Serviceaide ChangeGear Reviews

We primarily use the solution for processes in management, incident management, and problem change configuration service requests.

The solution is a highly mature product. Because of this, it can stand up to any other product on the market.

The solution does not align as modern service solutions do. Seamless integration is no available among the processes.

Their service management application needs a lot of work. It’s in a really bad state right now.

They brought on a new interface that clumped all the processes and features of the solution into one. Still, it’s not really compatible with other solutions. Because of this, its rating has dropped in Gardner.

The solution needs to improve its reporting features. The user interface needs a lot of improvements.

The product needs to implement a cloud platform solution, which is lacking so far.

Their workflow engine is still segregated. It’s not embedded. If you need to do some workflow approvals, you cannot do them directly on the service desk. You have to go into Outlook and do an approval or you have to go in through another screen to handle the approval because the workflow engine they have is a separate product.

The solution is fairly stable, regardless of the version clients use. The serious challenge the solution faces, however, is that CA is not investing in the service management suite.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support has lost a lot of customer confidence. Being a partner, I’ve dealt with support tickets for months at a time, which is unacceptable. It’s something CA has to do a lot of work on to improve. Customers are unhappy.

If you are going with an out-of-the-box implementation, there isn’t too much difficulty with the setup. The configuration is always a challenge, however. You need to do a lot of customization based on customer requirements. Implementation can get quite complex depending on if you have to set up a lot of different databases, etc.

I’m a partner with CA Technology. We have clients that are working on various versions, including 11, 12, 14, and 17.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I’d rate the solution six out of ten.

Event-based.

Automatic tasks.

Flexibility to customize.

Four years.

No issues.

No issues.

Not applicable. On-premise or cloud, I do not need it.

Great. CA Technologies support is excellent.

Yes, many.

The initial setup was easy.

We did the implementation ourselves (in-house). 

I do not know.

Not applicable.

Many.

We like the fact that all the tools interconnect. We can do everything from Service Catalog, such as create change orders, without having to use our ticketing system. It automatically ties it in to it.

For example, for our new-hire process, we have it set up to automatically add our new users to the system. Our people can then go in and we have groups set up that they can say, "Okay, I want this", and it goes and grabs all the services and automatically creates the tickets to create the group. It makes the process a lot easier.

We're real small. We probably only have about 50 people in our IT department now. We used to be a lot bigger. We have about 2,000 employees, so there are 50 of us doing the work of a larger team.

Using the self-service functionalities we have been able to eliminate a lot of the support phone calls, and actually reduce a lot of our help desk staff. We no longer have to have a 24-hour help desk, because our employees can create the tickets themselves. Then, we get an alert and we don't have to do anything. So we've saved a lot of money doing it that way.

There are a few things I would like to see.Service Desk has a quick profile feature, where you can pull up everybody's environment, including all their assets, their ticket history and everything else. When I go in to actually look at their contact, I would like to see that same information, instead of having to go to two different places for it.

I think they could update some of the interface. It doesn't look as pretty as some of the other ones. I would like it to be more visually appealing. And they could make it a little bit easier to do customizations.

Also, I think Service Catalog could be a little more user-friendly to the end user. It's fine for somebody who's more technical, but I think sometimes my end users, who are in the newspaper and they're usually older and have a little more trouble with it. But, they've really done a good job of improving everything lately.

There's always room for improvement. It used to be much harder to get support and the tool didn't tie in as well to their other products. You'd have to jump through so many hoops to get it to work.

Stability is fantastic. I never have any problems.

The scalability is great. Also, they finally added the ability to cluster your services server. So if one goes down, it can automatically fail-over. Which was not possible before; I used to have to do it manually.

And now you can automatically do fail-over between the services. Plus, we can use the Process Automation Management tool for more than just service management. You can create your own virtual servers using PAM.

Technical support has been fantastic. Honestly, I've had a lot more luck with CA technical support than I've had with the consultants that we've paid lots of money to come out to our sight. They've really improved technical support. They have the CA community now and it's much easier to find things.

We were actually using a web-based solution. The impetus to go with CA was because we took our help desk and all of our support back from IBM. We found out we could save more money by keeping it on-site. And we could have better control of our assets, and everything else. So that was part of it. We were using ManageNow or something like that. I've used many other ticketing systems before as well. CA IT Service Desk does the most.

