Clarity SM Reviews

We primarily use the solution for incident and change management.

The newest customer portal is an improvement on the old one. However, we don't have the possibility to use it as we're on an older version.

The new portal for analysts is supposed to be very good as well.

The in-service catalog is quite useful.

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.

I've been working with the solution for ten years, or maybe longer.

The solution is highly stable. We're using the high availability product for our application server and the program server is enough for our organization. We are using the application in over 70 countries because we have many branches abroad. It works well for us.

We have more than 10,000 users using the system across 70 countries. It's quite scalable.

We have a partner in Poland, so we've never contacted technical support directly. If we have issues, we contact the partner, not CA.

We have experience with Jira and have decided to move over to Jira in the coming months.

About 15 years ago, I also worked with an HP product called HP Service Desk. At the time, CA was more flexible and we could create customizations ourselves. On HP this was not possible without external support.

The initial installation was not complicated. It was pretty easy because I had previous experience. Occasionally, however, we did have problems with the environment and the application server would be on standby for a long time. I didn't find this too be too much of an issue though.

The pricing is quite expensive. It's so cost-prohibitive we've decided to move away from it.

We're using an older version of the solution. It's my understanding that in the 17.2 version there is a completely different customer portal.

I would recommend the solution, even though we are leaving it behind. I know another big company in Poland, which is an insurance company. They use this product and they've upgraded to the latest version. They have good knowledge and good experience with this product and they are using also the CMDB and the knowledge database, which is more of the product than we use. They are quite satisfied with the results they get from it.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We use this solution to improve user experience. With the new xFlow and Service Point features, we are able to bring users even further to our side. This is a huge gain when we look at a heterogeneous environment in terms of culture and variety of systems in operation. Demonstrating ease of use and interaction for end users along the same line of usability for support analysts was a key factor in the success of the deployment.

Visible integration between ITIL Processes makes service management easier by providing a broad view of the health of the organization's technology infrastructure, cost savings, and future investments.

Another relevant point is the ease of customizations and integrations that are inevitable in midsize and large companies.

XFlow (Temperature) and Service Point together provided an extremely user-friendly and collaborative experience to the point of making it easy for all users of the product, whether end-users or analysts.

In these resources, knowledge management gains strength and favors the dynamics of use and service, ensuring agility in operations.

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.

This has the best possible stability.

The scalability is the best possible.

This solution has satisfactory service and support, even after the Broadcom acquisition.

We did use another solution previously but there was a need for evolution.

This initial setup of this solution was complex, considering external access for Mobile use.

The implementation was performed by the vendor and our internal staff, both with equivalent knowledge and expertise.

Our ROI is satisfactory.

My advice is to try to test the product a lot, including its procedural dependencies.

Advice from some end-users would be very interesting, as it would evaluate the ease of integrations and customizations.

We did not evaluate other options as we were already satisfied with the product and would incur a high cost.

Try to focus on Knowledge Management and CMDB. Use CA Productivity Accelerator to learn and automate CMDB integration as much as possible.

We use this solution for request and incident management, as well as configuration.

Initially, CA Service Desk Manager was used by two divisions within the organization. In the past two years was rolled out to two more divisions.

The most valuable features of this solution are reporting, configuration monitoring, and the Request and Incidents workflow.

The monitoring tool is in need of improvement.

The main purpose is for service desk use. It is a repository of information.

It helps when you have an incident or performing a problem change management process. You can view what all the relationships are between the CI that you are changing or using. It helps the engineers to better understand what they are facing.

It has all our configurations. All our infrastructure configurations are on a single pane of glass to view, allowing for one single point of information.

• 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.

It's very stable. I don't have any problems regarding to it. 

There are no issues with the scalability. It is fully supported.

All support for CA products is quite good. It is not the best support, but all our problems have been solved.

I was not involved. It was already implemented when I joined the company. It was migrated from another company, and I understand the migration process was not difficult nor complex. 

It is quite a good product, and it's stable. They have a lot of features that you can customize to your organization. 

Everything should be automated, because if you are trusting on users to create their information, it will be not the truth on the moment. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Stability of the vendor
• Support
• How the vendor is positioned in the market.

Our primary use case is managing incidents and requests from customers.

It performs very well.

For us it's indispensable to have all the cases in one place. It's the main tool for managing cases, day to day.

