Lansweeper I believe is well suited for any environment - its low cost and small footprint make it an easy addition to any organization, big or small, that is looking for an asset inventory solution that can either replace or supplement existing asset management systems. It may not be well suited for situations where a lot of customization is necessary, such as pulling in custom fields or details from equipment that don't reside in a registry.
For beginning smaller companies that are in need of partially automating their incoming requests this product is easy to set up and will assist in structuring these request[s]. These requests can come in via email/phone or web portal. For companies that are beginning to streamline their support procedures, this tool can be a first step into automating part of these processes. This is also how user[s] should see it. It is merely a tool that can assist in structuring the incoming request flow the rest still has to be fit into business processes.
Inventory - LANSweeper scans the network for devices - anything with an SNMP trap or using AD or local credentials. We can get an in-depth look at devices.
Reporting - LANSweeper can generate just about any report you can imagine. We can check RAM in groups and determine where upgrades are needed. We can find local printers (which aren't allowed on our network) and address that issue with the user. We can check CPU type to help determine end of life without our network.
Printers - It's nice to have a quick look at printer statuses. Toner levels, out of paper, and service errors are all reported via LANSweeper.
osTicket is extremely user friendly for end users and support agents. It's very easy for new end users to put in a service request. This aspect of simplicity is important because we don't have to train new users on how to put in service requests.
Feature wise osTicket has everything you need without being overly complicated or cluttered. This is important for us because it allows for faster support times and happier end users.
Lightweight and very reliable, osTicket uses PHP and MySQL. Setup is easy and it can be hosted internally or externally web hosed. Also, since it relies on PHP it gives you flexibility to use Apache, Nginx , Lighttpd , IIS, etc.
Thriving community: the community behind osTicket is feature-wise. Which is very helpful if you have any questions.
Best of all, osTicket is completely free and open source. While they do offer pair tier cloud-hosting and enterprise support. The free version offers all the features of the paid tiers (minus hosing and support).
Can only scan what it sees. Doesn't show every item on the machine. Patches are also absent.
Software Recognition is OK with Microsoft. It is dire within our network of multiple products. Recognition is at about 35% with constant manual work needed to baseline for each manufacturer in each network
Datacenter compliance is a manual project. We used Excel extensively.
License optimization is limited to installations v surplus licenses. We need to know who's using what and how.
I am familiar with osTicket and this allow me to teach all the staff and support them whenever they have any concern regarding the usability and following processes.
Lots of info online there are tons of SQL Reports you can copy from the web as Lansweeper and users post many of them. They also send out alerts that pop up on Lansweeper, letting you know of an update that you need for certain software and provide an SQL report so you can scan your system to see what PCs need this update.
Microsoft System Center needs to install agents on all IT asset for discovery and sometimes the agents can easily get corrupted. Lansweeper is a SaaS solution and it's easier to deploy to all IT asset that are connected to the network. This save us a lot of deployment time without the need to engage vendor for professional service.
osTicket has proven to be a very useful tool for the team to help support the business. Open-source was the right price point and self-hosting as mentioned was quite important (however I believe that osTicket does have a hosting solution available if needed). Jitbit was a close contender but didn't like how it doesn't separate people submitting tickets from users acting as agents. So all in quite happy with the choice.
It had a positive impact on solutions expense cause several teams we're using different solutions with different costs that used several servers and DB resources. Now, we've been able to simply that a lot with Lansweeper.
With my previous point, people had to train and learn about each of their solutions. Now we can put a team in charge and so the other teams can focus on other tasks.
Last year Lansweeper changed their licencing prices a lot so it slashed our budget.
When we had a hosted version of osTicket, we were saving some time by having them work on our setup, but we were spending a lot. Switching to our own osTicket build from their open sourcing not only saved us money upfront but we actually spent LESS time developing because we knew our ideas and didn't have to explain them to another (unrelated) party.
Creating our own ticketing infrastructure for institutional data requests has been a game changer for us. We have been able to interface with our enterprise email client and create a level of customization that meets our existing informational technology culture.
