Clarity SM Reviews

The most valuable feature is the usability of the search when you want to find other tickets that relate to the incident you're working on.

We have all of our different ticket types in one area. There are incidents, requests, and change requests all tied into one application, so you don't need to go to different tools. It makes it easier to find all the data in one spot.

I don't know. There's really nothing that I can think of. Everything always can be improved.

It's really stable. We haven't had much downtime, so it's been a very solid product.

I haven't used technical support personally. My boss uses CA technical support. He handles all the issues.

Our old solution was not meeting our needs. It was very hard to use. It was causing a lot of people issues, so we needed to find something new.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup, but I heard that it was pretty straightforward. They didn't really have very many issues. The CA people were able to help out with any problems we had.

I don’t think we looked at other vendors before choosing CA.

Have resources available and people who are dedicated to the product.

When we select a vendor, we look for a company that's a leader in their industry, or somebody who has the backing to support the product that they sell.

It allows us to integrate all our processes into one. It allowed us to retire several disjointed custom-built solutions. It helps us to fulfill requests and change orders.

Our key requests are being implemented in the next release. There is a knowledge management portion. It is very cumbersome to create a knowledge management document. That’s one area that could be improved.

The Knowledge Management module in Service Desk Manager is cumbersome and hard to use. It’s not so bad for browsing and viewing knowledge documents, but to create content is extremely time consuming.

The main problem we have is, you can’t simply paste screenshots into the knowledge editor, they first have to be uploaded and then, attached to the document. We would love to have the ability to copy/paste screenshots into the knowledge editor, similar to how you can add images to an email.

The only time we ever have stability problems is when our environment is not stable, so it's a perfectly stable product.

It is very scalable.

They typically get back to you quickly regarding the less complicated requests. For more complicated ones, they obviously take longer; but they're always excellent.

I only got involved a few months after it was implemented.

Try not to bite off more than you can chew. Try not to piecemeal.

We emphasize a partnership with the vendor and their ability to understand our business. The more they understand about our business and our goals, the better aligned we are. It is not always just about the technology or whatever the functionality is.

Incident Management module: Tracking events or incidents is one of the most challenging work phenomena in the workplace. Convincing your clients to report issues is another different isolated task that, when done right, tremendously improves TAT.

The IT team becomes more effective and efficient because there is workload sharing. Where a Service Desk administrator would have had to log a call, Users can now do it themselves to get a service.

Automated email logging: The tradition in the workplace for communication will always be email. If emails can be used to automatically trigger calls, that is the best thing that can ever happen in the incident management or service desk process. This would save a lot of time, plainly speaking.

There should be a way for emails sent to a particular address to trigger an alert to create an incident or request, similar to SIEM automation mechanisms. If this is already available, my apologies, but I currently don’t have it.

I have used it for over three years.

The product is quite stable and highly scalable. No issues yet.

Technical support is 7/10.

I’ve used SCSM (System Center Service Manager), quite a good product from Microsoft. The difference is in scalability; there was a need to use a web application compared to an in-house product solution.

I wasn’t directly involved in the initial setup of the product.

Solution was implemented through a vendor. It is a good product to implement; quite feasible.

It really has a good cost-benefit analysis for any business with a large employee base.

It is a good solution for service desks.

We already have a service catalog in our IT department and one of the problems that we had was that we had several interfaces to users. The user had to know when to go our catalog to ask for something from IT and when they had a problem, they had to go to another interface to report an incident. One of the things that we're trying to do with the service catalog is to have it so people don't need to know in advance if they have a problem if they're asking for something new. Our idea was to remove that decision from the customer so customers can put in whatever they want and we decide if it's an incident or new requests. That's the way we're transforming our catalog to work that way.

In the background we have Service Desk where we fulfill the requests from customers whether they are incidents or new requests. It's a big transformation and I think that the customers quite like it.

I don't know if it's uniquely good, if it had to be CA. It's just that since we had some problems with our previous service desk platform because we made a lot of changes to it. It was very difficult to upgrade to the new versions because we had a lot of development put on top. This was one of the things that we did when we adopted Service Desk is that it had to be configurable and it would work out of the box and only with the configuration. We don't want to develop anything on top. That has been very good with the decision that we made because we've been able to upgrade the software versions in one month which is amazing. It's nice that they have a video interface.

Customers don't have to decide where to go to report something and they don't get those answers that we sometimes do, the technical people do. If you report an incident then they decide it's not an incident they'll tell you this isn't an incident so go to the other screen and just put in your request.

It's technical aspects. In fact, there was some technical issues in the way the product was built that in the long run could get us into trouble. We didn't actually have any problems but the new releases have redesigned the way things are and so I think it's much better now.

Most of these products are bits and pieces and when you bring them all together you bring them as bits and pieces. If you want something to be robust there are some aspects that you have to redesign some of the parts so that they can glue together.

Sometimes we would like things to be a bit easier. I think the reporting could be something that would help and I think this happens with most of this sort of product is that you need a lot of reporting on these sort of solutions. It's not as agile as we would like it to be.

I think reporting is always something that I think we feel that these products are short on. The problem with reporting is that you need to know the data model that's behind it so that you know what objects you need.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been stable for us. 

It's scaled just fine.

Right now we actually have a contract with them for Service Desk support. They're the ones that are bringing in people to get support to the Service Desk.

They are helping us evolve our Service Desk. It's a long-term contract for that, sort of a professional services thing.

