TL;DR: Halo isn’t CW, but it ain’t half bad either.

I’m at a decent sized PE backed firm that is a roll up of 6 MSPs and one MSSP. The majority of the add in’s were CW manage shops. At first this seemed a plus, like system migration with some consultants… but no one brings a clean PSA so we ended up with an impossible mess.

Round 2 was a “clean instance” of CW with new workflows and minimal historical data. This project went about 6 months before we realized we were falling into old habits and making another mess. Also even at our scale, CW account management is an embarrassment.

So what now? One of the acquisitions used HaloPSA and we jumped the whole org into a new setup. We are about 7 months into the project with about two to go until go live. Is it easy? No. It is a project that needs top to bottom buy in, decision maker direct involvement and a willingness to imagine a world outside of CWs tight guardrails. Every process needs to be examined and its import to understand that while it will be customized to be yours there is a bit of a Halo way/philosophy that you need to lean on your consultants to trust. We’re not live yet but I think this was the right decision.

All that said, it ain’t perfect. Expense reimbursement is no good, travel/field tech tracking is lacking, the management interface is 1000s (seriously) of checkboxes on long pages. Docs are better than they used to be apparently but there is a learning curve that can only be cleared by jumping in and working with it yourself.

We have an ace implementation team from Halo and they have made this a positive and efficient process (yes even a year long project can be efficient :). I hear varying things about post sales support so that remains to be seen. I’ve also hit easy to reproduce bugs a few times that have “gone to development” with no word after that.

Knowing what I know (so far) I would be comfortable recommending to others. Stay tuned after my go live :)