Knowledge Management software. The software itself is available in nineteen languages and comes in three editions; so there really is something that will suit most organisations. The three Incident Management solutions are:

1. Helpdesk (free): for Incident and Knowledge Management 2. Professional: All Helpdesk functionality plus Asset Management 3. Enterprise: Professional plus Service Catalogue Management, Problem

Management, CMDB and Project Management The tool includes an in built user community which is accessible in a single click from the main dashboard. The user community is active and thriving; at the time of the review, ManageEngine customers have access to over 90 products and free tools. The self-service portal is simple and business friendly; users can chose from raising an Incident or a Service Request and FAQs are on the right hand side of the screen meaning that help and further information is easily accessible. Users can also approve Service Requests from the same screen which is a really useful piece of functionality. As someone who approves Service Requests there is nothing worse than jumping through hoops to get through an overly complicated Request Fulfilment process; I’m only trying to approve a Service Request not find Mordor. The Service Desk analyst view is designed with people in mind; Service Desk analysts can work on Incidents within a calendar view and templates are easy to set up within the Admin console for Incident modelling. The Incident lifecycle is managed through the use of predefined categories and email integration means that tickets can be auto logged and updated without duplication of effort. Users are unable to set their own priority (can you imagine the chaos? Everyone would set their Incident priority to critical cue one stressed out Service Desk) instead, users are guided through a series of prompts to determine the appropriate SLA. There is a Major Incident widget so that Major Incidents are clearly visible within the toolset and key personnel can be notified via email and text message. Parent - child relationships can be applied within a single click and a user can be promoted to VIP status by clicking a checkbox.

As well as ITSM, ManageEngine can be used for desktop support, the deployment of software upgrades, patch management and the management of mobile devices. ManageEngine pride themselves on having 90% of the functionality of the four biggest ITSM vendors (IBM, CA, HP and BMC) an impressive accomplishment in today’s varied market. Technical Summary

Incident logging, categorization & automation options

Incidents can be created directly from the Service Catalogue or from emails, phone calls and web services.

System access options (web, fat client, mobile, etc.)

ServiceDesk Plus is a web-based application and can be accessed through any browser both on workstations, and mobile. ServiceDesk Plus also offers native android, and IOS apps.

Incident tracking and lifecycle

The end user is notified by e-mail when the status of their Incident changes.

Prioritizing and escalating incidents

ServiceDesk Plus offers a multi-level escalation process, using which technicians can configure both functional, and hierarchical escalations.

Major incidents Technicians can create custom SLAs, and configure business rules to create separate workflows to handle major incidents.

Applying industry models and frameworks

N/A

Incident closure Technicians can choose to close the ticket only when the end user acknowledges the fix or resolution provided. Until the end user acknowledges the fix by clicking on the link in the email triggered to them, the ticket remains in 'resolved' state. Technicians also choose to move the ticket to closed stage if the end user does not acknowledge the solution after n number of days.

Reporting and analytics Technicians can access over 150 previously defined reports in ServiceDesk Plus to measure IT help desk performance across requests, problems, changes, assets, surveys, and more. All these reports can be exported into a variety of formats such as HTML, CSV, PDF, and XLS. Technicians can schedule automatic generation and circulation of reports to key stakeholders. Apart from the built-in reports, ServiceDesk Plus also offers to flexibility to create custom tabular, summary, matrix, and audit reports across all help desk modules. ServiceDesk Plus also integrates with Zoho reports to provide advanced analytics that helps technicians tease out important information from their service desk data, and helps them make critical management decisions, and boost productivity.

Interaction/workflow with Problem Management

Incidents can be linked to Problem records.

Incident Mgt beyond the service desk

This can be done by configuring appropriate categories, and subcategories.

Strengths • Solid Incident Management tool • Free PinkVerified Incident & Knowledge Management tool available via the

ManageEngine website • Pricing model is by number of technicians, end users do not take up any

licences Weaknesses

• Some of the user interfaces can seem a little dated; this is on the ManageEngine radar however and a refresh is planned for Q1 2016

Customers

• L’Oreal • Barclays • Sony • AT&T

In their own words “ServiceDesk Plus is a web-based help desk software built on the ITIL framework with over 125,000 deployments in more than 100,000 organizations. ServiceDesk Plus is SMB affordable help desk software loaded with enterprise features. It can be the right fit for organizations that are looking for to organize their IT help desk without having to spend huge dollars. ServiceDesk Plus enables an easier service delivery to the end users with a range of easy code-free customizations starting from the user interface. Automation ranging from ticket handling to automated notifications in ServiceDesk Plus help increase productivity of the technicians. . ServiceDesk Plus has minimal learning curve and is easy to learn for both the technicians as well as the end users thereby ensuring a faster ROI for service desk teams. The native mobile apps provide anytime, anywhere access to the technicians to create, edit, assign, and close requests. ServiceDesk Plus delivers the right insights on the help desk performance s with canned and custom reports, and real time dashboards. ServiceDesk Plus is also scalable for organizations of different sizes. The key features of ServiceDesk Plus include:

• Incident Management • Problem Management • Change Management • Asset management • Project Management • Purchase and Contract Management • Self-Service Portal • Knowledge Base • Automated Workflows • Multi-Site Support • 150+ Canned and Custom Reports • CMDB • Real-Time Dashboards • Service Catalogue • User Survey • Native Mobile Apps

The standard edition of ServiceDesk Plus with the basic help desk functionality is completely free without any restrictions on the number of end users, technicians, or requests. The main objective is to eliminate the cost of decision-making for small organizations and enable them to take their first step towards an organized IT and streamline their incident management process.” Further Information Product Brochure: https://download.manageengine.com/products/service-desk/servicedesk-plus-brochure-2015.pdf This independent review is part of our Incident Management group test 2016, read the full report at http://www.theitsmreview.com/2016/02/incident-mngt-2016/. Also participating; Alemba Ltd, Atlassian, Cherwell SoftwareTM, HPE, InvGate Inc., Marval Software Limited, Matrix42 AG, Nexthink, SUMMIT Software Inc.

EnterpriseOpinionsisaglobalresearchandadvisoryorganisationspecializinginITAssetandService

Management

CommercialSummaryVendorManageEngineProductServiceDeskPlusVersionReviewed9.1DateofVersionReleaseJune2015YearFounded2002Customers100,000+PricingStructureTheIncidentManagementmoduleisfreeforallcustomerswithnorestrictions.Forcustomersthatrequireotherprocesses,thepricingmodelisbasedonthenumberoftechniciansandassetsmanaged.