That's actually how I got involved. The people who deployed it did a bad job. They built it and then the consultants left. The team that was onsite was doing the best they could but there were some foundational flaws with how the deployment was done that they didn't know about. They were looking for an expert, someone who knew the tool, who could come in and sort of help them fix some of those issues and they hired me over the phone because I fixed one over the phone.

They're like, "It's always slow when we do this thing." I said, "Well, have you checked here. There's an out of the box function that's really a sales pitch function, that as soon as you have a 1,000 records it starts to slow down." Like, "No, yes we do have that enabled. Let's turn that off." As soon as they did that on the phone, they were like, "Can you come work for us." No, I wasn't part of the initial deployment but have been there every year but the first. I solved the problem over the phone. He hadn't met me in real life, in that two hour phone conversation he said, "We want to hire you. Do you want to move out from Minnesota to New Jersey and take the job?"

It is easy to set up. Deployment can be done in a week or two weeks at most.

It is very easy to use and set up. When it comes to deployment, there are two kinds of deployment. They improved it by having a cordless version with Service Manager 9.5 and 9.6. SMAX is also a cordless platform, so it's not a problem to deploy Service Manager.

I've heard that it's been fairly complex, but I haven't done it myself. I'm more on the business side, so I haven't done it myself. But there are so many capabilities. Like with SAP, it's very capable, but it becomes complex when you have lots of capabilities. I'm not sure if they've simplified things over the last 12 to 18 months. When I was evaluating this, I heard even from some of the skilled partners that this was considered to be fairly complex, capable, but complex.

I think that if the right partner is involved, installation could be pretty fast. You could have this up and running if you buy this as a managed service within a very short time, maybe within days, because that's what we talked about with our partner. This could be deployed pretty quickly if you're working with the right resources around you.

Complexities have more to do with our company’s internal environments, meaning that we have a third party management service that manages our desk environment, and so we needed to communicate with that system.

The initial setup is not difficult. However, adjusting to the business requirements generally depends on the version, of course. If you have the product process designer, maybe it is very much easier, however, in an earlier version, it was rather difficult to develop since you had the object control and it was old-fashioned in terms of style. If you have a process designer, of course, when you start with a process designer, it's much easier.

I'd rate the ease of deployment at a four out of five. 

If you are doing it out of the box, it generally only takes one day to set everything up.

It was implemented generally in the high availability solution. Each component is running separately, so we focused on the high availability during the setup.

We have a few people that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks. They are admins. 

It was complex, but that was not all Micro Focus' fault. It was the fault of too many users trying to have their little niche specifically programmed into Micro Focus Service Manager.

It was complex due to the company still defining the processes as they were implementing the tool.

I wasn’t involved at the very beginning of the project, but I was there just after the whole effect. It's not a technical project. It's much more of an enterprise project.

The setup process is very well documented. It is straightforward.

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

Our approach was to install the entire suite globally at one time. This was aggressive and complex, but in hindsight the right choice. There were a great deal of challenges with user adoption, but delivering everything at once eliminated a lot of potential data issues and future integrations/conversions.

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

The initial setup is straightforward, and it took us about two to three months to implement this solution.

I was in the project from the beginning. Some of the problems are from our company because they don't always decide what way we want to go. Our company wants to go one direction, and when we start they sometimes change the direction and it will complicate the solution. Sometimes, it's our own fault.
But, for the product itself, the setup is straightforward, with some issues. Sometimes the logical database structure and tables is not very easy to understand. So we need to have some help with that. It seems like it's old tradition from the old versions, going up the system. It's hard to see the logical structure of the tables.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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. 

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.

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.

The installation was straightforward. Having previously used a service management tool, I’d say that usage was not so bad. Adoption is where the challenge was. Users were used to calling in with incidents, but now they need to raise tickets. That was a challenge, but it's been sorted out.

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

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

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.

Life cycle management is a drama. For almost every tool we have, it's a project for a couple of months to upgrade something to the next level. It's not next, next, finished. No way.

The integration is a little bit complex.

The user experience was great. The whole project was integration between the old version to a new version. It was better for the users and they agreed to upgrade to the new version.

It was complex due to the organization's size, complex customers and a lot of dependencies with interfaces internal and external.

HPE did the initial setup.

The initial setup was not complex at all.