Freshservice is a cloud-based service desk and IT service management (ITSM) solution that currently serves more than 10,000 SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers worldwide.
$19
Per Month Per User
Symantec Client Management Suite
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Symantec Client Management Suite is designed to automate time-consuming and redundant tasks for deploying, managing, patching, and securing desktops and laptops so organizations can reduce the cost and effort of managing Windows, Mac, Linux, and virtual desktop environments.
Freshservice is a complete ITSM solution. I have used some others over the years and moved away from them to Freshservice. I have implemented Freshservice in 2 new roles over the years, and everyone has loved it. The functionality that it incorporates, enabling IT teams to become ITIL compliant is truly useful. Compared to 5 other ITSM tools that I have used over the last 10 years, Freshservice is far better.
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.
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.
Change Management - Current system is geared towards full software or system change management. It would be great to have a simple Yes/No approval without having to utilize their workflow tools.
Data selection filters - Overall, their data filters are very good, but it would be useful to have "Last Week" and "Last Month" in the date selectors.
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.
On the I.T. side, the time to ramp up and understand how FreshService operates only took a few hours. After that, it was off to the races with configuration and customization. From the start, with minimal assistance, our end users found FreshService to be incredibly intuitive. At launch, we expected most to submit tickets via email, however, our analytics has shown that end-users actually prefer the portal for managing their I.T. tickets.
I contacted support once and the person handling the request was very helpful. The staff is very competent. In my opinion communication could be improved as the level of spoken English is very high. I was unable to understand some words, in fact two people participated in the second meeting.
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.
think of what you want to do with FreshService : a clean start or a migration. Migration can be done with csv files, it's easy to do but you need to test it first.
I've used monday.com for ticketing, but Freshservice is made for it and the asset management feature adds value. NinjaOne's ticketing is not built out so we only use it for its RMM features. Atera has a nice ticketing platform and looks similar to Freshservice but they do not have an onboarding feature and other integrations that Freshservice has
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
Freshservice has allowed our organization to better track the amount of tickets that come in for a particular individual. This allows us to better support a user that is having multiple of the same issue over an extended period.
The communication to the user has greatly increased due to the automated messages that Freshservice has built in.
