Clarity SM Reviews

We use it in our IT department to connect with our customers.

The performance has been excellent.

By connecting us with our customers.

It enables our coordinators to connect to our customers, and our customers are number one.

It adds tons of value. It gives us one central location to know, not only who is contacting us, but what they're contacting us for, what application they're contacting us for.

The new chat feature, I love that. They are always one step ahead of what we need. Usually, if I need something, I contact my rep and they tell us you have it.

In general, in terms of improvement, I would say our reps need to be a little more one on one. In the past we've had issues with that. But our current rep we love. 

Maybe training could be better.

Just little technical tweaks here and there. Like more options. For example "Organization." We wanted that to be available inside the change order, as well as the ticket and the request. And that's not available.

It's always on and it's always there. We've never had any issues with it being unstable.

Scalability is great. We can use it in our company from our IT department to our sales department. It works for everyone.

Tech support is fast. Fast, knowledgeable. I like that. I don't have to contact them often, just whenever I have a question.

I was not involved in the initial setup but I was involved in the upgrade. The solution was already there. But when I started, I knew that there were new features that we needed, so we upgraded.

We went from 12.1 to 14, so there was a lot involved in it. But from what I hear, the upgrade from 14 to 17 is way easier. So I look forward to that.

The issues we had were migration issues, getting our information from one place to the next and making sure everything was as everyone needed.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is communication. I like them to be upfront, honest, and transparent. Transparency means, when I call them they're honest about what they have available and what they can do, and not beating around the bush.

Our primary use case is mainly for incident problem requests and change management. The overall experience has been pretty good. It is customizable. You can customize it and make it work to the client's needs. Overall, the experience is pretty good.

Since we partnered, we go in and implement this kind of solution outside to other clients or other customers. Overall, depending on the customers' needs, the response is mixed. Some people who are process people, they like to adapt the tool, they like to follow it. They are more happy when we show them the power of incident power change request management. 

Some customers, the adaptability of any ideas in tool, is a little bit harder for them. Over the years, or over a period of time, the acceptance of the tool grows. 

The overall experience is pretty good. I love being in the process management area.

Ability to write macros, which can in turn trigger some condition or could be conditioned to basically trigger notifications, the workflow desk, or web calls. It is huge benefit to customize it.

I would like to see the customization being more flexible. What that means that we do not have to go through a complicated process of applying a custom field to a Service Desk Manager application if it would be easier to do through an interface, which would be nicer.

Some of the scripting parts, especially the spell scripts behind the scenes, if that could somehow be incorporated into the tool that would be helpful.

There are issues. Of course, then there is the CS port and Regal patches. They give us patches and we apply them. 

Overall, the stability is pretty good for the product, but there are gaps that could be fixed.

Solution is scalable. It does work. We can modify it up better to make it the way we want it to work. 

We use it for different clients and each client has a different number of analysts and different number of customers. I have seen some large scale implementations where they have over a 1000 people using it even in the country or outside of the country in multiple countries and even within small organizations as well.

We have implemented it for larger and smaller companies.

The technical support consists of very knowledgeable, helpful people. I know several of them personally.

Our issues are P1 or P2. We do not have the smaller scale issues because of our being on the technical side. We can resolve those issues by ourselves, within our team, or within the contacts that we have. In our organization, they can help us resolve some of those issues. Our technical issues are larger scale issues.

I am a consultant and we implement products for the tools. I only come into the picture once the product has already been sold. I am not part of that decision-making team.

It is not straightforward, but it is not complex since I have only done it about four or five thousand times. It depends on who is installing it if it would be complex.

Compared to some of the other products, I think we are bit behind.

I would highly recommend to install CA. Not only the CA Service Desk Manager tool, but the overall value that CA portfolio products can bring. If you can extend, you can get a grasp of management, you can get into IDCM client management, you can get into more automation and process automation.

The more add-on of the features that you can expand into your internal companies capabilities, the better, because CA has so many products.

The products are there that is why we work with CA's product suite. Other than the great knowledge of skill set available at CA that can help us guide through the project, the success is great.

I feel comfortable working with the tool as I have been working with it for years. 

Incident request, problem, and change management.

It's a solution. It needs a facelift, but it works. It improves our service delivery process. We're more efficient. We're leveraging the ticketing system, which is always more efficient, so we can measure and improve.

Extraction, the reporting tool that I tied into it. It's real-time reporting that's easy to use.

The user interface is just boring. I'd like to see a more interactive UI, from the end-user perspective, and from the analyst's perspective. I would like a product that looks like it was developed maybe in 2015, or at least 2012. Right now you see it, it's very flat.

