The API is very, very bad so we developed our own.

The out-of-the-box UI is not very friendly for end users so we don't use it. 

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So far, the only complaint from customers has been Clarity's user experience. Unfortunately, clarity's UX cannot compare with most modern enterprise service desk solutions. In the last couple of years since Broadcom acquired CA, they've put less effort into developing CA's product line. They aren't coming up with new features or refining the user experience. 

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They should enhance the service desk manager's service point function to be more customizable. Presently, there are so many limitations in this particular UI. Thus, similar to the existing UI, they should provide a customization source for this new UI. It could turn out to be very good for the end-user experience.

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The suite has grown too large, and has been pulled together from a series of acquisitions. For example, the Service Catalog, the process automation engine (IT PAM), and the Asset Portfolio Manager are all separate systems attached through integration. The good news is CA does not charge a la carte, so you get all of this stuff included in the concurrent user license. The bad news is this can be a delicate web of integration, which can be finicky.

The CA Service Management Suite is comprised of several components. All of them were acquired individually by CA over the past 20 years and integrated into the original system. The core of the suite is CA Service Desk Manager (“SDM”), which is a ticketing system that is excellent and scalable for Request Management, Incident Management, Change Management and Problem Management. This is the bread-and-butter of the CA Service Management suite. It is heavily used around the world and very reliable. A+ ☺

CA typically does a great job of incorporating acquisitions into their existing products over time. For example, the Knowledge base and CMDB used to be separate products, connected to the core Service Desk through an integration. However, today they have been fully incorporated into core SDM. Logging into SDM, you would never know that the KB and CMDB were once completely separate products. This adds KB and CMDB to the list of excellent, scalable and reliable functions of the CA Service Management Suite. A+ ☺

However, the industry is driving us all rapidly forward.

The Service Catalog, IT Process Automation Manager, Unified Self Service, Xflow and CA Business Intelligence are all separate applications connected to SDM via integration. Even though you are purchasing this as one suite under a per-concurrent user model, it is actually a bunch of applications integrated together. C-.

This adds complexity to the system and creates an urban sprawl of servers. This sprawl, in turn, creates challenges with patching, upgrades and daily operations. You’ve got to be smart about virtualizing it, SSO, etc. C-.

Consequently, my point is that CA has room for improvement here.

I hope this helps. I am a big fan of CA Service Management and highly recommend it. However, like the rest of us in life, we all have room to improve.

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Honestly, I would like to see them really change the UI for the user experience for the Service Management piece, or the Service Desk Manager piece, to match the unified self-service, so it looks more modern and more sleek.

It'd be nice if they actually improved the mobile scalability, so if somebody goes to that Service Desk Manager tool, it actually will go right to a mobile website instead of an old PDA-style website. Those are some of the bigger issues that we've been getting. The UI just looks really dated.

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All areas of every product have room for improvement.

That being said, this product would benefit by allowing individual users more customization, notably around notifications.

On a per-user basis, the individual user should have the ability to determine what notification types they want to subscribe to and how they want to be notified.

On an individual basis, users should be able to modify their interface to change things like the attributes returned from search results or have the ability to show/hide fields on ticket creation screens to support their own or a team’s workflow.

It would be handy to have an option in the interface to disable large chunks of functionality. For example, we do not utilize the application for problem management.

If there were an option to yank Problems out of menus, screens, this would expedite deployments and limit the need for the creation and maintenance of custom test scripts.

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There are a few things which bug me about it. For recent searches, if you are an analyst, if I click on it, it will pull up everything that I have looked at for the last ten years. Works great on the end user, they see their last five searches, or their last five documents, that they have looked at, but it does not work on the analyst side.

There are a lot of messages that just are not necessary. For example, every time you go to view mode in a document, even if you have not updated it, it is like, "You have to save this." Why? You just keep clicking things.

Something I have been asking for, probably for 20 years, we have a workaround for it, but they really want user names in the document owner and subject expert fields, and that is just not practical. I put group names in, and I have to do like three extra steps, because it does not recognize the user, and eventually it will save it. I have talked to people about that, years ago, and they were just like "No, it should be a user", and it should not. The people change. The groups are more consistent and will not change. So, I would like to be able to set that up.

