Just wondering if anyone is aware of any 3rd party end user portal offerings.

The out of the box one does not provide the look & feel we are after (too "industrial" & IT-like) for our clients, so I was interested in any 3rd party off the shelf offerings that may available. We are a small, non-Sharepoint IT environment, so customising the out-of-box version would not be the preferred option. We would be greatly interested in a more "client friendly" offering as delivered by many of the other service management tool vendors. We would also prefer to have a non-Sharepoint version if one exists.

Another key feature that we would be after is for the incident/service logging to be integrated with the knowledgebase so suggestions are presented as the client enters the title of their issue. I've seen this in the client portal offering of a number of other service management products and it is a great feature. Effectively can provide an answer to the client without them having to log a ticket.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

The master pages of the SharePoint are locked by Microsoft, so I kind of doubt anyone has any custom portals for you.

However you can obviously easilly change the colours, title and image logo etc via Site Actions \ Site Settings. I'm not a SharePoint expert but this is very little effort and any IT person can manage that. But if you say wanted to move the menu to a top frame menu, you cant.

To remove that Need Help bit and replace it, refer to this easy to follow blog post by the SCSM engineering team:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2012/02/06/customizing-the-scsm-2012-self-service-portal-how-do-i-change-the-need-help-or-description-text.aspx

I think your entering Title functionality with Help Article suggestions would be a great future, same as here on the Technet forums, but I cannot see that anyone would have been able to create that functionality in SCSM with the portal. Maybe in future versions, but I wouldnt hold my breath.

SCSM 2012 is not a quick out of the box product that you just install and off you go in a day, it takes a fair bit of configuring for the portal, ROs, SLAs etc. If you are a small IT counsultancy with small to medium businesses as your market, I might go so far as to say this is not the product for you. But that is just my personal opinion.

There are a few alternatives in the works that are built on HTML5:

http://www.syliance.com/marketplace/itsm-portal/

http://www.cireson.com/business/self-service-portal-for-system-center-service-manager/

I'm sure they aren't cheap though.

Hi!

Yes, there is a cool solution here: http://www.syliance.com/marketplace/itsm-portal

Regarding price-tag: at least it is for free to request a quote and a trial! Shortly you'll see that it is worth the (small) invest!

Kind regards,

Patrick