OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

A valuable feature for us is that we have an ordered way to handle all the cases that we can handle with the infrastructure.

We benefit as we can keep control of everything in the technical infrastructure that we are delivering to the business side of the organization.

It needs to be easier to use for the end users because one problem we had was that we are handling different kinds of cases. We use it person to person by phone. It's not so user friendly. If there was more ease of use, then people would use it more regularly.

We have recently built up a new data center. We are seeing a lot of actual technology and we are trying to implement the universal discovery and everything around the NCMDB in this new infrastructure that we have built. We had quite a lot of issues with stability and the quality of the product so far.

We are around 12,000 end users. Scalability is quite good. It's scalable enough. We have no problem with the scalability so far.

We have used the technical support and we have quite a lot of HPA people in place on site trying to help us solve different issues. It has been good after we have been in discussion a lot. Overall the technical support is good.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. I came in after they started the setup.

We are using ServiceNow for some facility management. It was easier to have a user-friendly interface from the beginning, but now when we use the service portal, it's catching up. It's close to the same usability as Service Now. As it stands, it's better than mediocre.

One of the big benefits that’s come out of this is a centralized view of all IT operations that really enable us to shift resources (people and money) in a real-time way to accomplish whatever we need.

If our company has availability issues or we need faster project timelines, or whatever our business need is at the time, this solution is able to allow us to shift our needs properly.

In the next release, I would like to see easier integration with the other tool sets, such as UCCB, business service management, etc.

Extremely stable – I have one person that manages all of it and it’s totally fine.

Once you get the reference architecture, you just have to add people and the same product.

We don’t have that many problems, but when we do have one, as long as we escalate effectively, it gets resolved in a timely fashion.

We bought every product HP offered back in 2007 when the Intel craze was sweeping the IT industry. We were running BMC Magic Solution before.

The product is easy to set up to operate the way the software was designed. However, our IT shop wanted to operate a legacy mode, so we had to re-train our team to learn how to use the software the way it was intended to be used as designed by HP.

BMC and CA. We chose HP because their functionality seemed to be fairly better, their product offering seemed to touch every area of our company’s needs, and we wanted to integrate it completely into our business.

We wanted to align with Intel, we wanted them to be a cloud offering, and we also needed a technology market leader that could offer diverse set of offerings. So for us, we wanted to invest in one company that could service all of our needs across the board.

We will upgrade to 9.40 before the end of the summer, but there are still some adoption issues. We struggle with and the simplicity of getting reporting data at a high level, and output is not where it needs to be for us. But as far as having an easily supportable and deployable product, it’s really changed the work we manage IT in the company.

Call HP, call BMC, call CA, call Service Now. Be skeptical of the guys that say “we can do whatever you want”. Partner with somebody that has a vision of how IT service management is supposed to work and shift your business in that direction.

The GUI interface portion of it is easy to use but when I have to revert to the non-GUI portion, it's very slow. It's very cumbersome.

We use it for the change management tool. All of our ticketing for the help desk, things like that, are put through the tool. You can call up the record on the issues that you have and report on it in Service Manager. They send the tickets to the appropriate departments who can resolve the issues.

Room for improvement is the speed with which you're able to access it and where it isn't as slow and draggy. It is really draggy.

Stability is great.

There's no problems there.

I've never had to contact them.

I didn't have a decision in that. That was made by the change management organization. They wanted to switch. They wanted something that could be interfaced with mobile phones that could send the approval notifications to the mobile phones or so the IM tickets could be sent to the mobile phones. I get them on my phone now. So that I can respond to those is it's an emergency and I can take care of them right away and I don't have to wait till I get back to the office or to a PC. I think that had a large interface in why they bought the product.

The GUI interface portion was very straightforward. The few little glitchy things that you had to figure out. But other than that it was very easy to use. On the non-GUI portion it's a little more cumbersome and complicated.

The interface is good, I like it. It's easy to use. It's intuitive and it does go to the mobile app for verification and approvals and it's easy to use on the mobile app. Just make sure that the PCs that are going to run the non-graphic interface have a fast processor because if they don't it's very time consuming to use.

The general integrated service desk incident, the customization, the work flow and the knowledge management. We've got limited deployment in change and almost none in the service request fulfillment.

We mostly use it as a platform for our service desk to streamline and optimize. We've done a lot of wraparounds the core product: adding chat and adding other features that aren't in the core product. The base core product does what we need it to do.

