OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

The most valuable feature of the solution is usability. We use the tool to keep track of our incidents, technical changes and problems. It enables us to address the root cause of incidents. Also, the service request management is also valuable. It addresses all those areas for us and is pretty key for us.

Before we had Service Manager, we had a number of products from other vendors. When we implemented Service Manager, it gave us a standardized, centralized tool which we were able to leverage globally.

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

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

The product is quite stable. We're having some issues with performance, but I think it's down to the way we've implemented it rather than something specifically within the tool. It just doesn't respond as quickly as we might expect. It's not that it's terribly slow; it's just that it's not as quick as you'd want it to be. I think that some things are more to do with our implementation, because it's an on-site, on-premise install we have.

It certainly scales. We work with some very large vendors and they use the same software. So it's quite clear that organizations that are larger than us don't have any problems using it.

I personally haven't used the technical support. The team that I work with in conjunction for delivery of the tool use it. It seems to be okay for them.

We were using lots of different solutions. We were using an old, heavily customized BMC Remedy workflow-based tool, which we were quite happy with at the time. But our company was acquired by our parent company and there were other tools that were in use by that company. Plus there were other companies that were acquired. Through acquisition you end up with an array of products that are in the same space, so what we did when we put HPE Service Manager in place, is we consolidated all of our tool sets into one, and we picked HPE. We didn't have one, most important criteria to satisfy. I think we had a lot of criteria.

Initial setup can be quite complex. One of lessons that we learned is that we configured the tool to make it fit with our processes and the way we wanted to run the processes. I think it's too much work. It's a lesson to be learned that you basically need to adapt your processes to fit with how the tool works, rather than the other way around. We ended up with an overly complex configuration, which causes us pain every time we do an upgrade. We're working now to simplify that environment by removing the customizations and go back to a more out-of-the-box standard tool.

Before choosing HPE Service Manager, we were BMC Remedy customers. We were quite happy with that. Remedy would have been on our short list.

My main advice is to work with the tool the way it is and don't customize it. I guess that’s one of things we picked up that's very key, to be honest. I guess just determine where your priorities are and start working with whichever module covers them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using the solution probably since about 2010.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regarding setup, it depends on which tool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have used it for four years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most valuable features are the ability to track tickets, analyze incidents, and get dashboards on how the environment is performing in terms of incident management. For example, when there's network downtime, you're can track how long it takes to resolve incidents. So you can see how long it took from the time the ticket was created to escalate it if necessary, and how long it took to close it.

There's a lot of accountability now. You can hold somebody accountable for incident resolution. You are able to see when a ticket was created and when a ticket was escalated for resolution. At the end of a period (week or month), you're able to see how the environment is performing in terms of how many incidents have been created, how they've been closed, and how the teams are performing. You get meaningful reports on how teams are doing.

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.

We implemented it in 2014. So far, it's been good.

The product is quite stable. It is quite good.

The scalability is quite good because we've been able to integrate other products like the Business Service Management into it. From a monitoring perspective, we are now able to create tickets as incidents happen, and correlate the ticket with other incidents. So, it's quite stable and scalable. You can do a lot of stuff with it.

We have used technical support through the HPE partner, the guys we use to implement the solution; and, in some cases, through HPE itself.

Previously, we were using Siebel HelpDesk. It was not suitable for our purposes. We needed something that was ITIL based; so HPE Service Manager fit what we wanted. It is easy to use, cost effective, and ITIL based.

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.

It's a good product.

I would advise colleagues to get the latest release because I’ve been told the reporting has been sorted out in this new release. I am interested in upgrading to get that. If what I'm told is true, then that's a good product.

It allows us to manage all of our incidents and requests in a single location where we have multiple applications previously.

It allows us to perform better tracking, especially manpower, and then tracking incidents and things back to particular configuration items.

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.

It's been pretty stable.

It hasn't been an issue. We're fairly small, so it doesn't need to scale much.

We've always had good experience with tech support.

There's a lot of features we're not using currently, some of which we're thinking about using. There's just a lot to it, a lot more than we really need in most of our cases right now.

Definitely check in with Packard App. There's a lot of good software applications that they provide. They've got a good integration with their hardware. Overall, HP will just give you a really great solution.

The most valuable feature is the whole compact thing. The ticketing tool has everything in it that we need.

There are some ups and downs. On the upside, we don't need to create any very complicated integrations because it's quite compatible with all the other HPE tools which we need for our end-to-end business. On the downside, it cannot really operate in the cloud; but other than that, everything is good.

It has improved our communication between teams. The distribution of issue solutions, for example, is integrated in one application. I know there are also the databases for the solutions, the known error databases and so on, which all improve the behavior of the company because everybody knows how to solve problems.

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 is stable now. We are quite special. In the past, integrations were kind of complicated. We had some ups and more downs. Now that we've switched to the Windows service, it is really reliable. The application's performance reached a completely different level; so it's quite fast. Users are happy about it.

The availability of the application is not comparable to what we had in the past. We had downtime maybe once or twice a month. At the moment, we do not experience anything like that.

Over the last five years, we had a huge project which involved everybody in the company switching over from Peregrine Service Center to HPE Service Manager. That was quite a huge achievement. In the past, we were not very satisfied with it; but after we upgraded the system, everything was okay.

The quality of the support depends on the type of support. We have multiple kinds of support. Either our customers contact our operations teams via service manager to provide support for the storage service, or we have a centralized and localized support directly for the application itself. I fall into the latter type of support.

In general, we are using multiple tools from HPE. Compliance and compatibility between those tools is better if you use the same vendor.

From my point of view, the most important criterion in picking a vendor is the quality of the support. We are in a position of the customer. We have the premium support for cases when something is not functioning and we cannot make it work.

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.

I was not in the company when the decision was made to choose HPE Service Manager. We have a management committee that makes those decisions.

The best solution depends on your needs. You should consider different solutions and decide which best fits your needs. Ask yourself whether HPE Service Manager can provide you what it provides us.

It's pretty well-structured in modules.

It's easier to roll it out within the company and to sustain the processes.

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.

It's stable.

Not that scalable. The functionalities still need to develop some, so that it's really scalable, and you can use it for operations management. 

It was, I think, a CA solution. SoftDirect, I think; there were several. It was a company decision to switch but I wasn't at the company at the time.

I wasn't at the time, but I think they were further considering the SoftDirect that they had. They had HPE and also another provider. There were three in the running.