It's pretty stable.

Scalability is good. All I have to do is buy more licenses and I can scale up as big as I want - maybe stand up another server and get a bigger database - but I'm okay.

They already had this stood up when I came to this company. But I own the system now. We just upgraded about a year and half ago and it was painful.

First of all it cost me a think $70,000 to pay my consultant. We had the testing of the dev environment, and then testing of the production environment, so it was two weekends out of my life. And stuff broke. 

For me the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is quality, because if the quality's not there then it's my time; quality of the vendor's service that they provide. If they're going to upgrade, I expect them to do the testing. Cost is a concern, but I'm already paying out the nose.

I heard an industry analyst say this once, and this is very true: No one likes their ticketing system. Everybody wants another one. It's just a difficult space. However, I would look for something that users want to use, and if you can get that amount of self-service tickets to rise, your cost of support goes down. So a good user interface is important.

Right now we have our IT analysts, about 500 users, that use Service Desk Manager primarily. They put in tickets, requests, incidents, and then track changes. Those are our use cases for it right now.

It's a great ticketing, tracking system. 

It also provides the front end for the employees too. It's pretty basic, but it gives them the means to reach out to IT so they don't have to pick up the phones. That's one of the big benefits.

Also, the flexibility in the tickets that are created, and what we can change and modify, is a big benefit.

There is a lot of flexibility in the system. There has not yet been a case where we've had people come to us and say, "Hey, can you guys do this?" and we can't. Some of it is obviously a little bit more complicated at times, but the flexibility in the system provides a lot.

Giving our end users what they need to perform their jobs better is highly valuable.

One thing that I'd like to see is with the Scoreboard usage. Right now, you have to create the Scoreboards individually for roles or users. If they could separate that functionality, and create the scoreboards separately, and then just link scoreboards to roles and users - that way you could reuse the same ones - that would be a huge benefit. I know, because they're a nightmare to manage at times.

Overall, the stability is pretty good. I think we step on our own toes when it comes to stability, more than the stability of the system itself. If you configure it to the specs, it seems to be working perfectly fine.

The scalability is pretty good. We've introduced new environments, new remote offices, into it and are able to incorporate them with pretty small impact.

I like the technical support. I've had pretty good instances with it, and feedback. They're really quick, typically. Even when I have really problematic issues, not just Service Desk related, they stick with me so it works out well.

We were a CA house, and then we outsourced to a company that brought Remedy in for the ticketing system. When we got rid of them, we needed to bring our own ticketing system back, and we brought CA back, we brought Service Desk back. We could have gone elsewhere, but we chose to bring it back into the environment.

I was involved in the upgrade, the most recent upgrade that we did, not the initial setup. MGM Resorts has been on it for a while, but I did do the upgrade.

I was pretty new to it, and we've done patch upgrades since then. There are a lot of steps in it. But what I'm seeing here, at the CA World conference, is that they have new utilities that make it more seamless. I'll be interested to see when we go to '17 what that does for it.

We didn't. Because we had been a CA Service Desk house before, we brought it back in.

Our users access it via the web. We have external and internal sources, and we're now introducing the mobile app portion so our computer engineers can respond to tickets remotely.

We're not currently using xFlow. I'm trying to push my boss to use it because I think there are benefits of having everything right there in your face. Service Desk right now, you have to really get into the tickets in order to get to some of the stuff that xFlow has puts right there.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor is seeing their desire and interest in making sure they understand what we need, and then making sure that they can do that. If they can't do that, see what improvements they can make to give us at least steps forward towards something that we may need.

I would highly recommend Service Desk Manager. The use, from an administrative stance, is pretty simple; and even from an analyst and employee's stances. It's an easy to use system, as far as ticketing systems go, because some of them can be really inundating and complex. Service Desk is pretty straightforward as far as use goes.

It is mostly used for support. If customers have issues, they log tickets and the issues hopefully get fixed.

It works well for this. We do some things a little strange as you can customize everything, so it has to handle different things, and it also does this well. 

Probably it streamlines the organization. They have actually had it longer than I have been there. So I am guessing in the past, support tickets were probably handled through email and stuff like that, so I am sure things got missed and lost. Now, it is all there and stuff does not get lost.

It is easy to tell what needs fixing and the priority of things.

Probably the support end of it. You can track where the ticket status is all the way from the beginning to the end, and the whole company has access to it.

It seems to be fine. We have had it for a long time.

We had a few issues with the last upgrade. It was actually caused by another system that it talked to, it was not Service Desk's fault.

