HaloITSM vs. Microsoft System Center Service Manager

HALO is very much suited to the IT Support Desk environment and works very well. It offers all the functionality that is required to run a service plus much more. I can't really comment on the other modules yet as we haven't really fully utilised them, but hopefully will in the future.

I think any organization that runs windows on their computers that is size over 50 workstations and looking for a complete package to manage their windows machines must have Microsoft System Center Service Manager, especially if they have Windows servers and VMs. The capability of managing multiple devices at ones can save a lot of time for the IT jobs.

Incentivized

• Ticketing Structure
• The ticketing structure (allowing us to add custom fields and tables) and the process are quick, clean, and easy to adapt to our changing needs. Change requests are processed within a few hours (complex ones take longer, purely for testing), however, the whole solution is geared to customization and the more you work with it the more you get out of it
• SLA's
• Detailed SLAs for each part of the business, with multiple tiers, time frames, reporting, and alerting options - a different config for every team configured with a few simple clicks
• Time Management
• Excellent granular reporting that lets you drill in, both from a business perspective as to how many hours are being spent on different activities and from a support perspective, where are your teams spending their team.
• Reporting
• Excellent set of customizable reports (hundreds of them) along with a reporting tool (For which a little SQL does go a long way) and for those fiddly reports, free support is only a call away.
• Role Assignments
• Simple role assignments that make updating changes to teams and departments the work of minutes rather than days. Easy to apply and each person can have multiple roles. Simple but powerful and very sleek.

• Imaging - Can hold all of your images and allow them to be deployed from one central place
• Patching - Able to manage patches from a central database and have reporting on machines out of compliance
• Reporting - ability to utilize several reports to check compliance and other items you may want to review

Incentivized

• Support for M365 \ Power Platform, Power Bi reporting in particular
• Feel the asset management side of the product is not as good as the ticket management
• Support is excellent but maybe an old school user forum where other admins can share and discuss ideas

• Reporting in System Center could be more user-friendly. While the data is there, sometimes several reports have to be run to get what you want
• SCCM would be better making updates to SCCM easier. We see risk in updates, so it causes delays, which creates more risk
• Improving the application deployment log files , making them easier to read

Incentivized

Its simple and intuitiuve - requires minimal training to get people in and working at speed

I've made overall positive experiences with the Halo support. The only thing to increase would be some follow ups on feature requests. If someone would reach out to me, telling me wheter or not my feature request will be considered in future updates or not.

Incentivized

The customer support service is excellent. They help from start/deployment through to any time later on. They responded quickly and resolved our issues professionally and in no time.

Incentivized

Based on our requirements, this is how we scored them. Halo - 78, ServiceNow - 77, Ivanti - 67, Jira - 57, Freshservice - 41. This was based purely on our requirements and whether additional modules required additional licences.

Incentivized

It has its similarities between the two from a ticketing standpoint but as a primarily Microsoft shop it is nice to have a product that was created to play along with other tools that we are using such as SCCM. We like Jira for the project management tools and Cherwell for their customization but the latter took lots of effort to get that piece working.

Incentivized

• It enabled us to allow our Service Desk Staff to work from home during COVID and this has continued ever since.
• We have halved our average resolution time.
• Some of the automation processes, when implemented alongside the MS Power Platform, have saved approximately 30 hours a month. This includes times when customers were unable to access the system until they had been trained. This is now automated via Halo and they get sent to on-demand training, instead of waiting up to 3 weeks for the next scheduled session.

Incentivized

• "Quick" patch management -- once the process is nailed down.
• The ability to include remote control in a central place.
• Reporting is great.

Incentivized