I would say the overall flexibility of the product is its most valuable feature. So, there is a lot one can do with the product.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I find the most valuable feature is that I can customize according to my needs. I can change nearly everything within the system from the front-end to the back-end of the integration to the managers. These fields you display to our end users, they will see the different categories. Also, there are columns on the online form when they submit an instance or request. I can customize all of this.

Through the BI Analytics module in SysAid, I can quickly gain insights into daily operation. Although the system can monitor each IT staff's performance, more importantly, it shows vital points for intervention in the matter of service quality.

SysAid is more user-friendly, and its configuration is easier than other tools. SysAid is also easy to customize.

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.

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.