Spiceworks Help Desk Server is End-Of-Life ?

johnnybraun · 2022-10-04T04:45:38.000Z

Today I got mails from the spiceworks feature request website ( https://community.spiceworks.com/feature-request ), that my requests for HDS have been closed, because HDS is EOL.

Isn’t HDS the “new” replacement for Spiceworks Desktop? Where is the official info that the development has been discontinued? I mean it is not that bad because HDS was lacking features everywhere, so we still use Spiceworks Desktop. But sooner or later we need a ticket system that is still in development and unfortunately I don’t think, that Spiceworks Desktop will be revived.

A cloud ticket system is absolutely no choice for us, so what would be your favourite alternative for an onprem ticket system?

conor1368 · 2022-10-04T05:01:28.000Z

What’s going on with Spiceworks Tools & Apps in 2022? Spiceworks Support

We know many of you are curious to know what’s happening with IT Tools & Apps in 2022 and have been waiting for an update on what’s planned for Help Desk Server. Last year, we made an announcement about our IT Tools & Apps with a focus on Spiceworks Desktop 7.5 that we deprecated in December 2021. Alongside that, we explained that we discontinued the development of Help Desk Server (HDS) and were re-evaluating its future. Of all the help desk offerings we have, Cloud Help Desk (CHD) is the p…

This is the post where the EOL was announced.

johnnybraun · 2022-10-04T05:06:06.000Z

Thank you Conor!

So this will be the official “Just ask the Community, and you’ll get a lot of great recommendations.” Thread

And a last comment to the “We did not see a significant increase in interest or adoption of HDS over the past year” statment… Is spiceworks surprised that no one is switching from 7.5 to HDS when the product is missing so many features? We evaluated it several times but no chance, 7.5 was much better and is therefore still in use.

scheff1 · 2022-10-04T09:06:41.000Z

JohnnyInc:

Isn’t HDS the “new” replacement for Spiceworks Desktop?

Yes and no. If I remember it correctly, HDS was first released in September 2019. Spiceworks intended at that time to develop HDS and CHD in parallel unto close to feature equality with the desktop edition before retiring the desktop edition. So both were expected to become successors, keeping the choice of public Cloud solution and on-premise solution. And as HDS was just a port of CHD, almost no additional development resources would be needed.

I don’t know when Spiceworks changed its mind without indicating it as a change of mind. At some time, the CHD documentation updated its FAQ section and reports that CHD (and HDS) not only have no feature equality with the desktop edition, but additionally promised to never reach feature equality. So those awaiting feature equality before considering a migration to whichever solution did not get notified of such change of mind.

JohnnyInc:

Where is the official info that the development has been discontinued?

You already read the first official announcement of Spiceworks back in May 2021 where Spiceworks obstructed its previous plans to make HDS a successor by announcing suspension of its active development, obstructing its initial reason and motivation to create HDS at all. When HDS is just a different output of common code base for different deployment, the automated build process and the automated regression test process would ensure that resources needed would be limited to time and storage. But in that announcement of May 2021, Spiceworks considered that HDS would bind too much undisclosed resources and undisclosed adoption rate was below undisclosed expectations of Spiceworks, omitting any root cause analysis (if most organizations delayed adoption due to lacking feature migration to HDS). That’s also called self-fulfilling prophecy where the prophet announces future events which were caused by the prophet and its announcement.

And you were even replying to this first official announcement although your assessment of privacy was too simplified and hence wrong in its simplification. Your privacy assessment was contrasting Spiceworks privacy statements for HDS. So if you would have done the privacy audit correctly in 2021, you would have known that even HDS would not meet your privacy requirements. It was already subject of a topic on HDS privacy back in 2020, and repeatedly afterwards.

So the announcement referenced by Conor is the 2nd official announcement, turning the initial suspension into expected end of development, and announcing an end date of support in addition which was end of last week resp. Spiceworld 2022.

JohnnyInc:

A cloud ticket system is absolutely no choice for us, so what would be your favourite alternative for an onprem ticket system?

I have not yet decided. My focus is on inventory, not on ticketing. I’m considering GLPI IT and Asset Management Software. And it is coming with a ticket system, having also an option and integration for at least another alternate ticketing system. It is available for on-premise as well as Cloud based.