SysAid Reviews

We're an unusual company where we don't have a traditional IT service desk. We do have an IT support team, we have a separate networks team, and we have our general client service desk. So what we wanted from SysAid, is something that was more customizable, more user-friendly, and didn't require huge amounts of consultancy to maintain and develop. We've got 14 directly using it, in various small service desk roles and three different IT-type network teams who do general client service desk.

Most of my environment is in IT. We do have a very large network of organizations that we've built and run data centers for other people. We build them and control areas of them. We build the infrastructure and provide it to the customer. We've got an internal IT team and a network team that manages the commercial networks. We go into each of these data centers and then we have our client services team. We're not using all of SysAid's features because some of those departments have decided to do things outside of SysAid, like monitoring and things like that.

All of our calls for everything used to route through our customer service team or our customer service desk then they would pass them out. We have many teams who passed IT tickets to IT and network tickets to networks and camera stuff to our camera team. Now, that's all automated. We're going to grow our business quite a lot over the next few years. We want to have that automation in place to allow us to grow and to take on lots of new stuff.

The systems automation capabilities definitely save us time. We've been automating links between different applications. We have a different system that runs a lot of our mechanical-electrical engineering jobs in the background. And we link that to SysAid via the API that they provide to interact. It is like data between systems, rather than it being manually copied and pasted or emailed around. 

It saves days of people's time. On a monthly basis, we definitely save a whole day of people's time. I'd say, three to four days a month minimum of someone's time, maybe more. It's a big improvement. Automation didn't save us headcounts. We haven't made anybody redundant or anything because of it. But it will allow us to grow without having to take on additional headcount, which is part of the point of it, so people are able to focus on more important tasks. A lot of service desk tasks can be pretty repetitive and pretty boring and this will take a lot of that away from them.

The automation capabilities have allowed us to free up time to do other things. There's no monetary value associated with it.

At the moment we're mainly using it as a ticketing tool. We're using the self-service portal internally. We are using monitoring for our internal infrastructure, internal servers, our internal laptops, and whatnot. We are looking to make use of the remote access tools to replace some legacy ones we have to keep them in one place. There are lots of elements or different applications that can be combined into one tool which is a nice feature.

It's really customizable. It's very user-friendly to change very quickly. We've developed lots of custom forms and things, without any need for thousands of accounting consultants which was one of our main aims of it.

I won't say it has the best user interface in the world, but it's very good. It's very clean and very simple to understand. Even since we've had it, they've made lots of improvements to it. I think that's one thing that attracted us to them. Out-of-the-box there are loads of things that we wanted to do, which a lot of the other solutions we looked at didn't provide. SysAid is constantly developing it, which is good. 

One major improvement we've seen is better workflows for tickets. That was really complicated when we started off but since it's been getting much easier with some of the new tools they've put in.

Our workflow used to be easier, you have to set up tabs and behind the scenes bits of code. You had to think about how to make things work and it was very complicated. They developed sort of a drag and drop workflow system.

To start off with, the service desk automation and orchestration were average and I think it's definitely getting easier with some of the visual tools they've put in. Support has been one of the best parts. They've been very helpful. We generally use their chat support or their email-based support and they've always been very quick at replying. They've been very good. I've generally been very impressed by it.

SysAid provides us with multilayered service management and all of our support pieces integrated into one system. We currently have a different tool for merging onto users' laptops to fix problems. That's all built into SysAid which is great. The monitoring is built into SysAid and it also logs tickets based on it. For at least one chunk of our business, we're able to merge three tools into one. It saves us money as well. 

It hasn't affected our operations a great deal, because the system worked before. It's just nice to have one tool to use, rather than having to swap tools or to have a ticket open in one system, open over those sessions in another system, do something else somewhere, and then monitoring in something else. It's all in one place, it's all easy to see. It's all easy to report on, which is quite critical for us as well. It's just ease of use and we're getting cost-saving since we don't have to have three applications doing the same job.

We're using the built-in asset management at a very basic level, but I would say it's better than most of the other tools of the same pricing structure I've seen. Having software licensing bills has been quite helpful. The physical asset monitoring hasn't changed. We did have tools there to do it before. It's just pulled into one place, so we can track and get a value-added glance view of the historic issues with anyone's laptops or with servers and things like that. It's not a drastic change, but it's helpful to have it all in one place.

We're still seeing about Automate Joe since we've only been running live with it for three months. We'll probably lookout this year. Especially with the COVID stuff that's happening, we've been a bit more focused on other things. But we'll look at it in the future, probably within the next year.

The automation needs improvement. The workflow has some improvements to do. There's some stuff that they are working on like having cascaded fields. For example, we're categorizing tickets by location, by site and by building and then by data room within a data center. At the moment they're all separate fields. If site A only shows you buildings and site B shows you inside the buildings, it's not clever enough for that. It is lacking a little bit of logic behind the scenes for that sort of stuff to work.

But generally speaking, it's a really good product. It's very polished. It could maybe use a bit more flexibility with the layout of the forms. At the moment you can choose your field, but it's just choosing which fields are on top of the other. You can't cancel or move fields around on a page to make it look a bit prettier. I think checkboxes and certain things like that would be handy. I would like to have a checkbox function, a yes/no dropdown list, against a bit of a user-friendly user interface stuff but I'm being quite picky, really. 

A bit of a more in-house UI would be great going forward.

The stability is very good. Ironically, the day after we went live, we had an outage of about three or four hours but that was more down to AWS from what I understand. Apart from that, it's been perfect. So we can't complain at all.

We have 400 hands-on users using the backend interface, we've got 30 active end-users that will use the self-service portal and docking supported by the tool is near 400.

We're certainly not seeing any problems with scalability, so it's fast enough. Because it's cloud-based, we don't see a lot of the background of it. It just works.

There's not really much else we can do with it, apart from adding extra sort of features. All of our users are currently using it. We are going to integrate other tools with it in the future. We have a separate client-facing portal, which we'll integrate with it to enable logging tickets to end-users and have a report on active tickets they have assigned to them and things like that, but it's not going to contribute to usage greatly.

