OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

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.

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.

The most valuable features are using the Big Data analytics and most of its functionalities like Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management and so on.

The new feature of the separate dashboard is the most perfect function.

The Survey function that has been added is also a very important feature and all of these features play a vital role.

It manages the end user experience for handling tickets. It helps in managing the events that are found for system environments and the end user experience for utilizing the environment systems.

I need to see more enhancements in the Service Catalog module as it is a very beneficial module and it needs more enterprise development.

The product is stable. We have had no issues.

It is a totally scalable product.

The first level of support is slow and it takes some time to receive support. However, the second level and third level as well as the R&D layer are faster.

Only our sales manager had used a different solution earlier. From our perspective, we always see other tools that compete with HP Service Manager; we never fail with price.

I didn't do the setup myself but from my team’s experience, it was easy to install.

I advise others to use the HP Service Manager because it's a powerful and capable enterprise solution.

The reason for choosing this product is that it is an enterprise tool and HP is a big company that supports its product powerfully. I have started working with it since 2009 and up until now, I have used about 6 versions, i.e., from version 7 to 9.5. Since HP is a big company, it has the ability to keep growing and that is an important factor for selecting this vendor.

The missing factor in this product is that there are some processes that are not mapped to the ITIL V3. Only 11 processes are certified for the ITIL V3; another 5-6 processes are not certified. Thus, it needs more customization and development that applies to the processes in regards to this aspect. In addition to this, the support team takes a long time to reach a solution and we want a faster response.

It's a complete service management suite; a complete management product used by the company worldwide for us. It's good. It's a full suite of processes under one tool, fully integrated with all the other HPE software products.

From an IT perspective, it improves the way my company functions because it supports all our ITIL processes, all the service management processes; best-in-class processes across the whole IT organization, which is good and important; and all components being connected under the same umbrella.

There are features that are missing and that can be improved in upcoming releases, and HPE is well aware of those. They're working on those. For example, they need to build a new portal for the end users to access, which is a kind of interface between our end users and IT. They're working on that. They need to have a portal that will be mobile friendly and all that stuff. That's coming up with a new version. It would still need improvement, but they're moving in a good direction.

We have used it for many years. With a previous version, more than five years ago, we showed some instability issues, but I know HPE put a lot of investment in the quality of the new products and the latest versions. Now, for the last 2-3 years, we haven’t had any stability issues.

It is highly scalable. We already use it on a kind of cloud architecture with several servers. We have what they call "horizontal scaling" with many servers. When we need to increase the bandwidth, we just need to provision some new VMs. It is easy to add to the cluster; so, extremely easy and scalable.

We rarely use technical support. We used it a few years ago, when we migrated from another HP product called OpenView Service Desk, which was phased out by HP, to a new one, because we had to get used to working with the new product.

For the last couple of years, we have opened very, very few support tickets. It's working fine.

As I mentioned, we were using another HP product (at that time, it was not yet HPE). It was HP OpenView Service Desk. That was their previous service management suite. When HP acquired Peregrine, with Service Center that became Service Manager, actually, they phased out Service Desk. We moved from Service Desk to Service Manager simply because of an HP – at the time, HP – decision.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Service Manager is not a simple product. It's not the kind of stuff where you download the bits, run setup and that's it. There is a lot of tuning and configuration. It's always the same: This product has a lot of configuration and customization capabilities. It's highly flexible, but on the other hand, what you have in flexibility, is also what you find in complexity.

For us, it's not an issue that it's somehow not friendly or easy, as you might imagine, but on the other hand, we can do whatever we want. That's the most important thing.

There wasn’t really a shortlist of vendors because, again, HP came to us proactively, announced the fact that Service Desk will be phased out, and indicated that all our licences, all the features, and even more would be available to us at no cost; that is, except the implementation cost, but we did that in house, so it was kind of an indirect cost. There was no cost in terms of new licences or professional services.

