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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 product that has been adopted the most and has the most positive impact on our customers. Considering that, our focus has been on developing Cloud Help Desk to ensure it fulfills the needs of our IT professionals, especially with the deprecation of Spiceworks Desktop 7.5.

We have been assessing the future of Help Desk Server. With Microsoft deprecating their basic authentication, this directly impacts Help Desk Server usability and has been a major factor in our roadmap for IT Tools & Apps. We have made a decision to end-of-life Help Desk Server by September 2022, as Microsoft’s email authentication transition will be fully complete in October 2022. What this means is that after September 2022 we will not be providing any further support on HDS, including addressing security vulnerabilities or issues related to external services.

If you are using HDS, we would recommend that you consider migrating onto Cloud Help Desk . We also understand that for some of you, a cloud-based option is not suitable for your environment. Regardless of whether transitioning to Cloud Help Desk is your next step, we are always here to help and guide you in case you have any questions around this. While we’d love to keep everyone in our tools ecosystem, we know our products will not always be the best fit for everyone, especially as your team’s needs evolve. Luckily, we work with a lot of great brands, so chances are you’ll find a suitable replacement through Spiceworks. Just ask the Community, and you’ll get a lot of great recommendations.

This has not been an easy decision for us to make. We did not see a significant increase in interest or adoption of HDS over the past year, especially when compared to Cloud Help Desk. By doing this, it will allow us to concentrate our efforts on our cloud-based IT tools and better move them forward in ways that positively impact our customers. This is a journey that we all are part of and you all are at the center of it as always.

What’s happening with Cloud Help Desk:

We have been working hard to add features to CHD that are not only the highly requested ones but also those that allow an IT professional to work effectively on a day to day basis. Below are the details of the features that have been added:

  • Enhanced Ticket View

  • Inventory Online Integration

  • Zoho Manage Engine Integration

  • CHD Mobile Application

  • Power BI Integration

  • Customizable Email Templates

If you have not checked it out yet, please register for Cloud Help Desk and access all of this amazing stuff with no cost. Need help getting started, here is the guide to help you do it.

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After all the fanfare of transitioning from desktop apps to HDS, and it’s gone already?

I’m really disappointed in this decision, I’ve now got basically no time to find an alternative (cloud doesn’t meet our needs) for two departments.

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  • Is my English semantics as a non-native speaker too poor?

The topic title is about the future of Spiceworks tools and apps in 2022. But beside the announcement of EOS / EOL for HDS by end of this month, I can’t find anything about the future.

  • Does this imply that development is going into vacation and no longer intends to fix bugs nor implement strongly missed features for CHD during 2022, postponing the release of any such updates into 2023?

Here again the same strange semantics. The headline is about presence and future. But the content does not mention anything about presence nor future. It uses past tense instead and reports what has already been done. But the part of what is currently going on and what is intended for the remainder of this year or the next six months is still missing.

  • Where may we find such updates on the topic as it was not yet included but promised?
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You can set up Cloud for two separate entities within the same organization. We have two instances - one for IT related and one for our field testing equipment.

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This is already known. But this does not help organizations with a requirement to only use solutions which don’t use a public Cloud, like the situation with which Conor is confronted with a three week notice time.

There existed a few indications since about six weeks to assume that suspension of HDS development will become permanent and degradation to expect to start in October.

End of support does not imply that the HDS solution will get dysfunctional immediately. And I guess that there exists some mitigation option to limit impact, giving you more time to migrate to any other solution meeting your needs.
The announcement in this topic included also the reference to the announcement for the discontinued Windows edition of last year. You may want to look into that topic and read from the end. Several Spiceheads have reported to which solution they’ve been migrating. Some migrated to some other public Cloud solution and some migrated to some other on-premise solution. So those choices mentioned there may provide you some candidate solutions for your partially disclosed requirements too.

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As we use MS, it doesn’t give us a lot of time to sort out our alternative. The point of my post was to express disappointment though, and I definitely am.

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I didn’t lookup the announcement of Microsoft. But I assume the announced change of Microsoft happens more than a week after end of support by Spiceworks. So that will be some more time.

I didn’t check. But I guess one mitigation option would be to change to a different email service for HDS and to configure forwarding between your Microsoft email solution and such alternate email system. That’s not ideal but will provide you more time for selecting a more permanent solution as it will not change the fact the active development has finished and support will very soon expire (beside limited community support).