On permissions, there are options to do groups and options to do roles. What is practical, you have to pick one or the other, for both read and write permissions. So, what would be more practical is to allow groups for write permissions, because there is probably only one group that should have write access, but then allow roles for the read access. E.g., all analysts can see this, but you have to be in this one group to edit the document and make any updates.

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We talk a lot about the idea that Service Desk Manager should be more "service" oriented, not just ticket oriented. Right now, it's just tickets, tickets, tickets. It could be related to a CMDB topic, but it's the service perspective. We talk a lot about that with CA. That's the main improvement that we need to have in place. There are improvements ongoing in that direction, I should say.

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When I am reviewing an incident, sometimes there is too much information on the same screen and it is difficult to discern what is of value. The agents generate information that is not important for me and it means that I have to scroll down to the bottom of the issue in order to find what I am looking for. In this regard, the interface is not always clear.

I would like to see charts and more graphical information available in the reporting. As it is now, we have incident data that is put into Power BI so that we can visualize it. We do this because it is easier to read graphical information. It would be nice if this solution had a simple wizard that could generate visualizations based on the data. As it is now, there are lots of reports, but from my perspective, the reporting is a little bit too complex.

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Reporting and integration to SCCM need improvement.

Service Desk Manager doesn’t integrate to SCCM out of the box. If you’re looking to use SCCM as your source of truth for servers or desktops and to populate a federated CMDB (using Service Desk manager), you’re looking at building a connector manually or buying another tool to do that. In our organization, we’re customizing code to do this in batch mode. Not ideal, but what we have to do. CA had recommended integrating with other tools of theirs that we have but the technology teams are centralized on SCCM. So that’s that one.

Reporting, we’ve had to buy Ivanti Xtraction to do all our dashboard and reporting. Boxi reports really fall short and we don’t use any reports out of the box. Be that as it may, we’re heavily metrics focused, so we’ve had to take that on separately to work with outside tools. Not ideal, but reality.

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Reporting is not the easiest. We just purchase extraction features, but again, people need training. It wouldn't be so bad if you could get more information when you do a query within Service Desk and to be able to drop that information into an Excel spreadsheet.

Right now, you're limited to what is exported, and there's only a certain number of fields, but there's additional fields that I'd like. If I could just add those to export real quickly, it would be a lot easier than have to create a report each time.

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The interface is pretty straightforward, but I think for some end-users a little more simplified user interface would help, perhaps. It's gotten better though. It's a little more streamlined, which we like. But every little bit helps with the end-user for them to get assistance.

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One thing that I'd like to see is with the Scoreboard usage. Right now, you have to create the Scoreboards individually for roles or users. If they could separate that functionality, and create the scoreboards separately, and then just link scoreboards to roles and users - that way you could reuse the same ones - that would be a huge benefit. I know, because they're a nightmare to manage at times.

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The old employee interface available in CA had certain features and functions that were not brought over to Unified Self Service. One of the features that we use extensively in our environment is the properties or also known as additional information. This gives us the ability to ask the end user certain questions upfront to assist the back office teams to resolve the ticket faster and more effectively.

We had to do some in-house development to get this functionality working and I am glad to say that we have successfully been able to get this implemented. USS is a huge improvement in terms of the look and feel from an end user point of view but letting out a key functionality like the properties resulted in a longer implementation period.

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Customizing it is very, very difficult to do. Although I know we're supposed to stay away from the code, we've got a lot of things internally where we can't revamp the processes and we'd rather use the tool than have to create customized things. But when we want to customize something, we can't do it easily and it's not very intuitive.

I'd also like to see a Quick Request function.

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There are some issues regarding the knowledge base and the configuration manager.

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We would love to see it integrating with other products like Splunk for log collection, integration to SMS facilities. It requires some effort for developers to get some of the things working because there aren't readily available APIs to interface with those. I'd really like to see Clarity more open to other products for purposes of integration.

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• Simplification in the user interface
• Being more expandable
• Better documentation

The user interface is fairly cluttered, and we can update it the way we need to, but it just seems dated, a lot of the things for the full functionality.