It works well. We have lots of stores that call in. We have gone from 200 stores to 600 stores and it supports all of it.

I have not really used technical support, but things get fixed by them on time and I have heard good feedback.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but was involved with one upgrade of it. The upgrade was pretty complex. They are really focusing on fixing the complexity of the upgrade, so it looks like it is going to be a lot easier.

We had a consultant helping us a little during the upgrade. 

I have no clue on pricing.

Get a demo. Try it out. See how it works.

I have been surprised by how many products CA has. We also use Agile Central, which used to be Rally. We just started to use it in the last year and a half, probably, so we are fairly new.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Bigger companies are usually better, just because there is other help online if you have issues. We have some vendors that we might be one of five customers if something breaks, and there is really no community to help. It always helps to have a good community around the vendor

We use it as our ticketing system, as well as our ability to use CMDB and change management, and for our incident request management.

It has performed very well in these functions. We have been using it for eight years now.

It has helped us to organize a lot of our assets, so we have configuration items to attach to our change management. We can have tickets for change management and set them aside for an approval process. That is something we have never had before, and it is something we have been able to divide up amongst our different campuses for ticketing use. That is something we have not been able to do either.

I would say change management and request management, as well as CMDB. 

We would like to see them revamp, or rework, a lot of their configuration management database structures. We hear that is on the horizon. We are very excited about that. That is something we use a lot. 

We would like to see them integrate more of a service catalog, which is more of an Amazon-type fill in your bucket, then sign in, once you decide what you want. This is something that we would like to see from the product, as opposed to what we have seen in the past, which is login, then go pick. It would be nice to say, "I like this, I like this." Fill up your cart, then go buy it.

There is room for improvement. I think the product is going in a different direction than what is has before, which I think is good. I like that they are looking at things, and they are opening themselves up to the community and allowing for people to bring enhancements to them and ideas. To be able to share those ideas with their management.

Our initial installation of the application was on a different platform. However, since we moved it to Windows, with a Windows database, things have been very stable as far as it is concerned. 

We were using Linux beforehand, and it just was not stable enough. It had way too many problems, and we found out the customer base for Linux was small, so was the support. Therefore, moving into Windows was the better idea for us. It is much more stable now than it ever has been. We did the move in 2010.

We have been able to utilize the system across all our different campuses. We find it to be fairly scalable, as far as bringing it up. We have not done HA yet, or any kind of high availability. That is something we are looking at as a possible future change. Right now, with our user base, we are pretty simple, but we find that it is scalable. It is something we are looking at in the future. Just not right now.

We have three different campuses, serving probably about 700 analysts, 40 different help desks, and about 70,000 possible customers.

They are much better than eight years ago.

We have received much better support. People that really know what they are talking about. They are able to help us better than they were in the past. We have had less breakdowns in how long it takes to respond to us. Their response time has been improved over the last five years, or so. The response to us, as far as making enhancements or changes, has been good. We have had good luck with technical support. I have no problems with it at this point.

I think they are doing rather well, as far as their support. Where I work in the university, we have about 50 different applications that we support within our department, with a wide range of varying support structures and support. They are probably one of the top vendors which we work with that do well in response to us and helping us out. 

Usually, we look for a new solution because most of the group does not like a product, and they go after a different product. It is not usually something we look at as a corporate standpoint, because we are a state entity. There are always those that can get involved and say, "Hey, we want to make a change." It is not always just us that say, "Hey, let's go and do it." 

Right now, the CA Service Desk Manager is a set standard for the university. All three campuses are using it, but there are some other help desks out there that are smaller help desks. Local help desks that are using other tools. Smaller tools. So, it is not like they have to use it from a corporate standpoint, but it is available to them if they want it.

I think we had the Amdocs product, which we had used before. Then, we had what is called Request Tracker, which is an open source tool for consulting. I can't remember some of the other ones. For this one, a lot of it came down to price, and what they could get for us. Then, it came down to the capabilities of making large changes that we could not make. 

At the time, which would of been 2008, it was all web-based. A lot of the stuff that was being brought in was either Microsoft only, or it was client-based technology. This was a web-based technology, so that is kind of why we stuck with it at the time, but things have changed in 10 years. That was the original thought.

Engage with consultants from the vendor at the very beginning. Learn the product, then train yourself to work on it. It is something you can work on yourself with a lot less consultation from the vendor. Also, take small steps before you start beginning with different parts of the tool. Do not try to bite off too much, as a lot of companies will try to do. Start with one, then work your way towards the others. 