Their tech guys are excellent. Compared to people that you pay 10 times that amount of money to and certainly we were in the past, their support is superb.

There's lots of community support out there as well, which is nice. It's not just tech support. You can Google stuff and you can see other people have come up with ideas which is nice to see.

We were using an older version of Remedyforce. We switched because it was horrifically expensive to maintain. The last upgrade that we did with Remedyforce was just before my time. It cost us 100,000 pounds and actually made the product worse. The cost of SysAid is so much cheaper, even from licensing. It's flexible where Remedyforce really wasn't. To make any change to anything in Remedyforce was 10s of 1000s of pounds.

The initial setup was really simple. There were some bits that were complex like the workflow work was hard but now it's getting better. Generally speaking though, it was great when we had a consultant, where we had a session every week and then I'd go away and make the changes. Now I'm a project manager for Ark and I've been an IT manager in the past, but I did the setup myself. It's not complicated at all.

They provided us with a solution architect who understood what we were trying to achieve and would guide us. They classify us more to knowledge transfer, rather than consultants. They teach me how the system works and how to use it for ourselves. The system that they provided is part of the subscription cost for the first year.

Because of my own issues, it probably took about three months to do properly. I think you could do it in days or weeks if you push hard enough. But we were all doing it as part of other jobs. It's not a difficult deployment.

We pretty much replicated what we had before in a lot of cases. All the categories and types were very similar to the tool we had before, just to keep the sectors going while we added some extra features and bits. We didn't migrate data from our previous tool and it was one variable, but once we had everything, we were happy, and we tested it to a relevant point. We stopped using one tool and we started using the new one the next day.

We had other people involved in the deployment. So we had the head of our service desk, he obviously was quite heavily involved. We had our change team involved, which is all data users involved, the self-service portal testing. But it was only a small team and it was done in chunks. We spent a few hours a week on it, rather than if we sat for a few blocks a day, we would have probably gotten the job done a lot quicker.

No one's doing administration for it full-time. I do bits and pieces of it. One of the sellers stepped in to do bits of it.

You could be saving money within the first nine months of using it, over 10 months. Previously we had people who were literally copying and pasting ticket information from one bit to another. They would have had some bits on spreadsheets, they had some bits just in an email. Things got lost and the priorities were not tracked. The fact that we've got automation to save people copying and pasting tickets and sending emails to each other, backward and forwards is ROI. 

Some of the functions we've got coming up with improving our change management workflows will help reduce the meetings we do on a weekly basis. We're putting in an automated workflow for our CAB approval system. If I look at how everyone worked previously, we are saving probably an hour or two a day. Including everyone in our company, we've saved around 16,000 pounds. So you'll really quickly get it back, not really a challenge at all on people's salaries.

SysAid is very cheap compared to what we had before. Price wasn't the driver for going into it. There were other products around that were the same price bracket, but it certainly had the best feature set for the price. It had a really good feature set and a reasonable price. It's certainly not expensive for what you get for your money.

There were no additional costs to standard licensing. All the knowledge transfer sessions they gave us that were part of onboarding were part of the fee. There are no additional costs for that. You can buy extra plugins and bolts from them if you want to. We paid extra for our third-parties to integrate it with our other applications. As a standalone tool, it's an all in one product. It's very cheap.

We looked at Zendesk and Samanage. We gave them quite a detailed analysis of the requirements we have as a business for it and the benefits of the different systems and SysAid came up as the clear winner.

The differences were that a lot of the built-in features just work like the categorization and the routine. SysAid came out highest. A lot of the stuff was, "Well, we can't do that, that'll be coming out in the new release." And it's like, "Well, SysAid does it now. So why would we wait?" It was just the whole feature set that out-of-the-box was better.

Customization was a big one actually. Samanage would allow us to create our own fields, which is the same as SysAid's cascading fields, the text inputs, and things like that. But you couldn't report on any of those custom fields, they kept them in a separate database and it was not integrated with the rest of the system. Whereas SysAid is perfectly integrated, you can then use it for reports. You can do workflow based on development fields.

The service desk and automation orchestration have not yet affected our employee onboarding processes. We are expecting it to be more automated. We'll also have workflow around it for approvals and for new starters. We want it to create tickets for laptop builds and stuff like that. That's all planned for the future, but it's not quite there yet.

My advice would be not to wait long to change. SysAid is so much easier than the previous tools we had. I wouldn't hesitate to use it anywhere else in the future. I'm confident in installing a new version of SysAid and getting it up and running in a matter of weeks, without any support from SysAid. It's that simple the second time around.

You've got to have a clear understanding of what you want and that there are limitations. If you set out your requirements with them when you start and you've got a clear understanding of what you're trying to achieve, then they'll help you achieve it. I think that's critical. If you don't know what you want, then they can't help you. They're not consultants in that way. They know their tool really well, but you need to understand what you're trying to achieve.

I would rate SysAid an eight out of ten. Most of the stuff it does is very good. There is some very simple stuff, the constant improvement is really nice. There are still some bits that are either complex or easy to break. If you're not very good at SQL you can write a query and there are ways to fix and bring it back. But you can break the views and reports quite quickly if you don't know what you're doing. 

We are overall, very pleased with the product. I'm happy with it. A few people in the organization were a bit hesitant when we made the decision to go to it and they didn't like it, but they are embracing it now, which is good.

We use it for IT, HR, Facilities, Client, Staff payroll, and Finance.

We are using SysAid in information technology (IT). That was what we originally started using it to do: incident requests, changes, and problems. Then, people loved SysAid so much that other support departments, like human resources, finance, and our facilities department came to us, and said, "Could we also use the same SysAid platform for all the staffing in our agency who are looking for support since everybody likes the user interface?" Also, if they're asking for support around IT issues, they could theoretically ask for support around HR, finance, facilities, etc. Over the last three or four years, we expanded the use of SysAid so it's not just used for IT. It is used by any support department who provides support to the rest of the agency. E.g., our facilities management team loves it. The solution allows them to do analytics if they have a problem with a piece of equipment.

