Likelihood to Recommend 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 I think TOPdesk is best fitted in small to medium businesses, if there is someone capable of programming the rule sets. Those can be hard to create properly or maintain over time. The knowledge base and Self Service Portal can provide users with some insights and help, even if the SysAdmin is unavailable at that time. I don't think it is suitable for larger companies, because I personally think it will get quite messy then.
Read full review Pros 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 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. Read full review Cons 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 The requirement to fill out certain fields before a ticket can be closed can be cumbersome. This could be a requirement for some organizations though. The field mappings from Azure AD to user data could be a little more precise. Some of the fields just don't translate. When setting up the system to intake emails as trouble tickets, it can be tricky when people reply after a ticket is closed. It will create multiple tickets from this. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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 As the project manager for the system, I find it to be intuitive and helpful to keeping our technicians in the field and working rather than running back all the time for paper copies of work orders. I think once we have a solid year under our belt there are things that we can work to expand on. The technicians like it because they can look back at old work orders to see what we did in certain locations to make repairs. All the notes are contained on the system rather than relying on someone else to put them in and dig them back out. The system benefits the technicians when they use it to their advantage. We are also finding reduced calls to the office asking about work order statuses. The customers are getting real-time updates on their requests.
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 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.
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 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.
Read full review Performance 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!
Read full review Support Rating Nothing ever seemed to get resolved
Read full review 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.
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Online Training 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
Read full review Implementation Rating 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 TOPdesk was picked as our new Helpdesk solution due to the Asset Management module and the ability to integrate to Active Directory. When we work with the product demo we enjoyed the way TOPdesk does its work flow. Just about any field in the system is customizable. I have found their knowledge base of the product to be well written and up-to-date.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 The self-service portal has allowed us to shift left massively. Students can find the solutions themselves very often. It has allowed easier collaborative working between teams. We are more efficient as we do not have to ask the student to repeat their question and we can record everything necessary in the incident. This provides an improved student experience as well as improved staff efficiency. Read full review ScreenShots