Marg Ivanti Service Manager

Their remoting software is actually on point, I liked being able to draw on the screen of the user to illustrate/point out things to the user.

Where to begin.

The imaging system was a huge mess. It took one of our team members months to get it semi working, and he had to practically write a book on how to do it. Support was non existent.

The ticketing system is terrible, weird UI design choices that are static make it very hard to create an easy user experience. Responding to tickets is an arduous experience. There is no obvious way to users on how to update a ticket with additional information after it has been submitted, but before the technician has replied.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The system does its job when if you only need a user to log a ticket, track and process it. Our CIO kept assuring us that LANDesk was a powerful system with lots of options but at our operational level we didn’t see anything extraordinary.

The look and feel is horrible. It’s not intuitive and new analysts require training.

Customers’ interface is ugly. At the beginning many people in our organization were extremelyreluctant to use the LANDesk self-service portal because they simply disliked it.

There is no text formatting option. When we need to explain complex matters to our customers, paragraphs, bold, italic, screenshots etc. can be very helpful. This is not possible in LANDesk! For such tickets we just have to send separate emails.

Reporting was the probably worst part. There are some queries but they are cumbersome to build and run. At the end we solved the problem extracting data and using a Business Intelligence tools outside LANDesk.

To the best of my knowledge, our CIO requested help from LANDesk to improve the system and expand LANDesk functionalities from IT Service Desk to other administrative services. The outcome was rather disappointing and currently we are running a tender for a new case tracking system to replace LANDesk.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It has a very wide range of usage scenarios. It is very configurable and maybe our instance isn't optimally configure for the way my team have to use the system.

Far far too many ways to achieve the same thing.It is very configurable and maybe our instance isn't optimally configure for the way my team have to use the system.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We have about 6-7.000 end users using the platform for reporting tickets & submitting servicerequests. We've been using it for almost 2 years.

Look & feel is reasonable, doesn't feel too dated

Allows you to customize easily (if your lucky enough and don't run into one of the countless limitations or known bugs)

Requires intensive training to get indepth product knowledge (mainly getting to know the countless limitations)

We've been having countless issues with this product since we started using it 2 years ago.

- Issues causing dataloss take over 12 months already, and no solution or workaround is being provided. Customer service responses don't contain any usable information. We have confirmation that these issues also affect other customers using this software. After a few months we were assigned a developer, but this person keeps changing and no feedback is provided to the customer. We have received so solutions to our issues so far.

- Usability issues never get addressed. Even if this means the processing of tickets is seriously impaired by them.

- Every update introduces new bugs, which only get addressed 2 releases later (no hotfixes!!) (onpremise release cycle is terribly slow, so you're stuck with the bug for 6 months)

- internal processes simply stop working (servicerequests) without any visual indication.

- if you have complex requirements (like a for-each loop) in a servicerequest, give up. It won't happen. Anything outside of very basic functionality isn't supported by the workflow engine.

- performance issues never get fixed

Their backlog of known issues must be huge, since they are not fixing any of ours. Or they are simply not focusing any resources on product stability, service request automation, and basic businessrules issues...

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Supposedly, a mature implementation can integrate with other Ivanti tools. We were not able to see that benefit due to more fundamental problems with the platform. There's very little benefit to this platform that I can see that makes it any better than its competitors.

Ivanti Service Manager (ISM) was a boondoggle from the start. It took over two years to get ISM working after we initially purchased it. Over those two years, we contracted with two different professional service partners and worked with Ivanti support themselves to iron out every wrinkle and squash every bug. Even once we moved it into production (after two years of implementation work), it still didn't work as well as competing service desk options.

If I had one word for Ivanti Service Manager (ISM), it would be "overengineered." A simple workflow that would take 1 step in a better ticketing system takes 5 (or more) in Ivanti. A number of basic functions didn't work out of the box, such as knowledgebase full text search. The entire web interface is obfuscated behind a layer of Javascript that renders basic browser functions (like "open in a new window") inoperable. For example: do you want to send a link to a service request, incident, or knowledge base article by email? You can't do that without significant customization. Do you want to open a few knowledgebase articles in different browser tabs? Again, you can't do that. Do you have users who need to use browser accessibility functions (say, for the visually-impaired)? ISM doesn't support that, either. Cross-compatibility between different browsers, and even different versions of the same browser, is poor. We found that some functions would work in Chrome and not Firefox, or vice versa.

Even when the platform is working, it's extremely counterintuitive for both customers submitting tickets and for engineers supporting them. An incident management system should facilitate support, not get in its way. ISM gets in the way.

Ivanti doesn't even use this product internally, as far as we can tell. Their ticketing and knowledgebase systems are built on Madcap and Jive. I can think of a dozen incident management systems & ticketing systems that I'd rather use than this.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?