For the end user, they don't have to deal with going through multiple systems for support. They go to one system for support instead. The benefit for end users is that it's very convenient. They use the SysAid Self-Service Portal which allows them to pick different categories of requests for support, incidents, requests, etc. Then, we use the SysAid workflow engine, based on the categorization of the issue, to automatically route an issue to a particular user. If it is a payroll related issue, then it will go directly to the payroll team. If it is a HR related issue, it will go to HR team. If it is an IP related issue, then it will go to the IT team, and so on. 

All our service management is integrated into one system. Our response time is much faster because we have a visual into what is going on.

Using the workflow engine in SysAid, we can automatically route incidents to the respective support teams. E.g., if support needs helps with escalating an issue because certain SLAs are not being met, all of that is very easy to manage. It makes the process very transparent, both for the person who is asking for support and also the person who is providing the support, because we can then see who is currently working on helping to resolve the issue and how long it takes for them to respond and resolve that issue. Therefore, it gives us a much better overall picture of governance, improving our ability to provide support to our staff.

In terms of resolution, we use a metric called First Call Resolution. E.g., if a person reached out to us for help, were we able to resolve that issue without having to go through an escalation process? Going through a Level 1 to Level 2 support on through that route, we have resolved about 85 percent of our issues within the first contact. That's a pretty good metric for us. Because 85 out of a 100 times, we are able to resolve the issue at the level that the issue was routed because not all issues are routed only to Level 1. There are some issues that could get directly routed to Level 2 depending on the category. Without having to go through multiple levels, we are able to resolve 85 percent of those incidents at the level which the ticket was generated. We manage those kinds of metrics, but those are not really put into some of the other support areas.

Metrics for response and resolution times are different depending on whether the issue is somebody from the service desk trying to help a person on the phone remotely versus our desktop team who travel sometimes to locations. Overall, our response time metrics typically depend on the priority of the issue. For example, with a Priority 1 issue, we respond in less than 15 minutes. For a Priority 4 issue, our response time could be as long as four hours. Usually between the P1 and P4 issues, the average response time for us is anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes no matter what the priority of the incentives. We are pretty quick with at least acknowledging the fact that we've received your issue. We will work on it and get back to you or resolve it and get back to you. We do pretty good in terms of responsiveness.

My team uses the change management software and Knowledge Base. They give us workflows and allow for an approval process. Within my department (IT), we use SysAid for change management. Anytime the network, server, application, or desktop team have to make any changes, we have templates in SysAid specifically for certain types of changes. E.g., if a server engineer would submit for a change, it gets approved by a first level manager, like a server lead or network lead. then it comes to me for approval. Only after I approve the change, do we actually implement the change and document the outcome of the change. Similarly for requests, if our end users are asking for net new equipment, e.g., they need a PC, laptop, or printer. Those requests also are managed in SysAid and the end user request is typically approved by a department manager who has budgeted approval. They come to IT for review and approval, then we will begin the procurement process, set up installation, configuration, etc. Therefore, we used SysAid for managing both requests and changes.

It also gives us the ability to host knowledge articles. Therefore, if a user is submitting a request for help with email, they have the ability to do one of two things:

1. They can see if anybody else in the agency has submitted a similar or related issue and what happened. Then, is this something that they can kind of help themselves?
2. In some cases, we actually create a one or two-page guide, where we say, "If you're trying to set up Outlook for the first time on your PC because you're a new employee, these are the steps you have to go through to set up Outlook on your PC." You don't necessarily have to contact an IT service desk to help you with that.

The user interface is easy to use. It makes it easy for users and administrators to put in different requests and get support by putting tickets in the queue.

There have been different versions of SysAid that have evolved. One of the newer things that my staff love with SysAid is their Self-Service Portal. Earlier, we only had an end user portal, which had some limitations around being able to categorize incidents differently in a better way. With the Self-Service portal, things are much clearer and simpler. For our end users, SysAid is easy to use. You don't need to do a lot of training for end users to give them access to SysAid and get them started. It gives them transparency on the process. At any time, an end user can know where a request is in the support process: Who is working on it? That is where when you look at return on investment on SysAid, I think we got a return on investment, even within our first year.

The solution’s built-in asset management is very good. We have deployed the software onto our PCs and laptops. It shows us what is going on with any app. Currently, we use SysAid to track all our end user equipment. When a user submits a request for a help based on asset management information, we know who the user is, but more importantly, where the user and the asset are located because we are an agency which has about 3,000 employees. These 3,000 employees are working out of more than 17 physical locations, and sometimes our users can work out of more than one location. Therefore, it is very important to connect the dots between an asset and a user, which is why we use the SysAid asset management system.

We would like them to approve the security functionalities, e.g., management security features. Currently, the way society is set up in our agency is that we only have two roles. There is either end user roles, where an end user can submit requests for help and incidents, then they can see the status of what is going on with them. We also have what are called system administrators. These are people who are providing the support, but there isn't any role based security. For example, if I could divvy up the security, I would like a staff role and a manager role, so a manager can look at all the different tickets that their staff has submitted and what the status is, as end users. For support people, I would like them to be able to figure out a way to separate out the support that is provided by the IT staff versus the facility staff, HR people, or finance people. Right now, we only have two roles: Either you are an end user, but then you can also be an office admin. This means the facilities people can see every ticket that is in the support queue, which is not great. This is an area where we would like much clearer, broader role based security from SysAid.

We have been using SysAid at our agency for seven years now, so it's been awhile.

It works. The solution is very reliable and stable. We have never experienced any issues with the performance or stability.

We have never had issues with the maintenance.

It is a very scalable solution. We have never had an issue with scalability. A good testimonial to that for us is when we originally started we had about 2,000 users. A couple of years ago, we went through a merger and added another 1,000 users. We didn't miss a beat. We didn't really have to do anything to add additional computer storage resources, specifically because it is locally hosted. 

We have 3,000 end users with roughly 300 people who are using SysAid as administrators or people who provide support. Those 300 are included in the 3,000 users who utilize SysAid to ask for support via incidents or requests.

