OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

The workflow engine that standardizes and globalizes the process steps. It drives people through the process by standardization and automation.

Let's take request fulfillment. You are assuming the use of an iPhone or a notebook in the past. People sent around a lot of emails to somehow organize. The notebook gets ordered, delivered, installed, and so on. This is now completely organized and standardized in one workflow. And people work on one ticket. There's full transparency and there's no confusion anymore. Time to market is much faster and the email traffic is less. So, it's much better than before.

There's a lot of manual work, which is error prone and time consuming, in how the code gets transported from one system to the other. This consumes a lot of my resources that have to be available for that. So wish that it could transport much better. Which goes into the direction of DevOps and the other things that need support. Support is the real issue.

I have seen a lot of features on the road map, which will increase my rating. But my assumption would have been that, by now, we would at least half way on the road, from the features that we have been presented with until now. They should have made most of these improvements earlier. And we have permanent discussions where we compare with products like Service Now and HPE is not there.

We have just implemented Asset Manager and it seems, from an operational perspective, to be much easier. We need to use less resources in the administration, compared to Service Manager. Asset Manager looks like it's going to be a stronger product.

It runs stable. There's really no question around it. We have no issues with the stability of the system.

So far, we haven't had any issues with scalability. We have about 35,000 users. There was one issue during the upgrade, but this was fixed. In general, it's a stable system.

In general, we were not satisfied with technical support. We needed to escalate. We currently have escalation with the highest HPE management, because the support around the suite is not good, especially first level support. When you call the first level hotline, there is lot of lost time, because many questions get asked twice. And they ask simple questions. We are a big customer and at the first level they don’t even know which systems we have in use. That's really unsatisfying.

When looking for a new product, check how the user interface looks. That was the mistake that we made. We underestimated the acceptance of the end user community of the interface. And we currently use the Service Request Catalog for HPE Service Manager, which is really bad. We had big acceptance issues with our user community on that product.

The other issue is how the administration of the tool works and how many resources you really need to administrate it, to keep it running, and to keep it alive. That's something that shouldn't be underestimated.

Check how much configuration customization you can do in the system without impacting the upgrade path and increasing the upgrade effort for the system.

It was easy to implement, as we currently have many HP solutions.

The integrated nature of the solution, from a service desk perspective, because we had so many other HP products, was easy to deploy. It was best that all our products could talk to each other without more strenuous challenges.

Part of the problem they’re facing right now is they’re behind the curve in SaaS offerings. Part of our reason for moving away from Service Manager is that HP was not on the leading edge of the technology and was consequently being surpassed by SaaS offerings. They’re offering one now, but I think it’s too quick to market and not all bugs have been worked out.

HP products generally have always been stable, and this is no different. I’ve been an HP user for 20+ years, so I definitely support their stability.

It's a very scalable product, as with all HP's other products.

On the development suite, technical support was very strong. On the user side, not quite as strong.

We own a number of other HP products that are related to Service Manager, I was brought on to deploy this package.

Complexities have more to do with our company’s internal environments, meaning that we have a third party management service that manages our desk environment, and so we needed to communicate with that system.

We also looked at CA, IBM, and Service Now. At the time, I felt HP was the stronger product. I felt that they were investing heavily in the product's future capabilities.

I considered the integration capabilities, that is, being able to integrate the suite of HP tools to already existing tools (in this case, also HP (SiteScope, AssetManager, BSM, etc.)). I was not involved in the initial purchase by Dignity Health, but I know price was important, so I assume it was also important when choosing HP.

Part of the challenge for any organization is the scale with which you intend to use any solution. This means that for larger organizations using Service Manager, HP could scale no matter what the demand was. However, many products are limited in their ability to scale. When looking at software, I think scalability should be important. If you can’t find that, walk away.

Also, they have a very poor follow-up. The technology itself isn’t very bad, but HP's lack of follow-up by its sales organizations has driven me the other direction. Not a single sales person followed up when I mentioned this a year ago. But, I still use the other tools pretty extensively and I intend to expand on them. I am, however, looking at a new service desk solution.

The product is completely integrated for our company, so it simplifies a lot. Also valuable is the ability to customize the tools, and learn to follow our process.

It is not so simple for the company. Basically, we are obliged to have an organization in order to do some development. We have a stronger requirement for our business to follow their process and the other very complex extra processes. For example, for change management, we have a very complex process, also due to all the regulators.

For me, it's a lot to follow. Previously, it was a lot to simplify the IT system. Before implementing HP service management, we had more than 10 different tools. One of the benefits was to simplify our architecture and significantly reduce the cost.