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We need a mobile solution. We are not using any mobile functionality for the product, but we think that this necessary. This should be provided in the next release.

The product needs to have a better user experience in the interface and mobile functionality.

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I would like to see the customization being more flexible. What that means that we do not have to go through a complicated process of applying a custom field to a Service Desk Manager application if it would be easier to do through an interface, which would be nicer.

Some of the scripting parts, especially the spell scripts behind the scenes, if that could somehow be incorporated into the tool that would be helpful.

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Taking into account the new version 17.0 that CA Technologies has released, issues in terms of the flexibility, ease-of-use, service catalogue improvements, etc. were resolved.

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There is nothing major in this product that needs improvement; maybe more documentation is needed for database relationships.

Although, the documentation in the Administration references, is very detailed and complete with respect to the internal/external table names, field definitions and relationships, it is difficult to determine database table inter-relationships, without examining and tracing paths. A person needs to start with a major table, and follow each reference field to the next table.

It would be beneficial, if there were diagrams with basic table interconnections within the major areas, such as Contacts, tables relating to Change Orders and the same for Incidents/Problems. This way, it would be much easier for the support specialists, who are just learning the system, to know where to find ancillary information related to the main tables.

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I don't know. There's really nothing that I can think of. Everything always can be improved.

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Our key requests are being implemented in the next release. There is a knowledge management portion. It is very cumbersome to create a knowledge management document. That’s one area that could be improved.

The Knowledge Management module in Service Desk Manager is cumbersome and hard to use. It’s not so bad for browsing and viewing knowledge documents, but to create content is extremely time consuming.

The main problem we have is, you can’t simply paste screenshots into the knowledge editor, they first have to be uploaded and then, attached to the document. We would love to have the ability to copy/paste screenshots into the knowledge editor, similar to how you can add images to an email.

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One of the biggest things we're talking with CA about is the integration between CA and PAM. PAM is a powerful tool, in fact, CA PAM is the single most important employee in our company because it basically orchestrates well over two hundred thousand operations in a month's time and it has an extremely low failure rate. One of the issues that exists, and I don't know you can really call it an issue, but it's not there yet, it needs to be tighter integration between PAM and Service Desk and they understand that, because the PAM engine for driving business automation and workflows is so critical to our business and keeping us on schedule and doing things.

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Support. Support is the biggest thing dragging it down, and the fact that it's not all one integrated package. You have to get different pieces and put them together when buying them separately instead of it being just one whole suite.

But again, the level of support is probably the area that needs the biggest improvement. But as for the product itself, there's nothing else I can think of as it does what we need it to do for the most part.

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The CA products integrate well together but I would like to see better integration with third-party solutions. An example of this is with AIOps, where I prefer Splunk over CASDM, so I would have like to see it opened up so that the integration is straightforward. We like the customer to be able to choose.

I find that there are many modules that offer similar functionality and I would like to see these consolidated. Perhaps it is because CA was acquired by Broadcom and they are still developing, with the intention to bring everything together but as it is now, the vendor has many products that do the same thing.

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There are later versions available that we are not using yet. Many desired improvements have already been included in those versions.

Nonetheless, here are a couple of ways they could improve the product:
- Better reporting: Data specifying which ticket spent how much time in which status should be easily available/stored somewhere.
- Readily available plugins: Plugins should be made available for integration with third-party tools that are commonly used (e.g., Nagios). Such integration needs to be developed externally. This improvement can make the tool really popular.

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It's technical aspects. In fact, there was some technical issues in the way the product was built that in the long run could get us into trouble. We didn't actually have any problems but the new releases have redesigned the way things are and so I think it's much better now.

Most of these products are bits and pieces and when you bring them all together you bring them as bits and pieces. If you want something to be robust there are some aspects that you have to redesign some of the parts so that they can glue together.

Sometimes we would like things to be a bit easier. I think the reporting could be something that would help and I think this happens with most of this sort of product is that you need a lot of reporting on these sort of solutions. It's not as agile as we would like it to be.

I think reporting is always something that I think we feel that these products are short on. The problem with reporting is that you need to know the data model that's behind it so that you know what objects you need.