I’m disappointed too, but not only with this decision. Spiceworks was causing and provoking a slow down of adaption resp. a migration away of HDS by their announcement of their plans in 2021 for 2021. Spiceworks was also causing such a waiting situation for not yet migrating to HDS by their decision last year to suspend active development for HDS as an unknown number of organizations wanted to await a certain progress in feature set of HDS before doing the migration of their more feature rich and discontinued Windows edition. I don’t consider suspension of active development as an appropriate means to meet expectations of prospective users who have expressed their missed features in feature requests during their evaluation for migration, IMHO. So this combination raised already the fears in last year, that Spiceworks will no longer commit itself to HDS already in Spring 2021 by letting Spiceheads think of the example set to the discontinued Windows edition. It was hence only a little surprise that these fears materialize quicker feared.

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Wow… agreed. I was really liking HDS and i see absolutely NO reason at all to have our ticket system in the Cloud. We folks with one internet pipe would be thrown under the bus if the internet went down and our CLOUD ticket system was unreachable. Spiceworks can answer our phones if that happens. Time to find something else.

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I’m very disappointed as HDS was working well for us and we can’t use CHD. Wasn’t the entire point of HDS to repackage code Spiceworks was already using for CHD? How much effort did that actually take?

This seems more like a strategic decision rather than HDS being too much work for the company. It sadly reminds me of the downward spiral of Firefox. Great product then wrong decision after wrong decision drove the community away.

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The more we can manage in the cloud, the better. That’s where “the future” is anyhow. We are very pleased with the cloud helpdesk as well as the inventory which are the main two things we use… And that Zoho integration… STELLAR! Thank you for all you do.

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I guess in case of Spiceworks, you’ve to distinguish between the community of Spiceworks tools users and the Spiceworks (forum) community. Several design and development decisions of Spiceworks seem to wanting to disperse a significant part of the community of Spiceworks tools users by removing working tools in need of some fixes without offering appropriate successor tools and hence pushing these to other 3rd party solutions. But it seems that Spiceworks succeeds in attracting some persons to their forum community without them ever becoming aware that some Spiceworks tools even exist.
And I’ve never read a policy of Spiceworks how they want to handle bugs as bugs get only documented internally and not mentioned in the documentation of the concerned Spiceworks tools. I can’t seem any commitment by Spiceworks to fix known and recognized bugs, even if they reduce main functionality for certain user groups to zero percent. This topic is about the presence and future of Spiceworks developments for the remainder of 2022. But I can’t see anything mentioned about this topic. It is an outcry of intended inactivity, fearing to make any commitments for the remainder of the year, expecting that answering support requests due to short notice of end of support of HDS will prevent development of doing any productive work to result in any updates or bug fixes before the beginning of next year! That’s again the same poor communication pattern to provoque problems which would otherwise not exist. Fixing bugs or addressing expected loss of features by a succeeding solution to prevent such loss of feature might cause less effort and less disappointments.

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Wow, I just moved from Cloud Help Desk to HDS, because well, too often there have been issues with the cloud service’s email system, always at the worst times in my office. This seems to occur about once a month, and usually takes hours before Spiceworks is able to correct the issue.

I was going to in fact give a demonstration of the new HDS setup today, but I guess I’ll need to postpone that.

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But there are organizations where public regulation either prevents use of public Cloud solutions or requires additional efforts to render it even possible. Private Cloud solutions would require much less efforts. As far as I understood, HDS is still falling short of a private Cloud solution but should already come with a considerable subset necessary to extent it in future updates to become a private Cloud solution.

  • So why is it better to prevent HDS to become a private Cloud solution by terminating not only its active development but also its support?

I’m trying Spiceworks Inventory Online too. But its scanning agent has severe limitations. Promised feature updates are missing already for several years despite the promise being made in the documentation of Spiceworks Inventory Online. And there does not even exist any scanning capability of the Spiceworks Collection Agent for Windows when the using organization is diverse or international. The concerned bug is known for quiet some time and recorded and recognized. But there is no feedback if such severe bug will get fixed anytime or remain so for the next decade, not even worth mentioning in any documentation neither of Spiceworks Inventory Online nor its collection agent. And look at those organizations using MacOS or iOS clients in their infrastructure for inventory. Android and iOS are not supported and feature requests exist. Spiceworks supports an agent for MacOS, but only for older operating system versions. Later this year, Apple will expire support for the last version of MacOS still supported by Spiceworks. I don’t know if this happens in a few week times with the release of the next version of MacOS or how long the transition period will be before Apple ends its support for such a legacy version.

You’re glad with the feature set of Spiceworks Inventory Online. But development practice and product development policies would mean that if HDS gets end of support due to Microsoft expiring its basic authentication, then Spiceworks Inventory Online would need to end its support at the same time at end of THIS month due to Apple expiring its MacOS version becoming legacy next month.

