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Hi Patrick,
A few months ago, we took up support of Magic TSD (Total Service Desk) and the various add-ons for the Australasia region as Network Associates is no longer supporting it directly at a local level here. So now in addition to several years Remedy experience I've got a couple of months Magic experience so in an ok position to make a comparison. Firstly, I'd agree with a lot of the comments others have made here in that they're not really in the same league as Remedy and Magic is probably more suitable for smaller shops, though it seems to require much beefier hardware / network infrastructure to run at a moderate level of performance.
Coming from a Remedy background, there's been a few things that've amazed me about Magic:
To do Administration tasks such as adding fields / forms, setting group permissions etc are done through a tool similar to Remedy Administrator. However to run this tool you have to shut down the WWW service (which Magic requires to run) effectively shutting down the server.
Weekly server reboots (and often more frequent) seem common with customers in order to keep the app stable.
Re-installs of the application server and server re-builds which although are a last resort still seem to be a much too common solution to problems, which in my experience, is near unheard of in Remedy.
Error trapping seems quite poor in the app and generic asp / ole errors come through for a variety of problems which can make troubleshooting a tedious process.
Saying all that, Magic does have it's advantages, it's entirely web based and you can do view customisations through your browser and I don't think even with Mid-Tier that Remedy is yet to catch up to Magic on the web interface front. The apps built with them are simple enough and don't really try to be everything for everybody (which is how I feel with Remedy apps at times). You can do some nifty things with the Business Rules which are a simplified version of AL's, filters, escalations etc. Also, the underlying database structure is much simpler and easier to work with than the Remedy DB can be for a relative novice like me.
Overall it depends on your organisation and what you want to achieve with the application. My suggestion would be not to necessarily go for the cheapest solution (as I believe the price difference is quite significant) and to consider the overall cost including support time, downtime, limitations the app imposes etc. and go from there.
If you have any specific questions, feel free to contact me offline.
Cheers,
Bryan Graham
Technical Support Engineer
Planwell Technology
Ph: 1800 684 773
Fax: +61 2 9419 - 7803
mailto:support@planwell.com.au
-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Hardy [mailto:Patrick.Hardy@IBPINC.COM]
Sent: Thursday, 26 September 2002 3:40 AM
To: ARSLIST@LISTSERV.QMXS.COM
Subject: Remedy comparison to Magic and other tools
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My company has recently merged with another company. Both companies have their own helpdesk tool, ours being remedy (4.5.2) theirs being Magic. In the not so distant future we will combining the two IT departments, I am interested in locating comprehensive comparisons between them.
At this point we are just trying to develop a strategy for the two companies, both companies are rather large. I would like to see us keep remedy (biased perhaps), however, I need to be open minded. It may decided to go with another tool altogether (let's hope not) Anyone have a good source for comparisons, or had to go through this process before? I'd be very appreciative of any nudges in the right direction, or documentation any one may be willing to share. TIA!
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