OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

We primarily use the solution for incident management, program management, as well as for change, release and configuration management. 

It's quite a complicated solution. The design has been revamped in terms of GUI. The current interface is quite easy to read. However, it's very much dependant on how everything is set up. Many people manage to have it properly set up with a reduced number of steps to create or to change or to close any other ticket. 

However, one of my latest customers decided to implement some items in very specific ways in terms of dealing with change management that is really bureaucratic but the way they implemented it with the tool was actually quite efficient. The modules were very utilitarian and it became like just clicking boxes. To track changes, track approvals or avoid any changes with support could be implemented in the publisher which made it quite efficient.

On certain implementations, it can be very difficult to customize and then very difficult to maintain as well. This is because it is quite a complex solution.

Users need to be very conscious of how they set up the solution in terms of how they propose and ultimately set up the end terminals to make it easy to use for end-users. 

The setup on past projects had been quite difficult for two reasons: the first is that it's quite a technical tool so it takes a lot to set it up and customize it. The other issue is that there's a lack of tool experts, which makes it even more difficult to set everything up properly.

The solution does not interface well with other products and is difficult to implement.

The entire system needs to be redesigned to help improve overall usability and design.

When you synchronize or perform a task for event management from external tools, you have issues of performance because synchronization can take four or six hours before there is a solution.

It's very hard for the end-user to customize items, but if they were able to, it would be easier for them to arrange specific views and reports that would be more relevant to them.

I started using the solution in 2008, when it was named Service Center. It's been about 20 years since I was first introduced to it.

It has really gained stability in the last few latest years. When I started working on it, I recall an implementation where there was an issue with stability. The customer had upgraded to Service Center from one version to another and something went wrong. They were unable to go back to the old version and then they were unable to resolve the issue. They were without any IT assistance for six weeks. It was very frustrating.

This was ten or twelve years ago, however, and they've made great gains since then. I've spent two years using the latest version of the product. We have been able to upgrade everything without any issue at all.

The solution is quite scalable. Some of our clients include some utility companies in France and some clients in the nuclear and electricity industry. It's a solution that can scale well for enterprises.

Although I don't contact technical support directly, I have clients that have. From a technical point of view, support is pretty skilled. The company makes sure they are generally experienced and competent.

The initial setup is really complex. Afterwards, it depends on the people that are handling the implementation. Some companies that are implementing the product have some pre-defined templates that happen to help to set it up quite easily and with few negative items for the end customer to deal with. I personally don't have any access to such tools for at least the past five years now so I don't know how easy it actually is if a user does have these predefined templates. The tool doesn't work out of the box. You really have to put effort in to get it working once you have installed it.

Deployment of the most recent version takes about four to six months. How many people needed to deploy the solution depends on the company and the setup. It could be anywhere from two to four people, but a company must ensure they are experts. You'll also need some additional resources for the server and the network, etc. You'll need to take into account also if you need to define the processes, etc. and agree to everything at the beginning of the project. I'd estimate a maximum amount of four people would be needed for a deployment.

We have a team that helps with customizing and onboarding new customers. We also have a subsidiary that is dedicated to implementing the tool for customers. 

I've been consulting with companies about using the solution and largely deal with the on-premises deployment model.

I'd advise others to really take their time and think about the specifications before they embark on implementation. They must be sure that the positions are implemented or not via their ITSM processes that are already in their company. 

To implement some features, it's possible to lose an entire year, so it's best to hire an expert to provide guidance and advice about what is feasible.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten. It's an improved rating since the last version. However, it still needs to be more user-friendly can could continue to improve its stability.

We mainly use this as a service-desk solution for receiving calls, issues, and requests from the end-users.

Its flexibility and ease of customization are its most valuable features.

Their end-user interface and technical support features could be improved.

I have been using this solution for 10 years.

Its stability is quite good.

Micro Focus Service Manager's scalability is quite good.

We have more than 10 of our clients using this solution.

In terms of their technical support, they are not great and not very bad. Their technical support should be improved.

The initial setup was not complex at all.

I would recommend Micro Focus Service Manager.

On a scale of 1 - 10, I'd rate this solution a 7.

• ITSM service processes
• The richness of supporting standards, such as ISO 20000.
  

We have inherited a customer base with Micro Focus Service Manager. It gives us better understanding and control of service management.

• Configuration options with very granular control parameters.
• Workflow support and ability to support events.

• Pure cloud-based native functionality is lacking.

• It lacks templates to support out-of-the-box best practices.
  

It's pretty well-structured in modules.

It's easier to roll it out within the company and to sustain the processes.

It needs good integration with the configuration database, that's lacking at the moment, It's not that good. 

It's very important to integrate also with other tools. They've shown the four suites that they are going to have in the future, so it's very nice. It's slim, but it needs a very good integration, and it needs a very good analysis and a relationship within the topic, so that you get the information for performance, quality, costs, and so on. 

The integration of all these topics and how they are interlinked, interconnected with each other, it's not that great at the moment.