For me, we need integration with big data. I think it will be with the new version. We have to see it to be able to analyze more. In fact, we are able to look at data; but, in the end, we are currently not able to manage it. I think the new version will be much better when we have the view of big data.

It's not so easy to move to the next version. It's not quick to upgrade. It's a significant project for us.

It is becoming more and more stable. We are currently in version 9.43.

It has met our scalability requirements.

Technical support is absolutely very good.

I wasn’t involved at the very beginning of the project, but I was there just after the whole effect. It's not a technical project. It's much more of an enterprise project.

We looked into some competitors, including ServiceNow. One branch of our company bought ServiceNow. We are in an internal competition.

We chose HPE because it's a large company. We are also a business with other lines of business. It was very helpful to know that it was not only useful for that one project.

Keep it simple. Do not do a lot of customization. Keep the implementation of the tool simple.

Service Manager is for incidents and service requests.

Service Manager does what it should, but it's quite outdated.

Service Manager is at the end of its life. The architecture, performance, and look are all way behind.

I've been using Micro Focus Service Manager for almost a decade. 

Service Manager works for our size, but it has limits, like search and attachments. It has some architectural disadvantages, like an inability to search attachment contents and stuff like that. We have tens of thousands of users. 

Micro Focus support is fine. I work in internal support, so I don't go deep enough into Service Manager to say much about vendor support.

We also use ServiceNow and Service Manager, but they occupy different lanes in the company. One is the classic IT service management and the other is for managing non-IT services.

I rate Micro Focus Service Manager four out of 10. I wouldn't recommend it. I would suggest ServiceNow. There may be solutions better suited for smaller companies. There are always alternatives because the architecture isn't terribly complex. 

The architecture is the same across solutions, and everything is linked. There are no modules to be bought from some other company in the past and integrated. ServiceNow also its disadvantages, but if you compare it to Service Manager, I can safely say ServiceNow is the future and Service Manager is the past.

It has features such as integration with Skype for Business, smart analytics, and smart ticketing. It integrates with our current proprietary system. It's provides end users with a single interface for multiple types of communication. This is how it is helping.

As a whole, it helps us to improve and automate workflows to make sure they provide the minimum guaranteed level of service, quality of service, and so on.

It's not the best trouble ticket system. We would like to have Skype for Business integration fail-over with our cluster-based solution. There are other enhancements we are waiting for and we are in touch with HPE support regarding them.

We are looking for a tool that is certified with Gartner. HPE is not the best tool for this. ServiceNow is better. We want to have more features, cloud-based solutions, and more enhancements regarding the digital service system.

Although we have never seen ServiceNow, it's been certified by Gartner, the certifying authority, so they have something that HPE doesn’t. HPE is now the third or fourth choice. It used to be second choice. So they need to be more competitive with the others and come up with better features.

We have not seen much improvement in the analytics reports interface, so that would be welcome.

Stability is quite good.

The solution is widely scalable.

Technical support is average. It takes too much time to resolve issues in relation to the competency of the technical support engineers. Every issue is elevated to the lab level. Maybe we are more competent than the HPE support or they lack knowledge. We do everything we can to identify issues and we pass them to the HPE support engineers. They ask the basic questions and then it takes 2-3 weeks for him to understand the issue. Then they escalate it to the lab and he will say that he is waiting for the lab. This is bad support.

We started 13 years ago with the original HPE Service Desk. Now, it's not an original HPE solution; HPE took over Peregrine Systems. So that’s what we use, for better or worse. But, it's quite customizable.

It's not like we just choose a solution. We follow the HPE roadmap. Whatever they deliver, we end up with it and implement it. There are times when we keep asking for some advanced features and it's a matter of time waiting for new releases. They are not that very agile incorporating the changes. They take a long time.

The setup process is very well documented. It is straightforward.

HPE also has a cloud-based solution called Service Anywhere, but we are not sure how it works. Is the functionality the same and just the platform changed, or is the functionality different in the cloud-based solution? They are also looking at the road map for Remedy. But we would rather they improve HPE Service Manager.

We generally use the solution for ticketing. 

We are using all of the models of the processes generally, however, it's ticketing that's the main purpose of the solution.

It's the point of control for managing issues and offers control in the implementation of the changes. It's had a positive impact in general in our organization.

Most of the processes are implemented in place. It's flexible for development. 

It is easy to implement. 

The product has been stable and reliable. 

It's easy to scale. 

It is customizable. 

The interface could be better. It's hard to integrate as there's no interface in place for the solutions to interface with each other. It's a bit of a bottleneck. 

There are other options on the market that make it easier to integrate with other products and get data to flow between them. 

The customization process is not easy.