We can search open cases and closed cases to find what we have done in other incidents. We use the cases as a knowledge base to find what we did last time this incident occurred.

Also, prioritization is valuable and managing work queues.

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

It's pretty stable. The last versions are very stable.

Our installation is very small but the customer's experience is good.

Tech support is "so-so." Sometimes it takes too long for support people to understand what is happening. They always ask the same things, and start over with installations and with configurations and all that kind of stuff. And then, after all that, they start to ask what is happening. It takes way too long to start solving the problem.

Easy. In the latest versions it is straightforward.

When our company is investing in a new vendor, what is important to us is 

• support
• world-class software.

Overall, I would give it an eight out of 10 because it's a good product. I think it can improve some things but it's stable and it's useful.

Install it. I think it is easy to use. It's a good tool.

I help my clients make best use of the tool in their service management environment.

It performs pretty well.

It helps organizations manage their services in a way that treats them as services, and not as, "Oh, this is what I do," in isolation.

Being able to specify event rules and SLAs that can help to automate some of the processes that people are doing manually is valuable.

I could pick a dozen and say, "That's useful, and that's useful, and that's useful." The fact that it aligns very well with ITIL. I think that's probably one of my favorite things about it, because it's following up a general best practice for service management. That's important.

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.

It's been there for a long time. It's very stable. No issues whatsoever.

I've seen it scale to very large organizations and do it well. They've made improvements to help with that scalability.

I think they're a great team. I actually did some work for them for a few months, a couple of years back. Knowledgeable, friendly, helpful, and very professional.

I've been involved in initial setup many times. It can be complex, depending on the requirements of the customer, primarily, whenever the customer wants to deviate from the out-of-the-box, in a large way; if they want to over-customize because they think it should look that way. It's better to accept the way it looks rather than try to force it, because then when you come around to upgrading later, those customizations may or may not be appropriate.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria would be 

• stability
• reputation within the industry in general

• their following of general best practices, like ITIL.

I would rate it bordering on nine out of 10. It is an older based tool, it's been around for more than 25 years. They've made improvement, but it still carries with it some of its old roots.

Make sure that you are recognizing what your real needs are and not just going go with whatever hype is being presented to you.

We use it for the collection of tickets, to help our end-users, make sure they're taken care of in a timely manner. We Utilize various aspects of it to provide best customer service for them, to get their problems resolved.

Sending an email, that's the old way of doing things. This system is still relatively new. People still use email, but using the ticket system verifies that no one gets left behind. We're in a world of electronic mail. Some nice people can slip through the cracks. It's kind of how it is. But the ticket system makes sure that everyone gets taken care of, and that makes for a better customer experience. It's something we enjoy and they especially enjoy. We want to make sure that the new IT is not synonymous with, "Eh, don't wanna work with it."

It allows IT to handle users on a personal basis. It allows IT to have a name and a face, and we interact with the end-users, and the ticket system helps us to get them the help they need right away.

The ability to keep track. The work is tracked.

Provides ease of customer interaction. Gives the customer a general sense that they're being helped. Email works, telephone calls work too. But having something that's tracked in this way just makes things easier.

It also allows us to assign different areas, maybe it's a multifaceted problem. Whether it's a problem we have to work on, or another part that needs to be worked on with infrastructure; sometimes they're meshed together. This really lets the IT group and our group shine.

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.

We recently upgraded from the older version, 12.1, we went to 14.1, and it has gotten a lot better.

We have a lot of assistance from CA support now. We have some consistent support options with them. They get around to us really quickly. That's the great benefit with this new system, we really like it very much.

We use them many times. If there are some internal problems with the system, it's usually on the server base, server side of it. They've been very helpful in helping us get things resolved, especially since we have the newer version that's within the support frame. We were out of support for a few years, but they still helped the best way they could, gave us a few options. But now they've been quite good in helping us out.

Our servers were upgraded and over time we were noticing that there might be some issues with it because the older system had a few bugs and it but support options were limited. It was decided that we should get a newer, upgraded system to make sure we had the support from CA. Even though they did help us a lot with our older system, they were limited in what they could do. They still helped out. And the new system, now we create tickets, now things are resolved quite well. So any little issues, whether it is tickets not going to a user's email, things like that, are resolved.

I think we are comfortable with CA. We had heard of other options. My colleagues and I have used other ticketing systems as well before, in previous jobs. CA just seems to work for us overall, so that's why we stuck with it.