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We need financial solutions for all projects we undertake, and Service Desk currently doesn't offer this. It would be of great benefit if it did.

I think that we need financial solutions for all projects, currently we do not have this and it would be of great benefit.

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There are some improvement that can be done. First of all, the interface is pretty old (although it looks ok). There some improvements needed in the support and security offered for mail servers. Also, the system should allow to add new action macros at the interface level, and not through workaround, and some more easy way manage the language support (an easier way to generate the translated interfaces, fewer files to be translated). The Web Screen Painter tool can be improved, since this is a very powerful tool.

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Automated email logging: The tradition in the workplace for communication will always be email. If emails can be used to automatically trigger calls, that is the best thing that can ever happen in the incident management or service desk process. This would save a lot of time, plainly speaking.

There should be a way for emails sent to a particular address to trigger an alert to create an incident or request, similar to SIEM automation mechanisms. If this is already available, my apologies, but I currently don’t have it.

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Ease of support and upgrades need much improvement. We don't have a dedicated team to support this system, and we still need to rely to much on services to perform upgrades and major patches due to the complexity of the system. Also, their mobile application does not allow us to configure it the same way as the system is configured, so we cannot use it at all.

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I'd like to see a Quick Request function. I think the reporting has been a little bit lacking as there are some basic dashboards, metrics and reports that we'd like to see that we've struggled to get out of their out-of-the-box system. So I'd say the reporting hasn't been quite as robust as we'd like it to be.

I think many of the good features are outweighed by some of the services and support issues we've had, and so again, we're still in the honeymoon phase, and we've got some struggles that we're trying to resolve. I think we're probably going through some growing pains.

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The user interface is a little bit old and not so mainstream. Nowadays every person is used to an interface that is more user-friendly and this one is not so user-friendly maybe due to the fact that, if you need to let people customize everything, sometimes you lose out on a clean user experience. When you can configure the interface, including all the buttons, all the things, it's hard to keep things streamlined. From my point of view, if you gain a lot of flexibility, you lose a little bit of the overall user experience.

We'd like to have a better overall user experience. 

The workflow design could be better. They have another product with better workflow designs and I would like to see them merge these products together. 

The costs associated with the product are a bit high.

The first level of customer service isn't very knowledgeable. 

They could use a better service portal. 

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The lack of parameters is limited. It's not possible to customize the solution.

We have issues with adding attachments and screenshots. Copy and paste is not possible on the solution.

Although there are some good features on the latest version, my company decided in the past month to switch solutions and we're moving over to Jira.

The cost of this solution is too high, which is why we're leaving.

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I submitted an enhancement request and I think it actually made it into the product. It was basically enhancements to how it integrates with Process Automation -- if Process Automation is down and Service Desk happened to call Process Automation for external activity type of thing, I want SDM to be more resilient to the interface being down to that component.

Also, instead of throwing an error to the user, I'd suggest maybe a spinning hourglass or something. A message that says, hold on, we're trying to talk to Process Automation or something along those lines.

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I can't think of any areas for improvement with the product itself, though when I stood it up, the documentation was not as straightforward as it could have been. But I figured it out without much issue.

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• Reporting side 
• Workflow engine 
• Knowledge base 
• SLA calculation and customisation

The SDM administration and customisation need deep information about architecture and vendor support continuously. Therefore, the quality of support service is very key.

For PAM and BO, it is very hard to create and manage reports, dashboards, or workflows. These topics cause difficulties on application usage for analysts and end users. 

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It needs better report-generation features and allow for different types of data.

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SDM could be improved. I don't know if it was in the infrastructure where it crashed a lot, or if it was with the tool. I think maybe I got used to it and then it sort of wasn't an issue anymore.

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Dashboards. Custom dashboards are really important because without that it takes too long to view some information. In the new version, xFlow is better.

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

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The thing that gets me is they sell it as a customizable tool, but the more customizations you add to it, the less stable it becomes. So over the last few upgrades, we've tried to come out of box as much as possible, and that has worked for us. Sometimes, people want and want and want and change and change and change and we find you really can live without all those customizations and it works just as well, I mean, works better. We're getting ready to upgrade to 14.1 and we were talking about that. Really, the last few years, we haven't really had to use the word outage very often.