Customer support often lacks experience. 

We've used the solution for eight years. 

It is a stable product. There are no bugs or glitches. The performance is good. 

The solution can scale quite well. 

We have a few thousand people using the solution right now. It is used pretty intensely in our company.

Technical support varies. Sometimes you might not get someone who is too knowledgeable. We tend to focus on the documentation for assistance. That's the first step - to link to the documentation. However, if an answer is unavailable, we must go further and rely on support. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial setup is not difficult. However, adjusting to the business requirements generally depends on the version, of course. If you have the product process designer, maybe it is very much easier, however, in an earlier version, it was rather difficult to develop since you had the object control and it was old-fashioned in terms of style. If you have a process designer, of course, when you start with a process designer, it's much easier.

I'd rate the ease of deployment at a four out of five. 

If you are doing it out of the box, it generally only takes one day to set everything up.

It was implemented generally in the high availability solution. Each component is running separately, so we focused on the high availability during the setup.

We have a few people that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks. They are admins. 

Our team set up the solution in-house. 

I can't speak to the exact cost of the solution. We do have a permanent license. 

We are a partner. 

We are on the latest version of the product. 

New users should know their business requirements and how to adopt and justify the product. An out-of-the-box solution may not be ideal. You will likely need to customize it.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We can have all our requests and incidents registered in one system. We have about 250 employees in the IT department and we have one system. We don't have to email each other and we are sitting in a geographically large company, in many departments and in many hospitals. So it's great that we just have one system and we don't have to call or drive to each other. That's the most important thing.

Some years ago we were three departments and now we're just one department for the whole region. And we have different systems, so we can't communicate. With one system you have to write emails and stuff. When I make a request it's immediately reaches our technicians, so it's great.

The greatest issue for us is to understand the roadmap. We want to know whether we should upgrade now or should we wait three months. Which version should we install? It's not the project, but it's the plan for the project. So we went to a recent conference to find out because we want to know which way we should go.

After we upgraded stability is good. But with our last version it was not very good. We had lags and it was performing slowly. We tried different solutions, upgrade servers, and databases, but the performance was not very good. Then we upgraded and we haven't had those problems since. Also, previously we had the client/server system, but now we only have web clients. That also may be an explanation of the improvement in stability and performance.

We are a big company, but we also have small departments in the hospitals who have this system as well. So it is scalable.

We have a partner to HPE helping us and we also have Premium support technicians that we work with all the time and we use them a lot. The support is good. We can have help any time, so it's good.

I was in the project from the beginning. Some of the problems are from our company because they don't always decide what way we want to go. Our company wants to go one direction, and when we start they sometimes change the direction and it will complicate the solution. Sometimes, it's our own fault.
But, for the product itself, the setup is straightforward, with some issues. Sometimes the logical database structure and tables is not very easy to understand. So we need to have some help with that. It seems like it's old tradition from the old versions, going up the system. It's hard to see the logical structure of the tables.

We looked at Service Now two years ago. We stayed with HPE over Service Now because we have a suite of HPE products. We think it's easier to make the integrations into one.

We heard some other customers in Denmark have the back end as Service Manager and the front end as Service Now, as a portal to Service Manager. I don't know if it's easier to deploy in Service Manager, so I don't know. But I know some Danish companies have done it.

• Flexibility
• Scalability

This is our “go-to” application for all ITIL processes globally. All service desks and backline teams utilize this tool from a work intake and incident management perspective. Due to its flexibility, it allowed us to come together globally on our IT business processes.

The tool is constantly improving and has been able to meet our business needs for the most part.

I've been using it for nine years.

Recently, we wanted to deploy the application across multiple data centers, but with the multi-cast restriction, we weren’t able to do it. They are working on a TCP based communication which should remove this restriction.

Stability was a major issue in older versions of the product. As the product has matured, the stability has improved. It is a Java-based tool that utilizes Jgroups for communication across the servlets. Proper tuning is needed to stabilize the Java servlets and avoid 'Out of Memory' errors.

Scalability has not been a big issue. The only complexity comes from the amount of Web clients needed to support a large implementation. Maintaining them, doing certificates for SSL if necessary and troubleshooting them at an individual level can get complicated.

Customer service is good in the fact that they are friendly and want to help, and they do follow up on issues.

Their front line support is poor. They do not have real experience so most issues will take a week or more to address and normally requires their second or third level support, or even their R&D Team. Premier Support is highly recommended if you can afford it.

No previous solution was used.

It was complex due to the company still defining the processes as they were implementing the tool.

In-house implementation was done.

Have a firm grasp on your business processes and how you’d like to see them implemented.