The technical support has been very good, effective, and efficient. We have an ongoing sort of annual support and maintenance. One of the things that is not unique to just my agency is that many healthcare agencies are 24/7, and we are also 24/7. E.g., I have staff who are working at our agency 24/7. Therefore, the support is 24/7. When we have issues with SysAid, though not many, they have 24/7 support. Primary support is via online support. If we need to get a hold of somebody, then somebody will pick up the phone and have a conversation with us. 

Positive

Our previous solution wasn't good for the long-term, which is why we switched to SysAid. We were previously using a homegrown Access database. 

Some of the other support departments outside of IT also love SysAid. Before, our facilities department was constantly chasing paper because people were submitting Word documents in paper form, then they had to either email or fax it to the facilities department. Of course, if you sent it, the facilities guys could be like, "No, I did receive it." Now, that process is more streamlined. SysAid makes it very efficient and effective. You don't have to do finger-pointing, as everybody knows where things are. Then, because everything is electronic and all the data is available, we can now begin to do some analytics and provide dashboards to people, and say, "In the last three months, these are the number of incidents from this location."

The initial setup was very straightforward.

Their team work very closely with us and got us up and running quickly.

We saw our investment back at the end of year one. Return on investment really needs to be around process efficiency or user experience and satisfaction. If I look at what I do and what other support departments do for the rest of our agency from a process efficiency, user experience, and satisfaction standpoint, then there is no comparable alternative. I started with an Access database and I can only begin to articulate the limitations of an Access database to provide support to almost 2000 users. When we implemented SysAid, the bar was so low that the user experience on satisfaction was sky high. It was night and day. At our agency, people love SysAid. 

SysAid is a good solution, especially from a pricing perspective.

We looked at a couple options. Previously, I have implemented BMC Remedy, so we looked at BMC Remedy. We looked at another vendor called Cherwell. A couple of years ago, we looked at ServiceNow, but we think SysAid is definitely worth the money that we spent. ServiceNow was just way too fancy and expensive for us. So, we looked at the usual vendors and decided SysAid really works for us.

ServiceNow does a lot more in terms of integration and automation. I'm sure SysAid also has some automation. I don't know how well it does in terms of integration. That is actually one of the next things we are working on with SysAid to implement: Automate Joe and some of their other automation parts. That will probably be sometime later this year as we were actually in the middle of conversations with them, then we all got sidetracked. I am hoping that before the end of this calendar year we will try to do at least some automation within SysAid. 

We do other kinds of automation already in our agency, but it's mostly using PowerShell scripts or a third-party automation. So, we are not new to the concept of automation. We just haven't done it within SysAid.

One of the things that we do in my department is a lot of training for our end users on different applications: clinical and financial applications. We use SysAid and the incident data within SysAid as a guide to think about how effective our training process is. Because if you do a good job of training, then the number of requests for support should go down. Sometimes, we do training but look for patterns with the incidents, then we figured out what we need to change with our training. Or, sometimes a particular user or group of users look like they're just not getting it, so we determine if we should do reinforced or targeted training just for them. That is over a period of time and it improves the overall user experience.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

We use it for incident management and service request management. We use it for the Knowledge Base and we also use it for equipment inventory, the CMDB. Those were the key pieces that we needed to bring together in our organization and we wanted a tool that would integrate those key points.

We are using the cloud version. We don't have the client onsite version.

When we have a new member of our IT organization, SysAid has had a good impact for us because we are able to spend minimal time training that person on the system. It's very easy to add somebody on the administration side and to set them up so that they have the access and groups that they need. The amount of work there is very minimal. I don't have to spend a lot of time doing that. And once they are part of our organization and are exposed to the tool, the time needed to pick it up and start working in the tool, in all aspects, is very minimal, which is good. That's a big plus for this tool.

Also, the reporting automation is definitely a time-saver because I can set things to run and then I don't have to worry about them unless I need to change a parameter of a report.

One of the things we're looking at, which I believe will save us time, is the task feature. With it we can generate tasks off one master ticket and that will be automated so it will save time and the effort of having to make sure that all the right areas within our organization are aware of a particular ticket and that they do the tasks they need to do. That automation is definitely a time-saver.

Another feature we use when we're loading our inventory into our CMDB — it's not really automation — is the fact that you can load mass lists of inventory at one time. You don't have to generate single records and that is a time saver. 

Within our system we have a series of notifications and email rules which would be considered automation within the system. We're able to keep our master ticket queue, where everything comes in, clean. Depending on certain types that come in, we don't necessarily need to look at them, or we can route them directly to a given area without intervention. We do save time with that as well.

It depends on what we are working on, but overall, SysAid saves us one to two hours a week.

In terms of having to hire extra people, it hasn't saved me there, but it has allowed me to free up my techs' time to be able to focus on other things. So in a roundabout way, it has had some impact on headcount because they're able to concentrate on other activities rather than spending time doing tasks that are not automated.

Another part of the cost savings for us is that I don't have to consume part of a resource, outside of myself, to do the administration of the tool. It is very intuitive. They do provide you Professional Services to teach you and get you up to speed, but once you have all that, the administration is not a big ask on my time. The flexibility to be able to change things and do things, from my end, in a quick manner, is a cost savings. Overall the administrative side does save you costs in terms of resources and time. And the fact that you don't have to buy other tools to supplement what you may want to do — you don't have to buy a new Knowledge Base because that's in there already — is definitely a cost savings from an IT perspective.

All the features are valuable. They all play a role in our overall support model.

What was important to us was that we could track incidents and service requests separately, and not in a complicated manner. That definition represents a workflow and a work time for us.

The Knowledge Base was key in our support model because it is a way of sharing information across our organization, Ross IT. It represented not only a centralized point to collect that information, but it was about having that information so you're not constantly doing the same issue or request over and over again; you have that documented.

The CMDB has been just as valuable in its own way because we had an in-house-built, legacy system of inventory, but prior to my arrival at Ross, the information wasn't very accurate. Having the assets tracked within SysAid allows us to not only put a more robust process in place to track our inventory, but the relationship function within SysAid, from CIs (configuration items) to customers to the database, allows you to know what assets or CIs your customers have when providing support for them. We haven't gotten to that point yet because we're in the last phase of putting all our assets in the database. But once we have finished that, we're really going to turn on the relationships and that's going to give us an even clearer path around our support for our customers.