In the next version I'd like to see end user surveys, and have it much more robustly meet our large enterprise needs. We'd like to retire our home grown solution.

We still find ourselves wrapping customizations around it more than we would like, and we still find the upgrade path more costly and time consuming than we would hope. We spend a lot of time on platform support, the patching, the care and feeding of the whole entire platform.

It's been relatively stable. We don't have much in the way of downtime with it.

Scaling is always a challenge for us because we're so huge. Generally it does the job though.

We're heavy users all the time. It's not one of the tools that we've got the advanced option for the TAM and all of that. It's been a much more successful implementation than some of our other tools.

It was long and complex, but it generally worked.

We did a large RFP bake-off between multiple vendors for large integrated suites doing processes, automation, and monitoring. We selected HPE due to the breadth of their tools, particularly in the monitoring and automation spaces. Service Manager was one of 49 products we purchased at the same time. It wasn't targeted explicitly for itself. It was more because of the breadth of tools from a single vendor.

It's a good solid product. We're not unhappy with it. We're not overjoyed with it, and we're big time looking at Service Anywhere and other SaaS solutions for that space as opposed to internally hosted. We brought it in in the late 2000s and it served us well. We're approaching 2017 and we're looking at what we can do much more cloud based.

We use the product for infrastructure, profile, and incident management.

The product's technical support services need improvement. 

We have been using HP Service Manager for almost ten years.

The product has good stability compared to other solutions like Remedy.

We have 900 to 1,000 HP Service Manager users in our organization. I rate its scalability a ten out of ten.

The technical support team’s response time could be faster.

Positive

The initial setup is easy; I have been working with the product for ten years.

HP Service Manager has moderate pricing. It depends on the negotiation and use cases.

We evaluated BMC.

I rate HP Service Manager an eight out of ten.

I mainly use Service Manager to log tickets, receive calls from end-users, and monitor our daily operations. I also use it to record all incident requests and for our self-service catalog.

Service Manager's best features are flexibility and customizability. For example, we can customize reports and dashboards and integrate with third-party systems. 

Service Manager would be improved with access to automation.

I've been using Service Manager for twenty-two years. 

Service Manager is very stable.

Service Manager is scalable.

Micro Focus's technical support is the best - once we send in a request or revision, we get an immediate response and are informed of any delay.

I previously used Remedy.

The initial setup was complex, and installation took two months.

We used a vendor team, as their expertise is required to complete the implementation correctly.

I pay for Service Manager on a yearly basis, and the price is reasonable - I would rate it five out of ten.

I would recommend Service Manager to other users, and I'd rate it seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for incident management, program management, as well as for change, release and configuration management. 

It's quite a complicated solution. The design has been revamped in terms of GUI. The current interface is quite easy to read. However, it's very much dependant on how everything is set up. Many people manage to have it properly set up with a reduced number of steps to create or to change or to close any other ticket. 

However, one of my latest customers decided to implement some items in very specific ways in terms of dealing with change management that is really bureaucratic but the way they implemented it with the tool was actually quite efficient. The modules were very utilitarian and it became like just clicking boxes. To track changes, track approvals or avoid any changes with support could be implemented in the publisher which made it quite efficient.

On certain implementations, it can be very difficult to customize and then very difficult to maintain as well. This is because it is quite a complex solution.

Users need to be very conscious of how they set up the solution in terms of how they propose and ultimately set up the end terminals to make it easy to use for end-users. 

The setup on past projects had been quite difficult for two reasons: the first is that it's quite a technical tool so it takes a lot to set it up and customize it. The other issue is that there's a lack of tool experts, which makes it even more difficult to set everything up properly.

The solution does not interface well with other products and is difficult to implement.

The entire system needs to be redesigned to help improve overall usability and design.

When you synchronize or perform a task for event management from external tools, you have issues of performance because synchronization can take four or six hours before there is a solution.

It's very hard for the end-user to customize items, but if they were able to, it would be easier for them to arrange specific views and reports that would be more relevant to them.

I started using the solution in 2008, when it was named Service Center. It's been about 20 years since I was first introduced to it.

It has really gained stability in the last few latest years. When I started working on it, I recall an implementation where there was an issue with stability. The customer had upgraded to Service Center from one version to another and something went wrong. They were unable to go back to the old version and then they were unable to resolve the issue. They were without any IT assistance for six weeks. It was very frustrating.

