ServiceDesk

Hello,

I would be very interested to hear some opinions about ServiceDesk 7.5 verse 7.1SP2.

We are looking at upgrading from ServiceDesk 7.1SP2 to 7.5.  Some members of our group feel that the effort and additional resources are not worth it.  Other members feel 7.5 might be a much better system.  Can anyone provide some real advantages they have experienced since moving to 7.5?  Also, any disadvantages of moving?

Thanks for any information you can provide!

This can be a loaded question but the bottom line from me is if you have the ability and time to do it, you'll be better off. 7.5 has some distinct advantages over 7.1. 

1. In-place upgrades moving forward
2. Routing rules inside of Process Manager (they are a little lacking in some areas but future releases can fix/modify them)
3. A little faster console
4. A more logical (to me) regard to queues/groups than in 7.1.

Of course the biggest pitfall of 7.5 is that the primary workflows are locked and shouldn't be modified. This means that SD.IncidentManagement can't be modified. This allows for the in-place upgrades to actually work however those of us who have modified this heavily in 7.1 will have to think about changing procedures or coming up with other workflows to get around what we can't do now.

That's just a start and I'll let others chime in as well.

Risking to repeat some/most of what jpellet2 already said:

The main disadvantage is that if you have customized the main flows - IM, PM, CM etc, this is something you can no longer do in 7.5. There are some workflow projects that you can still modify but this is more limited than it was in 7.1.

On the positive side:

Automation Rules have changed a lot, many things that needed customizations to bring them into ServiceDesk are now doable via Automation Rules.

Not only console is faster but rebuilt Incident Management (which is what usually is most used) has improved things. With the underlying Workflow version getting updated, performance has taken big step for the better. Of course, some/most of Workflow improvements will eventually get back to the 7.1 version too as Workflow 7.1 SP3 at some point.

Some new conceptsfor customizations have been introduced, Process Actions and Send to Workflow from Automation Rules being perhaps the most interesting examples.

If I'm not mistaken, you cannot transfer open tickets from 7.1 to 7.5. How have you (who have already made the switch) handled this issue? Have you been running both version next to each other?

Thanks

Kind regards

Koen

Runnig both is really how its done. We've made a cut-off point where all new tickets have to go into the new system while old tickets are worked in the previous system. Although we didn't do it, we had also talked about entertaining the idea of not allowing tickets to sit in a resolved state but rather work to change them to closed every day or so in order to get to migrate them faster. Honestly though, we don't have an extreme amount of open tickets, maybe 100 or so across all groups and really most of those are older and may be closed if there are no recent tickets left so that we can move the remainder and retire 7.1.

Can anyone who has implemented 7.5 ServiceDesk comment on the time it took you to roll this out.  We are currently on 6.5 and we are looking to implement 7.5 with in house resources.  We have one person that is intimately knowledgable about 6.5 and another who has primarily dealt with deployment.  We have come up with a 5 month implementation schedule for ServiceDesk that we need to sell to upper management.  Installilng ServiceDesk can be done in short order but the various intricacies of ServiceDesk is where we get into the extended time to understand and configure to our needs. Any comments on the time it took and resources needed would be greatly appreciated. 

With going from 6 to 7 5 months may be tight but doable. We had gone from 6 to 7.1 with only myself doing the work and I started in February and we went live in May. My biggest recommendation is to have your business process buttoned up and know exactly what you do now and how you want to do it going forward. Some things can translate over and others don't very well. 7.5 is a leap forward from 7.1 and has some nice features that will save a little time such as built-in routing rules but you also need to know the limitations (those same routing rules don't allow you to route on everything in an incident as of the current release, but maybe soon).

I would say that the biggest gotchas for us were:

     Emails and Email Templates

     Routing Rules

     Configuring Queues and permissions

     Reporting

     Training

The other item that takes a long time, depending on your business needs, is transferring closed tickets. It took us 3 days to transfer in 30,000 closed tickets from HD 6.5 and honestly we have NEVER looked at them. In fact I still haven't found a way to run a report against the migrated incidents at all. 

All in all, if you keep it simple and don't have large demands for custom workflows up front, 5 months should work out ok.