Plus, they have multiple solutions. They don't just have one web-based product. I can actually have my product and customize it the way I want to without going through them.

When choosing a vendor we want good support.

We've been using Cloud Service Management since 2009, so initial setup was much more complex back then.

We've gone through many iterations and we're now on the latest one. It's gotten progressively easier. With previous versions, if I was going to do an upgrade, I was like, "Oh, it's going to crash." I would have to do a system backup, because I knew I was going to have problems. Now, I don't have to worry about it. I know I can do an upgrade that night and the next morning my system will be up.

Remedy was really cost crazy. We thought about moving to ServiceNow, but it cost twice as much. The cost of Cloud Service Management isn't outrageous.

We also looked at Remedy and ServiceNow. There was another one, but it's been so long I can't remember which one.

Aside from the cost reasons for going with CA, the CA sales people were really good. We liked the fact that we could tie in all of our asset systems and we didn't have to get anything additional. Then we got Spectrum and everything to support it as well.

Make sure you take the training classes that they offer. When you have somebody come out to your site, make sure you sit with them and learn everything you can, because you're going to need that info later. We've had consultants come out for multiple products, and I always make sure to sit with them and go through everything. And they're also very good about what they do. They give you full documentation, so you can refer back to it after they leave.

It provides us with a very easy and flexible UI for CA Nimsoft Service Desk 7.

This product can totally automate service desk functions where very little phone and email interventions are required for resolution of tickets such as incidents, change request, problem tickets, etc.

Deployment and setup is a major difficulty and it could have been made easier.

The deployment was very difficult to handle. It's an unnecessarily difficult process that requires third-party assistance to do correctly.

It has been stable. We haven't had any issues with instability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

It was very complex and very difficult. It wasn't straightforward at all.

You should make an agreement with CA for deployment and setup support. Without it, deployment and setup are very complex and difficult.

It's quite a complete entry into the SaaS ITSM market with a reasonable price point.

We do not use the product ourselves in production, but provide support and expertise on it for our customers.

Importing data with relations is difficult and could be better.

I've used it for one-and-a-half years.

We encountered no issues with deployment.

We encountered no issues with stability.

We encountered no issues with scalability.

We are providing support ourselves, but the third-level support of CA is great.

The basic functions are usable out-of-box, so there's no need to configure a lot.

We are the vendor team.

It's price is very competitive if there are only a few licenses needed.

It is something that everyone uses with federation capability. Other than that, I cannot specify exact features as many are so beneficial.

I would love to see better two-factor authentication as that would really help us and make a big difference.

Historically, we have had issues, but recently it has worked very well and now we have no complaints.

At the beginning, it didn’t work well, but it has adapted well over the years and is now strong.

The support is pretty good. The follow up is great; it is 24 hours, so that’s been useful. Furthermore, it has a good escalation path, which is essential.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

We looked at the product stability: in our industry if it isn’t stable, then we are in trouble.

The most valuable feature is the ability to easily create service catalogues for our customers, something that we didn't have previously with the other tool we were using, which was SDM.

Having the self-service tool rolled out to all of our customers using CSM is a way it's improved our functioning. With SDM, we weren't able to fully utilize the service catalogues for self-service. So, with CSM, because of its ease of building out the tool, we were able to transition to self-service.

Usability for IT analysts could be improved. There are some filters, but we'd like to be able to save filters that are common to many analysts. There are also some minor tweaks to day-to-day operations of the tool, which are filters and the search functionality. I'd also suggest making some settings default rather than requiring the user to select them.

No issues with deployment.

I haven't noticed anything because it's browser-based. I haven't noticed any kind of dramatic instability beside the fact that our environment isn't fully rolled out with Chrome. We are a Microsoft environment, so working with Internet Explorer could have its latency, but it's not the tools, it's more of what our devices are and what our infrastructure is.

We've used it for about two months, so it's really in its infancy stage. I mean we know potentially there could be a lot to scale to. As of right now, we're still taking baby steps.

I've used communities a lot. It's beneficial and very timely. That's the very impressive part: I pose a question and I get a response really quickly.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. To me, I guess there were some other folks that might have other opinions, but, for me, I thought it was logical and easy to follow.

