Microsoft System Center Service Manager is an integrated
platform that is designed for automating and adapting IT Service Management
best practices to an organization’s requirements. The platform includes built-in
processes for incident and problem resolution, change control and asset
lifecycle management.
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SolarWinds Service Desk
Score 7.8 out of 10
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SolarWinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage) is a cloud-based, multi-tenant IT service desk and asset management software for IT and enterprise service management. Samanage is on a single, always new instance of software. The service desk includes a self-service portal, service catalog, knowledge base, and SLA management tool. The integrated agent-based asset management solution collects contracts and licensing data from Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix systems.
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Pricing
Microsoft System Center Service Manager
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft System Center Service Manager
SolarWinds Service Desk
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft System Center Service Manager
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Considered Both Products
Microsoft System Center Service Manager
No answer on this topic
SolarWinds Service Desk
Verified User
Engineer
Chose SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
As Solarwinds Service desk is completely hosted, it removes the need to commission one or more servers and database(s) which also removes quite a bit of overhead for the IT department to manage and maintain. Also, the operating system, database, and software updates are a thing …
We use Microsoft System Center Service Manager in the education sector. We believe this is the only real way to manage our IT systems and ensure compliance for not only today but tomorrow as well (what ever that brings!) Our IT management team significantly streamlined our working practices to mold a slick IT support service which serves our end users efficiently. Microsoft System Center Service Manager brought added automation and clarity for all major stakeholders in our organization through detailed reporting and scheduling, ensuring a complete realtime picture of the IT estate.
If you are looking for a way to support a company and bill based on the outcome this software works really well. If it's a quick password change there was no charge, but if it's troubleshooting things you click the box to charge. It works really well for this. Also bringing all your assets into this and associating them to a client works well. I can't think of anything that this software would not be less appropriate for. It works well for what we use it for.
Approval flows: You can have multiple layers of approval required for the tickets and service requests you design. This helps us show auditors that access to privileged systems and data was formerly reviewed and approved by the appropriate managers.
Easy to design forms: You don't need to spend hours reading the documentation to figure out how to create forms. It's simple enough that you can just jump right in and start creating them with minimal training.
Lots of options and features are available for you to include in your forms.
Integrates well with SAML-based SSO and has capabilities for MFA.
Easy and useful search function. Need to find that ticket from last year that you worked for a particular user or issue? Just search by keyword or username, and it'll quickly find the ticket.
There is potential to greatly improve the capacity for cascading attributes. Currently, categories are limited to a top-level category and one subcategory. This leaves a fairly shallow decision tree.
Greater flexibility to modify the layout of incident request forms.
More integration options for cloud file-sharing platforms. Solarwinds Service Desk has tie-ins to Dropbox but not other vendors.
My renewal is soon coming up, it is fairly likely I will renew again for the 5th year. I may consider evaluating what else is out there, It was requested by my staff to not make a change. They feel that SSD fits our needs, is easy to use and should keep it.
As with all software, Microsoft System Center Service Manager has its quirks but it has more than made up for them with the sheer amount of functions the system brings to the table. Being based on the ITIL framework really shows with its design/terminology and, generally, we have found it 'just clicks' with our ITIL trained staff which makes operating our system straightforward and enables us to report to end users and all stakeholders consistently with ease.
Solarwinds Service Desk has a very "user friendly" interface. Everything looks nice and neat. And, learning how to use the system is very easy. It provides multiple services that are easy for most people to grasp, and allows for great organization of incidents and assets. Support for Solarwinds Service Desk has a good response and resolution time and are easy to work with.
Because the data is stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) there are very rarely any outages. There have been some times when the product has been slow to load, but because the interface is web based it could be anything between my computer and AWS that was causing the issue. But also, because the application is web based it can be access from anywhere which makes it very convenient
When the system is working, the pages load very quickly. We run reports all the time in the system. The reporting can be extremely complex or very simple. Either way, we have not had any issues with the reports. We do not currently integrate Solarwinds Service Desk with any other software.
The customer support service is excellent. They help from start/deployment through to any time later on. They responded quickly and resolved our issues professionally and in no time.
SolarWinds support department will respond to you quickly from the time of purchase to after-purchase instructions & supporting, and the company is great in customers support. In buying a software, our organization always has a priority for the seller and support and accountability is very important to us, and the manufacturer or seller must be responsible and supportive.
When we first purchased Samanage (now Solarwinds) they provided us with an informational training session to show us all of the basics on how the service works and showed us everything we were interested in using. There are still some areas of Solarwinds that we do not yet utilize but I know if we choose to use them in the future we would be able to schedule another session with our representative to have them show us what we need to know.
The implementation process for our organization was fairly simple. We set up an email address to receive the emails from the system (for incident creation), and we allowed the system to spoof our IT email to respond to requests. Solarwinds helped us with the rest of the implementation, and it took less than a week to get the system fully operational.
I can't really compare them as we haven't used an "all in one" tool like SCCM. There are other patch management software, other remote control applications, and to be honest, I find those work better when compared to SCCM. However, there hasn't been an application yet that does it all, so I feel it's unfair to compare. All of these tools that SCCM offers could/should be fine-tuned and made to be a bit more user-friendly.
We chose SolarWinds Service Desk for its user friendly platform compared to what we had. Its was easier for requestors to submit tickets, provide feedback, merge tickets, build a suitable approval process. Our organization had a hard time going back and forth with the end user on providing a status on their request or issue, where most users just didn't follow through or lost interest in their issue. We would have to send multiple emails to get any type of feedback and that's something we did not want to keep on doing.
We have over 500 computers and tablets across our organization and this has helped us greatly in keeping track of where computers are and who is currently using it. I can see this product being useful to groups both larger and smaller than us and I really appreciate this product.
We are more easily able to quantify user satisfaction with support.
We are able to develop SLAs that quantify and define the obligation of our support teams.
The actual cost of Solarwinds Service Desk per agent user is high in our estimation. The more you implement this platform across your organization, the more tightly tethered you are to this solution.
