EasyVista Service Manager vs. Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk vs. Symantec Client Management Suite

It is well suited for a service-based department, but it can sometimes offer confusion for non-technical users because of the amount information the form fields require. Most customers don't want to write the equivalent of a book to simply say that " I want to obtain a license of Adobe Acrobat and charge it to the department."

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Whenever you have computers that aren't easily accessible or you have a big site to cover (or multi location), Symantec Client Management Suite (CMS) is really great to manage all your computers, if it's for installation, software, licenses or even status. Setting up all you need from CMS can take some time, especially when you're in a multi-location site. We had to ask the Symantec engineers to help us a couple of times and set things up because even if we followed the documentation, it wasn't an easy task. But at least, the Symantec engineers are people that know what they do and they're really efficient at it.

Incentivized

• Documentation is very important for any technology department. We can easy attach quotes, screenshots of issues, or invoices so that any one looking at the work order once closed can see that the task was completed quickly or may require more resources if needed again.
• Tracking the progress of your team is also important when considering pay scales or promotions. Reports help you see which employees are going above and beyond and those that are needing extra motivation.
• Universities have to work as cohesive unit to be successive. Our customers tell is us what is needed for them to do their jobs and we are able to divide the work amongst our staff to continue the quest quickly.

Incentivized

• It helps to multitask, even on the go with the mobile App.
• We can customize to meet your needs with automated responses, notifications, and templates.
• Detailed reports allow managers to keep track [of] and analyze data.
• Allows for a database to store notes helpful for future tickets.

Incentivized

• Patch Management: We are able to easily deploy patches to all our workstations and accurately report on compliance.
• Software Delivery: We do a lot of software deployments to our end users and with CMS we can quickly create policies or tasks to perform these deliveries and get quick results on our success or failures.
• Inventory: Ease of use to get reports of what workstations have what software installed, patch levels, or hardware specifications.

• Customization without the need for lengthy contacts with tech support. Non-technical team members should be able to resolve malfunctions with the interface and its components.
• A mobile app would make resolving work orders in the field easier. Without the need for a PC-like device to access the program. Many times, weather conditions are not kind to tablets. A cell phone is more reasonable.

Incentivized

• I have always wanted a way to redirect a support request into another IS bin, such as a development task.
• It's possible to extract the data from the Spiceworks database, but it would be helpful if the process to do so were easier.
• Improved ability to customize the system generated emails to improve the formatting and company branding.

Incentivized

• More transparency with the roadmap would be a welcome change. New and upcoming features are usually a surprise until a major Symantec Event takes place but little is heard about those features before and even after, in some cases, leading up to a release.
• Documentation for some items is poor. Especially around the Workflow product. It was intended that the documentation for the elements in a workflow would be crowd-sourced, which is a good idea, but in order for that to happen, more people need to be using it and taking the time to draw up the documents.
• Cost. Its always a big topic, especially in higher-ed, but Symantec could do more to lower its costs for some product lines in order to gain more acceptance and support. If that was done and more institutions could get their student workers to use the product, once they leave college and go into the "real-world" there is a possibility that they would start recommending Symantec products because of their use in College.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

So far so good - no major issues with that technology.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We use it both locally on our own server so up time is decided by us and we also use the hosted help desk. We have never had an outage of that.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Support at Symantec isn't that great. Client Management Suite isn't even listed on the Support Portal when trying to open a ticket. Your best bet for support is actually the user groups that Symantec hosts. The members of the groups are usually very responsive. With Broadcom buying Symantec, I've seen a huge jump in personnel leaving Symantec, so I'm assuming the support is just going to get worse. Recently for a simple question, I reached out to 5 people just to find out 4 of the 5 had left the company.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

There has been less downtime due to incompatible upgrade elements in our environment. EasyVista is takes hours not days to troubleshoot and resolve any functionality errors. Tech Support has been more helpful and reachable.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Although there are other tools that can be utilized I don't believe those tools are as robust as Symantec Management Platform. The Symantec Management Platform was chosen because of the value it returns internally and for our customers. You can pull just about any data element from an endpoint and provide detailed reports or great graphs for the C-Level

Incentivized

• Our turnaround time has decreased steadily use implementing use.
• Our CIO is update on the progress of his team at all times.
• The customers feel better informed about their requests from start to finish.

Incentivized

• Positive - Allow organizations to implement structured Help Desk procedures.
• Positive - IT can begin to quantify their tickets and uncover needs within the organization.
• Positive - IT can develop a solid roadmap with [the] management of future needs, equipment refresh schedules, etc.
• Positive - IT can pinpoint employees who may need extra training or updated equipment based on historical ticketing data.

Incentivized

• SMP allows us to centrally manage all of our endpoints with little to no end user interaction.
• With the new P2P downloading our bandwidth constraints have been almost completely removed.
• Cloud Enabled Management (CEM) allows our remote users to receive the same updates as in-network devices without the need for a VPN connection.

Incentivized