Micro Focus Service Anywhere [EOL] Reviews

From the user perspective - we don't use employee self-service, so I would consider a user the help desk agent. For them, it's the simplicity of live support as it has the big data behind it so as they're going through a transaction or a call with a staff member, they can enter the person's name and it shows past tickets. When they start putting in a title or description it gives them knowledge articles and the related tickets to the issue. They just love live support because it's got that big data behind it. They love the simplicity of the screens that they work with.

Because of the administration ability, being put into SaaS, we've now been able to spend time looking at other processes. Before we went to Service Anywhere, we did not have Operation Orchestrations so we weren't doing any kind of automation. Now that we have some time to look at processes in Service Anywhere it has an analytic engine. I guess it's called hot topics and we chose one of our hot topics which to us was a cash machine. We had a lot of failures on cash machines so we looked at that and said, "Okay, how we can help the help desk solve those quicker?" We looked at using automation for it, and now the help desk has better visibility of the cash machines. We can automatically fix some problems, but if we can't fix it with automation then we've given feedback of what's going on which helps to troubleshoot quicker. That's been a transformation.

The CI detection within Service Anywhere, that's part of the big data. If they enter a CI that’s known in the database then it pops up with a little window around the CI in the description. If you hover over that, it will show you more information about that CI. An example would be we have a lot of ATM's. Before Service Anywhere when they would be doing a call on an ATM, they would have the service manager open up on one window. On another window they'd have the ATM information open and then they'd have to do a copy paste or a manual enter the information. Now we use UCMDB to pull that information into UCMDB, push it into Service Anywhere. Now when that CI is detected they can hoover over that CI detection and it gives them all that information. Less clicks, faster information, more complete information. It's just all there part of the ticket.

Having one system that us and one of our major vendors which happens to be HPE are also able to do a ticket exchange on, so we've got smooth interaction of ticket information. We've got faster time for our agents to open tickets. They find the screens really easy to use, and they're pre-populated with information about our users which our old system didn't have that. They're finding it quicker to get a ticket open and being able to get to asking customers about their incident issues.

I guess there's two camps. One is tweaks to what's already there for incident management. Incident is one of their most mature modules, but there are still some things that we'd be looking for. Some people granular, specific things around ability. One of them is ability to add more values. A list of values is quite limited right now. We would actually like to see something pretty granular like that. It is tweaking things. Then on a bigger scale, I guess on the request management module. It's not as mature, and so we have got a few things we're looking for there that we're working with HP on.

The product has enterprise capabilities and it comes with out of the box capability. Within the target domain, I think Service Anywhere is a good product with a good feature set.

With our customers, the improvement to the organization is limited. I think the value proposition for a certain type of customer is strong. It's what HP says itself, the product itself: the fact that it's easy to upgrade, easy to control, it doesn't offer much variation. The environment will only allow pre-scripted modifications, and style-sheet driven visual changes.Therefore, it's a pretty stable product. Those are good things. Typically in the customers that we work with it's not a product that offers enough flexibility to support their needs. I don't consider it an enterprise-level product.

In the Enterprise domain, because of the diversity of such an environment, it is typically not feasible to implement a rigid, "one way" system. There will always be requirements that aren't readily available in the OOB system, or are add-ons to support a specific way a process was implemented, or the way a process needs to support the way an organization does its business.

SAW doesn't support these kinds of tweaks to processes, but only allows changes to the process composition (number of steps, order of steps).

The self-service portal is good. The dashboards are good. It's an improvement over what we had before. We just rolled it out, so we haven't been able to leverage all of the advantages. It's a little early to tell any more than that.

We're just barely getting any reports out of it. We hope to be able to roll self-service out to the rest of our company, and reduce the time for our tier one support team to resolve issues. Hopefully we'll get better reporting, improved reporting out of it so we'd be able to manage work a little bit closer.

The user experience is the most valuable element of Service Anywhere - it's modern and intuitive out of the box, and it looks and feels like the websites our users are used to and expect from a modern website. Our users love to use the self service portal, and our agents can easily and quickly deal with requests through features such as Live Support that make it very easy to have all knowledge and previous requests at our fingertips.

Hot topic analytics gives us great insight into what our users are searching for to greater target future knowledge articles and offerings. They also allow us to see what problem areas are developing across requests.

Our users have traditionally been slow to adopt new systems, and in the past have not raised requests in our previous ITSM systems. When we launched Service Anywhere to our staff we found they instantly adopted it, and the number of requests handled through the system has almost completely replaced other methods, allowing us to shutdown several email addresses, and have our staff use one single point of contact in Service Anywhere.

Our agents are spending less time on the administrative side of handling requests, and more time helping our users, and our users report that they feel better informed and in more control over the requests they raise.

From an administrative point of view of maintaining Service Anywhere, a key element to any solution we picked was not to create additional burden on us as a department both in terms of the initial implementation and ongoing improvements. We found the excellent onboarding support from HPE during the implementation, and ease of administration after that have been extremely helpful in reducing the staff time spent on these tasks.

It is very easy to implement and there is great customer experience. When I say "easy to implement", I mean it’s very quick. In terms of time to value, we're talking about a month to do an implementation for the customer.

In our terms, we talk of ITIL Version 3 compliance. This is a tool that, if you implement it, you will be compliant. It's one-stop shopping. It's really, really quick. It's got big data which is a big thing around here, so there is a lot of intelligence brought into the tool. It's got things like smart analytics, which I think for users in South Africa especially, that you know there's quite a low maturity in terms of its ITIL compliance. It helps customers really quickly get on top of the operation, what's going on inside the IT organization. It allows them to respond quicker. We use it as well as sell it.

It is a central place where customers as well as employees can put requests into our support organization, service requests, and support requests. They can use their mobile phones to log requests and to see the status of their requests. There's a very easy to configure self-service portal, so which is a self-service page that our customers as well as our employees reach out to. The internal customer can access services very easily, or request services very easily.

The big data engine, employee self-service portal, and the integrations.

We are transitioning to a full Employee Self Service portal with customer facing solutions. We don't have a portal right now so it will drastically change the way we portray our window into IT.

The self-service portal gives us visibility into IT that we didn't have before. We'll be able to use service offerings and support offerings that were not available previously. It should be an improved customer experience more than anything.

Incident, Change and Asset management.

Our service desk operates more efficiently and now has access to data that was not available with our previous product.