I've suggested a couple of improvements. It might not mean anything to you specifically, but I have joined one of their communities and suggested that, when it comes to groups, they need to have a separation of groups so that you can have a separate group for work flow tasks in the change side than you do on the other side. The problem is, we have business people and different approvals on the change side that need to approve change orders, but they don't need to be involved on the ticket. But what happens on the incident problem request side, when people are playing hot potato trying to get the ticket out of their queue, they're looking for a group and they're picking it whether it's a my work flow group or not. We've tried to creatively name them so people won't use them, but there needs to be a separation. You ought to be able to select what modules you want that to be available in.

One other thing I can think of. I've noticed with this latest upgrade they're starting to change their terminology. They're calling incidents issues in the service catalog and I'm really curious to go talk to someone about that. We have what we call an issue module for our business side and that is for our external customers. When we plan to bring about the service catalog, they're going to be really confused when it says open an issue. Why did they do that? Why did they change that terminology and I've heard them use it in here. You know, "When you go to open your issue." I'm like, that's an incident. That's not an issue. That's two different worlds.

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I think some of the work they're doing with the xFlow interface and the more collaborative tools. I think that's helping because this new generation of people like the social-media style of collaboration.

I would also like to see a simpler reporting tool. They went from one fairly robust, very complex, reporting tool - it was great - and then they went to another one that was also fairly complex and robust. That's a great tool for people who are report writers, but for the average person who just wants to get a quick little report, it's like handing somebody a chainsaw because they have to break some toothpicks in half.

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The solution could include in your own license other products to help your own customers embrace more disciplines to their needs.

With a small licensing of these products, it's possible to present all the power of the power of suite.

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One area that this product can improve is in the mobile user aspect. We need to get more solutions to our client's mobile, so they will have the same mobile experience that they have on their computer.

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There are some functions I have seen from its competitors that I would want CA SDM to have. I also find some of the items to be tedious from an admin point of view.

The pdm_publish process, that adds tables and columns to the database, is an unforgiving key stroke of errors.

A “publish” can run to completion, but if a mistake was made, then the system will stay down, until you figure out what mistake was made and correct it.

I would like to see the process just throw away the mistake and continue cleanly. After which time, it could post a report upon completion that you have to redo the offensive work.

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Room for improvement I would say from a back end perspective, I would say they need to streamline a lot of the code that they're using. I think it's very bloated, I think it has a lot of extra things that it doesn't really need. Things like for example, USS and Liferay. I mean, it's a great implementation and I think it can be used together if it was done appropriately but we haven't really seen much of a benefit in the way the tool works for our needs. For other companies I'm sure they've managed to implement the two and find a way to work with it but we've haven't had that kind of luck. I would say in those terms of getting a lot of the stuff in the backend, from my perspective, is to take a lot of the stuff out, look what they actually need, streamline the product, and then push it out forward.

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I took a breakout session on CA Service Desk here at the CA World conference. We're at version 12.9 and they're on 14 and getting ready to go to 17, so just looking at some of the features that I saw in the breakout session on 14, I would like to see us get to that version so that we can exploit a lot of the functionality that's available with 14.1.

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It could improve in maintainability and customization of features with a better and simpler GUI.

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One area of this product that needs improvement is the user mobile experience. We need to get more solutions on the mobile devices of our clients so that they have the same mobile experience as they have on the computer.

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I would like to see not having such strict compatibility requirements when working with other applications. This is just limited to certain parts of the application, though, such as email and how it interacts with certain servers.

This solution doesn’t always work in the real world with company and security requirements.

To clarify further, there are some parts of the application that have some inflexible settings, i.e., for the Maileater feature, you can only specify certain ports, encryptions and 1 certificate. This doesn’t always play nice with the email servers. For example, what happens if the settings that CA SDM send, are not the recommended settings that the email server is expecting? Maileater is the biggest issue we’ve had recently, and I’d provide another example, if I could. It is an issue to keep Java up to the latest security level, as it makes working with CA SDM also a little slow, but that seems to be a universal issue with many applications.

