Hornbill Systems, a leading supplier of enterprise service and support management systems has announced the availability of Supportworks Essentials. Based on the same technology as Hornbill’s award-winning Supportworks Enterprise solutions, the Supportworks Essentials helpdesk solution provides a service desk environment that is quick to deploy, easy to use and has a lower cost of ownership. Unlike other entry level solutions offered either in isolation or within a broader product portfolio, Hornbill's Essentials solution is based on the same common technology platform as its Enterprise solutions, giving Essentials customers a full upgrade path in the future.

Essentials, being based on the same technology platform, provides the same core functionality as Hornbill's Enterprise solutions, with some limitations to features that would typically only be required by larger organisations. Essentials can be installed, configured and supported with minimal overhead, making it ideal for small to medium sized organisations where speed of deployment and reduced cost of ownership are primary considerations.

Essentials provides full functionality to manage calls via an intuitive analyst interface. Call logging is straight forward: calls may be allocated to analysts using drag & drop capabilities and a variety of time saving features such as Quick Log Calls. Essentials includes wizard-driven reporting and Service Level Agreements. In addition Essentials provides comprehensive email functionality, search capabilities, asset management and knowledge base management.

As well as standard service and help desk features, Essentials provides a web-based Customer SelfService Portal, which enables customers to log and track the progress of their calls. The SelfService Portal offers unlimited access to customers, making it very cost effective and easy to deploy. A graphical form designer enables organisations to include their own branding within the user display, and build workflows within the application that maps on to their existing business processes.
Essentials is designed with ITIL in mind, harnessing Hornbill’s long and proven compatibility with the ITIL framework. Supportworks Essentials can be used to support the ITIL disciplines of Incident, Problem, SLA and Change request management.

Gerry Sweeney, CEO of Hornbill Systems commented, "At Hornbill our ethos has always been to support our customers as they grow, and to provide an appropriate upgrade path. This has been most evident in our approach to ITIL solutions, where customers have been able to migrate from our standard helpdesk solution to our ITSM product. Supportworks Essentials is the natural extension to this approach. Hornbill technology is now available to organisations that are looking for an entry level solution, that is fast to deploy and easy to use. And as these organisations grow there is a fully mapped migration path enabling them to upgrade to Hornbill’s Enterprise solutions when they are ready."

More information on Supportworks Essentials.
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