HP Service Desk is only sold through resellers and not through HP.  ITILPeople.com contacted Fox IT, one of HP resellers for details of Service Desk.  Fox IT is located in Woking , Surrey and produced Red Box.  They have decided to discontinue Red Box and become an HP partner.

Service Desk seems a particularly strong tool.  The GUI takes its look and feel from Microsoft Outlook, and as such it feels familiar the moment it is out of the box, and this can help to reduce training costs.  It is highly customisable, from how individual users want to work, to which fields are needed, through to the database structure.  One thing that should be noted is that Service Desk will only run on Windows NT or Windows 2000.  Fox IT say there is a Windows 98 version, but that it is not very reliable.

Service Desk is sold with either an Oracle or SQL server database (neither licence price is included) which makes support for the database much easier due to most companies having in house SQL or Oracle DBA’s already in place.

Service Desk consists of Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Service Level Management and Configuration Management.  Each of these modules is highly customisable to meet individuals and the organisations needs.  The Help Desk module is neat and compact, and works well out of the box, and once some tailoring has been completed it can be made to meet the organisations needs exactly.  Escalation is controlled via the Service Level Management module, with alerts of breaches, or potential breaches, reaching the user by a variety of means; e-mail, on screen alerts, pages, SMS text messages or other formats.

Problem Management interfaces to the Help Desk module to allow multiple incidents to be associated with problems, as well as allowing incidents to resolve problems or cause problems.

The Change Management module is well ordered and a project can be generated to show multiple, dependent changes, simplifying the process of tracking these changes.

Service Desk interfaces to HP Openview, and all the other major monitoring packages, BMC Patrol etc. and can generate incidents from alerts received from these packages.

The one area where Service Desk is weak is the lack of a ready made Known Error database.  This means that it is not completely ITIL compliant, and could be a problem for some organisations.  However with the level of customisation that is available this should not be a problem as it appears that creation of a Known Error database through the utilisation of tailor made fields would make it possible for the organisation to create it’s own. We also feel that there is not enough ‘out of the box’ definition of escalation paths – which would lead to more initial tailoring than desirable. A web front end is available, which has a lot of the functionality of the main client.

ITILPeople believe that overall, Service Desk is a sound product with some excellent features.

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