Altiris Helpdesk vs CA Service Desk

[rockon]

Hi,
I wonder if anyone has recent experience with both or either. I know both are ITIL compliant to a degree but not sure what is lacking in each. I found a previous thread said Altiris is not very friendly and reporting is hard. Is it still true? We have Altiris for software push now and CA v.6 for helpdesk software. We want to revamp the helpdesk software to be more ITIL complaint and be able do better workflow. It will be nice to use Altiri to have the CMDB info built into the tracking software but not sure it will also limit ourself because of lacking other features. Thank you for any input.

[UKVIKING]

A tool is never ITIL compliant. Aint no such animal.

ITIL is a people process.

The tool may be designed to follow what the developer/software house deems is the appropriate process for the ITL disciplines

but since people design the process to be best practice for the environment they are working at, the tool also has to be designed to fit the business not the other way round
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[UKVIKING]

SIGH

I hate replying to myself

You need to scope what you want from the tool in order to benefit the business.

You need to scope what you want from a incident report, problem etc

Once you know what you want from the report, you need to say what does the tool have to to do to get that report

For example

I want to track the # of incident for the 7 services that we are providing to our customers - who do not all use all 7 services.

You would need to be able to identify the customers, the users of the customers, the services, the associated SLAs, what groups within org support what services, how you plan to describe the service in the CMDB -
and how you devolve the service

For example

The services I provide are

Foto service, email service, VOIP, web service

The foto service depends the web

the web service uses apache as the web app
the web app sits on a server farm of 10 servers
the servers are using linux on sun servers
there are giant database storage arrays for the foto server
each customer has ___ as their default storage
they allocate ___ to each user

so with that data, you would extrapolate the following

the incident tool needs to be able to identify the customer/user and what service the customer and the user have indepently
the service should indicate what groups support the service
the support grou p shoudl be tracked as to how well they do (OLAs)

etc
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[rockon]

I got the picture of what you described here. Yes, implementation is important key. Maybe I didn't make it clear that I am trying to ask about the product scalability and comparison. Which is a better tool for large organization of more than 10000 employees? Which product provides more solutions and is robust. Which can easily implement and configure Incident, Problem, Change requests and workflows out of box and, also has a lot of potential to grow in the next few years. Thanks.

[UKVIKING]

How much money does the company wish to spend on the product
the infrastructure etc

regardless of the size of the company, the key point is the cost of the product

I dont see a real difference between any of the tools that I have seen

like beers, soft drinks, and candy bars

each one has its own flavor

this question should be directed at the companies which produce the products

you should get a demo meeing from them and ask them the question


of course there is a product mgmt in the forum.. he wil plug his product set....

i dont know any other reps that are in here
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[DanA]