Definitely use it in an organization that has not aligned their processes yet. So, you definitely get your processes in place organizationally, and internally within IT. Be sure you know what you have because it’s easier to mould with CSM. We've tailored some of our work processes with CSM, which is also flexible so you can make changes later on.

I'd say that the most valuable feature for us is the management of all our tickets, with change incident requests. The service catalog is huge for us, with which we just went live. Prior to this, we had no self-service, so that's a big plus for us.

The self-service is huge for us. It allows the customers to place their own orders and request. We can then automate ticket workflow and ticket distribution assignments.

I would really like to see a mobile app for our analysts. That would be a huge improvement, a huge win. Also, some type of mechanism to manage analysts who are on call would be nice.

No issues encountered.

We have been seeing a little bit of latency here and there, but we haven't been able to identify it. We are still in the process of trouble shooting it, seeing if it's something with the network or with the services of the product.

We just went live two months ago, so it's hard to say. I would imagine, yes, it's very easy to expand our service catalog and our forms on there. So, it's very nice.

They get back to me really quick when I have a critical ticket. I logged a critical ticket just on Friday. So, it's nice that they got back to me within half an hour. That was a big plus.

It was easy as all the tools they provide. Not having to deal with building anything in the database and just being able to put in custom attributes and communication templates. It was all really easy.

This is really easy solution to scale up and get get going to add new catalog items. It's very simple.

The most valuable feature to me are--

• Workflows with Knowledge Management
• Dictionary
• Thesaurus and synonyms
• Permissions
• GUI HTML editor
• Metrics you can get on every document and ability to aggregate those to get really good reporting

It's provided self-service and automation, notifications, and reporting. That’s where we spend most of the time fishing for things. It’s good on a day-to-day and macro perspective.

It’s always the little things. There used to be a spell-check function that allowed us to add technical terms, but it no longer exists, and I’d like to have that back.

Also, adding group names is a complicated process that involves adding analyst names, and analysts change all the time, so it's nearly impossible to consistently add group names.

There's no issues with deployment.

We switched out whole-knowledge search to an “and” instead of “or” search. We have 10,000 examples. But this made it unstable and it timed out in the middle of searches. Now we have just one URL that supports people use and another for the general masses.

Theoretically, it’s great, but there are those time-out issues. It’s a web-based product, which we like, and thus are able to scale sufficiently.

I haven’t had to use them for a while, but they’ve been good for the last that 15 years I’ve used it. For a while, they were never in my time zone, but not any more.

I wasn’t involved, but I installed some GUIs that were straightforward to set up. Also, the settings – workflows and templates - were very straightforward as well.

It loses points because it’s not GUI enough too "code"-y.

You should go into their sites and communities. They’ve built that up a lot and you can get help without contacting support, e.g. YouTube videos.

Finally, plan exactly what it is that you want.

The most valuable features for me are:

• Scalable architecture,
• Customization potential - the UI, background, and data movement allows you to be able to tailor to the nitty gritty details of what you might need in your environment, and
• Advanced workflow management.

It has the ability to integrate with other CA tools (we use a lot of others). It fits well into the CA ecosystem of multiple products.

It needs a better integration engine.

A UI for a lot of the systematic commands which are still command line interface-based needs improvement.

Good stability – partially because we implemented it well for hundreds of concurrent users (not thousands) and we never have issues.

It's planned for, but not added on so easily. With newer versions with the next upgrade we plan to issue it to more users.

Most often I try to go to high-level support personnel. They redundantly ask for the same information as you move higher up in the support information system, so you need to give them so much information that that often doesn't matter. Once you find the right person, it's easier to get what you need.

There was a merger and acquisition and we had competing products, so we looked for a tool that could merge two products, initiating the transfer. We looked for commitment from the vendor for further development of their tool.

The complexity depends on how you set up. A tiered approach focusing on the modules of management within the program would be best. You can't just roll out all the modules all in one swoop.

We also looked at BMC and ServiceNow. We chose CA because they integrate with other systems already, so this was easier.

There’s a lot of practices that others consider standard, that you need to adopt yourself or enable/configure, as it's not a given that it's already there.

Size of your business will dictate whether or not you should be looking at this tool. This is not appropriate for a small or even a medium-sized business. Too much overhead for a small company. There's the need for continual maintenance.