Service Desk 7.0 - Upgrade Considerations

I attended one of BMC's webinars yesterday, focusing on the Service Desk product. Service Desk, consisting of Incident Management and Problem Management, is the replacement for Help Desk. I learned quite a bit. The upgrade will be difficult for some people, because in addition to adding many new features, the offering has changed and some of the old features are no longer available. In addition, licensing has changed quite a bit.

• Change Request (I.e. Change Tasking) is gone from Service Desk. Customers must purchase Change Management. Their replacement? Tasks in the Incident and Problem forms. For some customers, who have been using Change Tasking, this change will require a lot of reconfiguration.
• Asset Tracking has been changed to Asset Inventory. I haven't yet learned the extent of the paring down of the product.
• License Management, Incident Management and Problem Management applications must be licensed on the server before the application can be installed. All existing Help Desk customers are eligible to download these.
• All customers who own Remedy Help Desk user licenses will be eligible to receive 1 Incident Management license and 1 Problem Management license for each user license.
• You must upgrade all the applications at one time. In other words, you cannot install Service Desk 7.0 to work with Change Management 6.0
• The upgrade to SLA and SLM (the product is now combined into one) must be discussed with your Account Manager, due to a cost differential in the new product.

In future articles, I look forward to sharing some of the cool, new features rather than harping on the difficulties that some customers will face. As a consultant, I'm in touch with my customers and I know that the news above may upset some of them. It seems as if BMC has decided to change the direction of the product, and to make these radical changes all at once. While previous versions have all strives to be backwards compatible, it seems that BMC has decided to make a clean break. Well, hopefully we'll only have to go through this once.