The system becomes a centralized place for ITSM data and process automation for the enterprise. For example, a monitoring system generates an alert on a production server (the SDM system will integrate with any monitoring tool on the planet). The alert can generate a ticket in SDM. The server is listed as a CI in SDM, so the resolvers know where the trouble is. The Change Impact Analyzer will highlight how that server interacts with and impacts other systems in the environment) so you can see if this will cause a downstream problem. The Asset Portfolio Manager component of the system will have the purchase, warranty and service agreements for that specific server. The knowledge base can have articles describing how to deal with that particular alert, or possible specific steps that should be taken on the system in question. If this has happened often with this server lately, a problem ticket can be opened. The incidents related to that CI can be attached to the problem record, so the problem manager can get a full view of what has been going on, etc. And on down the merry ITIL path.

I’ve implemented, configured and managed this system for hundreds of clients. I trust it. CA is not perfect, but this system is one of their most reliable products.

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Honestly, we started off just using one part of the solution, just using request management, and then gradually, as they've improved the application, we've actually started to use it more and more. Now, we use it for our change management, our problem management. We started to use the mobile application and the unified self-service. We've started to expand as CA has focused more on their ITSM tool.

This solution has helped align our overall IT and organization strategy because it got rid of shadow systems. Before, because we're the central IT department, every area kind of had their own shadow system or some way of doing change management, or some way of doing request management, or incident management. Basically, we kind of unified all our processes to bring down the cost. Everybody's on the same page. Everybody knows what's going on. Our outages have dropped. Our communication between areas has increased. It's been a huge benefit for us.

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Utilization of change management features allowed us to effectively implement both group- and department-level change advisory boards and coordinate the interaction between the disparate management levels.

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We centralized our knowledge from various sources into one source of truth that is continually updated. We have processes built around that. We have a lifecycle around the documents. We have good reporting, so we can show an ROI by tickets of time waited with people searching knowledge themselves. We have decreased training and talk time, and all those good stats, just by reusing information, not reinventing it, every time we get a call.

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We get control, and the incidents are actually connected to changes and problems. So we do have a good picture and control.

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Quick capture of ticket info lends itself to easy resolution and/or assignment to other groups.

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The product itself gives you a lot. If you use it correctly and enter the information correctly in the fields, you can get a lot of data out of Service Desk, including trending information, to be able to help us troubleshoot what's going on. It also allows us to be able to determine trends in our issues and to manage those trends to train our end users.

You can always find a pattern with trending data. If you set it up correctly, you're going to find the patterns, and you're going to be able to resolve issues quicker and be able to improve on your services.

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Sending an email, that's the old way of doing things. This system is still relatively new. People still use email, but using the ticket system verifies that no one gets left behind. We're in a world of electronic mail. Some nice people can slip through the cracks. It's kind of how it is. But the ticket system makes sure that everyone gets taken care of, and that makes for a better customer experience. It's something we enjoy and they especially enjoy. We want to make sure that the new IT is not synonymous with, "Eh, don't wanna work with it."

It allows IT to handle users on a personal basis. It allows IT to have a name and a face, and we interact with the end-users, and the ticket system helps us to get them the help they need right away.

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It's a great ticketing, tracking system. 

It also provides the front end for the employees too. It's pretty basic, but it gives them the means to reach out to IT so they don't have to pick up the phones. That's one of the big benefits.

Also, the flexibility in the tickets that are created, and what we can change and modify, is a big benefit.

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Provides quicker resolution of all tickets with SLA management; reporting is quick and easy; tickets can be tracked and escalations can be handled by the correct teams.

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From a cost perspective, we don't have a very big service desk. We have many service agents because there's a facility that allows people to log onto the system and raise their own tickets. It saves people from having to wait for the service desk. From the company perspective, it saves us resources in the service desk. From a cost perspective, it counts. The fact that xFlow has got the self-service that's linked to knowledge management, means people are also able to solve their own problems without necessarily requiring tickets through the entire life cycle of second line support. From a quick resolution point of view, that has helped a lot.