Also, the service desk orchestration, overall, is good. It allows an organization to build that service desk concept into its organizational and support strategy. And it allows an organization to digest that and create a support model very quickly around the tools. The fact that the tools are integrated within the system itself gives the organization a really robust way to integrate everything and have a complete support model. 

The other aspect that we use as is the reporting function. It's fairly good. I'd like to see some growth in that area over time. But for an organization just starting out and building that complete service desk model and the components behind it, it's a good start. The reporting lets you complete your circle because it has a lot of ready reports that, in most cases and for most organizations, would hit the main things you would want. You don't have to write them, so that's really nice. If you've had any type of reporting responsibilities in your background, learning how to write reports in this particular tool is fairly easy to pick up. You can be generating those reports very quickly. 

There is also a good scheduling feature, which is nice because you can automate a lot of that.

The Knowledge Base would be another area where I would look for growth in SysAid. It is very much a text-based article system, or you can do attachments. But I'd like to see it grow so that it is more graphical and has some additional tracking features. The Knowledge Base is a simple text editor. I'd like to have more formatting and be able to use more visual elements within the tool.

One of the features that I'm hoping comes at some point is that currently you can only have one Knowledge Base instance within it. For me, it would be beneficial to have multiple instances for different purposes. I'd like to have a completely separate one for customers and the only way I can achieve that right now, where I can tag articles to only be viewed by customers, would be if I use its portal function. The portal function is not a function, at this time, that my organization would have any need to turn on. Because of that, I'm limited. I can't directly expose articles to customers. I'd like to see a little bit more development in that area where you're able to have segmentation of knowledge. 

The other aspect that I'd like to see is that, in the Knowledge Base and in the CMDB, I can't run reports into those entities. I can do it from the incidents and requests — and problem management, but we don't use that. So for the Knowledge Base and CMDB, I have to go into the dashboard for each one of those and use filters to get to the information that I want, and then I can export it. A nice feature and growth opportunity for SysAid would be to develop the reporting tool and link reporting capabilities to all the aspects within the total solution.

We have been using SysAid for about three years now.

It has a good interface. When I was out looking for possible tools for us to use, what was very important to me, in our organizational organization's case, was having it be simplistic and not complicated. We were able to spin up everything very quickly. Our IT support staff took to it right away so there was very little training needed. Putting the pieces together to turn it on and make it live involved minimal work. What I like about the tool is that you can manage different aspects of your organization from a service-management perspective, but it's not overly complicated and that's a good thing. For us it works very well.

The setup was pretty straightforward. SysAid's professional staff did a really good job of helping us understand how the tool works and what was important to consider as we were setting the tool up. Once we had that knowledge, it was pretty straightforward to do and maintain. It works very well.

For maintenance of SysAid I do the front-end administration and my team of three system admins does the back-end infrastructure stuff because we link to LDAP for users and the like. It's one system admin function and that's a very small part of their overall responsibilities. For us, maintenance is not a big investment.

One of the factors that, when I was first looking at tools, made SysAid attractive was the initial cost for bringing the system in. I found it to be very reasonable and very appropriate for what you got with the tool. The standard stuff that initially comes with it was a really good base. That meant I didn't have to add a lot of things. It was a good value. That was very important to me in deciding what tool we were going to use.

Overall, the price is good. It's all about what you get for the base amount. From my perspective, you want to look at what you're getting out-of-the-box. SysAid does a good job of putting key stuff in the box for you. 

You get X amount of initial administrator's licenses. Each person who has to use the system in some capacity on the tech side needs an administrator's license. You have to take that into consideration in terms of your costs as you grow. 

We have also added the TeamViewer integration so we can remote to a customer's desk through SysAid. We've done that because it's integrated within the tool and we can do some tracking of things. 

You really have to decide what's important to you: What you're going to do in the immediate scope of your environment and does SysAid bring that as part of the out-of-the-box functionality, and what things you might have to add as a result of that.

If you have a service management strategy and model of support, that integration of key elements that are important to your organization — whether it's incidents or service requests or problem management or asset management or a CMDB database — becomes very important. The fact that they're all in this one tool is a nice thing to have, both in terms of functionality and cost.

We don't use the asset management. We use the CMDB for our inventory and we went to that because the barcode scanner app currently only functions with the CMDB. I made the decision to use the CMDB in the capacity of tracking our inventory because once we get our inventory in, I want my techs to have a quick, easy, and efficient way to scan an asset to make sure it's in the database. If I used the asset management system in that capacity, I would have lost that functionality.

Overall, I would give the product about a nine out of 10. It brings a lot to the table. It is a very simplistic system in a very good way. There are definitely some growth opportunities for it and I'm excited to see how they'll grow the tool. Overall it is a good solution for our purposes as a mid-sized college, the school of business, within the university. It's a good solution for a small or mid-sized organization that wants to create a support model using an integrated tool. It fits the bill really well.

We use SysAid for all of our internal user requests from all departments, from all areas or offices for the whole IT Department as well as for finance and for marketing. Any user request will go through SysAid to be dealt with. 

We are on the latest version. We are just about to upgrade to the full version where you have access to the newest features. 

After we introduced SysAid, especially in the back office team in IT where we started with it, we had the option to report the workload of the team. We increased the team afterward because we could see and prove the workload of every single member. Additionally, we implemented SLAs. It's open to everyone. When you request or send a request and we have an SLA based on it, then we can see the status of the ticket, who's working on it, how it is against the SLA, if we are within the SLAs, or if we are above the SLAs. That's from an end-user point of view. 

Additionally, the admin point of view or my point of view is with the reporting function to see where we have SLAs and to see if they are or aren't working and where we need to improve. We can see who is taking the most time to close a ticket and if we then need training improvement. 

