Clarity SM Reviews

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.

The primary use case for the product is the help desk, and it has performed okay. It is working as it is designed.

It is a one stop shop. With the service catalog integrated with IT panel to the Service Desk. It is very nice to be able to use, because the workflow is all-in-one for the same product. 

As far as the integration with using all the CA products, all the components integrate well together and are very easy to use. 

Previously, we did not have a help desk at all. So, it has made a difference.

It would be nice to be able to just click the executable and have it do the upgrade with minimal configuration, post installs, etc.

Once it is installed, it is pretty stable. With the way we have it setup, we use virtualization and we are probably running 99% uptime. 

It is very scalable and very flexible. 

The support is great. That was one of the big features of using CA: the technical support. They are very helpful and willing to go above and beyond.

We did not have a previous solution. We did not have a help desk at all.

I was involved in the initial setup. The setup was complex. Out-of-the-box was definitely a difficult configuration because a lot of manual configuration needs to be done. It is due to the flexibility of the product. 

I am also having issues with the complexity of the upgrades. In regards to configuration to the new version, when you are not completely out-of-the-box, like an SSL configuration, it cause us issues with the upgrade. 

We looked at ManageEngine, Semantic, and a couple other companies.

We chose CA because of flexibility, working with them and another company, and the support. Support was a big thing about choosing CA.

It has been very functional for what we will be using it for.

You want to keep in mind what your end goal is; what you want to accomplish would probably be the biggest thing.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: In this case, it was the support that made the big decision on who we went with. We also considered cost, ease of use, and flexibility.

We use the tool for many processes. Incident problem, change, config, and knowledge. So it's very important for us, and it's used very much and it will increase in importance for us. There are 47,000 employees at Sandvik who do need these systems for IT processes.

It's operated in one company, a supporting IT company. It's in one place and the whole global organization at Sandvik is using this for IT incident problems. It's a central solution for Sandvik.

Right now, we are starting to be dependent on the CMDB a lot. It's increasingly important but, of course, as with many other customers, it's the ticket system that actually helps us a lot. For incidents, of course, that's the biggest use right now.

We get control, and the incidents are actually connected to changes and problems. So we do have a good picture and control.

We talk a lot about the idea that Service Desk Manager should be more "service" oriented, not just ticket oriented. Right now, it's just tickets, tickets, tickets. It could be related to a CMDB topic, but it's the service perspective. We talk a lot about that with CA. That's the main improvement that we need to have in place. There are improvements ongoing in that direction, I should say.

The stability is very good right now. We had some problems, issues, absolutely. The issues were regarding the application that is connected with the servers. It's a lot of configuration, there are a lot of challenges in that. We have virtual servers over there and we have the application on them, so it's been challenging. But right now we have succeeded.

Scalability is quite good I think. Right now we are quite satisfied with the solution.

We are using CA AMS in Prague, they help us with the operational side. They let us focus on the improvements, the future. We can actually relax, we don't need to take care of all the incidents regarding the tools. So we are relieved a bit regarding the operational side.

We had our homegrown solution in Lotus Notes, but we knew that we should grow a lot, be more of a global IT. So we needed one central system that was more generic. What we used before was just a database, very, very simple.

We also picked Service Desk Manager because we saw there could be possibilities to add other products once again.

We installed it in 2001. I was a bit to the side, but yes, I was a bit involved. And we implemented it, perhaps, not in an optimal way. We tried to change it so it suited us. That was, perhaps, a mistake. But we have changed it continuously as well.

In terms of the important criteria when researching products and vendors, I don't know really, because I haven't been involved with that many new products. 

We know that if we want to have another system, it's an advantage to have another module from CA, so that we are increasing the product family from CA. Perhaps this has been an approach. It costs too much if we try to connect to others. But I haven't involved in the other investments in the system, actually.

I give it a six out of 10, but that depends; it is our fault because we are, perhaps, not using the tool as we should. It's not just CA's fault. But it's a six.

As we have other solutions from CA, I would recommend this for others, absolutely, because if you are using this in the right way you have big possibilities.