It's more for tracking and documentation purposes, not that much for operation management purposes. You need to do a lot of customization to use it for operation management purposes.

It's stable.

Not that scalable. The functionalities still need to develop some, so that it's really scalable, and you can use it for operations management. 

It was, I think, a CA solution. SoftDirect, I think; there were several. It was a company decision to switch but I wasn't at the company at the time.

I wasn't at the time, but I think they were further considering the SoftDirect that they had. They had HPE and also another provider. There were three in the running.

It's mostly so reliable and has a lot of functionality. We're using a lot of HPE tools and we can do a lot with it. So, its functionality is the most valuable feature.

When I attended the conference, I just saw a presentation about the Containers part and am really looking forward to that, because installing a new version/upgrading is always a pain. I think that this could be a big improvement.

It, still, has a bit of more of improvement possibilities in the codeless part. But, I can see that they are working on it, so that's quite good as well.

I think there are still some improvement possibilities and flexibilities needed, but, overall, it's a good solution as it is right now.

I have been using this solution since 2011.

I started using this solution in 2011, it has improved a lot in the past years.

We have just installed Service Manager 9.41, the new version and I'm really glad about this version; it's really nice and is making me smile.

It has scaled mostly over the past few years, but I think it could be a bit more flexible in terms of how it scales and the upgrading aspect.

Sometimes, it takes a while to find the right person or to get a point over but mostly, the support is okay.

I'm in finance, so it's mostly the reliability part that is important while selecting a vendor. As a company, we are trying to be reliable to the outside world, so we need reliable suppliers that can support this ideology.

We are an organization with 45,000 assets. Service Manager gives us a single system where everything is centralized in one base. We can log onto the equipment so we know when the equipment is, for example, freezing in the live environment.

It's web-based so we don't need to buy the spoke. Just log into it and away you go.

The user interface is very clunky. It's only now beginning to be a web-based interface, but for now it's still very clunky.

It deploys without issue.

It's very stable, but that's part of its clunkiness.

It scales for our needs.

We have an HP on-site support contract, which is nice and easy.

Get it. It's a one-stop-shop solution.

A valuable feature for us is that we have an ordered way to handle all the cases that we can handle with the infrastructure.

We benefit as we can keep control of everything in the technical infrastructure that we are delivering to the business side of the organization.

It needs to be easier to use for the end users because one problem we had was that we are handling different kinds of cases. We use it person to person by phone. It's not so user friendly. If there was more ease of use, then people would use it more regularly.

We have recently built up a new data center. We are seeing a lot of actual technology and we are trying to implement the universal discovery and everything around the NCMDB in this new infrastructure that we have built. We had quite a lot of issues with stability and the quality of the product so far.

We are around 12,000 end users. Scalability is quite good. It's scalable enough. We have no problem with the scalability so far.

We have used the technical support and we have quite a lot of HPA people in place on site trying to help us solve different issues. It has been good after we have been in discussion a lot. Overall the technical support is good.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. I came in after they started the setup.

We are using ServiceNow for some facility management. It was easier to have a user-friendly interface from the beginning, but now when we use the service portal, it's catching up. It's close to the same usability as Service Now. As it stands, it's better than mediocre.

I don't use it as a technical person, but just as a regular user. It helps to register things, to see the changing parts, and to correlate incidents. I'm talking about Operations Bridge with automation. We also achieve a lot, such as deploying infrastructure, automating our daily routine tasks, and things like that.

I would like to see more connection to DevOps, but not in terms of deploying the suites, deploying the tool itself. Rather, I'm talking about DevOps and self-service for our customers so they can, as users, do something in our tool without getting too many rights or using the wrong options.

There should be some front desk provided or some options to let our users serve themselves, because we have about 5000 servers and 400 applications. Those applications are developing continuously with DevOps and that means that they release everything, every day. They need extra monitoring, extra automation, or some corrections.

Our service time-to-market is very long. We need to free them and let them do things by themselves in our tools.

Previously, I was an HPE consultant, so I was not only using these tools, but also developing and integrating them. If I start from developing, it has been around 10 years.

Stability is getting better. I’ll put it this way.

It's enterprise level, so it’s scalable. We do have some questions about deploying server automation globally, because we have integration with another part of our organization. It should be possible.

When support is dedicated, it works well.

I know that that at our site, almost every two years we go to events like Gartners to ask for additional advice. Choosing a vendor actually comes down to the ability to integrate and scale and be enterprise level. There are a lot of small tools. They are good at some point features, but when it comes to the global picture, then you need to have quite a lot. For instance, to contain the rights. We are not there yet.

Life cycle management is a drama. For almost every tool we have, it's a project for a couple of months to upgrade something to the next level. It's not next, next, finished. No way.

Most of the time it's the value it can provide, as long as you've got it properly mapped out. So the most important factor is being able to gather all the data into one place and then you can distribute that information across to other areas, and they can then benefit from it.

It's strong, there's no doubt about it. I wouldn't want to go replacing it with any of the other tools. There are enough other companies that have got similar tools. But once you've gone down the road of using the HP software, you would like to make sure you carry it on, even though there are certain things they still need to improve upon.

