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.
N/A
TOPdesk
Score 8.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
TOPdesk is the flagship highly-modular cloud-based or installed ITSM service desk and asset management solution from the Dutch company of the same name, for enterprise companies.
$76
per month Per agent
Pricing
Microsoft System Center Service Manager
TOPdesk
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Essential
$76
per month Per agent
Engaged
$109
per month Per agent
Excellent
$155
per month Per agent
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft System Center Service Manager
TOPdesk
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
The TOPdesk license model:
- Modular: Organizations purchase only the modules needed
- Saas or On premise
- Supports unlimited number of assets.
- Service agents based.
- Discount available for annual pricing.
TOPdesk is much more flexible, it also has a self service portal which is convenient. Easy to ask questions to the TOPdesk service desk and good support.
Verified User
Manager
Chose TOPdesk
TOPdesk provides lexibility with HTML5 and creation, edits of self-service portal. We have the ability to access TOPdesk from anywhere. Service from TOPdesk to implement is great. Cost was very affordable.
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.
We had a smaller team of 6-7 people and for us it was perfect. It was very easy for us to book time per ticket and keep track of what we were spending the most of our time on. Escalating tickets was easy because of the prebuilt emails and message saving features. The typical features are all there of course such as incident, project management, etc. TOPdesk is highly customizable and we felt like we always had a good oversight of the KPI's, time management and customer satisfaction ratings. Our management liked the reporting features, the customizable dashboard and the data visualization. In my personal experience, TOPdesk also had the best search feature, and with the tags we were also very easily able to find the tickets we needed.
It just works, has some continuous development and an easy-to-use interface, which is important especially because not all our colleagues are technical experts (or in other words, "capable of more than switching on and off the computer"). We use a large range of functions and therefore it would be really hard to replace TOPdesk in our company.
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.
In short, we've been able to remove many pain points, automate multiple things, and empowered the end-user by being able to manage more items via the Self Service Portal. We've been able to do more than we were able to do with our previous ITSM platform. The TOPdesk development team added some things recently that will allow us to make some other things more efficient.
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.
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!
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.
Most if not nearly all questions are answered within the same or a few days. The helpdesk is very knowledgable about their product and are always willing to help. The only downside is that for more difficult questions it can take a while due to the experts being further removed from the helpdesk. But they are always willing to answer questions, even if they are not directly related to a problem with the service.
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.
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
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
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.
Spiceworks is an easier-to-use Help Desk solution but it lacks all other features that Topdesk has. Freshdesk was just too much for our environment. It was cost-prohibitive for our intended use. TOPdesk fit our org size and budget better than the others.
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.
