Security and data protection are paramount for us. We take security very seriously and have developed a comprehensive set of practices, technologies and policies to help ensure your data is secure.
Manageengine Help Desk
This document outlines some of the mechanisms and processes we have implemented to help ensure that your data is protected. Our security practices are grouped in four different areas: Physical Security; Network Security; People Processes and Redundancy and Business Continuity.
Our network security team and infrastructure helps protect your data against the most sophisticated electronic attacks. The following is a subset of our network security practices. These are intentionally stated in a very general way, since even knowing what tactics we use is something hackers crave. If your organization requires further detail on our network security, please contact us.
You might not think of help desk software playing a role here, but it's actually a key employer touch point for workers trapped at home. Making sure employees are working on fully-functional equipment, maintaining security and patch updates, fixing problems quickly and when needed, and (often one of the most important considerations) making sure there's an actual voice available when you need one; these are all critical aspects not just of a successful help desk, but of one that helps keep employees feeling connected to the organization. However, looking at help desk selection through this sort of COVID-19 lens can be daunting to many smaller businesses who may never have considered a help desk before, primarily because there's a lot more to worry about than fast ticket management. That's why we've put two of our top internal IT help desk platforms head to head to help make your selection process easier.
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus offers strong functionality, especially with a focus on internal Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) tasks. ITIL means this platform is best suited for an internal help desk run by your IT department for its users, which means it's also geared more toward enterprises than small to midsize businesses (SMBs). For larger organizations, ServiceDesk Plus excels at providing business visibility and pre-emptive automations and solutions. Pricing is offered in groups of users (10, 20, 50, 100, and so on), but is competitive with per-user-per-month rivals. ManageEngine also offers a version of ServiceDesk Plus specifically for managed service providers (MSPs) with additional integrations, better SLA functionality, and asset management features.
Freshservice can be considered the ITIL sibling to Freshdesk. Both products come from Freshworks, which means they feature intuitive, modern interfaces that are easy to learn and solid self-service and ticket-management tools. The two differ in that Freshdesk is positioned to handle tickets for small, customer-facing help desk teams, both in terms of pricing and feature set. Organizations looking to support internal workers, on the other hand, particularly those who want to standardize on ITIL to accomplish this task, are better served by Freshservice. While these features come at something of a premium, its IT service desk includes multi-channel support as well as gamification capabilities to keep service agents engaged and competitive.
ManageEngine prices ServiceDesk Plus based on the number of users. An annual subscription for 10 users starts at $1,195, which works out to less than $10 per user per month, which is competitive even when matched against tools like Freshdesk and Zoho Desk. Project management and the service catalog are available as add-ons for an additional annual fee of $1,195 each, and change management is $2,395 annually. The standard pricing tier includes incident management and SLA management.
The professional pricing level of ServiceDesk Plus includes a more complete tool set to manage your help desk, including various asset management features, which are more important than ever considering how many employees are taking work equipment home. Professional licenses are also broken down by user count, but include node licenses as well (used for asset management). These licenses start at 2 technicians and 250 nodes for an annual license fee of $495, which brings the monthly cost up to the $20 per user per month range. Additional nodes can be added to your license, starting at an additional 100 nodes for $345.
ManageEngine doesn't offer a public customer portal, which is understandable considering its focus on internal IT help desk operations. However, it also doesn't have a knowledge base, which is actually a very popular self-service solution for internal help desks looking to keep call volume more manageable. This makes it a tougher sell for businesses that need external-facing customer support. ManageEngine does serve such companies with its SupportCenter Plus offering, which includes a knowledge base and self-service portal, though at additional cost.
Estate and Forest plans is where most IT help desk seekers will go however, as these bring with them the ITIL tools (problem management, change management, release management, and project management), as well as analytics, custom agent roles, and portal branding tools at respective costs of $79 and $99 per agent per month. Major differences between Estate and Forest are IP whitelisting, SLA-backed support, and access to audit logs.
ServiceDesk Plus offers most of the ticket and request management features one should expect to find in a help desk system. Dashboards are available for a variety of record types, each of which may be further customized to meet your needs. Users may also create custom dashboards for themselves or to make available to other users.
Freshservice's core tools also involve managing tickets, problems, changes, and releases. Folks implementing this for an internal help desk will likely choose the Freshservice tier that provides ITIL capabilities to govern these processes. While its interface makes this easy enough to navigate, small businesses looking to employ ITIL for the first time will want to make sure their agents have some understanding of ITIL before dropping them into Freshservice's interface. Tickets are used for simple communication between an employee and the help desk, usually involving some common and fairly straightforward IT problem, such as identity management changes, software installation, or requests for additional rights.
Most help desk users will likely spend most of their time in two areas of Freshservice. The dashboard offers key metrics pertaining to the organization's ticket workload, and supports customization in order to further refine those metrics. The ticket view, which is accessible either through the left menu or by clicking an item on the dashboard, can be filtered using preset categories from a menu at top left or manually using the filter panel on the right side.
Like Freshdesk's, the ticket view features actionable buttons on individual tickets, giving easy access to change assigned agent, status, or priority. Bulk changes are also available when multiple tickets are selected, allowing an agent to quickly assume ownership, close, merge, or add details such as department, category, or tags.
For most help desks, be they aimed at customers calling in about a faulty product or employees calling about a malfunctioning laptop, every request for help is called a "ticket." How the system manages these tickets is the beating heart of these systems. Successful ticket management depends largely on organizational factors, such as how the company wants to use the help desk (internal or customer-facing), how large the support base is, how the company wants to receive help requests (phone only, email, social media, and more), and a potentially long list of other factors when it comes to data collection.
ManageEngine's ServiceDesk Plus offers most of the ticket and request management features one should expect to find in an internal help desk system. Dashboards are available for a variety of record types, each of which may be further customized to meet your businesses' needs. Users may also create custom dashboards for themselves or to make available to other users, an especially useful capability of your internal IT folks are often faced with requests about custom software or specialized equipment.
Freshworks has taken a team view approach, which you can find in some other players such as Zendesk Support, and added another twist: gamification. This amounts to a novel, game-centered approach to ticket solving by rewarding the most successful agents with points and trophies. It's aimed at organizations with large internal user bases, but if you're looking for a way to keep help desk agents engaged and working quickly to solve your employees' problems, this can be an effective measure.
As mentioned above, a key capability for a help desk designed for an internal IT operation is adherence to the ITIL standard. ITIL is an established service framework that amounts to a set of best practices covering common service desk tasks, that include things like ticket formatting and management, change management, and other common IT processes and tasks. Having ITIL effectively govern how your company does things can be both constraining yet beneficial depending upon your particular industry. While very small businesses might not see as much benefit, even midsized companies implementing an internal help desk should probably adopt ITIL, since it'll mean not just easier and faster problem resolution but also an easier time hiring new IT service desk agents, too.
For Freshservice, the Estate and Forest plans are what bring customers the ITIL tools. These tiers also add analytics, custom agent roles, and portal branding tools (which can still be relevant for large internal help desks). While both platforms address basically the same ITIL capabilities, we found that Freshservice's interface and its orientation towards team environments made its ITIL implementation not only more effective for midsized companies, but also a little easier to learn. 2ff7e9595c
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