[BMC Helix Remedyforce] is probably best suited for an MSP who needs to keep multiple clients separated. If you were an internal IT department I think the additional features it has would be lost. When dealing with an MSP who needs to know what software and what issues have effected specific clients it is very well suited to do that.
From a technician's point of view, it is extremely easy to create new work orders or tickets. It's also very simple to enter in data and keep track of the state of the ticket without taking too much time to keep it updated. I would love to see a cloud instance available to be able to make it a global installation as our company grows.
The ability to monitor/regulate the volume of tickets when you integrate with your monitoring software. We have so many items that trigger alerts, creating a ticket for each is somewhat overwhelming. Would like to be able to better control when an incident should be created.
Being able to report on Service requests and tasks together would be nice. Right now I have to do it separately as they are in different buckets, so to speak.
Remedy console is an improvement from where it started but can still be a cleaner interface for a tech to be able to work out of for their day to day work.
Care must be taken when configuring automatic replies otherwise you can end up in an endless loop of emails if response goes to another auto-responder. This will cause tickets to automatically be generated with every reply and then it takes a while to clean up the unwanted tickets.
The support model is prohibitively expensive if you let support lapse and then need support once again. This is because they expect you to pay for all of the previous versions/years between when you last paid for support and their current version. This means that if there have been 3 versions of the software since you last had support, they expect you to pay for the 3 versions even if you did not use them. This is a primary reason why we are looking at alternative ticketing systems currently.
It would be nice to have the ability to selectively kick a user our of a ticket without having to kick them entirely out of the application.
The total amount of time spent from installation to configuration for a minimal ticketing system was 2 hours. Maintenance and customization for the application can be completed with a great amount of ease. In addition having a customer portal is an added benefit that pays for itself
I only gave it this rating for the fact that we did not really use their support for much of the time we used the product. The support documentation in the actual program seemed to be lacking, so finding the information via the web or the vendor's site provided more helpful, from a support standpoint. I did notice that the vendor does have a portal where you can manage support cases and also has live phone support and an email option. All of these options are good for any customer that needs good support while using the product
Learning industry best practices or gaining insight on them from either BMC or an implementation partner would have saved some headaches we faced after roll-out.
I previously worked with tools like Service Manager which were difficult to configure, administer and maintain. The support options were very limited. Remedyforce has local US support, dedicated reps, and a more developed infrastructure to work from to support an organization. This runs on the Salesforce platform so worrying about server failures and unscheduled outages was no longer going to be an issue for us. Self service, knowledge base, and change control were just a few highly utilized features that helped employees support themselves and automate very manual processes.
ConnectWise was far more robust with a lot more customization, project management features, templates, and documentation. It tied into other software that we needed to do our jobs. The interface was cleaner, the software was faster, and users had an easier time. Oversight was also much better. That said, it was also far more expensive, and it was developed more for managed service providers and large companies than smaller enterprises like ours.