The automation capabilities save us time. Before, whenever we had to set up any database systems, any new clients, or any new suppliers we work with, we got an email. Everything was typed manually from the requesting user. Everything had to be then done by copy and paste into the right systems and then write back that it's done or that it's not done. Now, with automation, an end-user is created as a new lead in the CRM. This gets automated into the database and creates a ticket in the system so that we can check or double-check. That's it. That saves quite a lot of time and is a resource system.

On a weekly basis, we save between five and eight hours per team. We need to get more done with what we are working on together with the SysAid implementation team. This will then save even more time.

The self-service portal for the users as well as the reporting functionalities in SysAid to report any requests and tickets coming in are the most valuable features. Overall, the whole workflow system, how it works, the setup, how you can integrate it into other applications is valuable.

I find the self-service portal valuable because if a user wants to enter the ticket and start typing in, they will already get suggestions about how to resolve the issue, which is very helpful and reduces the number of requests. 

In regards to the workflow on the ticketing system, it's absolutely flexible. You can integrate it everywhere. You can use it everywhere. It's very easy for every end-user. Reporting functionalities, especially for me, as I am leading the department to see how the workload of the different members in my department is, where we get more requests, and where we get fewer requests. I can see the workload and I see which departments we get more requests from.

The service desk automation and orchestration are very good. We are implementing it at the moment. We implemented it for two of our applications already for our CRM. Whenever there's a change in the CRM, it will automate them into SysAid as well. We have two workflows from our CRM into SysAid, which is very helpful. Overall, we're very happy with the workflow.

From the admin side, the user interface is easy to use. There is a good overview. It's quick to deal with to get your requests and to deal with them, to change the status and work on them. From an end-user perspective, it's easy to create the ticket. You log in with a single sign-on. You don't need to log in or type in your login details. When you start to type in your ticket, you already get the self-service options to resolve it. If not, then with the categories, you get directly to the right person who will then come back to you very quickly. That's how I see it from an end-user and from an admin perspective.

SysAid provides us with multilayered service management and all of our support pieces integrated into one system. Our service and support systems are much more transparent for everyone in the business to see what the support function is doing and how they're doing to gain even more understanding and recognition. Secondly, having one system for all support operations, helps us to deal with resources and we can swap resources quite easily if we notice that we are behind or we have a higher workload than on others. It makes us more flexible and more transparent.

We had quite a few requests in the past that were taken care of with the latest version that we're implementing at the moment. There are not so many left.

On the old version we only had the option to introduce one helpdesk email address, so weÍ couldn't have more email addresses for various departments, IT and marketing, and finance, it was one email address. Now, we can add more. With the workflows and automation, weÍ can integrate into even more applications but we are on the implementation phase at the moment. 

So far, we're very happy with the new integration. The only thing that I would like to see is for them to improve asset management so that it's more usable. We looked at it once and we didn't find it quite usable for us. That's why we didn't use it. We haven't looked into the new one yet but the asset management is something that can be improved even more and patch management is not as good as it could be.

We started to do introduce the free version in 2014 so we've been using it for roughly six years. 

It's absolutely stable. We have no issues.

Scalability is very easy. It's very easy to scale in regards to scaling up with more administrators and so on. It's very easy. If you want to add more assets, it's one email and it's just an amended license. There is no issue with anything in regards to scalability from growing. When we started with SysAid I was the only one working on SysAid. Since then, we are now 30 people working on SysAid. The scalability from one to 30 happened without any problems.

The majority of the users are from the IT department and there are a few from finance and marketing. At the moment, we have 30 administrators and we have 18 from IT, seven from finance, and five from marketing.

The quality of the support depends. I would give the first level of support a three out of five (on a scale from 1-5, with one being the best). The second level of support would get a one out of five. The professional services are amazing. They know the system. They find solutions for whatever you want to implement that are easy and quick.

We are absolutely happy with the second level of support but not so happy with the first level. It depends on the agent that you get.

The initial setup was quite complex and when we started we started with the free version as a test. It was a trial. Over the months and years, we noticed that there are quite a few things that were not really thought through at the beginning, from our side. This means we had to redo or find a workaround to work with on the actual version. When you use the free version, there aren't many guidelines in regards to the various modules, how to set them up, and what's the thought behind it to set them up the right way. It's a bit of a learning process and you get used to it over the years. You will figure out what you did wrong in the beginning because you were not aware.

The overall setup itself is quite easy and straightforward. There is nothing that is an issue.

The deployment itself took us two to three days. It was more of a setup to get everything set up in the right way. Currently, it was a test system. I was working on my own on these apart from dealing with all other requests for the time being. It took me a few months to get it implemented. This was due to the additional workload. If you really concentrate on it and work on it, then I would say, it takes you two to three weeks to set up.

Our strategy was to monitor the workload of the IT department because we had the impression that the staff was overwhelmed by the workload, but we couldn't monitor it and we couldn't prove it. Then we wanted more end-user transparency to show them that a request they worked on is finished. The ticket is either closed or we have to deal with it with an external supplier.

I did the deployment myself. We didn't use the professional service. We use it now for the new implementation because we learned what we did wrong at the beginning.

If you want to implement it the right way and understand the thinking around it and all the details, then you should use the professional services we implemented in order to have it right from the beginning.

In terms of ROI, on one side, we have fewer people than we would have seen on the other side. It's not a real return of investment. It's more a return of acknowledgment in the whole business to have more transparency and more trust in the support functions. It's not a real return of investment but it helps you to get people more satisfied and get staff more satisfied with it. There is no monetary return on investment but we reduced headcount by two people. 

The pricing is really not expensive compared to other solutions and what you get out of the licenses in regards to how many licenses. You can easily upgrade the license number for the administrators. I would start with a small number and grow whenever needed and not get a huge package already at the beginning.

You have unlimited end-users. There's licensing for assets, reporting, and for administrators. but you can add on whatever you want.

You have to contact the salesperson. It's only an email. You get the offer back. As soon as it's paid, then you get the license key and implement the license key and that's it.

The system is there already. Just free up additional functionalities or additional administrators with the different license keys.