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1. Release Management is not supported out of the box
2. SLO Management
3. Cloud, SSL Configuration, Remote Support and Chatting
4. Support for different mailing protocol other than SMTP, POP3/IMAP such as for MS Office 360 exchange
5. Conditional Survey so it doesn’t send a survey on the closing of a Parent Ticket but of the children

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The product has traditionally lacked the tools to support data migration from development to QA and then to production. CA has made a tool for this on the latest release but I haven't laid my hands on it yet. Also, data manipulation outside the UI - the parts that aren't modifiable through the UI by default and where the effort to enable it would be disproportional to the gained benefit - really lacks support from CA. They do ship tools that can achieve this but they're clunky, counterintuitive and prone to errors. Additionally, they bypass all the checks the system has in place for ensuring data integrity. Therefore, no, I'm not a big fan of those, and I've written my own tools to handle the data manipulation in a way that all the checks are made. Luckily, CA provides a couple of APIs for this. Also, the UI is a bit outdated and, while CA is working on bringing it to this century, they're still far away from it. The good part is it's pretty much just good old HTML and JavaScript, with just a hint of syntactic sugar from CA and you're golden.

The product has potential and if your business is flexible enough so that you can adjust the way of working to what the product offers out of the box, then it might be a good solution. However, I'm cutting down the score because of bad design decisions and outright bad implementation on some specific areas. Also, customizing the product to your needs beyond the basic UI changes means you'll have to hire either CA's professional services or an external consultant. Luckily, that's what pays my salary, so I'm not complaining too loudly. CA does offer training for this but they don't tell you the juicy bits. You'll have to reverse engineer and hack your way around to get to them.

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I know that there is a mobile application version coming with version 14, though I haven't seen it yet. Hopefully it's going to really improve the mobility. It's one of the things that I would love to have. It would help those inside be able to change the way that they are doing business. I haven't seen it, but I would love to see it.

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The part of notification methods and satisfaction surveys remain almost unchanged. Perhaps greater attention to these two simple and native features could give the set a greater force. It is as if such modules have not evolved with the rest.

Diversifying notification methods with pop-ups or ready-made WhatsApp or Skype integration packages would be welcome.

Making the Satisfaction Survey more interactive would also be interesting.

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• We would like more information about all the configurations that we have on our infrastructure side.
• The interface for the users is a bit old-fashioned and not user-friendly.
• We would like the CMDB to be populated automatically. At the moment, everything is manually created.

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We would like to see them revamp, or rework, a lot of their configuration management database structures. We hear that is on the horizon. We are very excited about that. That is something we use a lot. 

We would like to see them integrate more of a service catalog, which is more of an Amazon-type fill in your bucket, then sign in, once you decide what you want. This is something that we would like to see from the product, as opposed to what we have seen in the past, which is login, then go pick. It would be nice to say, "I like this, I like this." Fill up your cart, then go buy it.

There is room for improvement. I think the product is going in a different direction than what is has before, which I think is good. I like that they are looking at things, and they are opening themselves up to the community and allowing for people to bring enhancements to them and ideas. To be able to share those ideas with their management.

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I've heard about the xFlow. I'm looking for the improved user interface. A lot of people complain about the amount of time it takes to do things in Service Desk. It's a very old product, 20 years, so there is a lot of legacy there, hard to shift. 

We would love to be able to do more on our mobile app for our technicians that wander the floors. We don't use the mobile app because its very difficult to use. I understand there are upgrades in the works there. 

If I had to choose, it would be more around the user interface than the mobile experience.

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The UI is old and passé. It needs to be intuitive, efficient, and allow users to tailor it to their way of working.

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Ticket event and notification creation/management is cumbersome and has not improved over the many versions I've worked with. Workflow design and management requires knowledgeable administrators with programming experience.

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The monitoring tool is in need of improvement.

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The new chat feature, I love that. They are always one step ahead of what we need. Usually, if I need something, I contact my rep and they tell us you have it.

In general, in terms of improvement, I would say our reps need to be a little more one on one. In the past we've had issues with that. But our current rep we love. 

