OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

I like that you can actually customize it for different customers without any kind of problems. You can write some simple scripts to handle some of the workaround solutions that are not out-of-the-box. Recently, the interface has been changed; they changed all the menus.

We implemened HPE Service Manager for InterTelecom. It improves their company operation by allowing them to open incidents and new requests providing their customers with better, quicker service. They can implement SLAs and other modules that allow them to look over their problems and categorize them. This way they can filter them much easier.

The user interface was not really good, but they improved it a little bit. Last year they released a new version and now it's much better. Speed could be improved also. It depends on your setup, share version, internet connection speed, and database.

Service Manager is stable. We have more than 20 consultants implementing Service Manager and our customer, InterTelecom, has about 100 or so people using it.

Scalability is good. InterTelecom is a medium size company with many subscribers.

We are the biggest HPE partner for virtual solutions and when we open up cases, we get really good support.

InterTelecom was a consultation project. They were using Service Manager with three different incidents. We consolidated and put everything into one incident and implemented some new features.

Initial setup was complex. It took 6 or 7 consultants almost a year to finish the implementation project.

We do not use HPE Service Manager ourselves. We implement it for our customers and they use various other vendors, such as CA IT Service Management.

We suggest to our customers that they use a similar solution to Service Manager even if they use different products. But we do suggest they switch to HPE products. We think it’s worth switching over to HPE. They are a good company.

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 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.

We implement some modules of this solution for our clients, mostly we did the integrations with the MF PPM. They are a medium-size development that focuses on a particular functionality.

It's flexible in terms of configuration and making changes. It can adapt to any process in the organization. It can be customized.

It's a new version with a fresh interface and incident management. The SMAX is the most recent that I remember and behind that is the smart service, it's a smart search when entering the system, it automatically recognizes an incident, takes a screenshot and opens a ticket. It's nice progress made to the user interface and incident management.

The codeless configuration is more simplified. Most of the customer's requirements can be done without coding, it's simple and very quick.

It has nice charts.

The reporting is not very strong. it can be improved. Customers need to combine different data from different sources to the same report, but it's quite difficult to do. You have to do it with many different versions.

With the new version moving toward the codeless configuration is good, but it's losing flexibility. There should be a larger selection of configuration tools made available to allow some parts of coding to be codeless and others allowing you to make some coding for business rules and workflow. You need some coding ability and functionality. It is difficult to find a customer who doesn't want to make any kind of customizations. It comes with many limits making it very difficult especially with on-premises customers.

I like the support but they could improve.

In the next release, I would like to see improvements made to reporting and the dashboard. Also, I would like to see the configuration simplified without losing flexibility. The best model that I have seen was with PPM where you can provide some coding with flexibility allowing you to configure to the customer's requirements but having limitations at the same time, but they are meaningful limitations that are easy to negotiate with the customer explaining that it is to prevent it from being a completely customized tool that will be very difficult to maintain, upgrade and update the versions. I would like to see a balance between the two. Flexibility plus simplifying the configuration.

I have been familiar with this solution since 2013. We work with this solution based on the customer's needs. It was periodically job and experiance until 2018.

There are always some amount of known issues in any tool, but I can conclude that the solution is stable, as long as all hardware and software recommendations and requirements are met. There were between one to two hundred employees in operating.

I have contacted the technical support team. We had open tickets with them, especially with the last year.

The technical support is ok, we have dealt with them for many years.

I would rate them a seven out of ten.

It's quite straightforward.

It only took one day to deploy for our testing purposes, but for customers, it can take anywhere from one to three days to ensure that all of the technical requirements are met. 

We implemented it ourselves.

I would recommend this solution. It's a classic with an operating system that can easily adapt and be implemented.

70 to 80% of the time with different cases the customer's requirements can be met.

The customer can start to implement the incident management with just one post. if you feel that you want to add more, you can add the change management, it can be implemented step by step.

There is always a place for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Most of the time it's the value it can provide, as long as you've got it properly mapped out. So the most important factor is being able to gather all the data into one place and then you can distribute that information across to other areas, and they can then benefit from it.

It's strong, there's no doubt about it. I wouldn't want to go replacing it with any of the other tools. There are enough other companies that have got similar tools. But once you've gone down the road of using the HP software, you would like to make sure you carry it on, even though there are certain things they still need to improve upon.

I think one area which is the most painful from my point of view is if you need to integrate a lot of the tools, and being able to make that a lot more seamless.

For instance your workflow could be - that's the name of the server, that's the IP address, go and communicate, sort it out, pass the data in between. Having to sit there and spend sometimes weeks, trying to get them integrated and properly operational is annoying.

We have been using the solution probably since about 2010.

It is pretty much stable. I mean, it's been long enough now to the point that there are still issues here and there, but the main product itself is strong enough, and it's decent enough to be able to make use of.

I think the hardest part sometimes is when you try to integrate with a lot of the other HP software tools. That's where the containment, being able to move to the new sort of ITS main model, will most probably help. But the initial thing is if you've got to get these different tools integrated, it can be a bit difficult.

You have to have an idea of what the size of your organization is to begin with. So if you think, "we're only small," and then you actually realize you're discovering an awful lot of continuous integrations, then you may need to expand it.

So in the main, you've got to have a decent understanding about your organization in the first place, then make sure you scale it properly. Then from there on it's pretty scalable.

Technical support is pretty good. I mean, whenever you've got an issue you can at least always raise an incident and then with that someone's always going to have a look at your support case, get back to you, and then be able to sort of work the problem out.

There are times where you don't always get a fix, and it's mainly because of the version that you're running, so you need to upgrade. Being able to upgrade every five minutes is not something which is an option. So you can get to that point where they say, "we've fixed it - it's in the latest release." Great, what do I do now?