In general, when we’re looking at a vendor like HPE, Dell or IBM, the main criteria is integration. We’re using a lot of HPE products, and because we're using a lot of their products, we expect that we won't have to manage product A talking to product B and to product C. That is their stuff, and they need to manage that for us.

First of all, compare, for sure. We use an HPE product; we still look at other vendors and competitors. We have a long history with HP/HPE. Now, what I would also say is, wait, because in my shop, we know we are a pure customer of this software product. We know it's moving away from HPE going to another company. They say nothing will change. We'll see. I think it brings uncertainty, and they're well aware of that.

If I had a colleague or a friend of mine say to me, "I need a service management solution.", I would say, “We have a nice, wonderful solution.” Now, what it will look like in a couple of years is less clear than what I would have said last year. So, we'll see. Normally, nothing will change, but we just know the name of the new company. We don't know what the leaders will choose, even if right now, the HPE people we see say, "Nothing will change." I think that will be the case for one year, but they can't speak for 2-3 years.

No vendor is perfect. There's always improvement possible, so nobody deserves a perfect rating. Why not a lower rating? I think they're doing a good job, and they listen to customers.

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 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 of the solution is usability. We use the tool to keep track of our incidents, technical changes and problems. It enables us to address the root cause of incidents. Also, the service request management is also valuable. It addresses all those areas for us and is pretty key for us.

Before we had Service Manager, we had a number of products from other vendors. When we implemented Service Manager, it gave us a standardized, centralized tool which we were able to leverage globally.

The things that I'm waiting for are things like better email integration, mobile-type connectivity, and an improved portal for users. The end-user experience is very key for me. At the moment, that's an area that the product's perhaps a bit weak. In terms of functionality, it does already what I need it to, generally. There are some new areas coming along that are quite exciting. Things like big-data analysis, automation. These are all things that are going to be strong, for the tool in the future. In terms of what I want right now, is a tool that's slick and usable for the end-users. All these extra things are bonus add-ons for me.

I think making it a lot easier for the user to pick up and just go with it. We want something that's more akin to the standard internet experience that users would expect today when they're looking at things like Google and Amazon.com. It's that kind of experience that we want them to move the product towards. We've got some additional add-ons that would be of interest, but they're secondary to getting the user experience right.

The product is quite stable. We're having some issues with performance, but I think it's down to the way we've implemented it rather than something specifically within the tool. It just doesn't respond as quickly as we might expect. It's not that it's terribly slow; it's just that it's not as quick as you'd want it to be. I think that some things are more to do with our implementation, because it's an on-site, on-premise install we have.

It certainly scales. We work with some very large vendors and they use the same software. So it's quite clear that organizations that are larger than us don't have any problems using it.

I personally haven't used the technical support. The team that I work with in conjunction for delivery of the tool use it. It seems to be okay for them.

We were using lots of different solutions. We were using an old, heavily customized BMC Remedy workflow-based tool, which we were quite happy with at the time. But our company was acquired by our parent company and there were other tools that were in use by that company. Plus there were other companies that were acquired. Through acquisition you end up with an array of products that are in the same space, so what we did when we put HPE Service Manager in place, is we consolidated all of our tool sets into one, and we picked HPE. We didn't have one, most important criteria to satisfy. I think we had a lot of criteria.

Initial setup can be quite complex. One of lessons that we learned is that we configured the tool to make it fit with our processes and the way we wanted to run the processes. I think it's too much work. It's a lesson to be learned that you basically need to adapt your processes to fit with how the tool works, rather than the other way around. We ended up with an overly complex configuration, which causes us pain every time we do an upgrade. We're working now to simplify that environment by removing the customizations and go back to a more out-of-the-box standard tool.

Before choosing HPE Service Manager, we were BMC Remedy customers. We were quite happy with that. Remedy would have been on our short list.

My main advice is to work with the tool the way it is and don't customize it. I guess that’s one of things we picked up that's very key, to be honest. I guess just determine where your priorities are and start working with whichever module covers them.

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.