Vivantio

I have had limited experience with Vivantio technical support and after sales however the interactions that I had were pleasant and prompt. I have attended a handful of user groups over the years with former colleagues and the owners and developers that I talked to were very open and receptive to user feedback and seemed genuinely interested in their users.

Vivantio are a small enough organisation to have a relatively personal interaction level to their user base which is nice as it makes you feel more valued and appreciated as opposed to larger corporations which have a far more clinical approach.

: Vivantio is a great (ITSM) system for helpdesk and support teams, the system itself comes with a full set of configurable tools, log Incident calls, setting team tasks, problem management/change control/knowledge base, this is a product that fits in for both businesses that practice ITIL and for small businesses. the software itself is very configurable allowing the software to fit in with the business support strategy. users are notified and updated in relation to there logged call keeping the user in the loop. The look of the web interface is great, easy to follow and calls are easy to read. if an incident requires more than one team with the Vivantio system it is possible to easily set other IT support teams a set of subtasks that may be required to complete a solution, so many tasks can be assigned to one incident creating a master call in effect.

Vivantio does what it says on the tin, and for a small organisation it does a fine job. The weaknesses only become apparent when the numbers of users passes around 20, tickets pass 100 per week and customers pass around 20. Then you start to realise that there are too many manual steps in the use of the system. A good example is SLA (service level agreement) reporting; how have we performed this month against the targets we are contractually obliged to meet? An analyst works on a ticket, sends an update, then marks the ticket 'awaiting customer'. The SLA clock stops. The customer replies, but crucially there is no mechanism to start the SLA clock again, and if no one notices the SLA clock does not start again. For a small business this is not much of a problem but in the big leagues being unable to measure performance against SLA is the same as failing SLA.

Reports look great but are a nightmare to set up. If you don't know crystal reporting you may need a course just to send out a daily report of how many tickets you have open.

The Change workflow is rather good though. Custom workflows can be defined, where a user raises a change and submits it for approval. Any number of approvers can then be notified and the change can only be actioned when all the necessary approvers have given their go-ahead. One downside is that each person who actions the change must choose who does the next action, and if anyone forgets no tasks are assigned to anyone. Again, this is fine for low use, but if you are dealing with a hundred changes a week and need to convene a CAB meeting you may risk missing something.

The support department are helpful and friendly though. Always a pleasure to deal with.

Overall, I would say that Vivantio improved my own service desk, but outlived its usefulness in around 4 years.

Vivantio is a great (ITSM) system for helpdesk and support teams, the system itself comes with a full set of configurable tools, log Incident calls, setting team tasks, problem management / change control / knowledge base, this is a product that fits in for both businesses that practice ITIL and for small businesses. the software itself is very configurable allowing the software to fit in with the business support strategy. users are notified and updated in relation to there logged call keeping the user in the loop. The look of the web interface is great, easy to follow and calls are easy to read. if a incident requires more than one team with the Vivantio system it is possible to easily set other IT support teams a set of sub tasks that may be required to complete a solution, so many tasks can be assigned to one incident creating a master call in affect.

There are lots of other functions and features, all configurable but just too many too mention, in a nut shell and a 360 view on this system, to put it bluntly it's a fantastic system that does basically what it says on the tin, I would recommend the Vivantio system to other businesses as this system in my opinion is much further ahead than others.