We did evaluate other solutions but we decided to go for SysAid as it was the easiest to implement and in the beginning, it was the cheapest. We could implement it on-premise, we could already implement all of our email systems so we can use all our internal email systems from the very beginning. It was easy to set up for the initial test use. 

We haven't seen money savings via automation capabilities yet but going forward, as we are introducing it at the moment and as we are in these circumstances with the pandemic and with tourism, we will have a smaller team. We will be able to do the same work with a smaller team. We will have savings going forward with the automation, which we need to have implemented. 

With the openness and transparency, the first thing I learned was, people are really looking into it and you need to be up-to-date with the system. It has nothing if you have tickets and you don't have to change any stages or you just deal with it. It has to be transparent and used. You need to get used to it. You need to bring down barriers from departments that should use SysAid with every ticketing system. It takes them more time to send the ticket than picking up a phone or just dropping an email. On the other side, they have the transparency and the knowledge where the ticket is. 

I would rate SysAid an eight out of ten. 

My company is an airline and my IT department uses it. For example, an IT request will come under the house subtype. It is all under one system, but we have subtypes, where subtypes are called: 

• "Incidents" that go to the IT department.
• "Requests" that go to the HR department.
• "Complete" that go to the facility management department.

I am in IT. So, if staff needs assistance, we have three types of forms that they can do: 

1. They can call in, then the administrator will create the certificate. 
2. There is a client that is installed on most machines, where they can generate their own certificate and IT will respond to it. 
3. They can send an email to SysAid, which will automatically generate a ticket.

Afterward, as the administrator, I will assign it to the relevant personnel to do the action. That is how it's done in IT. 

It improves IT with its tickets. The IT team became more efficient at how we respond to the needs of clientele. With the last ticket that was created, we previously had no way to track responses. Now, if there is a same-day activity assigned to an engineer, then the engineer has 24 hours to resolve the ticket. Because of SysAid, the responsibility is placed on the administrator who keeps track of the customer incident. It also helps with putting the onus on the engineer to actually close the ticket. Because if an engineer has a ticket that is overdue, it's assigned a flag and escalated. Once it's escalated in the system, it goes up to Tier 2. With Tier 2, we have to know why it was escalated. The engineer would need to have a good reason why it wasn't resolved or it had to be escalated. Therefore, it increases the efficiency of technicians and departments. Because it's in the system, managers may generate potential solutions too.

It tracks everything that the technicians are doing. We can account for time and manage resources.

Most valuable is the reporting aspect of it. What happened was that we grew and expanded the airline. Because of that, there is more demand on the IT system, infrastructure, and resources. SysAid allows us to quantify and fortify our performance. At any point in time, I can generate a report based on a time frame. We can drill down on which categories have the most calls. For instance, if the monitor is not coming on, then we can drill down on that. We could use that information to find out why it is that we have so many tickets based on monitor failing. It can also allow us to be proactive.

Next feature, which we're exploring right now, is launching something called Automate Joe. They launched it late last year. With Automate Joe, we are planning to using account unlock profile in the near future, which will allow us to use SysAid to reset passwords and unlock accounts. This will help on the amount of time that we spend doing this task, because anyone here can get 10 to 15 requests to reset passwords or unlock accounts. Those 10 to 15 calls will probably take like two or three minutes each to start creating a ticket. Altogether, this is about two hours just to do a minor task, which is would be eliminated with just the Automate Joe feature.

The administrative side of the user interface could be a little more user-friendly. It is easier for me to export our reports into Excel, then do a server retrieval and get the information. Whereas, to do a report, you have to go through a configuration type of process, which is kind of difficult and complicated. I have been using this solution for two years now and I still haven't gotten the hang of the reports. We did have a forum about a month ago, and they wanted to tie in how reports were generated. I think they are doing that now.

It is cumbersome to provide customers a report. They could make it a bit easier, e.g., the same way that I can export the source data into Excel sheets. Because each ticket has categories or columns, I should be able to process that monthly data, then simply press on which feeds I want and pull stuff for that. That might be easier to do instead of the customizing which is going on with this interface. 

If you have IT hardware and IT networks, the reporting is set up to report each one individually, but combining them is kind of difficult. However, it is manageable and improving.

When it comes to learning the application, it's complex. There are a lot of functionalities. The only training that they offer is a help option, where there is a document with multiple chapters. You can read it, but it is a lot to look at. We have spoken to them about training, but they don't do one-on-one. They only do in-class training for groups. However, for my company's personnel, you don't need to train a group. You just need to train one person. 

We just want to have some type of online training, not classroom training. For example, I did ITIL training online, which was not interactive. It has videos that I could go through, learn from, take exams and pass. I go through these all the time. I would like SysAid to improve on this help aspect and ideally be more flexible.

Two years.

SysAid is one of the best performing applications at my company. It is very robust.

We recently upgraded. We had no hiccups nor downtime.

It does scale well. The application is designed for company growth. Rather than having SysAid catch up to what you want, you have to catch up to all the features that SysAid offers.

The solution provides us with multi-layered service management along with all our support pieces integrated in one system. Our entire system is run on SysAid, from Tier 1 to Tier 3. All the other IT department functionality is captured in SysAid, like development, warehousing, and application. So, it has vertical and horizontal coverage.

We have two head offices with more than 10,000 staff members who all have access to SysAid, though not all them use it.

I have used the technical support on numerous occasions. They are really good. I am impressed. When I have had a major issue, I have relayed it to them, then it took them about a week to resolve it. However, the problem, which I did wrong on my end, caused a lot of issues, and their response was good. I really appreciated how they dealt with it. They had two teams working on it with two contact people, and I was always kept in the loop. They took a week to bring it back to what I needed it to be. In the interim, they found a solution that allowed me to continue working and still found the correct solution.

We did not previously use another solution.

The initial setup is complex because there were a lot of back-end configurations that needed to be adjusted. We are a medium-sized company, working on so many different things, and we had to configure each end end user. Then, we had to create our templates and configure each request. Though, there are some things you could do before the template. 

I don't think anybody in the company could just take over. It's something that has to be guided by SysAid.

