Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
BMC Helix Client Management
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
BMC Helix Client Management provides comprehensive, automated endpoint management, delivering great service to end users while minimizing cost, maintaining compliance, and reducing security risk. It replaces the now EoL BMC BladeLogic Client Automation platform. The software automatically deploys patches and updates patch bulletins.
N/A
Pricing
Azure DevOps
BMC Helix Client Management
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.
This tool will work the best in homogeneous environment where systems are running on Windows OS. In heterogeneous environment like ours where we have Windows, Linux and OS X operating systems, roll out and integration will be a challenge since not all the systems will have accessibility from a common credential
Patch management provides the flexibility to deploy patches using a test to production methodology. It also allows us to customize restart actions which helps with compliance but eases disruption to the business.
Computer imaging and software deployment work together to improve speed to delivery.
Financial asset management is very useful providing all of the information we need to support our PC replacement process.
I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
The process followed by the support team for incidents as well as support requests will become bottleneck for dynamically growing organisations as nothing works fast from a support point of view. A few of the requirements that we asked for took more time to execute and most of them came with a cost.
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
As we decided to go for BMC Remedy for ITSM, BMC Helix Client Management was the better solution than other tools for ITAM solution as integrating ITAM and ITSM was easier than other tools and also from support point of view, it will be one throat to choke. The reporting module was elaborate and customisable.
We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.
BMC Client Management has improved our speed to delivery, quality of service and security by providing the necessary automation tools to improve our processes.
