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Update (Mar 27, 2020): Read our ticket import guide for a step by step workflow.
Update (Apr. 12, 2020): Table updated - ticket muting is now available in Cloud Help Desk.

Hey Spiceheads,

Last Sept. ’19 during Spiceworld , we talked a lot about reporting and migration of tickets from Desktop on-prem to Help Desk Server and Cloud Help Desk.
Read here if you want to know the latest and greatest on Reporting, in Cloud Help Desk and Inventory online .

The rest of this blog will focus on the progress we have made in helping you migrate your tickets from Desktop on-prem to Cloud Help Desk (we are also planning to make this available in its “twin brother” Help Desk Server).

In short, the Cloud Help Desk Settings page can now import your exported Desktop tickets into a Cloud Help Desk “organization” of your choice.

C_HD_ticket_import_highlights.jpg
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Many of you told us last year: “I’ve been using Desktop for years, performance is not at its best, I get that Spiceworks is not investing in it, and we are now ready for the “zero maintenance” benefits of a cloud-based help desk, so we’ll migrate to Cloud Help Desk when there is a migration procedure available!”

This day has arrived, but before we let you go and migrate your tickets, we want to be clear (or just remind you) that Cloud Help Desk does not have the same feature set as the Desktop Help Desk.
This should help you confirm that you’ll find what you need in Cloud Help Desk.

As informative as the below table maybe, ultimately, the best way to know for sure, is to try Cloud Help Desk on your own, before committing to this migration. Your Spiceworks credentials should get you a Cloud Help Desk account in a matter of 1 minute, so you can test it and make your final decision.

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Remember that support@spiceworks.com is free and available to help you!

The Spiceworks Product and Engineering team

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Is there a chart that compares Cloud Spiceworks Helpdesk (Free SaaS) , Legacy Desktop Helpdesk (On-Prem), and also SpiceWorks On-Prem OVA released Fall of 2019?
Is Exchange and Office365 Exchange support on the road map for the Cloud SpiceWorks Helpdesk?
Is ticket muting on the road map for Cloud Spiceworks Helpdesk?

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I’ve updated the table above to include our HDS column. Right now Cloud HD effectively support all email providers, or none, depending on how you look at it. Are you asking if we plan to allow Cloud HD users to “bring their own email service” instead of using the built-in email provider?

Ticket muting is indeed on the roadmap - look for this soon!

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I’ve updated the comparison table now that ticket muting is available in Cloud Help Desk.

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Will inventory online have the extensive detail of desktop inventory in the future?

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Is Cloud Help Desk HIPPA compliant?

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When exporting from the on-premise server (legacy version) to the cloud version, are attachments from the tickets migrated?

The migration posts mention a 300MB limit but says “to delete some things” to get around this. Is there a way to chunk the tickets so that I don’t have to choose between cloud and deleting some things?

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@jason13057, can you provide more details around the extensive details you’re wanting to see in Inventory online?

@BillCarrington, from our understanding HIPPA compliance is not possible with Cloud Help Desk, so for example you should not store patient information in Cloud Help Desk.

@rzeisler, your recent attachments are migrated but we impose some limits. The file you import contains the ticket information together with attachments, so the total size of that data can’t exceed the file size limit. Typically files larger than 300MB contain many attachments, or some very large attachments. How large is your Desktop/legacy/on-prem server’s exported file?

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The timeline tab has saved me many times, and all of the info on the General, Config, and Software tabs. Also the “Complete Profile” page for each computer is very handy. (This is with the WMI scanner)

3 Spice ups
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Is there a feature timeline somewhere I can subscribe to find out when “Customized end-user portal” is available in the cloud? We depend on that feature greatly, and losing it is absolutely preventing us from going to the cloud.

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You can Subscribe here: https://community.spiceworks.com/support/help-desk-cloud-edition/release-notes

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The exported file is 92mb. How can it be so small considering we have almost 20K tickets in Spiceworks? That’s because all attachments are dropped from tickets that haven’t been updated in the last 30 days or if the attachment is larger then 5mb. This is a lot of valuable data that is being abandoned. Spiceworks is useful for managing current tickets but it is even more valuable to answer the questions “How did I fix that problem 2 years ago” or “Has this happened before? How did the other tech solve the problem?”

I would migrate to Spicework Cloud in a heartbeat but I don’t want to loose all the history. Is there a way to do a full migration with all the attachments and not just arbitrarily drop attachments? Even if this made the export large, having the export chuck it every X tickets (maybe 5000 or let the user pick the chunk size) without dropping attachments seems reasonable.

I have attached the log file.

exported_data.txt (722 KB)

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Currently we don’t have a way to circumvent this limitation. There are two factors at play, the ability to handle and process very large import files (hundreds of MB up to GB etc.), and the cost of storing and serving large numbers of attachments and/or large attachments.

Based on some research earlier this year, our impression was most help desk users would like to keep all of their history, but searching or using old ticket information was a need that was infrequent. Definitely not “zero” but also not very common. So, to date, we’ve accepted a trade-off where you give up some attachments on older tickets to simplify the migration effort.

By your estimation, would you say the scenario you described is something you do:

  • multiple times/day
  • daily
  • weekly
  • monthly
  • periodically

?

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At least daily, often multiple times per day.

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At least multiple times per week. The other problem is dropping off attachments from tickets strictly based on days since last update. I have older tickets that are still important and the attachments are crucial to handling the problem

The only thing that is keeping me from migrating to the cloud version or the newer on-premise is the export/import limitations. I talked to Spiceworks employees a couple of years ago at SpiceWorld that is was an inadequate approach and was told “Yes, we’re working on this. We are working toward migrating all of your data”. It doesn’t look like you got there or are concerned about getting there. This provides me no incentive to stay with Spiceworks if I am going to loose a large part of my data. Just letting me change the 30 day limit to X, but still having to stay under 300mb for an import file, would be helpful. Chunking it is more helpful. If your policy is “we don’t want to import your data because it’s too big” then on-premise should allow me to do it since it is my storage.

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Definitely something that’s still on the table for the future, just not possible to chunk the import or increase the limit today. Thanks for the feedback, super helpful for us as we plan.

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Other things I’ve found (Played with the cloud version to see what I would miss)

  1. Printer info I get with desktop (Toner levels/history, alerts)

  2. Inventory on iOS app

This is very useful looking up computer data while away from desk, I am in a multi-subnet static IP environment, so getting network data while a computer is down is useful, along with other information available currently