Those challenges are the ones which are sometimes the biggest problem. It's not that you don't know it's not getting fixed, but it doesn't mean the fix will always necessarily come to you to actually be able to use.

Regarding setup, it depends on which tool.

UCMBD has become a lot more easy to set up and put in place. So perhaps for instance in the case of a Chinese Asset Manager, that would still be a little bit complex, trying to get it operational. Especially when you're trying to feed data between UCMBD and the Asset Manager. So it depends on what you're trying to do.

If you then need to connect it and whatever else, then you have to sit there and really work out the actual data models that sit between both and then be able to patch it all through.

So, I think it should try and sort that side of things out and make it a little bit more seamless, so that from a user point of view all I need to do is just this, this, this and this, and then it works. That would be a lot nicer.

There are a number of things to consider. One, you want to know that the reliability is. You need to know the software is going to do the job that you want it to do. You need to know that it's going to be fairly easy, painless to set up.

But at the same time, if you have any issues, you've got a good customer focus. That they're interested in making sure that they're going to basically get the best for the customer. So it's not just about - "we've sold you a load of products, so we'll respond to you now."

You need to spend a lot of time getting it developed. Make sure you go over areas brought into it so you can then show the value of what it can do. Once you've then got it, then you can prove to the business that this is how important it is, being able to understand your IT. What makes up your IT. Then of course, if you're trying to pass that information into other areas, like asset management or software license management, it's all feeding from the same place. So you can then at least get something which is meaningful at the end.

• It integrates well with multiple Management Information Bases (MIB's).
• It can detect the Cisco switch backplane's latest condition

• It detects abnormal network traffic -- even from a PC network interface card
• It provides us with many types of logs with hundreds of thousands of log entries

It's not user friendly (too complex), and it gives limited guidance documentation of how to filter all the logs detected. We struggle with filtering over 50 types of logs with more than 200,000 lines of log information.

It can detect the Cisco switch backplane's latest condition, but I'm unable to find any documentation to provide me the value insight of these logs, hence reducing the power of risk management for my customers' network environments.

We implemented it around 2008.

It takes around 24 hours to detect all the network equipment & VLANs. If any of the network equipment or VLANs are missing from the finished network topology, you need to delete the whole topology, reset the system, and scan again.

We previously used a very old version Solarwind, which could only detect CPU & memory. The main purpose for the upgrade project, was due to a broadcast storm occuring with my previous customer.

It took my HPOV classmate and a team of more than 10 people to implement this product, and it has lasted less than four years due to a lack of research of their requirements. Due to the complexity (depending on your project scope, implementation can take around two months to finalize all the needed settings.

We used some very skilful vendors (two freelancers, and a wiring company). The vendors were HP NNI for the server, and HP PI for the manual setup – (including reporting), then the wiring company

There are three types of licenses, so make sure the license you select fits into your project scope. It took ove two weeks to verify the licenses, but it has lasted with my customer for more than six years.

Approval routes for catalog items: We can now set up multiple, different approval routes and have a nice front end for the users.

The organisation can use special approval routes for different items now; previously, we could only have one approval route.

There could be some slight fixes to managing the catalog, because you can customise the items so much you can't really change the items in dropdown lists easily.

In the catalog you can have dropdowns which are managed by a list in the background. For example you could have a dropdown of pc equipment. If a new item of equipment is available you would need to add it to this list, there is no way to insert a line in the correct position, instead you need to cut and paste all entries down one line so you can fit your new line in the correct location.

I have used it for four years.

Deployment took around two years but this was due to project teams changing, HPE releasing newer versions and requirements changing! 

The stability of the product is absolutely fine; there has never been any downtime or anything that has been of any concern.

We have never had to scale the system out but cannot see any reason why this would not be OK; the system is built to handle this.

Customer service is great; the guys are really friendly and always offer knowledge to the best of their ability. They are generally quite quick to response

We used HP OpenView 4.5; we switched to Service Manager as OpenView was relatively old anyway. HPE Service Manager was the natural successor so we went with it.

Initial setup is very straightforward to get a OOTB system up and running. From there, you can see how the system is intended to work, also.

For implementation, we used a mix of HPE Partner and in-house team. The level of expertise was questionable at times but on the whole, we got the job done.

The return on investment is unquantifiable. I would have thought we have made our money back now in the way it has streamlined processes.

Make sure you can get the best price available! Always look at all options for license types. I think concurrent worked out better.

We didn't look at any other options as we wanted to continue with HPE and on-premise software, so we still had control.

Service Manager is a very versatile system that can be tailored in many ways to suit many customers' requirements.

It's mostly so reliable and has a lot of functionality. We're using a lot of HPE tools and we can do a lot with it. So, its functionality is the most valuable feature.

When I attended the conference, I just saw a presentation about the Containers part and am really looking forward to that, because installing a new version/upgrading is always a pain. I think that this could be a big improvement.

It, still, has a bit of more of improvement possibilities in the codeless part. But, I can see that they are working on it, so that's quite good as well.

I think there are still some improvement possibilities and flexibilities needed, but, overall, it's a good solution as it is right now.

I have been using this solution since 2011.

I started using this solution in 2011, it has improved a lot in the past years.

We have just installed Service Manager 9.41, the new version and I'm really glad about this version; it's really nice and is making me smile.

It has scaled mostly over the past few years, but I think it could be a bit more flexible in terms of how it scales and the upgrading aspect.

Sometimes, it takes a while to find the right person or to get a point over but mostly, the support is okay.

I'm in finance, so it's mostly the reliability part that is important while selecting a vendor. As a company, we are trying to be reliable to the outside world, so we need reliable suppliers that can support this ideology.