Yes, Beetil is now called Service Desk and is part of Citrix Online's GoToAssist suite. Citrix acquired Beetil in early September, read our blog post 'Beetil has been acquired by Citrix!'.
Beetil is a Saas (Software as a Service) application that helps you manage your IT services. Beetil is based on the internationally recognised ITIL framework and covers incident, problem, change, release and configuration management. For those not familiar with ITIL and its concepts this means that Beetil covers the full spectrum of managing a service, from dealing with customer issues to implementing changes to a service, and mapping your assets and infrastructure.
Beetil is for anyone who is interested in putting more structure around their service management procedures or who wants to introduce ITIL into their organisation without frightening their staff or incurring huge implementation and training costs. Beetil can suit small to medium as well as large organisations. It has customers from around the world from many sectors including IT, retail, marketing, finance, construction and energy sectors. Read more about who's using Beetil.
Beetil is based on ITIL best practices which is fundamentally geared towards Information Technology but at its heart it's just great common sense that can be applied to any industry that deals with customers, assets, or changes and upgrades to products, procedures or production environments.
Beetil is easy to learn, easy to use, and easy on the pocket. Just sign up and start using it, you'll be creating incidents within 10 minutes with no need for a manual. Beetil is designed with the end user in mind, not with enforcing a process, so it'll be a breeze to introduce to your business. And by adopting Beetil you will be adopting a well recognised framework - putting more structure into your service management processes is good for your customers, staff and ultimately your business.
Beetil has been designed with the end user in mind rather than supporting every last detail of a framework. At the end of the day it's all about the people who have to use it. In a comparison of Beetil with other ITSM and ITIL-based tools out there we believe Beetil wins hands down when it comes to ease of use. There are a lot of other very nice and easy to use tools out there that cover just incident management or issue/bug tracking - however with Beetil this is just a fraction of the equation. To really get the true benefit from implementing service management philosophies and processes you need an integrated tool that lets you see how your incidents, problems, changes, releases, knowledge and assets relate to and affect one another.
A service is something that delivers value for your internal or external customers. Generally there are two types - business services and technical services.
Service management, or more specifically IT Service Management, is a discipline for managing systems with a focus on the customer/user's perspective. It is a discipline that applies to systems already in production, but many of its philosophies can be borrowed and used for systems in development and non-IT related businesses.
Service management covers the management of customer incidents, recurring problems, changes to a system and the managed implementation of those changes, as well as the management of your assets and infrastructure.
A reasonable definition of service management can be found on Wikipedia.
Sign up online for a 14 day free trial, no downloads required. All you'll need is an internet connection and a modern browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer v7+. Beetil, now called Service Desk, is part of the GoToAssist suite - sign up for GoToAssist here.
Beetil has recently been acquired by Citrix - read the Citrix press release. Citrix is a great company known for its market-leading, cloud-based support product line, Citrix GoToAssist, and the addition of Beetil into its portfolio will provide a fantastic and seamlessly integrated set of cloud-based services for remote support, monitoring and service desk management. We’re really excited to be part of this, and it’s going to be great for our customers.
Our Beetil team consists of ITIL® certified gurus, as well as developers and designers with no ITIL background - this combination gives us the service management expertise we need whilst being able to take an objective and critical view from a non-ITIL perspective.
Beetil is so much more than an issue tracker! You can use the 'incidents' part of Beetil to log issues, reassign, resolve and close them, or you can use the the 'Change Testing' part of Beetil to log issues against features undergoing change or development.
Beetil can be used for projects in development (and we certainly use it like this) but to get the most from it you need to look at the bigger picture of all your products and services in production and how you go about managing customers, known issues and change, release and knowledge management - something that a simple issue tracker just can't do.
Read our blog 'More than just an issue tracker'
Beetil is a service desk with a whole lot more. It has you covered from end to end with incident, problem, change, release, knowledge and configuration management.
Beetil covers the following main elements of ITIL, these are:
Beetil also has:
Yes we do! You can configure Beetil to automatically create incidents via email and you can reply to email notifications sent from Beetil to update an incident - perfect for your customers or for when you are out and about! Read our blog post 'Email Integration Is Here!'
Yes, see our API section of this website for documentation.
For each of the incident, problem, change, release and knowledge sections we have customisable reports that can be scheduled to run and emailed to users daily, weekly or at whatever frequency you desire.
For larger system wide or service reports we have a modest list that we intend on adding to. All business are different and have different requirements so we envisage this section to get fairly large and are open to your suggestions about what you'd like to see here.
There's plenty! Things we are currently working on:
We have a tonne of good ideas for both new features and ways to enhance existing features and we'd love to hear you ideas too - so please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about things you'd like to see that aren't offered, chances are they will be on our to-do list.
You can customise:
We don't currently build for individual customised extensions to standard functionality.
Beetil, now called Service Desk, is part of the GoToAssist suite. You can read about GoToAssist pricing and plans here.
No - you have no obligations and and can choose to leave whenever you like.
ITIL® stands for 'Information Technology Infrastructure Library' and is a registered trade mark of the Office of Government and Commerce in the UK. ITIL is essentially a set of standards, or good practices, for IT service management. These practices were developed in the UK and are internationally recognised and widely adopted.
For more information go to www.itil-officialsite.com
IT departments are the predominant users of ITIL best practices, although any sector can benefit from the adoption of these practices to help manage their services.
Many smaller businesses might be put off my the seeming complexity of ITIL - it's actually just great common sense and we believe anyone can and should benefit from it.
