Based on the ITIL best practices framework, the SunView ChangeGear product suite improves and streamlines the IT service management lifecycle. By automating IT service management processes, companies gain greater visibility into their IT infrastructure, eliminate system downtime, reduce operational costs, ensure regulatory compliance and improve IT service delivery. SunView Software is a Serviceaide company (acquired August 2021).
$0
Per Seat per Month
Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Spiceworks offers a set of free tools for IT network management and help desk support ticketing. The inventory management system essentially provides comprehensive device information for asset management.
ChangeGear is a full blown IT management system and does lots of things very well, but the beauty of Spiceworks is that its not as complicated to use as ChangeGear. (I only used both systems for 6 months as basically Help Desk Tech, so I didn't use the system for more than that.)
1. What kind of service-levels are you looking to establish? 2. Are there other programs you are going to be using for other aspects of 'the job?' 3. How many employees are going to be needing access to ChangeGear? 4. Do you want a highly configurable product or something that will come out of the box pre-set? 5. Are you looking to keep track of equipment deployed to the customers you support?
It's a great helpdesk solution - we currently have five years of data within it, roughly 25,000 tickets. The older edition is a great inventory and software license tracking tool. It is easy for users to use the interface and submit tickets and requests on the web, and its email integration is solid. The new version is a below-average system monitoring tool, only giving up/down status and a few other metrics.
Not sure if this is due to our back end, but ChangeGear Service Desk can sometimes bog down. Speed can always be improved and, while version 6 has been impressive so far, slow downs are still common.
Browser compatibility can sometimes be hit or miss. Certain fields would not work on Chrome, so our department has required FireFox. I have not tested 6 on other browsers but hopefully the upgrade has taken care of this.
The communications with customers are not easy to sift through. With limited attention spans, seeing a subject line filled with 'gibberish' causes our customers to either delete or leave the message forever unread. Again, not sure if due to our implementation, but I would clean that sort of thing up.
Spiceworks is a free tool, so there would be no hesitation if we are required to upgrade it. We have installed Spiceworks on a dedicated server with more than enough resources to get the most from this tool, so we will have this running in our department for years to come.
Because it allows me to work in (probably) the most organized way possible. It allows me to collaborate quickly and rather effortlessly with coworkers within my team and other teams in the Technology department. The deduction in rating is due to the issues with speed and browser compatibility. Version 6 has been a revelation but I as always, there's room for improvement.
Spiceworks is user friendly and easy to set up. It can be customized to suit your needs. If there are any problems, you can go to the community forums for support and be in contact with many IT Pros, as well as the Spiceworks support staff and development teams who are always happy to help users out
Spiceworks has been working out of the box, and some of the basic customizations have been successful with just our internal staff handling. We don't have any other issues with the tool. It provides us with the inventory information we want in a quick and concise report in a variety of formats for our team.
If you can spin up a VM to run it on, you'll thank yourself later. If you have remote sites, set up a local server (or dedicated computer) at each site and set them up as remote collectors for the main site. You'll save time and bandwidth
EGroupware UI is clunky and hard to use, Jira is great but the pricing is expensive in comparison with spice works that has a free version and you can test it out properly before buying and make a correct decision based on your business plan and company objectives with the right software.