Micro Focus Service Anywhere [EOL] Reviews

• Service desktop management
• Analyzing Big Data
• Real time Dashboard
• A cloud service
• Easy to get feedback from users

I'm involved in the implementation, so from my point of view, I can manage computers and peripherals in an organization. Previously this would be done using an Excel file to keep records of tickets and change requests and it was difficult to trace issues and perform analyses. Now, our customer has a flow chart to maintain requests, and the service desk has got good feedback from the customer.

It should be more flexible and have more features added to make it easier to use. We can delete some data ourselves because the data is on the cloud, but we have to raise the issue with the support team to do it.

I've used it for nine months.

When I imported data to the system, it did not detect duplicate information. You can't delete the information yourself and need help from support to do it. The issue with this is if the support team is slow it can compromise the SLA.

3/10 as it has a lot of scope for improvement.

The initial setup is straightforward because it's a cloud service. You just have to prepare a tenant and some demo data.

I'm part of a team implementing it at a customer site.

Get the requirements from your customer as much as you can. Declare a timeline of the project and plan to implement. For master data you should be cleaning it up and making it clear before you import it into the system.

Having one system that us and one of our major vendors which happens to be HPE are also able to do a ticket exchange on, so we've got smooth interaction of ticket information. We've got faster time for our agents to open tickets. They find the screens really easy to use, and they're pre-populated with information about our users which our old system didn't have that. They're finding it quicker to get a ticket open and being able to get to asking customers about their incident issues.

I guess there's two camps. One is tweaks to what's already there for incident management. Incident is one of their most mature modules, but there are still some things that we'd be looking for. Some people granular, specific things around ability. One of them is ability to add more values. A list of values is quite limited right now. We would actually like to see something pretty granular like that. It is tweaking things. Then on a bigger scale, I guess on the request management module. It's not as mature, and so we have got a few things we're looking for there that we're working with HP on.

We've been live with Service Anywhere since 1st March.

We had one little blip with the portal, but other than that, it's been very solid. We haven't had any performance issues.

I don't think there's going to be any concerns for us. Actually, HPE built a Canadian data center in BC, to meet our data security and privacy requirements. They have scaled that for quite a large amount of on-boarding, and we are definitely seeing on-boarding. Every few months there's a new customer coming on board, but at this point, there's lots and lots of scale there for us.

It's been quite good. We've had a couple of interactions. Again, because it's a new Canadian data center, we have this extra layer in there a couple of times. We're working through some of that as it is relatively new. There's been a little bit of timing issues, but I'd say, for the most part we'd probably give it an eight out of ten.

We have a very old system right now, Paragon 5, which is ancient. I've been using it for 14 years, but we had so heavily customized it, there was no upgrade path. We started looking around for a new product. Then we realized that we already had a strategic partnership with HP, and that they had Service Anywhere as an ITSM product suite. We started looking at that product and seeing if it would meet our needs. It did, so we just entered directly into contract with them for the services.

I would say it's relatively straightforward. Our implementation took a long time, but that was mostly due to us, not to HP. They had a standard methodology, but we didn't want to move that quickly. We wanted to do lots of change management, because our old system had been in use for such a long time. The technical setup, the getting HP to do the configurations, all of that went fairly smoothly. Yeah, one of the other customers in BC on-boarded very quickly onto seven modules in five months, and that was not an issue for them.

Think about your processes first and definitely think about the change management aspect of it. Get people ready. We had a very smooth transition, and I think that's a lot of the reason why. Definitely stay out of the box. I don't have a lot of choice anyways, but I think that has been completely working for us. We've used it as seizing the opportunity to standardize processes in our organization. I think that you'd be having a miss if you didn't do that.

Big data and analytics are the product’s most valuable features.

Since the Service Anywhere (SAW) implementation, we have improved in two major aspects:

• User experience: SAW’s self-service portal has provided valuable information to the users, a single point of contact and knowledge base access.
• Efficiency: Big data functions and analytics provided valuable information for decision-making about the capacity of human resources.

Integration: The integration capacity of the tool is limited. It supports REST/API integration, but it has many limitations. The clearest example is the SAW-HP PPM integration. You can build an integration between the two platforms, but this will not provide much value because there is limited data available.