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The flexibility and being able to connect to multiple products. It allows to use it the way we want to use it versus the way it came out of the box.

It has given us the ability to automate a lot of tasks, things we couldn't do before.

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We have a very good relationship with all the users. When users have a problem, they report using Service Desk and it is very useful for this. All the interactions and orchestrations of every problem, we can analyze what happens in the organization and which kind of incident we have. It is a very good tool.

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Since we partnered, we go in and implement this kind of solution outside to other clients or other customers. Overall, depending on the customers' needs, the response is mixed. Some people who are process people, they like to adapt the tool, they like to follow it. They are more happy when we show them the power of incident power change request management. 

Some customers, the adaptability of any ideas in tool, is a little bit harder for them. Over the years, or over a period of time, the acceptance of the tool grows. 

The overall experience is pretty good. I love being in the process management area.

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• All incidents, requirements, changes and problems are documented in one database.
• It is easy to follow, control and generate reports.
• There is a synergy with other products for incident management, monitoring (infrastructure and applications), asset inventory, etc.

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It is often the center point of reference on discussions of either outages in other applications or planned modifications in hardware or software.

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CA Service Desk benefits come in the fact that it gives you some aspects of automation, which is really key to our operation. We're not a typical help desk like most companies are that use Service Desk, we're a service center. While it is only used internally by our users, it touches our customers. Therefore, it's really important that we had a tool that was going to allow us to do things in a precise manner and do it in a way that gave it the structure and the automation - keeping people on track. Instead of training everybody on thousands of business processes, it's really important that our users be able to walk in, sit down, and know what to do because the tool is driving them to do their job. Versus, the user driving themselves.

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Multitenancy has helped to use a single solution for multiple departments. This way, there was a single ticketing system for many departments, which saved a lot of cost and helped the departments with organizing their requests.

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Customers don't have to decide where to go to report something and they don't get those answers that we sometimes do, the technical people do. If you report an incident then they decide it's not an incident they'll tell you this isn't an incident so go to the other screen and just put in your request.

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We've improved as an organization very quickly because of it, especially when it comes to self-service capabilities for our customers. It's been a fast, easy, and reliable tool to use, so much so that we've even had auditors who credited us with the quality of the implementation.

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The IT team becomes more effective and efficient because there is workload sharing. Where a Service Desk administrator would have had to log a call, Users can now do it themselves to get a service.

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The scalability of a product this size has provided us with the most improvement. Being able to use one product globally throughout our company to capture and report on all IT work being done has provided the most benefit.

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Service management includes incident problem change and request. From an end-user perspective, it's more around the incident and request area where an end-user can request a service such as needing hardware, software, or accessories that they need to do their job. From an incident perspective, they might need to report an issue, if something's broken and they need it fixed, that could be with something on their workstation, and that could also include something with an application that they use to get their job done. They need the ability to report those issues and get them resolved quickly.

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Before Service Desk, we were kind of flying a bit blind internally. With it, we're still in the honeymoon phase, but it's provided us many, if not all, of the tools that we're looking to use and implement in our system. And the online community has been excellent as well.

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Right now, we are using it for change management, incident management and service requests. It provides all users with a scoreboard where they can track all the incidents, requests, or change orders that they're responsible for. It provides the user with a tracking of anything they may have submitted.

With the simple notification when somethings being worked on, your Service Desk allows you to be creative with the notifications. Who gets what, when they get it, and it keeps dialogue open between service provisioner and the service requester.

There's always behind-the-scenes notification and tracking of what's going on through the Service Desk incident record or through the change record.

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Although we've implemented Catalog, we haven't used it in production yet. We built a prototype and what we want to use it for is to take over our request management system, because right now we do requests in Service Desk. I think Catalog is going to provide us more of a cart-type system.

Catalog gives us that cart view if you want to submit a request for service. Right now we are using Service Desk, but we would like to put the request management system in Catalog. It gives us a better buy and it gives us a more friendly view of ordering requests.

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Some of workflows became centralised and the complexity of approval cycles decreased via this tool. In general, it has helped us to implement some ITIL practices easily. 

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It's given us the ability to allow for automation of service-level reporting.

