ServiceDesk Plus

What we like most about Service Desk Plus is its strong functional breadth combined with a high level of configurability. The solution covers core ITSM capabilities comprehensively, including incident and request management, asset management and CMDB support, without requireing addional modules for basic use cases. Standout strengths include: 1) Configurability and flexibility: the ability to adapt workflows, forms and processes to organisational needs rather than forcing standard templates. 2) Operational stability and reliability: consistent performance in daily operations, even as usage and process maturity increased. (Cloud Version) 3) Value for money: Enterprise-grade ITSM capabilities at a cost point suitable for mid-sized organisations, without the overhead of large enterprise suites.

The product itself provides great value and spans a lot of different types of services. The user interface, for the most part, is easy to navigate. They also have lots of different integrations into third-party services that will be helpful to us down the line.

I really like the workflow builder. Workflows in ServiceDesk can be created using a detailed workflow builder tool. From Start to End, you can drag and drop different items on a grid in order to add notification stages, approval stages, and adjust outcomes based on the workflow status. Workflows in services, for example, can be adjusted to indicate to the user whether their service is assigned, in-progress, completed, or ready for review. Each stage can perform an action such as notifying the user or even the whole company or set the status of a change. Customizations to these workflows have allowed for the creation of an onboarding tool, mover tool, and even a leaver tool based on company specific tasks rather than buying a whole other solution.

The main weaknesses we experienced are mostly related to usability and effort rather than functional gaps. 1) Initial setup and configuration effort: fully leveraging the platform requires a well-defined process model and dedicated internal ownership. The learning curve can be steep without prior ITSM experience. 2) Advanced reporting and analytics: while standard reports cover basic needs, more complex reporting and cross module analytics require additional configuration and are not fully intuitive out of the box. 3) Integration depth for complex environments: integrations are available, but more advanced or non-standard scenarios can require workaroudns or custom effort.

The workflows in the Change Management module can get messy when you are designing them. Some notifications can't be customized the way we'd like them to be. ManageEngine is putting more focus on the cloud SaaS based version vs. the on-premises version.

While we like the advanced customizable incident and service templates, ManageEngine's Service Desk Plus limits you on how many additional fields you're able to use depending on what database you use as your backend. As we added more departments to our SD instance, we required more customized templates. Our situation ultimately required more additional fields than what the cloud version could sufficiently manage and required us to migrate to on premises with SQL. Hopefully future versions of the cloud will support more additional fields.