I have used it for two years.

This SaaS solution only supports ADFS technology and doesn’t support VPN connections.

Online support or SaaS support is really good.

We choose this product because we needed a SaaS solution and this platform has many valuable functions that our previous tool didn’t, such as a training self-service portal, big data & analytics, knowledge base and “real” ITIL compliance. ITIL processes modeled in SAW are REALLY good. I think that you can have a good processes model just by using out-of-the-box SAW processes.

It was a straightforward setup. If you are implementing new processes, you can use out of the box models. If you want to build custom processes and business rules that may be as complex as you want, I recommend having ITSM expert consulting support during the project.

We did the implementation directly with HP. HP Latin America consultants do not have the required skills and knowledge for SAW implementation or it was insufficient.

I recommend reviewing your IT processes before implementation begins to identify gaps and set realistic goals. I think that it could be helpful to have ITIL-trained staff and not forget the importance of MoC (organizational change) planning and support.

Self service portal and speed of development

Easier access to data and for reporting which gives the data for managing IT. It has provided us with a very good change management process.

The process of moving updates from development to production.

Nearly two years

Deployment went according to plan once we sorted out how we wanted the processes to work.

None

Getting better

Very good

The previous solution was provided as part of a managed service. It did not have a change management module and was very difficult to get management reports from it.

The initial set up was kept simple as there were very tight timescales.

We implemented the system ourselves with some help from HPE.

It has a very flexible pricing structure so make sure you understand it fully before committing.

We evaluated:

HP Service Manager - Too mature for the state of service management in our company

ServiceNow - Too expensive and implementation too complex for our timescales

OTRIS - Implementation too complex for our timescales

Go for it.

• Configuration Management
• Dashboarding
• Analytics is definitely a game changer and has the potential to provide the organizations with usable data to be to enable them to be proactive in addressing customers’ requirements

One of the best features is the ease of use Out of the Box with very little need for tailoring to get started. We can provide a rollout in two to four weeks from customer engagement to production use. HPE aligns this closely with frameworks, similar to ITIL, as well as best practices.

It needs better integration with other solution and product sets from HPE.

I've used it for close to three years, since HP Service Anywhere v2, and we're currently using the latest version.

We had some teething problems with Dev tenant export to production tenant import.

7/10 - you get good days and bad days regarding the time to resolution, and the time to get a reply from support. However, mostly it's very good.

We still use HPE Service Manager alongside it, as we are implementers of the products to customers. Each one has its pros and cons, and depending on customer requirements we can guide them as to which is the best solution to implement.

It was very easy to deploy and configure. It was not entirely codeless, however this was very minimal and easy to understand.

We are a vendor and have done multiple deployments for different customers across different organization types.

The pricing and licensing is reasonable, and if adoption is good, ROI more than offsets the cost of licensing. Additionally, all the infrastructure, maintenance, and support costs sits with HPE.

If you are looking for a quick ITSM deployment to address your needs without unnecessarily complicating the processes and deployment, you should look at HPE Service Anywhere.

The big data engine, employee self-service portal, and the integrations.

We are transitioning to a full Employee Self Service portal with customer facing solutions. We don't have a portal right now so it will drastically change the way we portray our window into IT.

The self-service portal gives us visibility into IT that we didn't have before. We'll be able to use service offerings and support offerings that were not available previously. It should be an improved customer experience more than anything.

There's a program called Dev to Production that's lacking a lot of functionality. Also, migrating a development environment into a production environment. So far, that's probably the biggest concern we've had with it.

So far, we've only done a proof of concept, and we're just now going live. It's been completely stable. We haven't had any issues with it whatsoever.

It seems scalable, but I don't have much experience with it in that manner yet.

They're terrible as there was just a lack of response. We had to go through other avenues to get responses from the first level support. We've had lots of conversations here about that. We see some avenues that we're going to take to fix it.

We were using Service Manager and migrating from the on-premise Service Manager 9.3.1 to Service Anywhere. The primary reason we looked at Service Anywhere was the cost of upgrading. 9.3.1 was astounding. It was actually less expensive to switch to a new platform. That was our primary reason. With Service Anywhere, there's a million reasons. That one just happens to be the biggest one that started us down that path.

