Other pages in the review
BMC Remedy Service Desk
BMC has a range of management applications for IT administration with the service desk application being but one component. The vendor would normally come to install and configure the product to suit your business needs.
Remedy is focused towards internal company IT support as clients use an application-based interface. BMC suggests that this product is best suited to companies with more than 2000 employees; another BMC product, Service Desk Express, is intended for smaller ones.
Upon logging in as a customer/user it is necessary to navigate through two screens before you can initiate a search of the knowledgebase or request assistance from helpdesk staff. This seems needlessly obtuse given that users will probably receive no training in the use of this software.
When processing an incident staff have immediate access to information such as the knowledgebase as well as vendors and products associated with the issue. A tab is present for each source of information and another set of tabs guide progress through the incident resolution process. Unfortunately the result is a really busy screen—administrators may choose to exclude some items to improve the focus for staff.
Incidents may be converted to problems by appropriately privileged staff. This allows all relevant data to be transferred, saving a lot of typing. Problems can be created from scratch if required. Staff that are logging problems can also generate known errors and enter them into the knowledgebase. A couple of methods exist for adding items to the knowledgebase, either entering information directly into the database with a built-in authoring tool or an entry can be generated from an incident report, well in theory at least—we couldn’t make it work which is another mark against its usability.
Developing an escalation rule allows for formulation by SQL, Boolean logic and anything else you’d care to name, rules can also be applied to specific forms. On the downside non-technical people may find the configuration of these rules a nightmare. We were hard-pressed to find any simple plain language options. Typically, however, administrators involved in this type of task are likely to have some familiarity with the required methodology.
Flashboards allow workers and managers to quickly see incidents arranged by status and priority with BMC’s product and the data available in these can be configured to suit individual needs. More advanced reporting features are also available.
We found the helpfiles left something to be desired. Context-sensitive help drew a blank on flashboards although some minimal data could be found in another helpfile. Help is distributed between several files (one for each module) and there are separate user and configuration applications with separate help systems. It might be better if indexing covered all these files as one.
BMC offers training both online or in person. It also suggests that a mixture of named and concurrent licences would be appropriate to most businesses as several administrators and managers can readily share one or two concurrent licences.
Remedy is a powerful package with many options and data-handling methods. Learning to use this product could be a headache and should not be attempted without plenty of vendor support. Although a little difficult to come to grips with initially, the BMC tool is a powerful, top-end tool that carefully guides and enforces the proper procedures for incident/problem resolution. While Remedy is fairly pricey, it also has the features to match, although it must be remembered that the price quoted in the features table includes only the service desk component.