I think one area which is the most painful from my point of view is if you need to integrate a lot of the tools, and being able to make that a lot more seamless.

For instance your workflow could be - that's the name of the server, that's the IP address, go and communicate, sort it out, pass the data in between. Having to sit there and spend sometimes weeks, trying to get them integrated and properly operational is annoying.

We have been using the solution probably since about 2010.

It is pretty much stable. I mean, it's been long enough now to the point that there are still issues here and there, but the main product itself is strong enough, and it's decent enough to be able to make use of.

I think the hardest part sometimes is when you try to integrate with a lot of the other HP software tools. That's where the containment, being able to move to the new sort of ITS main model, will most probably help. But the initial thing is if you've got to get these different tools integrated, it can be a bit difficult.

You have to have an idea of what the size of your organization is to begin with. So if you think, "we're only small," and then you actually realize you're discovering an awful lot of continuous integrations, then you may need to expand it.

So in the main, you've got to have a decent understanding about your organization in the first place, then make sure you scale it properly. Then from there on it's pretty scalable.

Technical support is pretty good. I mean, whenever you've got an issue you can at least always raise an incident and then with that someone's always going to have a look at your support case, get back to you, and then be able to sort of work the problem out.

There are times where you don't always get a fix, and it's mainly because of the version that you're running, so you need to upgrade. Being able to upgrade every five minutes is not something which is an option. So you can get to that point where they say, "we've fixed it - it's in the latest release." Great, what do I do now?

Those challenges are the ones which are sometimes the biggest problem. It's not that you don't know it's not getting fixed, but it doesn't mean the fix will always necessarily come to you to actually be able to use.

Regarding setup, it depends on which tool.

UCMBD has become a lot more easy to set up and put in place. So perhaps for instance in the case of a Chinese Asset Manager, that would still be a little bit complex, trying to get it operational. Especially when you're trying to feed data between UCMBD and the Asset Manager. So it depends on what you're trying to do.

If you then need to connect it and whatever else, then you have to sit there and really work out the actual data models that sit between both and then be able to patch it all through.

So, I think it should try and sort that side of things out and make it a little bit more seamless, so that from a user point of view all I need to do is just this, this, this and this, and then it works. That would be a lot nicer.

There are a number of things to consider. One, you want to know that the reliability is. You need to know the software is going to do the job that you want it to do. You need to know that it's going to be fairly easy, painless to set up.

But at the same time, if you have any issues, you've got a good customer focus. That they're interested in making sure that they're going to basically get the best for the customer. So it's not just about - "we've sold you a load of products, so we'll respond to you now."

You need to spend a lot of time getting it developed. Make sure you go over areas brought into it so you can then show the value of what it can do. Once you've then got it, then you can prove to the business that this is how important it is, being able to understand your IT. What makes up your IT. Then of course, if you're trying to pass that information into other areas, like asset management or software license management, it's all feeding from the same place. So you can then at least get something which is meaningful at the end.

We can have all our requests and incidents registered in one system. We have about 250 employees in the IT department and we have one system. We don't have to email each other and we are sitting in a geographically large company, in many departments and in many hospitals. So it's great that we just have one system and we don't have to call or drive to each other. That's the most important thing.

Some years ago we were three departments and now we're just one department for the whole region. And we have different systems, so we can't communicate. With one system you have to write emails and stuff. When I make a request it's immediately reaches our technicians, so it's great.

The greatest issue for us is to understand the roadmap. We want to know whether we should upgrade now or should we wait three months. Which version should we install? It's not the project, but it's the plan for the project. So we went to a recent conference to find out because we want to know which way we should go.

After we upgraded stability is good. But with our last version it was not very good. We had lags and it was performing slowly. We tried different solutions, upgrade servers, and databases, but the performance was not very good. Then we upgraded and we haven't had those problems since. Also, previously we had the client/server system, but now we only have web clients. That also may be an explanation of the improvement in stability and performance.

We are a big company, but we also have small departments in the hospitals who have this system as well. So it is scalable.

We have a partner to HPE helping us and we also have Premium support technicians that we work with all the time and we use them a lot. The support is good. We can have help any time, so it's good.

I was in the project from the beginning. Some of the problems are from our company because they don't always decide what way we want to go. Our company wants to go one direction, and when we start they sometimes change the direction and it will complicate the solution. Sometimes, it's our own fault.
But, for the product itself, the setup is straightforward, with some issues. Sometimes the logical database structure and tables is not very easy to understand. So we need to have some help with that. It seems like it's old tradition from the old versions, going up the system. It's hard to see the logical structure of the tables.

We looked at Service Now two years ago. We stayed with HPE over Service Now because we have a suite of HPE products. We think it's easier to make the integrations into one.

We heard some other customers in Denmark have the back end as Service Manager and the front end as Service Now, as a portal to Service Manager. I don't know if it's easier to deploy in Service Manager, so I don't know. But I know some Danish companies have done it.