If you are going to use SysAid, you really need SysAid reps to come in and take a look at the company to see what you want. They can judge the best use and configuration of SysAid.

We have seen ROI. The company has grown over these last two years. The only way we could have managed that growth was by having an application like SysAid.

Everyone is accountable to the company. For instance, everybody has their method. Our CIO's method is numbers. He needs to see numbers to justify the usage that he makes. The numbers that it allows us to capture help him to make proposals to the CEO. Otherwise, he can't really justify why we need more staff or whatever decisions/questions he puts through. SysAid is a great help with this. Without it, we can't quantify or codify anything that we do.

Once you're interested, talk with SysAid. You can have them come in and look at your company and advise you on the best solution. They will tell you what comes with each separate package and also advise you what application to activate. If you want something that they don't have, they have a department that can design something based on your unique requests.

They have explored other solutions, but always stuck with SysAid.

Once you implement a system like SysAid, it changes IT and pushes the business and goods forward. If you work at an older company, you will have people with a seasoned mentality. It is to be expected that you will have to get everybody onboard with the new technology. This is why we still take calls, and we shouldn't be taking calls. A person should be telling them to do tickets because tickets have kept us on track. However, because we have newer and older mentalities, the people with the older mentality will always try to do a call, so we accommodate that. We really need to move away from that and keep it strictly emails and tickets, since emails go straight into tickets and tickets go straight into the system.

We have the client-side interface that looks at our data. It has no big graphics nor fancy graphics. It's a straightforward interface, which is fine.

They have a lot of integrated applications, like TeamViewer, built into their platform. 

There are a lot of other features that we will explore because we are growing now. We are now taking the time to see what SysAid offers. We are looking to have some of the features that we have in other third-party platforms, like remote control and asset management, into SysAid under one platform. This will make it easier to manage, generate reports, and integrate. 

We can't automate yet in our current version because we don't have the password reset and password unlock. We are thinking of getting this. 

I would rate them a nine out of 10. If they make the reporting easier, then I would give them a 10.

In Sri Lanka, we are a kind of a partner of SysAid. We have handled multiple clients regarding the SysAid and internally we're also using it as well. We use it as an IT management service tool. We use SysAid for incident management, request management, and change management.

I really like the SysAid self-service portal. It's very customizable and we can customize it to fit our needs rather well. 

They have a good workflow designer and it's very easy to configure everything. You can configure anything at a code level or we can configure everything with some basic knowledge without having to go do code-level changes.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

Technical support is helpful.

The solution can scale.

The pricing is okay.

The solution needs to improve their mobile product. Currently, SysAid does not have a mobile application. It would be better if SysAid had a mobile application for Android and iOS. It would be very helpful for users.

The solution is always increasing its pricing.

I've used the solution since about 2014. it's been a few years now. I've used the solution for a while.

Initially, there were some issues with stability. That was more in 2014 or 2015 and at that time it was kind of an unstable period, however, now, it's a mostly stable solution.

Typically, the company works well for medium-sized organizations.

The solution scales quite well.

Most of the time I will contact technical support through the tech portal if I have any questions or if I am doing something and I need to get verifications. I chat with them through the online chat portal.

They are good. When I contact them through the portal, it's the level 1 support. Sometimes they don't know how to answer the kind of issues I'm asking about, and, in that case, they will escalate via email and come back to us again.

The initial setup is easy, and, on top of that, it's simple to configure and customize. It's not a difficult process at all. 

We give support for the maintenance, which includes the customizations for our customers. If they don't have specific resources for doing customizations, we can jump in and assist. For example, if they need to create a new web-flow, if the customer doesn't have resources, we will do the maintenance part. Other than that, the implementation is easy and there isn't really a maintenance requirement as all the updates automatically get pushed live from the cloud.

Our company is capable of providing implementation services to our clients. 

Compared to others, it's reasonably priced. Compared with ServiceNow, they aren't very highly-priced, however, they are continuously increasing their price.

I have analyzed a few products, however, among them, SysAid is, in comparison, very easy to configure and customize.

We are both partners and end-users.

We're using the cloud version of the product and it automatically pushes the upgrades to us. We don't have to manually upgrade the product. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I would recommend it to other organizations. 

We primarily use the solution for incident management and request fulfillment.

It's supporting the daily routine of the IT organization, it is the ticketing system. It's very helpful due to the fact that it provides us with full evidence and full transparency for what we are working on. In that sense, it's improved our organization.

The simplicity of the solution is excellent.

The product has a very clear user interface.

We've found the product to be stable over the years.

The solution has been able to scale to meet our needs.

Technical support has always been good.

The pricing is excellent.

In terms of the main ITSM tool, the product is not good at automation which is the main reason we are looking for a different option and migrating away from it.

Monitoring in our organization needs improvement in several areas which are not supported by a tool. At the moment we are looking for an advanced monitoring tool, which is using AI and machine learning as well. This product currently does not offer that.

From my perspective, it's a little bit of a legacy system in our IT landscape.  I haven't seen much progress in the development of the tool in previous years. Due to this, it's behind the leaders in the segment.

I've been using the solution for five years at this point. 

We had one incident in five years which was requiring the support of the vendor. I would say that it's stable. It doesn't give us trouble.

The product has been supporting our ever-growing environment without any issue. Therefore, I'd describe it as very well scalable.

We have about 100 active users in various support teams. The tool has as well a portal for regular users. We support about 2000 end users.

I've dealt with technical support in the past and I can say that they are very helpful. We're satisfied with the level of support we've been given over the years.

We're moving off this product and onto a Jira solution. We haven't started with Jira yet. It's a project for next year.

I wasn't part of the team when it was implemented, however, it's my understanding that it was straightforward mainly due to toll and the fact we were not migrating any historical records. I haven't heard about any hiccups in implementation.

The pricing is very good. It's an affordable tool in comparison to other market leaders.

We're just a customer and an end user. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that it's not so much about the tool as it is about change management. You need to ask yourself how you can effectively introduce the tool into a company to get the most out of it.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations. For smaller companies who are starting with their first ticketing system, it's a suitable entry platform.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a six out of ten.