We are currently not using xFlow yet, but it is something we are going to take a hard look at as to whether or not it will be useful for us.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: I think a lot of it has to do with where their niche is in the market. 

A lot of the decisions that are made are based upon bringing everybody in to have some sort of a RFP process, where they sit down, and do some sort of bidding. It is usually a bidding war, because were a state entity. I would like to say that we could pick a product based upon whether they are the best, but it doesn't always work that way.

I would personally like to see it where a product is more flexible. A product has the ability to make changes in the different environments, especially from a support standpoint. When you would go and look at different ways that help desks, or support, is structured across corporations, or across higher educations, in this case. There could be a lot of segmentation going on in lots of different places. It is nice if you are able to flexibly change the product to bring it to different customers, so you can support their needs. Flexibility is an important key for different vendors, but for us, it is nice. 

We would also like to see them challenge themselves and not stick with the norms of specific platforms, such as Microsoft or Mac, even though typically businesses will only code to a specific platform like Windows. It is nice to see others do things where it works with different browsers, or it works with different platforms. That helps us out, because in our world it does not work all homogenized with a single platform. It is lots of different platforms.

It's our primary ITSM tool for managing problem chains and incident management.

I think it's performed okay. I've been with PenFed for a couple of years. I think one of the drawbacks is that we have adequate support within PenFed.

It has allowed us to be more efficient in our problem and change management processes and procedures.

I think the incident chain and Problem Management modules are key to IT being able to effect change within the organization, and manage that change effectively through ticketing systems and approvals, etc.

I took a breakout session on CA Service Desk here at the CA World conference. We're at version 12.9 and they're on 14 and getting ready to go to 17, so just looking at some of the features that I saw in the breakout session on 14, I would like to see us get to that version so that we can exploit a lot of the functionality that's available with 14.1.

I think it's a pretty stable platform. I think we don't necessarily exploit a lot of the features and functionality within the product because we don't really have a good support network with the company.

For example, right now we're not at the current release. We're back-leveled as far as the releases go. Our internal support doesn't know the product as well as they possibly should or could.

I think the solution is scalable. We just have not leveraged the scalability aspects of it, or the latest versioning of it.

We've used it. Again, our team doesn't really know the product that well so they use technical support when they runs into issues. CA's technical support, is pretty good. Our company reaches out to them frequently because there are things we don't know, so we rely on them. They've bailed us out a few times.

I wasn't there when they made that decision. When I got there they had already implemented it, but I think they didn't have a real viable ITSM tool for effecting problem change and incident management, so they needed a tool to do that.

I think we're probably looking to move to another solution.

The company has invested in ServiceNow for the facilities side of the business, so they're already using that on to manage facilities, ticketing and the like. And ServiceNow is probably the leader in the industry when it come to this ITSM tool.

Personally, my most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• stability
• reliability
• scalability
• good technical support.

I give it a six out of 10 overall, and that's because I haven't really seen us be able to exploit a lot of the functionality that exists within the tool, because of limited resources internally to support it.

Stay current with versioning and make sure that you're exploiting all of the functionality that exists within the tool so that you're getting the most out of the tool for the money that you're paying for it. 

Knowledge management. Most of the idle functionality, incident, change requests, and knowledge.

We centralized our knowledge from various sources into one source of truth that is continually updated. We have processes built around that. We have a lifecycle around the documents. We have good reporting, so we can show an ROI by tickets of time waited with people searching knowledge themselves. We have decreased training and talk time, and all those good stats, just by reusing information, not reinventing it, every time we get a call.

The knowledge.

There are a few things which bug me about it. For recent searches, if you are an analyst, if I click on it, it will pull up everything that I have looked at for the last ten years. Works great on the end user, they see their last five searches, or their last five documents, that they have looked at, but it does not work on the analyst side.

There are a lot of messages that just are not necessary. For example, every time you go to view mode in a document, even if you have not updated it, it is like, "You have to save this." Why? You just keep clicking things.

Something I have been asking for, probably for 20 years, we have a workaround for it, but they really want user names in the document owner and subject expert fields, and that is just not practical. I put group names in, and I have to do like three extra steps, because it does not recognize the user, and eventually it will save it. I have talked to people about that, years ago, and they were just like "No, it should be a user", and it should not. The people change. The groups are more consistent and will not change. So, I would like to be able to set that up.

On permissions, there are options to do groups and options to do roles. What is practical, you have to pick one or the other, for both read and write permissions. So, what would be more practical is to allow groups for write permissions, because there is probably only one group that should have write access, but then allow roles for the read access. E.g., all analysts can see this, but you have to be in this one group to edit the document and make any updates.