Maybe training could be better.

Just little technical tweaks here and there. Like more options. For example "Organization." We wanted that to be available inside the change order, as well as the ticket and the request. And that's not available.

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I come from a ticket background. I have been with this company for about a year, but I have been in the ticketing system with my previous company for the last six. The big thing, or the problem, that I have is not being able to see tickets on a bigger scale. I can see the request, or if it is the way they categorize them, but I can't see the overall bigger picture. 

Let us say, for example, I have a technician that is out for a week, and I want to go into all of his open tickets regardless whether it is a request incident or a change order. I can't do that very easily. I have to go through and look at the request. I have go through and look at the instance. I have to go through and look at change orders individually. Instead of being able to say okay what is on this technician's docket across the board. I have no way of doing that.

We are still working towards integration with the hardware as well, where I have seen others products more tightly integrated with hardware. For example, with Quest KACE (formerly Dell), the hardware is right there. I can easily add hardware for a user to a ticket. I know you can do that in this, but it is not as easy.

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The UI needs to be upgraded.

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From the implementation side, it's a tool that you can customize a lot. This customization sometimes, on upgrades and so on, it gives you a really hard time, so I would suggest trying to build a solution that you can operate with the customizations that the product allows you to do.

I would like to see a new UI, and stuff that will keep customizations going on so you don't have to do all of the reworking all over again to keep up with the next product version.

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Some the features that can be improved are:

• Usability: xFlow is a great step forward, but further steps are needed. Public bids in Finland often require HTML5 UI. xFlow fulfills that requirement.

• Public bids in Finland often do not permit browser plugins: Java or Adobe Flash Player. In such cases, we just have to offer other solutions since Visualizer requires Flash. Thus, there is a need to get rid of Flash.

• Internalization: Check out language plugin in ServiceNow. CA is quite far behind in this area.

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I would like to see probably not so many individual modules where it kind of wraps it all together. I would like to see like asset management be part of Service Desk so that I don't have to keep buying more modules, I can have everything in one.

Integration is probably one of the biggest for us. We want it to be able to integrate with everything we use so we don't have to rip and replace everything.

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Its biggest weakness is the user interface.

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Pretty much all of its areas: It has a very outdated UX - circa Windows XP It has a lot of errors in its documentation. It has a lot of undocumented quirks and limitations. It has a lot of bugs. Its UX does not support HTML 5 style controls resulting in the need to build very bizarre workarounds. Its API architecture is not orthogonal. View full review »

The report solutions are a little short and that could be improved. It's possible that part of the issue is the customization because we had the tool customized for our clients. Clarity is also quite an expensive solution and it would be helpful if the cost was reduced. 

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The user interface is just boring. I'd like to see a more interactive UI, from the end-user perspective, and from the analyst's perspective. I would like a product that looks like it was developed maybe in 2015, or at least 2012. Right now you see it, it's very flat.

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As an end user I don't probably use it the way that other people would use it, but maybe automatic opening of tickets for other products would be helpful.

I think that we would like to see tickets opened and closed automatically. We would also like to see different functions for employees versus administrators versus managers; people being able to lock down certain features once they are there. That could be available now and we just don't have it turned on.

I have a feeling that the newer release has a lot of things in there that are useful for us, I've just haven't seen it because we don't have the newest release in.

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The UI is old school with a lot of windows opening and slowing down the process of ticket creation by the end users. The reporting ability of the tool needs to improve drastically. Currently, the solution is provided with Business Objects (BO) and is too slow to use for every day reporting.

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They need to improve the High Availability, and the native integration between CA Service Desk Manager, CA Process Automation, CA Service Catalog and CA Unified Self-Service.

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We would like to see improvements mainly without the Service Desk. This was where we saw the greatest gain in unpaid performance and collaboration.

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The upgrading process needs to be improved. They need more testing with more customers before the release. We are dealing with a lot of defects that should have been caught before the product was released.

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The software asset management is a feature for which we don't find the correct functionality. It's something we could potentially use, but it needs to be improved.

