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We have an agreement with MS that provides us with a work order system for “free”. My colleagues and I on the Service Desk don’t find it all that useful.

I’ve used spiceworks at my earlier job, and loved it. Now I’m at a much larger organization, with much more conservative decision makers. They don’t like the idea, but I’m not sure exactly why. It might just be the big change.

Has anyone taken their large organization through this change? Does anyone have a business plan they used to convince management? Are there case studies that can be used as examples?

If you have any answers, comments, advice, or just want to shoot the breeze, please let me know.

Regards,

Pat Estes

11 Spice ups
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Subscribed, curious in other peoples’ answers.

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Your management kind of sounds like mine. What I would do is start up a Spiceworks server anyway, and show them the live potential. You could just do it on your local machine. Show them the graphing, and the statistics functions. Show them inventory - anything you think would appeal to them. Once you can show them a live system you can brag about, I think they’ll come around. Spiceworks is just too awesome!

2 Spice ups
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Which part of spiceworks, the helpdesk, inventory or both?
Maybe it’s the fact it’s free that concerns them, maybe they dont like the fact you are required to login using an online account, maybe they are happy with what they have and regadless of cost will stick with it. You’d need to know their reasons before you can even begin to try and sell SW to them.
I have it installed at my company, it’s a fair size but i only monitor 1100 devices, we dont use the heldpesk side, neither the local nor the cloud would do it for us, however we have our own in house devlopers who have designed a helpdesk for us, and this works well.
If you are a large company and you wanted the helpdesk side or both, your company may be too large for what SW can actually handle.

1 Spice up
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At a previous place, I was tasked with evaluating helpdesk solutions to replace the archaic Lotus Notes system that was (maybe still is) in place. I came up several solutions and recommendations. Management wasn’t fond of any and the project fell by the wayside. Move forward 4 years, and they want to change the helpdesk software. By that time, we ALL wanted. Several software options were evaluated. Our evaluations fell on deaf ears. This time we were told we would be moving to a different software. One which none of us had evaluated or anything. Best of all… this wasn’t imposed on us by OUR management (at any level), our customer imposed it upon us.

I’m glad I was out of there before it was (if it has been) implemented. All we kept hearing was:Soon™. To be honest, I’m sure they’re still using Lotus Notes…

2 Spice ups
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Microsoft has a “work order” system?

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So heres a scenario to ponder…

What if your management is asking about going in the opposite direction? You already have spiceworks up and running for a long time (10 years) and now they want to move to something different…something thats not even a full fledged help desk. They recently started using a workflow management software for other functions and they would like to consolidate things.

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It is the CRM part of Microsoft Dynamics for those who haven’t heard of it. I have used it before and it isn’t a true ticketing system, it does function as one. Think of it like saying “I use SharePoint as my web portal front page”, sure it CAN do that but it does a whole lot more.