The beauty of ITIL is that it can structure and clearly define how your projects and services are working out for you. It enables your business to become more proactive as opposed to reactive and establishes a platform for continual improvement of your services. If you're looking for an effective way of managing deadlines, priorities and service level agreements then ITIL might be just the ticket.
It's internationally recognised and widely adopted so chances are your competitors will already be using ITIL, a similar recognised framework, or looking into it.
No they don't need to be ITIL experts or even know what ITIL is. ITIL is a method of documenting common sense for your IT department. We've made a point of trying to keep things as straightforward and jargon free as possible so there's no need for big investments in training or heavy manuals. In fact your staff may not even be aware that they are using ITIL principles at all - they might even enjoy it!
No tool can claim to be "ITIL certified". ITIL is a non-prescriptive framework from which you can pick and choose processes or parts of processes that best fit your business needs. If you're asking "does Beetil have PinkVERIFY™ certification or is it process compliant under OGC's new scheme?" the answer is no. Beetil supports key ITIL processes in an easy to use and practical way that is focused on adding value to our customers' business. Our focus on practicality and ease of use means sometimes we make deliberate design choices which may conflict with aspects of the certification schemes.
Read our blog 'Usability versus Compliance'.
Beetil is currently based largely around ITIL v2 and also includes knowledge management with more ITIL v3 or ITIL 2011 processes to be incorporated in the future.
An incident is a single event, a disruptance or query that affects the quality of a service to a customer. It will have a timeframe within which it needs to be resolved by in order for customers to feel OK about it. Basically, incident management is about getting your customers up and running (and keeping them there) by whatever means necessary. An indepth description of incident management can be found on Wikipedia's ITIL page.
Managing incidents means the right priority, an appropriate deadline, open communication with the right people, understanding the incident's context and what and who it affects. You should be able to accurately measure your Service Level Agreement compliancy and understand your incident hotspots and their wider affects.
Read our blog 'Effective Incident Management'.
A problem is a recurring issue that affects a service. It could be a technical glitch, something unclear about the UI, or the absence of a feature or certain information that customers keep requesting. A problem will indicate an underlying issue with a service that needs a short term and/or long term solution.
Problems are not incidents - a customer might be affected by an incident which is then resolved i.e. the service for that customer has been restored to normal levels, but the problem might still be there just waiting to occur again and again. It should be logged, associated with any related incidents and investigated for short and long term fixes.
Problem management is a proactive way of managing your services, and it's a bridge between keeping customers happy and keeping your business running smoothly and efficiently. An indepth description of problem management can be found on Wikipedia's ITIL page.
Read our blog posts 'Effective Problem Management' and 'I'm sure I've come across this before!'.
The correct ITIL term for a Change is an RFC (Request for Change) - we simply refer to them as 'Changes' in Beetil for the sake of simplicity. Changes a pretty self explanatory - basically any change to a service or to something that will affect a service should be defined and logged as a Change.
Change Management allows you to justify any change, have that change go through an approval process, plan the urgency and impact and allocate resources. You should also be able to tightly manage the plan, build and test phases of a change. An indepth description of change management can be found on Wikipedia's ITIL page.
Read our blog 'Getting Started with Change Management'.
A Release is an implementation of a change to a service. Well planned releases allow for clear disruption points and ensures quality of the production environment by formal procedures and checks.
An indepth description of release management can be found on Wikipedia's ITIL page.
Knowledge management helps to identify, create and share service related insights, experiences and initiatives to staff, customers (where appropriate) and your organisation.
When implemented effectively it helps move knowledge from the individual to the organisation as a whole. It can also act as a resource for customer self service, freeing up your service desk and reducing incident rates and resolution times. An indepth description of knowledge management can be found on Wikipedia's ITIL page.
Read our blog 'Getting Started With Knowledge Articles'
Configuration management is all about identifying, defining and mapping all your assets and their relationships to one another. It's also about maintaining control over these assets (or 'Configuration Items') through effective incident, problem and release and change management. Understand what affects what, what's causing you the most trouble, where your hot spots are.
Configuration is a complex subject, and one of the hardest ITIL processes to implement. An indepth description of configuration management can be found on Wikipedia's ITIL page.
Read our blog 'Getting Started With Configuration Management'
We are available to consult to your business and help you put ITIL processes in place, or we can put you in touch with the right people to do this depending on your needs.
We also recommend your check out Rob England's 'The IT Skeptic' website for a practical and critical look at ITIL.
You'll need an internet connection and a modern browser. We recommend Chrome, Safari, Firefox and also support IE7+. Your customers accessing the Beetil Customer Portal will need at least IE7 (IE6 no longer supported).
The are currently no plans to offer on-site deployments of Beetil.
If it’s possible to extract data from your old system then we will do everything we can to help you do this so we can then import it into Beetil. You can also use the Beetil API or one of our import tools to import your incidents and customers into Beetil.
You won't need to worry about upgrades. Because Beetil is software as a service they will just happen at a suitable time. Don't worry - we'll keep you informed about new features.
Current Beetil users can contact us at support@beetil.com for any support related questions. New Citrix GoToAssist Service Desk customers can receive 24/7 support through our Global Customer Support site.
Email us at beetil.info@citrixonline.com and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Beetil, now called Service Desk, is part of the GoToAssist suite. GoToAssist provides 24/7 support through the Citrix Online Global Customer Support portal.
Inevitably, we will have to schedule downtime on Beetil to release new goodies into the wild, and to keep it in tip top condition. We'll ensure we give you plenty of notice and try to schedule outages during low periods of activity. Hopefully, when you're all tucked up in bed.
We'll keep your data online for 6 months after you leave so you can always come back. If you want a copy of it or want it removed just ask us.
No, only people you add as users to your account can see your data.