Likelihood to Recommend [BMC Helix Remedyforce] is probably best suited for an MSP who needs to keep multiple clients separated. If you were an internal IT department I think the additional features it has would be lost. When dealing with an MSP who needs to know what software and what issues have effected specific clients it is very well suited to do that.
Read full review The single element of Parature I've not seen in any other system of this kind is the Download Module. You can post files in the open, or protect them by any number of entitlement methods. The solution is also appealing to those who don't want to manage the back-end/IT needs as it is a hosted solution and has proven to be very reliable.
Read full review Pros An admin user is able to quickly create a request definition with all of its components from one screen. We use to have to go to the 7 or 8 different screens to create each piece of the request definition. Ability to update multiple Incidents/Service Requests at once with the update button. This allows essentially an inline edit functionality within Remedyforce. Change management schedule is a great feature as well to be able to see how changes align and what there expected start dates/times are. Read full review Clean/Friendly UI. It was extremely easy to navigate around Parature's menus at a high level, and you could take advantage of the more robust features as you became more comfortable and familiar with how Parature operates! Strong Knowledge Base. Writing KB articles or ticket summaries and making use of the search function within Parature allows for expedient recovery of past ticket information. Being able to search for a fix action, or at least a troubleshooting article that can guide you towards a resolution is extremely valuable. Enhanced Notation Capability. Being able to send/post internal or external updates to a ticket is great! You can leave the wordy technical details for other employees while making sure to communicate the high-points and fix action to the end-user. Read full review Cons The ability to monitor/regulate the volume of tickets when you integrate with your monitoring software. We have so many items that trigger alerts, creating a ticket for each is somewhat overwhelming. Would like to be able to better control when an incident should be created. Being able to report on Service requests and tasks together would be nice. Right now I have to do it separately as they are in different buckets, so to speak. Remedy console is an improvement from where it started but can still be a cleaner interface for a tech to be able to work out of for their day to day work. Read full review Reporting is barebones at best. If you need special reports, we had to go through Parature to have them built. The use of frames on a website is very 1990s. It actually impacts usability of the product, especially when combined with how Parature handled sessions. An engineer could only work one ticket at a time which, honestly, isn't very realistic for a busy support team that is working on several issues at a time. Support was often unresponsive when contacted for unplanned problems. The knowledge base was not very friendly for clients and it provided no real encouragement for it to be used. It took several clicks to do something as simple as edit and assign a ticket or to close a ticket. Read full review Likelihood to Renew The total amount of time spent from installation to configuration for a minimal ticketing system was 2 hours. Maintenance and customization for the application can be completed with a great amount of ease. In addition having a customer portal is an added benefit that pays for itself
Read full review Parature has been the best option for this campus in terms of what we use it for and there is no alternative
Read full review Usability It was bulky, cumbersome, and didn't allow us to handle the volume of cases we received on a daily basis. Many of our issues were highly technical in nature and we would often need to work on 2 or 3 at once. The poor design choices prevented this, which was unfortunate.
Read full review Reliability and Availability They recently had one very extended outage. It was a data center issue - but they were not diversified enough so in the end the system was down for almost 8 hours. There are also periods of time where for no reason the system simply doesn't respond. This small outages are usually short (just a few minutes), and have in fact been occurring less often, so it appears some corrective actions have been taken.
Read full review Support Rating They care about your success.
Read full review Nothing ever seemed to get resolved
Read full review Implementation Rating Learning industry best practices or gaining insight on them from either BMC or an implementation partner would have saved some headaches we faced after roll-out.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I previously worked with tools like Service Manager which were difficult to configure, administer and maintain. The support options were very limited. Remedyforce has local US support, dedicated reps, and a more developed infrastructure to work from to support an organization. This runs on the Salesforce platform so worrying about server failures and unscheduled outages was no longer going to be an issue for us. Self service, knowledge base, and change control were just a few highly utilized features that helped employees support themselves and automate very manual processes.
Read full review There are services that do bits and pieces of what Parature does. We liked the idea of having one service that meets our needs
Read full review Return on Investment Remedyforce has allowed us to eliminate other solutions that provided similar features. By now using one true ITSM we have been able to save money which in higher education is always a concern. The reports and dashboards allow for a birds-eye view of our daily operations and provide managers and executives the information they need to make important cost saving decisions. Read full review Parature allows for better Customer Service Can follow up automatically for tickets Will automatically close tickets that haven't been responded to. Allows customers to reopen tickets easily and not allow them to be missed. Read full review ScreenShots BMC Helix Remedyforce Screenshots