Thinking of migrating from SupportWorks to Service Manager

[ryan.davidson]

Hello,

We are thinking about taking the step and migrating away from SupportWorks to Service manager.

I'm keen to hear any other customers experiences in doing this and lessons learnt which could help influence our decision. 

 

Great to hear from anyone either via PM or by reply.

Thanks

Ryan

[Martyn Houghton]

@ryan.davidson

Sorry for the delay in responding to you enquiry, we have been going live with another Service Desk on our instance.

We originally where a Supportworks ITHD and then a ITSM + VPME customer for a number of years.

We took the decision to migrate to Service Manager at the end of 2015 going Live in June 2016 with Service Manager after a soft live with Collaboration in-between. Our decision was based on us either having to migration/upgrade our Supportworks environment to the newer/higher version due to our increasing demands or move to Service Manager. Having a distributed service desk team, we decided on the Service Manager route as it gave us the ability to implement workflows to aid consistency of working across the service desk as well as the collaboration elements as well.

Though there have been challenges and we still are pushing Hornbill for more features, especially around the External Customer Portal (the majority of our customer base is external organisations who use our software systems), we would recommend Service Manager. We could not work the way we work without the new Hornbill Platform.

Things we would do differently in hindsight?

1. We took the decision to migration only our active requests and and a subset of our closed requests. We still have our Supportworks server switch on for access to closed requests which where not transferred as a reference . In hindsight we should have migrated them all, to avoid having to maintain/run the old system. We are now considering migration the residual requests so the SW Server can be decommissioned.
2. When we set up our Service Catalog we did it at a very granular level due to the system only support subscriptions at the Service Level. Catalog Level subscriptions exemptions have subsequently been implemented, so now we are looking to combine some Services so that our Service Calog is not so numerous and easier for the correct service to be selected. This is a critical point, as you will discover if you implement Service Manager, that is is not possible to alter the Service a request is linked to after the request has been created. 

As you have located, there is a very active community here on the forums which is a great help whatever the level of issues you have as well as being a means to push/guide Hornbill in the development of the product. Also in terms of new features the deployment method as well as the turn around time for new features is so much easier and rapid compared to the traditional SW Service Pack/Upgrade method.

So in summary I would recommend moving to Service Manager, as it has made a major difference to us and we have adopted it as a corporate standard for Service Desk across all our different divisions. 

Any questions please let me know.

Cheers

Martyn