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It wasn't really rolled out to the organization, it was more of an IT tool, because we didn't fully utilize the tool, as we expected to do work in a mature state within the organization.

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For us it's indispensable to have all the cases in one place. It's the main tool for managing cases, day to day.

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We implemented this for a customer. The major improvement in functions is their ability to track, report incidents, problem, changes and configuration management.

There is no documentation available from CA for SPEL code; I hope they make this available, so that we can customize it more 

CA Service Desk Manager used a SPEL code to perform different action in the tool. To create a new action or condition generally know as macros (type: action macro, condition macro etc) knowledge of SPEL code and how to use it important. Unfortunately CA does not share any document around it hence we as administrators cannot customize it much like we can in servicenow, remedy etc. So if they can make it available, we could tune or optimize CA SDM as per specific requirements and it will help the tool to sink in the organization implemented. 

The process of adding new columns in the DB and publishing it from the front end is a lengthy activity. I hope they make adding columns and tables in DB easier. 

Creating a new custom column in servicenow is a child's game as you can do everything from the UI. No service restarrt, code execution etc needed. However, in CA SDM the process of adding a new column is a little lengthy with service restart and few steps needed, hence this is where they can improve upon.

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It helps organizations manage their services in a way that treats them as services, and not as, "Oh, this is what I do," in isolation.

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I've been implementing the solution for more than a decade, in different companies of different sizes and in different industries. It's adaptability is incredible; you can codify and change almost everything. Therefore, the solution is working for our needs.

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• We certainly increased the quality of our work.

• The system is more robust. We can elaborate on a better and complex service. At one time, we had a lot of processes.

• The application has the possibility to integrate with other systems. This, in turn, transformed the information to be more solid.

• Due to the integration with Business Intelligence (BI), we had possibilities to create reports. In these reports, we can see, in-depth, about where and when exactly we need to modify our processes. Therefore, there was a decrease in the count of open and duplicate tickets.

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CA SDM has organized the work for our internal groups to run the IT infrastructure in our company. When you add the workflow engine to the mix, the productivity and process adherence both get greatly enhanced.

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The biggest things that we've noticed has been the actual performance of the tool. In Maximo we had a lag and again, it's more or less because it was a shared tool were as we have a dedicated tool now. When we went to the tool that we're now using, SDM, we noticed that the performance was so much more increased than it was in the past. People were noticing pages would maybe take like 10 seconds to come up. It was almost instantaneous as soon as they'd click submit. That's the biggest hurdle that we had to overcome was just to demonstrate how much more of an increase time to resolve an issue we can give our customers

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It has allowed us to be more efficient in our problem and change management processes and procedures.

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Our managers are able to properly monitor their team activities with CA Service Desk. With knowledge base, the end users are able to fix simple issues.

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We have certainly increased our quality level.

First of all, the system is more robust. In this way, we can elaborate on more complex services. At one time, we had a lot of processes.

Secondly, the application has the possibility to integrate with other systems and transforms more solid information.

Lastly, owing to the integration with BI, we now have various possibilities to create reports in which we can see where and when we need to modify our processes. Therefore, there was a decrease in the number of open and duplicate tickets.

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1. Bundled CA EEM (LDAP Application from CA) has improved, and it supports multiple AD integrations in v12.51.x
2. Up to v12.7, the load balancing feature (Primary and Secondary Server Configuration) was crude and script based, and from v12.9 onward, it is UI based. Apart this, from v12.9 onward CA SDM supports advanced availability which assures fail over along with load balancing
3. Internally lots of schema structures have changed to help improving our performance
4. Knowledge Management becomes smarter and from 12.9 onward it becomes federated Search enabled to capture from heterogeneous sources, Like Google, SharePoint etc.
5. Support community is strong and end users and customers can ask for feature enhancements through the Community after getting it verified by the product engineering team
6. v12.5 onward, Incident, Problem and Request Management can be extensible or customized with CA ITPAM. Initially it used to have CA Workflow which is replaced by CA ITPAM i.e. much stable, robust and high performance process automation engine.
7. v14.1 onward, CA Service Desk Manager gets packaged with CA Service Catalog, EEM, ITPAM, Open Space – a common portal to raise and track ticket for end user (but accessibility is controlled through licenses)
8. Integration documentation has been improved a lot with code snippets and examples since v12.5
9. Role Based Access Control allows user to login to the system with permissions based on their role. Single login and Multi-tenancy, hosting multiple sub-business units in a single instance were introduced in v12.1.