So far, the initial setup time for the initial configuration to get it up and running and usable was surprisingly fast. We were able to do in about three days what previously took us over a month to do. It was phenomenal.

We also looked at ServiceNow. That was more of a glance. We're pretty committed to the HPE product lines. We have a full suite of HPE products, so there's no point in changing direction at this point for us.

I would just tell them to buy it. If you compare it to the other products on the market, it's well-suited for its market audience. The employee self-service portal, the window into IT is dynamic, well thought, and the graphics are fantastic.

From the user perspective - we don't use employee self-service, so I would consider a user the help desk agent. For them, it's the simplicity of live support as it has the big data behind it so as they're going through a transaction or a call with a staff member, they can enter the person's name and it shows past tickets. When they start putting in a title or description it gives them knowledge articles and the related tickets to the issue. They just love live support because it's got that big data behind it. They love the simplicity of the screens that they work with.

Because of the administration ability, being put into SaaS, we've now been able to spend time looking at other processes. Before we went to Service Anywhere, we did not have Operation Orchestrations so we weren't doing any kind of automation. Now that we have some time to look at processes in Service Anywhere it has an analytic engine. I guess it's called hot topics and we chose one of our hot topics which to us was a cash machine. We had a lot of failures on cash machines so we looked at that and said, "Okay, how we can help the help desk solve those quicker?" We looked at using automation for it, and now the help desk has better visibility of the cash machines. We can automatically fix some problems, but if we can't fix it with automation then we've given feedback of what's going on which helps to troubleshoot quicker. That's been a transformation.

The CI detection within Service Anywhere, that's part of the big data. If they enter a CI that’s known in the database then it pops up with a little window around the CI in the description. If you hover over that, it will show you more information about that CI. An example would be we have a lot of ATM's. Before Service Anywhere when they would be doing a call on an ATM, they would have the service manager open up on one window. On another window they'd have the ATM information open and then they'd have to do a copy paste or a manual enter the information. Now we use UCMDB to pull that information into UCMDB, push it into Service Anywhere. Now when that CI is detected they can hoover over that CI detection and it gives them all that information. Less clicks, faster information, more complete information. It's just all there part of the ticket.

I'd like to see better ways of getting reports into a paper copy which means the ability to export into Excel. They've got a little bit of an issue there with rich text fields not being able to. The suggestion is using what's called the BI integrator to go directly after the data in the database. We're just implementing that now, but I don't know how that's going to work for us yet. If it works then that's not a problem. If the BI integration works then I'm not going to complain about it, but that's an enhancement I wish was there.

The way the big data pushes information to the technician or the agent. One of the enhancement requests we've put in is we wish that we could prioritize what is spit up in front of the agent. Right now, sometimes non-important information is pushed in front of them. The knowledge article that they're looking for is down further. We need a way to give weight to a knowledge article or give weight to something else to make it pop to the top. That's something I'd like to see enhanced.

We've been using it for a little over a year and a half.

In the year and a half we've been using it, we had a couple problems with email notifications not going out. They've fixed that, and what I see in their forwarding pathway in the next release that it is supposed to have a lot of built in monitoring and performance enhancements so I'm really expecting that to help with the stability even more.

It's been pretty stable. Like I said, the new features that are coming out in the next release will allow a monitor to be turned on from the user sitting at their desktop and it will help them determine if the slowness is us at the desktop level, or if it's something in the network, or if it's something on the SaaS part. The stability part, I'm impressed with what they're doing with that.

The thing I think about is as more customers come on board how is that going to be handled? I have every faith in HPE so they'll handle us.

Excellent. We have an HPE partner for our support. If it's something that they can't answer they ask HPE for the answers. Most of my support comes out of a partner, but I know they work directly with HPE. I do have the ability to log a ticket directly with SaaS which we do once in a while. Some of our problems have been put into enhancement requests. I love their support.

We were using Service Manager previously.

We're a small group compared to a lot of other organizations. We're 2400 employees, 150 IT, 15 agents so we're small. We love it, and I know of big companies that are 40-50,000 people that are using it so the scalability there. Just the use of big data is a game changer for us. Anybody that asks me if they ought to go to Service Anywhere I say yes.