Release management can play a significant role in providing support services for an entire company. However, it’s often time-consuming to handle manually.
Fortunately, by using release management solutions, you can plan and roll out fixes for entire departments in a matter of minutes. Service desk release software combines help desk and release management capabilities, so you can take care of two key areas of business using a single tool.
What Is Service Desk Release Software?
You’re probably familiar with service desk software. It’s a family of tools enabling your business to deal with customers or internal support requests more efficiently.
To achieve that, service or help desk solutions rely on various features, such as ticket processing, automation, knowledge bases, and more. In some cases, however, fixing IT issues requires you to make changes to the software or products you provide.
Release management solutions are tools designed to help you log changes to your IT infrastructure, products, or services. By combining service desk solutions with release management tools, you can track errors from their inception, find solutions, and keep tabs on new launches—all using the same platform.
Some of the features you can find in these solutions include:
- Options for scheduling releases in advance to avoid conflicts
- Tools to request approval from specific users or departments before launching updates
- Assessments of your company’s IT assets, which can be linked to specific releases
Ultimately, the goal of a release management solution is to help updates go smoothly. This way, you can avoid prolonged downtime for your internal systems, which often results in significant monetary losses.
Top 4 Service Desk Release Management Solutions
There are plenty of standalone release management solutions. However, for this section, we’re going to focus on four tools combining the best of both worlds by also offering service desk functionality.
Freshservice enables users and employees to submit support requests or tickets through various platforms. On your end, you can prioritize requests manually or by using automation tools.
Once you’ve figured out the root cause of each error, you can assess the impact of the changes you need to implement to solve it. This is possible because Freshservice tracks the IT assets in your network, which you can link to specific tickets.
By using the change management solution from Freshservice, you can schedule updates or releases, monitor approvals, and assess the post-release impact on your workflow.
Price: Freshservice Estate plan starts at $79 per agent per month.
Next on our list, ServiceNow is a management and service desk tool enabling you to launch a centralized repository of all planned changes in your IT infrastructure. With ServiceNow, you can schedule meetings to discuss new releases, and create detailed service maps to detail the impact changes can have on your workflow.
If you need to run new releases past management, ServiceNow lets you create custom approval policies that vary depending on the magnitude of each update. Once you launch a new release, you can monitor its impact through a custom analysis dashboard.
Price: Prices vary depending on the tools you need, and you can request a custom quote at any time.
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is an all-in-one platform for incident, asset, release, and project management. On top of that, it comes with ticketing capabilities, which enables you to process requests through multiple channels.
By using ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, you can assign agents to specific tickets and monitor their resolutions. If IT upgrades are needed for specific issues, you can schedule them on a calendar built to help you prevent conflicts between releases.
This scheduling process allows you to keep multiple departments in the loop concerning releases. Plus, ManageEngine includes a notification system for updates. To make your life simpler, you can also configure release templates and custom statuses for complex updates.
Price: Prices vary depending on the tools you need and how many agents you want to have access to them.
Last but not least, SolarWinds® Service Desk is a comprehensive help desk solution creating a full inventory of the IT assets in your network. With this information at hand, you can coordinate complex releases with multiple elements.
The release management solution from Service Desk enables you to document changes extensively using a log system. These logs help you keep track of release schedules, share potential issues, troubleshoot them, and ensure your entire team is in the loop.
The platform also enables you to submit releases for approval and set up notifications, so managers never miss a request. If you have a release requiring multiple approvals, Service Desk can manage those as well.
What’s more, Service Desk can even monitor the impact releases have on your systems. Having access to this information can make future updates go much more smoothly.
Price: SolarWinds Service Desk Business plan starts at $39 per agent per month.
Conclusion
Release management solutions enable you to plan and track changes you make to your IT infrastructure. If you combine those features with service desk software, you’ll get a one-stop solution for providing support and rolling out fixes for your employees.
Here are four of the best service desk release software options you can start using today:
- Freshservice: The Estate plan costs $79 per agent per month
- ServiceNow: You can request a custom quote for your business
- ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus: You can request a custom quote for your organization
- SolarWinds Service Desk: The Business plan starts at $39 per agent per month
*As of November 4, 2020. All pricing in USD.