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I've worked as an employee and as an independent consultant for a number clients so I can't really speak to how this product has improved my organization. Usually, the organizations that decided to buy CA's service management solution had a very poor incident/request/change management system and process implemented, and this is what they got the product for. For some customers, it was way overkill when they would've been better off with some other commercial or open source solution. For some customers, it was scalable and robust enough to take the load the customer's use required.

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The benefits are if you go back a year, we'd have 20,000 tickets a month and we were to having to track each ticket individually and using the new integrated portal, we're able to combine those into workflows, and actually track a user's experience from the start to the finish. We were finding that we had to try to look for individual tickets and maybe people were closing tickets when they finish their part, but it didn't give us the whole picture. We've really been able to get out the metrics of a full service experience. That's been our prime focus over the last year.

I like to call what we are establishing is our operating model. I call it our ecosystem and so we really worked with the CA architects to design what that should look like, how it would integrate with other existing software and tools. We built a picture so everyone can understand this is what we're building, just like a real architect plan would be, and it let us have a road map for a few years and go to our state and get money to actually implement something.

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I think maybe the biggest improvement has been in the integration parts of our organization. Though it's an easy solution to use, I find colleagues talking about CMDB parts. Sometimes I feel that maybe there must be a way to improve it where it's kind of simplified in a way where it's more usable. I think sometimes it's too much for someone to use, or someone gets lost, or someone complains about having too many things in there. It's not easy to manage, not user friendly, and maybe not easy to use.

So, when you get down to it, you have to see the details in the ways in which it's used. Maybe they have to work out the interface in a way that is more usable based on whatever you're trying to see.

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Visible integration between ITIL Processes makes service management easier by providing a broad view of the health of the organization's technology infrastructure, cost savings, and future investments.

Another relevant point is the ease of customizations and integrations that are inevitable in midsize and large companies.

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It helps when you have an incident or performing a problem change management process. You can view what all the relationships are between the CI that you are changing or using. It helps the engineers to better understand what they are facing.

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It has helped us to organize a lot of our assets, so we have configuration items to attach to our change management. We can have tickets for change management and set them aside for an approval process. That is something we have never had before, and it is something we have been able to divide up amongst our different campuses for ticketing use. That is something we have not been able to do either.

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It keeps all of our changes in one spot, so it's easy for management to see any given changes that are happening, and how they cross pollinate with CMDB.

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In addition to IT, we also use this product on our business side to manage lobby flow for clients and workflow for our client service staff. The product has allowed us to efficiently manage workflow, measure performance, and analyze customer service measures.

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Adoption of ITIL incident management for business process re-engineering was very easy to fit into the CA Service Desk Manager Incident Management module. It allowed IT operation support to easily identify, track and monitor incidents with data in 45 days that was analyzed. Within the first calendar year of deploy, the incident manager was able to strategically set and meet the field support goal of responding and resolving 25% of incidents remotely.

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Initially, CA Service Desk Manager was used by two divisions within the organization. In the past two years was rolled out to two more divisions.

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By connecting us with our customers.

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Its benefits. Going back to the ticketing part, we are benefiting by being able to put time to what our technicians are doing. Without the ticket there, without them having something that says, "Hey, I worked for this user to do this." We do not have anyway of tracking without the software of how much time they are spending on different things that they are working on.

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It has made us a lot more organized, and a lot more aware of what needs to happen. Just now, some of our teams are really adopting the managed change, such as using the product instead of emails back and forth. 

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The benefits that we are seeing from the service management is since you can integrate the products, you can make correlations of which changes cause incidents, or which configuration updates have changes or have many incidents over a certain period, and from that, gather more data to work with it.

