The former VMware Service Manager was an ITSM option from VMware. VMware stopped supporting SM in 2017 and transferred support to VMware partner Alemba. The product is presently supported by Alemba, as Alemba Service Manager.
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TOPdesk
Score 8.7 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
TOPdesk is the flagship highly-modular cloud-based or installed ITSM service desk and asset management solution from the Dutch company of the same name, for enterprise companies.
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Pricing
Alemba Service Manager
TOPdesk
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Alemba Service Manager
TOPdesk
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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The TOPdesk license model:
- Modular: Organizations purchase only the modules needed
- Saas or On premise
- Supports unlimited number of assets.
- End users OR service agents based. For flexibility in the number of agents for e.g. extra busy times of the year, the end user license allows adding agents without any restrictions, no day passes needed.
When a Service Desk agent receives a request from a user to fulfill and an incident occurs during implementation, VMWare Service Manager (VSM) will be able to link all events and correlate records across the system.
TOPdesk is a comprehensive service management software ideal for IT-departments, managing incidents in handling change requests. Also fiscality management can use it to keep track of assets and booking of rooms for meetings e.g. Also the registration of employees can be managed by TOPdesk and is therefore ideal for HR department. A scenario where it is less appropriate would be production planning.
TOPdesk provides a clean and modern interface for all of its modules. Many of the modules have a similar look and feel, which makes it easy for users to utilize each one.
Its workflow system allows administrators and developers to define what needs to occur when certain events happen. This can ensure that processes happen in the correct sequence.
TOPdesk includes a vast API system to allow for external systems to integrate with it, and for TOPdesk to communicate with external systems.
We have a multi-year contract and plan on keeping the database growing with our inventory. Techs are getting used to it and seem to like the ease of use and reliability of the cloud system. We have never seen it go down before and maintenance windows have been short and easy to work around.
Sometimes I think some things are hard to find. I often do not know if I have to search in Settings or in Modules. In some cases the user has to do a lot of clicks for example to link a key to a user. Something could work a little smarter.
Like I said somewhere else in this review: the helpdesk of TOPdesk is top of the bill! In the Netherlands, that is. I can not plea for the helpdesks in other countries, but I guess the TOPdesk organization will make sure the quality of the helpdesk is the same in every country.
Although being a SAAS solution, TOPdesk performs pretty fast. One can imagine that any SAAS solution is slow or has hiccups, but we have not experienced such with TOPdesk. Pages load quickly, logging in goes smoothly. We have made reports on premise in the past - that always took some time, as you might expect with such complex tasks. It seems that in the SAAS solution TOPdesk somehow has managed to make it even faster!
TOPdesk is easy to use and affordable with all the major features required for any organization to smoothly manage its services. We were not quite sure at the beginning if we should go with the TOPdesk for IT service management but we started getting used to it in just a few months. Now, after using it for 3 years, it has been a backbone tool of our organization. The customer support provided by TOPdesk is fast and reliable.
We had Topdesk in-house here training staff for almost a month (2-3 hour meetings 3x a week.) It was invaluable and we were able to take that training and share with the rest of our IT staff. Once implemented we were able to fly from there. The challenges we found were in how to get started. Once started the knowledge base offered from Topdesk has been invaluable.
Online training documentation is easy to access and consume. There is no real challenges with finding information on how to use the product and some really helpful knowledge base items that show us how valuable these options are in our own implementation of it. The online training we've used has been self driven
It was a challenge to port over years of the same thing and we ended up keeping old ideas in Topdesk that we will eventually weed out as time passes and we learn how users view categories and flows of tickets. Planning is key but bear in mind that just because you used to do it this way doesn't mean you still have to
We used to use Maintenance direct - it also had limitations in what we were able to utilize it for. The biggest thing we did use if for was utilities. I'm still working on the comparison to the TOPdesk Utility module to see if it fulfills our requirements from a reporting and financial standpoint. We selected TOPdesk over the Maintenance upgrade due to it being more user friendly and we could focus our time on getting things completed rather than setting up users and monitoring their activity. The ability to put TOPdesk on mobile devices for the technicians has been huge for us. We can do real-time work order assignments while they are in the field. Our old system did not do this.
TOPdesk is very flexible and scalable. Every department in you organization can you the software. Perhaps some persons need some training, but that can be provided by TOPdesk ot some keyusers.
This year we moved to a unified hardware budget where IT now orders all assets from our budget. Asset management is key to that goal. TOPdesk has enabled our department to move forward with of Computer Lifecycle program of replacements.
TOPdesk did come with a cost, we went from using the free Spiceworks solution to a paid solution with TOPdesk. But I firmly believe the benefits outweigh the cost.
We had started to have stability issues with our old helpdesk solution. With TOPdesk I have had no downtime and by it being cloud-based we no longer have to have onsite servers.