My big concern is that HPE made a decision in its last dot release to change the way that these improvements and enhancements are done by the end user. They went to what they call code-less, really it just means you code less. It's not really a code-less mode, you're just coding less. Their sales pitch is, they can take the control of these improvements and enhancements out of the hands of people like me and into the hands of the person who's saying, "Can you make it do whatever?"

The gap in that or the thing that makes me nervous about that is the guy who is saying, "Here is my thing." Doesn't have the picture of here's everybody else's thing and how yours is going to impact theirs. Some of the things they ask me to build are really dumb and I shouldn't build. That conversation with the development team that says, "This thing that you're trying to do doesn't really fit. Does it really make sense to do this thing?" And having that sanity check. If my end-user can build that themselves, then you don't get that level of sanity check.

As they move to what they want, I think they're trying to make it easier for the companies that are smaller companies that don't have guys like me, that don't have an expert to do the building and make it simpler for them, but in doing so they do make it a little bit more scary for the guy who is managing it for the larger organization. I want to be able to make this stable. I know that what I'm putting in isn't going to break anybody else's things. I won't step on your toes because so and so has asked me and so and so has asked me, so I'm familiar with what everybody wants.

My concern is not something I want them to do different, but as they're going in a direction that might sell well to the guy who doesn't have a guy like me on their team it actually is scary to the guy like me who says, "But how can you ensure that people are going to do it right if you're putting it into the hands of Joe user who isn't aware of that bigger picture."

Other than that, I guess the only other thing I would say is it really is an amazing tool. They have built in integrations with out of box tools and standing up integrations to brand new tools is really simple. We've custom built 64 different integrations, usually within the period of weeks. Somebody says, "I need a new way to do this." We're like, "All right, we'll stand that up." Most of the development time is their product talking to mine, because I know how to make my product work. They're still figuring out how to talk to my product. But standing up new integration points is really simple, working with other tool sets is really simple. They do a lot of things really well. I think it is awesome, and I'm surprised that more people don't think so.

Customization can be difficult at times because scripting is often required.

I don't see anything lacking. They have a very complete solution. They have all modules needed, including portfolio, procurement, financial, and purchasing modules.  

I think the best recommendation to Micro Focus would be to increase awareness and the marketing for this product. I'm not really sure how intensely they are developing this solution during the last year, but I'm assuming that this is still a strategic offering for Micro Focus. Therefore, I think they should be focusing on creating awareness and increasing marketing knowledge for this product. I think the technology is more than capable, but I think many customers don't know or are not considering it. That's my gut feeling.

Something that could be improved is simplifying the area and providing a best practice insulation. Having a modern interface is always important.

Part of the problem they’re facing right now is they’re behind the curve in SaaS offerings. Part of our reason for moving away from Service Manager is that HP was not on the leading edge of the technology and was consequently being surpassed by SaaS offerings. They’re offering one now, but I think it’s too quick to market and not all bugs have been worked out.

The interface could be better. It's hard to integrate as there's no interface in place for the solutions to interface with each other. It's a bit of a bottleneck. 

There are other options on the market that make it easier to integrate with other products and get data to flow between them. 

The customization process is not easy.

Customer support often lacks experience. 

We aren't able to take emails that come in and turn them into tickets, especially when it comes to attachments. When an email has an attachment, like a screenshot, it is a very cumbersome process, and it does not work very well. I shouldn't have been paying technicians to cut and paste attachments from an email into the ticketing system. It should do that automatically. Other solutions are able to do that. This is something that needs to be improved.

Test manager and knowledge management areas are probably amongst the worst parts of this solution. We try to use this solution for knowledge management, but it is not user-friendly. Therefore, it has limited ROI as you need to spend time to try and fully capitalize on the knowledge management system.

The tool is constantly improving and has been able to meet our business needs for the most part.

There's a lot of manual work, which is error prone and time consuming, in how the code gets transported from one system to the other. This consumes a lot of my resources that have to be available for that. So wish that it could transport much better. Which goes into the direction of DevOps and the other things that need support. Support is the real issue.

I have seen a lot of features on the road map, which will increase my rating. But my assumption would have been that, by now, we would at least half way on the road, from the features that we have been presented with until now. They should have made most of these improvements earlier. And we have permanent discussions where we compare with products like Service Now and HPE is not there.

We have just implemented Asset Manager and it seems, from an operational perspective, to be much easier. We need to use less resources in the administration, compared to Service Manager. Asset Manager looks like it's going to be a stronger product.

For me, we need integration with big data. I think it will be with the new version. We have to see it to be able to analyze more. In fact, we are able to look at data; but, in the end, we are currently not able to manage it. I think the new version will be much better when we have the view of big data.

It's not so easy to move to the next version. It's not quick to upgrade. It's a significant project for us.

It's not the best trouble ticket system. We would like to have Skype for Business integration fail-over with our cluster-based solution. There are other enhancements we are waiting for and we are in touch with HPE support regarding them.

We are looking for a tool that is certified with Gartner. HPE is not the best tool for this. ServiceNow is better. We want to have more features, cloud-based solutions, and more enhancements regarding the digital service system.