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We have mainly made money by selling our consultant services around it.

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We're essentially in business services. The role of the business architect that we play is the definition of our services to our customers, the internal capabilities to support those services, the service delivery processes, the design of those processes and automation, the structure of the organization, rules and responsibility, functions, and change management. Service Desk helps us with all of that.

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In combination with Automation for Cloud Services, it has increased the ability to dynamically allocate Virtual Machines for test and development. View full review »

It's a solution. It needs a facelift, but it works. It improves our service delivery process. We're more efficient. We're leveraging the ticketing system, which is always more efficient, so we can measure and improve.

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Keeps track of any issues that we're having, as well as any changes that take place. 

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With its scalability and ability to connect with various systems, we have been able to exchange data with several systems automatically.

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The product update process has been improved, and I like that they have included advanced high availability. Also, the process of adding new customers using multi-tenant is relatively simple.

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It provided greater agility in service and a more agile management vision.

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It is scalable and we are a big organization.

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Probably it streamlines the organization. They have actually had it longer than I have been there. So I am guessing in the past, support tickets were probably handled through email and stuff like that, so I am sure things got missed and lost. Now, it is all there and stuff does not get lost.

It is easy to tell what needs fixing and the priority of things.

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It helps us have a clearer understanding of our environment, that's the big part of it that I use. As far as the ticketing part of that, it integrates within our email. If you're an end user, just a person, you don't need to go the website at all, you can do almost everything through email, so that is nice. 

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The intelligence introduced into the product keeps getting better the longer you use it. Unified Self Service gives our end users an interface that attracts people and which they want to use, as it looks great and the offerings we provide makes their work life easier.

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• We are better able to manage and keep track of SLAs with end users.
• Analysts work more efficiently based on the ticket priority.
• We can better manage IT assets and contract license through CMDB.
• Reporting and dashboard: it is easy to produce a report with drag and drop functions.

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We are ITIL compliant and we have a lot of experience implementing IT services. We offer these facilities to our clients and customers. SDM has many automatic functions that allow us to offer value when implementing business rules in a short time and without code, just by configuring the tool.

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Try managing the expectations of 180,000 users as if they were just one. That's how much it's improved our functioning.

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For the analyst, the user experience is better. Also, for the demo, it is a good experience for them, because they want to look at a fancy application and forms, and know that it is to easy to use them and create easy tickets.

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Service Desk Manager keeps our customers updated regularly regarding any network outage and aware when we will respond to his request and when it will be repaired. Our customers receive better service and we also have a better experience serving them. The CA tool is actually helping us and we can see drastic improvement from it.

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It is a one stop shop. With the service catalog integrated with IT panel to the Service Desk. It is very nice to be able to use, because the workflow is all-in-one for the same product. 

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All business processes have been built around the service. SLAs are measured promptly and tickets are owned/resolved faster, thereby improving user/customer satisfaction.

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When we started, we did not have a proper service catalog or services, and there were many complaints from end users regarding our services.

CA Service Desk Manager has helped us publish our service and provide better service to our users. That’s why our satisfaction rate has increased over the years.

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We lean on it quite a bit in creating incidences, tracking them historically and following up open tickets created by a number of sources. It also serves as a cross-reference for other tracking tools we use in our daily work.

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This is first time I’m working on this platform. I use it for Service Desk Catalog and ITSM asset management. I use all functionalities.

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New usage approach for end users

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• Automated our manual business processes

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User satisfaction has improved dramatically for our customers. It's really improved a lot since bringing in Service Desk. This has, therefore, improved things internally for us.

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• Self-consumption of services by end-users
• Standardization
• Automation with increased effectiveness

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I can easily say that SDM is the core of our organization. We have integrated a lot of related systems, implemented contract management logic, and some HR functions, such as vacation planning routines.

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It’s in a language that everyone in the business can understand. It uses not only depictions but also symbolic language, as opposed to language that only IT personnel can understand.

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It established a more organized dynamic and the ability to better plan activities.

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• We can use the same installation for several and independent customers (multi-tenancy).
• ITIL processes.

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