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I would like to see the API cleaned up. Right now, because of the way CA works, they combine a lot of applications. That's just the nature of it, they can't fix that probably. But the API is a mess, it's hard to navigate, hard to figure out. The documentation is okay, but from a back-end standpoint it's kind of difficult to work.

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The methodology introduced for Level 1 analysts needs to be taken to Change Management Process. It would be useful to be able to look in Change Management and see the current status of the process. For example, it could show that this change has five steps and the analyst is performing step three. Also, end users would benefit from this step view.

Change Management is the most complex ITIL Process. Here a clear guidance for the person in action or all actors are important. Currently, there is room for improvement.The change process has a variable amount of steps to complete, depending on several attributes. If you look into a change, you should directly see that you are on step three out of seven, so you have a clear idea of how many steps have to be completed and how many are already completed. It gives you a good understanding of where you are in the process.

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Customization and configuration of CA Unified Self-Service needs improvement. CA needs to provide similar tools like Web Screen Painter (a customization tool for Service Desk) for CA Unified Self Service.

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We are an enterprise that sells IT services and all our areas involved in IT processes use the tool.

I think each tool suffers difficulties when a customer has requirements completely outside the standard, which is very common.

Technical support is good, once scaled to a second level. But usually, there are difficulties in the first approach.

CA develops and acquires enough tools and adds them to its solutions, but does not necessarily fully integrate them before releasing them. That also makes initial implementation difficult.

And finally, CA currently has problems delivering the tool in the cloud. CA tried to insert a new tool in the cloud but failed. Today, only MSPs can deliver the service, but not CA directly.

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I'd like to see CA continue to invest in the initial engagement of my end-users with Service Catalog. I would like to see CA continue to invest in form, design, and functionality.

From a developer's perspective, the biggest weakness is what you can and cannot do. I'd like to see CA continue to invest in reducing a need for technical staff to engage in process automation, vehicle limitation, and product design. I don't like to see developers in 2015 writing code for things that other companies have already figured out for a while.

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More user experience in the look and feel of the application. 

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The view we now have of our customer base, and how they link to the network is more of a bottom-up approach. I would like to see it from a top-down approach. We want more visibility into how the network layers are linked. That's the next stage that we are working toward.

I also want to see how we can bring DevOps automation and lifecycle development into the equation, and evaluate how that helps us to mature much faster.

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Doesn't scale well. No real-time reporting. Need lots of investment to have it integrated and running in your environment. View full review »

It would be nice to be able to just click the executable and have it do the upgrade with minimal configuration, post installs, etc.

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The Reporting part (Reports Tab) needs to be more robust and made less complex. CA Service Desk makes use of a BusinessObjects XI tool for reports, which is owned by SAP. This is actually a third-party tool and a bit complex in terms of reliability on the network, mostly. If these reports were in-built, without having to integrate or connect to any third-party tool, then this would be better.

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Mobility is one area: There should be improvements in terms of implementations and content.

Also, they have launched Xinterface, which is very good, but it is restricted to only to incidents and requests. It should be used for changes, as well.

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It’s always bothered me how you need two steps to close a ticket (solution then update status) to do essentially one task. I’d love to see that merged into one easy step. I also have issues with Configuration Items but I think that it's our issue, not a CA issue.

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The new version should have an app, as it’s not in this version.

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From the user’s perspective: One of the most criticised aspects by the clients is the web interface, which is not too user friendly and hasn’t been changed in the last years. CA is trying now to promote an additional new interface which is more user friendly, but in this new interface, they removed some key functionalities. So, it brings value on the design, but with the price of losing some features.

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Access to services

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IT PAM Workflow could be improved.

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We would like to have a unified self-service tool for all the tools that Service Desk Manager integrates with. This would really improve the product.

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I would like to see integration between the service management products and consolidated application of patches.

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Rebuilding the visual interface in the same style using modern web technologies can extend the usability of the system for up to 10 years.

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It has some stability issues, and it can be complex to implement. The last implementation took us about two years to complete.

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CMDB and the user interface, especially for extracting reports, could be improved.

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Minor issues creep up and create huge problems. Product stability is also an issue. View full review »

I would like more flexibility on KPI and SLA definition.

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UI is not perfect, but maybe with Jaspersoft.

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