I was involved in the upgrade. We just recently did that this year. I was working the project management aspect of it to make sure it got implemented. I had a lot of help from other departments, so it was a very big team effort to get things done.

It went quite smoothly actually. We understand that now, with 17.1, it's even easier to upgrade, but the process didn't take that long. Considering the fact we'd been out of support on the older version and went to 14.1, it worked out quite well. And this is on a worldwide scale, it's used worldwide at Novus International, everyone uses it.

We especially like the look of xFlow. That looks very personal, so they can keep track of how things are going with their ticket, if it has been worked on, what the status of it is. It seems to be a little more user friendly. The user can see more from a distance right away.

I do recommend CA. Even though it can be complex, there are a lot of aspects to it that are fairly easy. There's a lot of material, CA has a lot of documentation to assist. Personally, I never knew of CA Service Desk at all, or even the name, before I came to this company five years ago. I adopted the system to help with any problems with it. The previous users who utilized and helped set it up, they weren't there anymore. It became my little project. I was able to get assistance from our group and from CA as well, to make it work out well.

So I would recommend it. From a newbie of that system I was able to help out, and CA was able to help out a lot, so it wasn't a huge learning curve.

We drive all of our operations for our enterprise solutions through Service Desk Manager. It has performed really well.

The flexibility and being able to connect to multiple products. It allows to use it the way we want to use it versus the way it came out of the box.

It has given us the ability to automate a lot of tasks, things we couldn't do before.

The flexibility. It allows us to do things, expand it, and integrate with our other solutions. Also, it's pretty easy to use.

• 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.

Stability is pretty good. We've made strides in making it more available. Switching to the High Availability model helped with that. We had some "growing" issues, upgrades, and the like.

Scalability has been good. We've been able to add new servers when we need to and it's been performing well.

We use tech support a lot. We do things in a lot of non-standard ways, and we end up finding a decent amount of bugs or corner-case kind of things.

I'd like to see things move a little bit faster with it. Sometimes we've had tickets open for a long time, but overall they provide a good service.

Although I wasn't involved in the initial setup I have been involved with upgrades. They have been fairly complex. We've had some issues with upgrades where we had to roll back and get some things fixed. Some things that we ended up tracking back to not following directions right, but then other things we've run into issues.

When selecting a vendor, support is the big one. Also, the capabilities; the fact that it can do what we want it to do. And then expandability, being able to customize it the way we need to.

I think the best advice I'd have is to really use the automation features and expandability to be able to make it do things the way you want it to do them. Simplify the way a user has to interact with things by using a lot of automation.

For the analyst, the user experience is better. Also, for the demo, it is a good experience for them, because they want to look at a fancy application and forms, and know that it is to easy to use them and create easy tickets.

The value for the clients is that you can save information in the application and get reports with that information.

We are also installing xFlow in our QA environment at the moment.

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

The stability is great.

We are working on installing in the production environment.

In some cases, I receive late information. In general, it is good.

It was not simple or complex to set up. It was medium with CA's support.

Its implementation was a little complex. I needed support with the service department of CA to work together to implement the version of the product.

In my work, we only use CA products.

I would recommend this version of the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: the customer service and the quality of the product.

There are different products for different purpose. The Service Desk is to take account of incidents and minor requests from the different area of the bank. The PPM is to organize projects. I know that the organization is using Spectrum, but it is out of my scope.

The Service Desk has performed very well. I chose it. It was my selection. I managed the implementation of the product. It is a very good product.

We have a very good relationship with all the users. When users have a problem, they report using Service Desk and it is very useful for this. All the interactions and orchestrations of every problem, we can analyze what happens in the organization and which kind of incident we have. It is a very good tool.

It is simple for me. Simple, and it is robust. It works very well.

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.

It is very stable. We have been using it since 2010. We have the usual problems, but no major problems.

Scalability is very good. We have scaled to more users and more functionality. 

The technical support answers your questions and partners with you. They have very good knowledge.

We were using Remedy previously. It was such a complex solution. It was very hard to maintain it. That was its main problem.

The initial setup was straightforward.

CA helped us with the installation.

We work with a lot of vendors, but they did not have this product.

Choose this product. I recommend this product for different companies. CA presents a case with our implementation.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We can trust him and that he will work to help us.