  • Would you remain satisfied when Spiceworks clarifies in this topic to also let expire support for Spiceworks Inventory Online by end of THIS month?

This topic here are not the release notes. This topic is not about what Spiceworks has done in the past. Your quoted comment is appropriate for the release notes blog. And the ZOHO integration seems limited when I tried it a few months ago. I can’t remember for which use case it remains free and for which use case it is considered a trial license. It’s better then nothing correspondingly. So that are still matters of the past.

Spiceworks started this topic here as promised about half a year ago, about its development plans for its tools, apps and community for the remainder of this year. But I’m still unable to find such plans disclosed despite Spiceworks using so many letters of text. And I could not find which of those plans disclosed you were appreciating with your better understanding of this Spiceworks announcement.

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That’d be the ticket view change that has caused more furor on the forum than any other change so far?

and the 400 MB free download from Microsoft, to get the simplest report out?

and the email templates that are not actually Customizable (because of a bug)?

Is it really that challenging to add a 365/Azure SSO login option? (no really, I’m asking)

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HDS was a much more functional program, with inventory. The decision to move to the cloud and get rid of the local database structure was disappointing at best, and the loss of features and accessibility being mixed with the issues inherent with cloud services (such as inevitable, stylistic and programmatic changes as 'the company takes the program in a new direction) makes announcements like this a sore subject.

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But what about organizations that need HIPAA or other compliancy?

From all that I read, SW won’t go down that road. So they are effectively saying to the users, FU, we don’t care, but make sure you use the forums and keep our advertising revenue flowing. A catch 22 situation, in my book.

So basically if you use the CHD, you can’t store confidential info, PCI etc. without violating certain standards, policies and perhaps laws.

Frustrating, the On Premises HD was an awesome product, we migrated to the CHD, and just make sure we don’t put anything there that could be construed as confidential.

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All you had to do was integrate SSO from MS and the problem would have been solved.

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Any news on 2FA for CHD? I mean its 2022 and an IT service without it?

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@richardingram2 ​ welcome to Spiceworks and its community, a community of IT professionals for IT professionals with a focus on SME. And please don’t forget to read the recommendations of our field guides, especially those on getting started and on pos(t)ing good questions, including the helpful references found at the bottom of its web page.

Spiceworks will determine priorities for development based on ranking of feature requests and their comments. For commenting, you may need to increase your community privileges to the next level. And the getting started field guide offers you two options to reach that level within a few hours.

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We really appreciate you all taking the time to respond to this post. We understand that decisions like these might not be in the favor of every organization and we try our best to meet the needs of the majority.

For the ones concerned about the lack of features on the Cloud Help Desk, we want to assure you that your highly upvoted feature requests are a major factor in our product roadmap planning. So for any feature you know is an important Cloud Help Desk enhancement for your organization, do not forget to upvote and comment. The release of the customizable email templates feature is one recent example of our team implementing highly requested features.

We also take the evolving help desk market into account - planning for the future of help desk to ensure our products provide valuable features. In doing so, this due diligence allows us to keep the lights on and keep enhancing our Tools & Apps for everyone.

Regarding the timing, while Microsoft’s changes are in October, they indicate you can re-enable legacy protocols, extending your deadline to EOY. This should give you more time to migrate over to either the Cloud Help Desk or another help desk solution. For those of you not using Microsoft mail services, your Help Desk Server will not cease functioning Oct. 1, 2022 - this is just the end of our commitment to support the application.

As for the Cloud Help Desk roadmap for the remainder of 2022 and into 2023, we plan to research a refresh for the Knowledge Base and options for User Portal single-sign-on. In addition we plan to continue our work knocking out challenges users face with the Tickets and customizable email templates features and functionality. As usual these plans and specifics are subject to change, but you can see our intent is to continue to invest in the Cloud Help Desk in the short and medium term.

For those of you concerned about using the Cloud Help Desk as a replacement for the legacy Desktop application after our announcement , we want to inform you that all of the features from the Desktop application that were planned to be moved (based on the usage statistics) are already present on the Cloud Help Desk.

We also noticed some of you are concerned about cloud technologies not being reliable. Even through the past year’s major web frontend transition on the Cloud Help Desk, we’ve maintained minimal downtime. Factoring in the value of your time not spent on maintenance (backups, upgrades, etc.), we think the Cloud Help Desk is also more desirable for more people, and this has been strongly evidenced by user adoption throughout the history of Help Desk Server and Cloud Help Desk.

Last but not the least, much like other areas of our Spiceworks C ommunity , we highly encourage all our members to stay respectful & considerate of their peer’s opinions to make it a cordial experience for everyone.

Thanks again for your feedback!

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