Although we have never seen ServiceNow, it's been certified by Gartner, the certifying authority, so they have something that HPE doesn’t. HPE is now the third or fourth choice. It used to be second choice. So they need to be more competitive with the others and come up with better features.

We have not seen much improvement in the analytics reports interface, so that would be welcome.

Room for improvement is the speed with which you're able to access it and where it isn't as slow and draggy. It is really draggy.

Authentication needs to natively support multiple AD forests, since this is typically an enterprise tool with global users.

Service Manager would be improved with access to automation.

Micro Focus Service Manager is not very great. It would be better if it had more features. When it comes to features, BMC tops the chart. When it comes to usage, people use BMC more. 

The greatest issue for us is to understand the roadmap. We want to know whether we should upgrade now or should we wait three months. Which version should we install? It's not the project, but it's the plan for the project. So we went to a recent conference to find out because we want to know which way we should go.

In the next release, I would like to see easier integration with the other tool sets, such as UCCB, business service management, etc.

It needs to be easier to use for the end users because one problem we had was that we are handling different kinds of cases. We use it person to person by phone. It's not so user friendly. If there was more ease of use, then people would use it more regularly.

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

Service Manager is at the end of its life. The architecture, performance, and look are all way behind.

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

In the next version I'd like to see end user surveys, and have it much more robustly meet our large enterprise needs. We'd like to retire our home grown solution.

We still find ourselves wrapping customizations around it more than we would like, and we still find the upgrade path more costly and time consuming than we would hope. We spend a lot of time on platform support, the patching, the care and feeding of the whole entire platform.

The product's technical support services need improvement. 

On certain implementations, it can be very difficult to customize and then very difficult to maintain as well. This is because it is quite a complex solution.

Users need to be very conscious of how they set up the solution in terms of how they propose and ultimately set up the end terminals to make it easy to use for end-users. 

The setup on past projects had been quite difficult for two reasons: the first is that it's quite a technical tool so it takes a lot to set it up and customize it. The other issue is that there's a lack of tool experts, which makes it even more difficult to set everything up properly.

The solution does not interface well with other products and is difficult to implement.

The entire system needs to be redesigned to help improve overall usability and design.

When you synchronize or perform a task for event management from external tools, you have issues of performance because synchronization can take four or six hours before there is a solution.

It's very hard for the end-user to customize items, but if they were able to, it would be easier for them to arrange specific views and reports that would be more relevant to them.

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

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

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

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

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

I like the support but they could improve.

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

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

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

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

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

In the release that we currently have, the biggest challenge was reporting. It didn't have the reports that we needed out of the box. In fact, it didn’t have reports at all out of the box. It was a nightmare.

You need to use Crystal Reports to customize your reporting. In the next release, I want Service Manager to have its own reports. Straight out of the box, click a button and you get the report you want. I'm sure that with all the implementations that have been done, there must be some common reports which have been used.

It could have better user control of the user interface. You have to either sacrifice seeing what you can see or having to scroll a lot, one of the two.

I’m not sure what I can suggest to improve. We also got such questions from our customers; and we provided them with our contact in HPE. Not all of those requests are possible to get into the product; so we sometimes end up customizing it. For the moment, I cannot think of anything specific that I would change; but I'm sure there are multiple things that could be upgraded.

It needs good integration with the configuration database, that's lacking at the moment, It's not that good. 

It's very important to integrate also with other tools. They've shown the four suites that they are going to have in the future, so it's very nice. It's slim, but it needs a very good integration, and it needs a very good analysis and a relationship within the topic, so that you get the information for performance, quality, costs, and so on. 

The integration of all these topics and how they are interlinked, interconnected with each other, it's not that great at the moment.

It's more for tracking and documentation purposes, not that much for operation management purposes. You need to do a lot of customization to use it for operation management purposes.

The licensing model could be made more flexible. Some of the reporting capabilities could be adapted for some of the modern reporting tools.

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

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

• Pure cloud-based native functionality is lacking.

• It lacks templates to support out-of-the-box best practices.
  

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

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

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

I would like to see more connection to DevOps, but not in terms of deploying the suites, deploying the tool itself. Rather, I'm talking about DevOps and self-service for our customers so they can, as users, do something in our tool without getting too many rights or using the wrong options.

There should be some front desk provided or some options to let our users serve themselves, because we have about 5000 servers and 400 applications. Those applications are developing continuously with DevOps and that means that they release everything, every day. They need extra monitoring, extra automation, or some corrections.

Our service time-to-market is very long. We need to free them and let them do things by themselves in our tools.

We have a rather old version, so naturally there have been improvements to the latest versions. The issues we have with web-based access, user-based knowledge access, etc. have already been resolved, I think. I'll know it when we eventually upgrade.

The support and functionality of the portal could be improved. There was an old portal and they stopped it in the last version. Though there is a new portal, it's not really clear. It's a problem.

It needs to be a lot more flexible, a lot more user friendly, and a lot lighter, not so heavy. If it were lighter, it would react a lot quicker and take less of a toll on CPU resources.

The user interface is very clunky. It's only now beginning to be a web-based interface, but for now it's still very clunky.

Bring in new requested features to give the product a faster development cycle, ahead of the game!

I would like to see continuous improvement in the HPE SM.

Their end-user interface and technical support features could be improved.