The stability is good. However, there will be slow times. The analysts experience that more than I do. They have a lot of windows open and stuff. The knowledge does not do it too much. They experience it more with tickets.

It is pretty good. I have used it. Our company is like 10,000 employees. My previous company was approximately 100,000 employees, and it worked fine for both.

I have not used it in a long time.

My part of the initial setup was pretty straightforward: setting up workflows, categories, and all that. It has a good GUI interface, even the admin functions have a good GUI interface. You do not have to be incredibly technical to use it.

It is very comprehensive. You can use it for the whole idle range of processes, including idle. It integrates pretty well with your contacts and the tickets. The integration between the ticketing and knowledge is huge, because that is a best practice. The knowledge is great. It is simple but efficient, and it works.

We are on an older version. I did look at the newer version in the self-training. The old version looks older, and the new one looks a little newer. It is more integrated. It sounds more mobile. So, it sounds like they have made a lot of the improvements that we do not have in our version. Import and export of documents by like category, for example, which I would love.

We use it as a help desk ticket. Anytime users have a problem, they can go in, put the ticket in, and we are able to track what the technicians do.

Its benefits. Going back to the ticketing part, we are benefiting by being able to put time to what our technicians are doing. Without the ticket there, without them having something that says, "Hey, I worked for this user to do this." We do not have anyway of tracking without the software of how much time they are spending on different things that they are working on.

The ticketing aspect. Knowing that there is a ticket there. Something that we can justify what our users have done for our end users.

I come from a ticket background. I have been with this company for about a year, but I have been in the ticketing system with my previous company for the last six. The big thing, or the problem, that I have is not being able to see tickets on a bigger scale. I can see the request, or if it is the way they categorize them, but I can't see the overall bigger picture. 

Let us say, for example, I have a technician that is out for a week, and I want to go into all of his open tickets regardless whether it is a request incident or a change order. I can't do that very easily. I have to go through and look at the request. I have go through and look at the instance. I have to go through and look at change orders individually. Instead of being able to say okay what is on this technician's docket across the board. I have no way of doing that.

We are still working towards integration with the hardware as well, where I have seen others products more tightly integrated with hardware. For example, with Quest KACE (formerly Dell), the hardware is right there. I can easily add hardware for a user to a ticket. I know you can do that in this, but it is not as easy.

The stability seems stable and robust enough. There are parts inside, which I could see being done differently.

The scalability is good. As far as it goes, we are not that big of a company, but it seems to do well for us in this area.

Not being part of the process when we choose this product, because I have only been with the company for a year. In any kind of software like this, if you can take it for a test drive, because we did change software at my old job, that is a real good key or determining factor as to whether or not you like the software. Take the software for a test drive in your work environment.

Change management. We use it to control changes throughout the company. Developers submit change orders and it flows through to QA, and then on to our production deploy. We use CMDB to be sure we understand the impact to changes. So, the focus is for auditing and reducing changes that break things. That's how we use it.

It's performed well. It's a reliable product. 

It keeps all of our changes in one spot, so it's easy for management to see any given changes that are happening, and how they cross pollinate with CMDB.

• The auditing
• The view it provides into who's doing the work
• How long it's taking to do the work, where the black holes are in terms of the work

I've heard about the xFlow. I'm looking for the improved user interface. A lot of people complain about the amount of time it takes to do things in Service Desk. It's a very old product, 20 years, so there is a lot of legacy there, hard to shift. 

We would love to be able to do more on our mobile app for our technicians that wander the floors. We don't use the mobile app because its very difficult to use. I understand there are upgrades in the works there. 

If I had to choose, it would be more around the user interface than the mobile experience.

Stability is good. We've had a couple of outages but it's not a chronic problem.

In terms of scalability, I don't know if you can get integration. There have been complaints about integration with other tools. A lot of people wish that Service Desk had more of a REST API interface instead of SOAP. Some of our networking guys - we're trying to drive automation - and the enterprise, would like to see an easier way to interface with Service Desk.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to me is

• a company that's financially stable
• I like leaders in their industry; I think CA is one of those
• a company that is agile and responsive to our needs.

I give it a seven out of 10, only. The three that I'm not giving it is just because it is such a legacy product.

I would tell colleagues to evaluate everything. One of the reasons we are going to be reluctant to remove from Service Desk is because it is so entrenched, it would be such a big deal. However, if I had a clean slate, I would advise someone to evaluate all the competitors. Service Desk is not perceived as one of the better products in this space. It serves us well but I would tell them to evaluate ServiceNow and some of the other products.