ITIL-Aligned Sharepoint? Nooooooooo!!!
Servicesphere brought to my attention the recently announced product from GMA that is an "ITIL-aligned SharePoint IT Service Desk Solution". I break out in a cold sweat just hearing that. So what is meant by "ITIL Aligned" and "Service Desk"?
If "ITIL Aligned" means all it does is "supports the ITIL-recommended process for incident management" then we're all having a good chuckle at GMA's naive understanding of "Service Desk". A simple interface to log and flog fault reports does not constitute ITSM, and the world is awash with such little toys. I'm thinking using the term "ITIL Aligned" in this context could provoke the attention of OGC/APMG's trademark rottweilers, especially since GMA have failed to acknowledge that trademark in their press release or their website. Chokey the Chimp is taking an interest too.
Having a tool based on Sharepoint may be novel but GMA's statement in their press release about replacing a "complex and extremely expensive IT service management package... [which] might be described as a sledgehammer to crack a nut” strikes me as ironic when their product uses Sharepoint as an engine.
As the world's four-thousandth helpdesk product hits the streets I find myself humming Elvis's "In the Ghetto". It stands about as much chance...
Made in New Zealand 
Comments
I'm still recovering from the horror...
I tried so hard to push for something else, but the managers wanted it to be SharePoint, so that is what were stuck with for our knowledge base. Simply impossible to use, not easy to do updates...
Since I had some time between jobs I've been looking at some of the free tools out there for helpdesks and ITSM, some of them I thought were better than the software I've seen companies pay big money to license.
SharePoint is good as is
Its really ridiculous when i see people complaining about SharePoint.
I think is quite a good product if you use it for what you need it for.
Well stop complaining and build something better if you can.
I will be the first to buy it.
SharePoint ? Doh !
Unfortunately, ITIL has become very devalued because of this sort of rubbish.
SharePoint sucks. It seems to be prevalent in technology obsessed (usually Microsoft) I.T. Departments.
ITIL tool on SharePoint.. not a very good idea
I have worked a lot in SharePoint 2007 both as a developer/ Architect and have built some applications in SharePoint.
I thought about using SharePoint to develop an ITIL tool 2 years back and decided against it. Let me share my reasons why I decided not to use SharePoint.
1. You are not only tied to SharePoint platform, now your product depends on the SharePoint platform. Your upgrades etc will become more problematic .
2. If you use SharePoint, you will use SharePoint "Lists" to store the data. This is a big limitation for performance if you want customer data in a SaaS type scenario. Lists is not the same as database table, it looks like one but it is always one table in the database.
3. Costs is a huge issue. Not a good idea, if your product takes off and now you need to pay huge licensing fees
After I decided against SharePoint, I founded a company called tingbasoft.com and built an ITIL tool from ground up. I am glad I stayed away from SharePoint because I would have lost lost of the flexibility. If i built it in SharePoint, it probably would have a simple and limited functionality.
[Editors note: shameless plug removed :)]
knowledge management tools
A reader asked me what does work:
I've never seen a good solution to document management let alone knowledge management. It seems to me people are looking for a technical solution to a nontechnical problem.
People have to value knowledge and manage it. Someone must own and be the custodian of knowledge on behalf of the corporation. There must be an active KM practice (I refuse to use the word "process" any more). If these things are in place then any good tool will help.
I don't think Sharepoint is a good tool because it requires enormous initial and ongoing investment to squeeze any value out of it... but maybe they all do.
I've heard good things about the open source tool Cyn.In.
the danger of Sharepoint
This comment on a Sharepoint forum gives me the horrors:
The Service Package/Configuration Management modules are in process of concept refinement. I'm currently working Performance Monitoring, capacity management and service design module concepts
Obviously I don't know the background, but I'd be looking very closely at the wisdom of building a service management system from scratch with so many good ITSM products on the market.
This is the danger of Sharepoint: it provides a workflow platform, which is just a bullshit way of saying a development platform. The geeks run off and start building stuff. In three years time who is going to be supporting this? How well documented will it be, when changes need to be made as the world moves on? How can they possibly aspire to building something with rich functionality at a sensible price? Someone just wrote themselves a job. If the fool companies that pay for this are very lucky, the consultants will walk off with the IP they've paid for and launch a product. That's their only hope of ongoing development without costing a fortune. if I got wind of something like this, heads would roll.
I bet money is being pissed away at Sharepoint sites around the world. Lotus Domino too. Bespoke development of a commodity product like ITSM is as daft as homemade backup tools.
Don't waste your time
Why did you waste your time on this? Why am I wasting my time commenting on this ;-)
Have a good day
Osama S.
A fair and reasonable
A fair and reasonable question: why are you? :)
I have this uncontrollable aversion to Sharepoint. Once something causes enough pain to me and my friends I get irrational about it.
And evangelical: I need to save others.
uncontrollable aversion to Sharepoint
Let's create a community of rationally irrational SP-doom evangelists and join the Sharing Point (tm) for Sharepoint aversion on LinkedIN:
[ http://www.linkedin.com/groups/I-dont-like-Sharepoint-1818784 ]
Nominate it
I just could not resist: There is a nice website (in German, sorry, but you will be able to understand that without google translate) called dreckstool.de (http://www.dreckstool.de/hitlist.do). Which translates roughly to shit tool (even if google assumes it to be dirt tool). Sharepoint isn't even on the list of the 168 tools but a lot of "ITIL Aligned Tools".
3. Place HP OpenView Service Center (even beating Lotus Notes by 1 spot, which really is a tough job)
6. Remedy Action Request System
So nominate sharepoint. I wouldn't do it, sharepoint is much better as a company intranet platform as lotus notes is. Still most of my customers use notes (bugger).
Btw. 1st place is MS Project
Oh thank god! I thought I
Oh thank god! I thought I was the only person out there with an aversion to Sharepoint.
+1 aversion to sharepoint.
+1 aversion to sharepoint.