ServiceDesk

Has anyone moved to the new SD7 in production?

We have two completely different Helpdesk 6 systems and i'm looking to combine them both when we move to SD7 . I don't want to invest the time in moving to the new version if it is too buggy. 

If you do have it running in product how many people are using it ?

 seems like everyone is testing only not yet using in production 

You'll be lucky to get it installed IMO. Good luck!

 we tried it in beta and had a bunch of issues and gave up .. all mostly issues with off box SQL. we installed Workflow 7 which is about the same install

I have to agree with Tech-O. This product is clearly still very immature and riddled with errors and implementation issues. I'm hoping that Symantec will get most of these issues ironed out in the next few releases, or else I'm not sure if we'll be able to make the move to 7.

Here are a couple of the issues I've encountered while trying to build a sandbox SD7 environment:

-- SQL off-box is possible, but a major pain. You'll have to create an AD service account for SD7 and do some manual configuration of IIS to make SD7 run as that account, then make sure that the account has rights to SQL to create and modify the database.

-- AD authentication is also possible, but a pain. Instead of being simple, clean, & straight-foward (like HelpDesk 6.5, where you would have roles inside the app that you could assign/map to AD groups), instead SD7 imports your AD users and populates its own copy of each account in the database, then does the same for your AD groups (but doesn't bring over the group memberships). So when it's all said-and-done, you have to grant permissions to the groups imported from AD and then assign the users to those groups again in SD7, or just stick with the out-of-the-box groups and assign users to those. There doesn't seem to be a way to use AD to drive security, instead you have to do it all from in the app, which I find to be a bit annoying).

I'm not sure if that came across clearly or not, but what I'm trying to say is that I wish you could go into SD7 and tell it that for any given role, it should use a specified AD group, then when user X logs in, SD7 checks user X's AD group memberships and grants them the appropriate role in SD7. To me, this would be a way cleaner way to administer security in SD7 for AD-integrated environments.

-- After all of the above tweaking and cursing Symantec was done, I still wasn't actually able to use the product, as I kept receiving errors when trying to create incidents (I'm still looking into this one).

Now, I don't mean to talk down about this product (heck, I love what they've done with NS7 and I think SD7 has a ton of potential and some amazing features), and it's quite possible that these issues are due to me not configuring things properly, but all-in-all, it's been an extremely frustrating and time-consuming experience just to try and test/evaluate this product.

 NFdotcom Thanks for the input ..wish we could find some running it in production for questions

We're also looking for someone who's running SD7 in production as we are actively looking to replace an antiquated ticketing system. Not sure that SD7 is just right, but would love to hear the opinion of someone using it today.

It seems like you wouldn't find anyone for awhile . Seem it'll take awhile for people to get the hardware need and to do the migration. I bet it will be Q1 when you maybe find a few people on it 

We are looking to roll it out before Christmas - but am struggling to find help on choosing hardware - theres enough information about cores/RAM etc but i cant find information on HDD space required.

:-(

http://www.altiris.com/upload/servicedesk_impl_gde.pdf

https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=46471&p=1

Also, the release notes have a couple sections about scaling and SQl etc.

Holler if you find what you need, or need more specifics.
thanks

We liked the story and vision of what they're trying to do,  especially with workflow, but the product isnt quiet there yet SLA management is disapointing (which tells me they are not really into service management yet as a company) and we had difficulty getting detailed knowledge out of EMEA in particular. Also the hardware and OS requirement meant we couldnt justify the expense for what is an untried product.

 NS7Guru what are your problems with the sla

SD 7 is a fantastic system but it needs allot of knowledge to understand. The company I work at is Symantec Gold Partner and we have invested a lot of time and resources in this product. So far we have two installations that are in production state and 3 more projects that are started or will be in near future.
Compared to setting up Helpdesk solution which easier could be setup by one person it's important to have a project team with correct expertise to succeed. To clearify there are three main areas where skills are needed to fully configure and customize a Servicedesk.
1 - Technician with SMP(CMS/SMS/CMDB/Servicedesk/Workflow) knowledge
2 - ITIL expertise that understand SMP and it's solutions and of coure deep knowledge about ServiceDesk
3 - .Net developer with experience of Workflow Solution and Servicdesk processes

If all this is to be handled by one person it might be frustrating since it's a wide spectrum. I completely agree that there are also allot of things
that could be better and that of course will be. My suggestion is to speak with Symantec or a partner to them which have practical experience that
could give you and idea of what a project scope would look like setting up Servicedesk 7. It doesn't need to be time consuming(expensive) to setup Sevicedesk.

 

Great post Jesper! I completely agree with the frustration that comes with one person trying to integrate this, especially when migrating from an existing Altiris TMS/Helpdesk environment that has been heavily customized. I wanted to add a number 4 to your list:

4 - SQL guru :)