wel our helpdesk lead at a 300 person company, 4 of us on the desk. password resets, lockouts and outlook issues are like half our queue and we're always behind. trying to figure out if any of these AI options are worth it or if its all hype

we're on freshservice for ticketing and been happy with it overall. they have their freddy AI stuff and our account rep has been pushing us to try more of it, so thats one option. we're also looking at atera's robin since it fixes stuff on the device and closes the ticket, and apparently it works with freshservice so we wouldnt have to switch our ticketing

mostly want to hear from people actually running one of these, setup time, what you let it handle at first, all that. demos all look amazing so not much help there lol

When there’s pressure to reduce Adobe spending, how do you decide which licenses to keep without turning the review into an argument with every department?

IT can check assignments and whatever usage data is available. But that doesn’t necessarily explain why someone needs Acrobat. A person using it twice a month could depend on a specific feature; someone opening PDFs every day might only need a reader.

I’d want department managers to confirm the tasks their teams need, with IT checking which plans or tools can support them. The options could include reclaiming unused seats, changing plans or testing another PDF editor with a small group.

The part I’d be cautious about is counting the license savings before understanding the support work. Deployment, document compatibility, signatures and retraining could all affect whether a switch is worthwhile.

There’s also the ownership question. Procurement handles the renewal, IT manages access, and departments request the software. Who has the final say when a manager wants to retain every license but IT is expected to reduce the budget?

How have you handled that review, and which changes actually reduced costs without creating more work for your team?

I have about 8-9 weeks to trim 30% off our SaaS budget before the new fiscal cycle starts (January). A primary institutional donor to our NGO pulled out last month, taking roughly 1/4 of our annual funding with them (still mourning it). We have around 110 people spread across 4 regional offices, and leadership handed me the spreadsheet to fix.

I already did the easy cuts, after Microsoft ended the free Business Premium licences our renewal finally lapsed in March. I downgraded the org to free Business Basic tiers and pushed the staff onto web apps, which cost us Intune and Defender (not ideal but workable). We also migrated our password management from Bitwarden Enterprise over to Passwork, their nonprofit pricing freed up north of $400 a month.

(For context: we do environmental mapping and cleanups, from forests to beaches, we also collect the trash and turn it into data to understand which products keep showing up and which sites keep refilling after we clear them. That data is also what proves the work to the government, it gets attached to every report we file and our main government grant depends on it.)
Now I am stuck on the remaining which is NOT little (we’re already on every nonprofit programme I could find):

• ArcGIS: 4 years of survey data and every report we’ve published sit inside it, and the Esri nonprofit programme we’re already on comes with a fixed named-user count, no price I can argue down whatsoever.
• Planet: their imagery used to reach us free through the NICFI programme on Global Forest Watch, and that access got pulled on 1 April 2025. The limited version that came back in May 2026 only covers the Amazon basin, which includes none of our sites. So it’s either commercial rates or dropping to Sentinel and losing the resolution, which also breaks comparability with everything we’ve already filed.
• Starlink Business: field sites have no other connectivity. I can’t find a nonprofit rate anywhere and there’s no cheaper satellite option I’d trust for a 2-week deployment.
• Deel: payroll and contracts for staff in the 2 countries where we have no legal entity. Remote dot com runs a nonprofit programme, bbut moving means re-papering those contracts.

When I price out alternatives, it rarely mathematically works. A cheaper tool usually means self-hosting, which trades licence fees for infrastructure costs and my own sanity. When I factor in migration hours, the switch seems to cost more in labour than the subscription costs in dollars.

Which of these aforementioned tools makes the most sense to rip out/switch from, and which ones should I fight to keep? I am overwhelmed to the brim by the deadline so excuse me if the post is a bit all over the place please, thanks.

Type II, second year. The auditor wants the full list of laptops so he can pick 25 and check encryption, EDR and patching on each. Simple ask.

I sent him three exports because i did not know which one to send. He sent back one line asking which was the population.

Three days in excel after that. AD has computer objects for people who left in 2023 and for VMs that were never laptops. Intune has 60 loaners that got autopilot registered and never handed out. The EDR only knows what the sensor reached. Host names don't match between any two of them because half the fleet got renamed during the domain migration, all three already feed axonius on the security side, which i only found out on day three. it would have given me the overlap, not the rule for what counts as a laptop.

I ended up handing over a list of 1,912 with a page explaining how i got there, and he was fine with it. Auditors are fine with mess as long as you can explain it.

I am not fine with it. Nobody owns the question "what counts as a laptop" and every tool answers it differently. Next year its the same three exports and the same three days unless somebody writes that rule down.

So that is what i am doing this week, writing the rule down, before anyone asks me for the number again.