I was not part of the selection process. I know that HP was one of the vendors. I don't recall if IBM was in there as well. We previously had BMC.

First and foremost, when we talk with our customers about the CA brand, they immediately feel comfortable. That's an incredibly valuable thing.

From a technical perspective, we work and integrate with PMO offices, and they've all integrated Service Desk Manager, so it's something that's widely used and known.

We've improved as an organization very quickly because of it, especially when it comes to self-service capabilities for our customers. It's been a fast, easy, and reliable tool to use, so much so that we've even had auditors who credited us with the quality of the implementation.

We need financial solutions for all projects we undertake, and Service Desk currently doesn't offer this. It would be of great benefit if it did.

I think that we need financial solutions for all projects, currently we do not have this and it would be of great benefit.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's a very stable product.

It's scaled just fine.

I am very happy with our partnership with CA. Technical support is very good. Since the very beginning of our relationship with them, they've provided us with great support and information.

We chose CA because we had previously used CA Spectrum.

The initial setup was very easy. We're quite happy about that.

It’s very simple, fast, and has great support for the tools.

I help my clients make best use of the tool in their service management environment.

It performs pretty well.

It helps organizations manage their services in a way that treats them as services, and not as, "Oh, this is what I do," in isolation.

Being able to specify event rules and SLAs that can help to automate some of the processes that people are doing manually is valuable.

I could pick a dozen and say, "That's useful, and that's useful, and that's useful." The fact that it aligns very well with ITIL. I think that's probably one of my favorite things about it, because it's following up a general best practice for service management. That's important.

I think some of the work they're doing with the xFlow interface and the more collaborative tools. I think that's helping because this new generation of people like the social-media style of collaboration.

I would also like to see a simpler reporting tool. They went from one fairly robust, very complex, reporting tool - it was great - and then they went to another one that was also fairly complex and robust. That's a great tool for people who are report writers, but for the average person who just wants to get a quick little report, it's like handing somebody a chainsaw because they have to break some toothpicks in half.

It's been there for a long time. It's very stable. No issues whatsoever.

I've seen it scale to very large organizations and do it well. They've made improvements to help with that scalability.

I think they're a great team. I actually did some work for them for a few months, a couple of years back. Knowledgeable, friendly, helpful, and very professional.

I've been involved in initial setup many times. It can be complex, depending on the requirements of the customer, primarily, whenever the customer wants to deviate from the out-of-the-box, in a large way; if they want to over-customize because they think it should look that way. It's better to accept the way it looks rather than try to force it, because then when you come around to upgrading later, those customizations may or may not be appropriate.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria would be 

• stability
• reputation within the industry in general

• their following of general best practices, like ITIL.

I would rate it bordering on nine out of 10. It is an older based tool, it's been around for more than 25 years. They've made improvement, but it still carries with it some of its old roots.

Make sure that you are recognizing what your real needs are and not just going go with whatever hype is being presented to you.

We use it in our IT department to connect with our customers.

The performance has been excellent.

By connecting us with our customers.

It enables our coordinators to connect to our customers, and our customers are number one.

It adds tons of value. It gives us one central location to know, not only who is contacting us, but what they're contacting us for, what application they're contacting us for.

The new chat feature, I love that. They are always one step ahead of what we need. Usually, if I need something, I contact my rep and they tell us you have it.

In general, in terms of improvement, I would say our reps need to be a little more one on one. In the past we've had issues with that. But our current rep we love. 

Maybe training could be better.

Just little technical tweaks here and there. Like more options. For example "Organization." We wanted that to be available inside the change order, as well as the ticket and the request. And that's not available.

It's always on and it's always there. We've never had any issues with it being unstable.

Scalability is great. We can use it in our company from our IT department to our sales department. It works for everyone.

Tech support is fast. Fast, knowledgeable. I like that. I don't have to contact them often, just whenever I have a question.

I was not involved in the initial setup but I was involved in the upgrade. The solution was already there. But when I started, I knew that there were new features that we needed, so we upgraded.

We went from 12.1 to 14, so there was a lot involved in it. But from what I hear, the upgrade from 14 to 17 is way easier. So I look forward to that.

The issues we had were migration issues, getting our information from one place to the next and making sure everything was as everyone needed.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is communication. I like them to be upfront, honest, and transparent. Transparency means, when I call them they're honest about what they have available and what they can do, and not beating around the bush.

Our primary use case is managing incidents and requests from customers.

It performs very well.

For us it's indispensable to have all the cases in one place. It's the main tool for managing cases, day to day.

We can search open cases and closed cases to find what we have done in other incidents. We use the cases as a knowledge base to find what we did last time this incident occurred.

Also, prioritization is valuable and managing work queues.

Dashboards. Custom dashboards are really important because without that it takes too long to view some information. In the new version, xFlow is better.

It's pretty stable. The last versions are very stable.

Our installation is very small but the customer's experience is good.

Tech support is "so-so." Sometimes it takes too long for support people to understand what is happening. They always ask the same things, and start over with installations and with configurations and all that kind of stuff. And then, after all that, they start to ask what is happening. It takes way too long to start solving the problem.

Easy. In the latest versions it is straightforward.

When our company is investing in a new vendor, what is important to us is 

• support
• world-class software.

Overall, I would give it an eight out of 10 because it's a good product. I think it can improve some things but it's stable and it's useful.

Install it. I think it is easy to use. It's a good tool.