This was ten or twelve years ago, however, and they've made great gains since then. I've spent two years using the latest version of the product. We have been able to upgrade everything without any issue at all.

The solution is quite scalable. Some of our clients include some utility companies in France and some clients in the nuclear and electricity industry. It's a solution that can scale well for enterprises.

Although I don't contact technical support directly, I have clients that have. From a technical point of view, support is pretty skilled. The company makes sure they are generally experienced and competent.

The initial setup is really complex. Afterwards, it depends on the people that are handling the implementation. Some companies that are implementing the product have some pre-defined templates that happen to help to set it up quite easily and with few negative items for the end customer to deal with. I personally don't have any access to such tools for at least the past five years now so I don't know how easy it actually is if a user does have these predefined templates. The tool doesn't work out of the box. You really have to put effort in to get it working once you have installed it.

Deployment of the most recent version takes about four to six months. How many people needed to deploy the solution depends on the company and the setup. It could be anywhere from two to four people, but a company must ensure they are experts. You'll also need some additional resources for the server and the network, etc. You'll need to take into account also if you need to define the processes, etc. and agree to everything at the beginning of the project. I'd estimate a maximum amount of four people would be needed for a deployment.

We have a team that helps with customizing and onboarding new customers. We also have a subsidiary that is dedicated to implementing the tool for customers. 

I've been consulting with companies about using the solution and largely deal with the on-premises deployment model.

I'd advise others to really take their time and think about the specifications before they embark on implementation. They must be sure that the positions are implemented or not via their ITSM processes that are already in their company. 

To implement some features, it's possible to lose an entire year, so it's best to hire an expert to provide guidance and advice about what is feasible.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten. It's an improved rating since the last version. However, it still needs to be more user-friendly can could continue to improve its stability.

The most valuable feature is the whole compact thing. The ticketing tool has everything in it that we need.

There are some ups and downs. On the upside, we don't need to create any very complicated integrations because it's quite compatible with all the other HPE tools which we need for our end-to-end business. On the downside, it cannot really operate in the cloud; but other than that, everything is good.

It has improved our communication between teams. The distribution of issue solutions, for example, is integrated in one application. I know there are also the databases for the solutions, the known error databases and so on, which all improve the behavior of the company because everybody knows how to solve problems.

I’m not sure what I can suggest to improve. We also got such questions from our customers; and we provided them with our contact in HPE. Not all of those requests are possible to get into the product; so we sometimes end up customizing it. For the moment, I cannot think of anything specific that I would change; but I'm sure there are multiple things that could be upgraded.

It is stable now. We are quite special. In the past, integrations were kind of complicated. We had some ups and more downs. Now that we've switched to the Windows service, it is really reliable. The application's performance reached a completely different level; so it's quite fast. Users are happy about it.

The availability of the application is not comparable to what we had in the past. We had downtime maybe once or twice a month. At the moment, we do not experience anything like that.

Over the last five years, we had a huge project which involved everybody in the company switching over from Peregrine Service Center to HPE Service Manager. That was quite a huge achievement. In the past, we were not very satisfied with it; but after we upgraded the system, everything was okay.

The quality of the support depends on the type of support. We have multiple kinds of support. Either our customers contact our operations teams via service manager to provide support for the storage service, or we have a centralized and localized support directly for the application itself. I fall into the latter type of support.

In general, we are using multiple tools from HPE. Compliance and compatibility between those tools is better if you use the same vendor.

From my point of view, the most important criterion in picking a vendor is the quality of the support. We are in a position of the customer. We have the premium support for cases when something is not functioning and we cannot make it work.

I wasn’t really involved with the initial setup. We started with the Service Manager 7.0, the version that was there 5-6 years ago. Then we had the huge upgrade to Service Manager 9.0. It was not that huge because at that time, it was only a small number of people working with it. That was the preparation for the rollout to the whole company.

The upgrade was kind of a complex process. Everything is complex. We are using our own customizations. We are not using the out-of-box stuff. Therefore, each upgrade involves something unexpected.

I was not in the company when the decision was made to choose HPE Service Manager. We have a management committee that makes those decisions.

The best solution depends on your needs. You should consider different solutions and decide which best fits your needs. Ask yourself whether HPE Service Manager can provide you what it provides us.