ManageEngine Boosts ServiceDesk

MSPs looking to offer service desks may be in business. MSP vendor ManageEngine (News - Alert) this week boosted its ServiceDesk Plus – MSP tool with a configuration management database (CMDB) as well as project management.  The company, which has a large base of MSPs, believes that these partners are challenged by a variety of issues. For one, there are lots of people who get involved in IT projects and change implementation, making them harder to manage. And these teams don’t always communicate effectively. Finally IT projects are increasingly complex with more and more dependencies.  “In turn, maintaining clear project oversight and providing progress updates becomes a nightmare for any MSP that relies on manual reports to manage projects. Similarly, MSPs that rely on manual processes to manage growing numbers of client resources frequently lack the visibility needed to provide the right support quickly and efficiently,” the company said.

Much of what ManageEngine does is make sure IT infrastructure is running optimally, including applications, desktops, networks and servers. The company claims that over 60 percent of the Fortune 500 somehow use ManageEngine tools, and over 72,000 smaller companies do the same.And managing IT Infrastructure is exactly what ServiceDesk Plus – MSP is all about.“MSP projects often balance cost, time and resource considerations as well as client communications and real-time reporting,” said Uma Shankar, director of engineering, ServiceDesk Plus, at ManageEngine. “Our new project management module lets MSPs take care of these important tasks directly from the ServiceDesk Plus – MSP console. Meanwhile, our new CMDB module is the powerful, easy-to-use alternative to most CMDB technologies that many MSPs reject as too expensive, complex and difficult to setup.”

 Managing Projects

The project management tools take a project and divvy it up according to milestones. These milestones are then subdivided into discrete tasks. This is all to make it easier to track and assign tasks.  Security levels for each task can be set as well. Plus “IT project managers can perform feasibility checks through cost estimation and resource management and track the progress of the project through a Gantt chart and calendar view from a single dashboard,” the company said. Meanwhile with the CMDB modules, MSPs can gain deeper visibility into the infrastructure they are tasked with managing. Some of this is done through visualization. “The direct visualization map provides the central repository with complete information about the configuration items and their relationships as well as the impact those items have in their IT environment. The CMDB can also perform impact analysis based on configuration item relationships,” ManageEngine explained.  Want to see ManageEngine execs first hand? Check out this TMC (News - Alert) video about the company’s approach to social networking.