OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

The workflow engine that standardizes and globalizes the process steps. It drives people through the process by standardization and automation.

Let's take request fulfillment. You are assuming the use of an iPhone or a notebook in the past. People sent around a lot of emails to somehow organize. The notebook gets ordered, delivered, installed, and so on. This is now completely organized and standardized in one workflow. And people work on one ticket. There's full transparency and there's no confusion anymore. Time to market is much faster and the email traffic is less. So, it's much better than before.

There's a lot of manual work, which is error prone and time consuming, in how the code gets transported from one system to the other. This consumes a lot of my resources that have to be available for that. So wish that it could transport much better. Which goes into the direction of DevOps and the other things that need support. Support is the real issue.

I have seen a lot of features on the road map, which will increase my rating. But my assumption would have been that, by now, we would at least half way on the road, from the features that we have been presented with until now. They should have made most of these improvements earlier. And we have permanent discussions where we compare with products like Service Now and HPE is not there.

We have just implemented Asset Manager and it seems, from an operational perspective, to be much easier. We need to use less resources in the administration, compared to Service Manager. Asset Manager looks like it's going to be a stronger product.

It runs stable. There's really no question around it. We have no issues with the stability of the system.

So far, we haven't had any issues with scalability. We have about 35,000 users. There was one issue during the upgrade, but this was fixed. In general, it's a stable system.

In general, we were not satisfied with technical support. We needed to escalate. We currently have escalation with the highest HPE management, because the support around the suite is not good, especially first level support. When you call the first level hotline, there is lot of lost time, because many questions get asked twice. And they ask simple questions. We are a big customer and at the first level they don’t even know which systems we have in use. That's really unsatisfying.

When looking for a new product, check how the user interface looks. That was the mistake that we made. We underestimated the acceptance of the end user community of the interface. And we currently use the Service Request Catalog for HPE Service Manager, which is really bad. We had big acceptance issues with our user community on that product.

The other issue is how the administration of the tool works and how many resources you really need to administrate it, to keep it running, and to keep it alive. That's something that shouldn't be underestimated.

Check how much configuration customization you can do in the system without impacting the upgrade path and increasing the upgrade effort for the system.

Approval routes for catalog items: We can now set up multiple, different approval routes and have a nice front end for the users.

The organisation can use special approval routes for different items now; previously, we could only have one approval route.

There could be some slight fixes to managing the catalog, because you can customise the items so much you can't really change the items in dropdown lists easily.

In the catalog you can have dropdowns which are managed by a list in the background. For example you could have a dropdown of pc equipment. If a new item of equipment is available you would need to add it to this list, there is no way to insert a line in the correct position, instead you need to cut and paste all entries down one line so you can fit your new line in the correct location.

I have used it for four years.

Deployment took around two years but this was due to project teams changing, HPE releasing newer versions and requirements changing! 

The stability of the product is absolutely fine; there has never been any downtime or anything that has been of any concern.

We have never had to scale the system out but cannot see any reason why this would not be OK; the system is built to handle this.

Customer service is great; the guys are really friendly and always offer knowledge to the best of their ability. They are generally quite quick to response

We used HP OpenView 4.5; we switched to Service Manager as OpenView was relatively old anyway. HPE Service Manager was the natural successor so we went with it.

Initial setup is very straightforward to get a OOTB system up and running. From there, you can see how the system is intended to work, also.

For implementation, we used a mix of HPE Partner and in-house team. The level of expertise was questionable at times but on the whole, we got the job done.

The return on investment is unquantifiable. I would have thought we have made our money back now in the way it has streamlined processes.

Make sure you can get the best price available! Always look at all options for license types. I think concurrent worked out better.

We didn't look at any other options as we wanted to continue with HPE and on-premise software, so we still had control.

Service Manager is a very versatile system that can be tailored in many ways to suit many customers' requirements.

It helped us conform with ITIL service management requirements.

I would like to see continuous improvement in the HPE SM.

The stability could be better. There are a lot of changes between versions and in the updates.

I think the scalability is good.

It was great to work with technical support.

HPE did the initial setup.

HPE is a strategic partner for doing such work. I would advise colleagues who are considered this solution to take it.

The most valuable features are the ability to track tickets, analyze incidents, and get dashboards on how the environment is performing in terms of incident management. For example, when there's network downtime, you're can track how long it takes to resolve incidents. So you can see how long it took from the time the ticket was created to escalate it if necessary, and how long it took to close it.

There's a lot of accountability now. You can hold somebody accountable for incident resolution. You are able to see when a ticket was created and when a ticket was escalated for resolution. At the end of a period (week or month), you're able to see how the environment is performing in terms of how many incidents have been created, how they've been closed, and how the teams are performing. You get meaningful reports on how teams are doing.

In the release that we currently have, the biggest challenge was reporting. It didn't have the reports that we needed out of the box. In fact, it didn’t have reports at all out of the box. It was a nightmare.

You need to use Crystal Reports to customize your reporting. In the next release, I want Service Manager to have its own reports. Straight out of the box, click a button and you get the report you want. I'm sure that with all the implementations that have been done, there must be some common reports which have been used.

We implemented it in 2014. So far, it's been good.

The product is quite stable. It is quite good.

The scalability is quite good because we've been able to integrate other products like the Business Service Management into it. From a monitoring perspective, we are now able to create tickets as incidents happen, and correlate the ticket with other incidents. So, it's quite stable and scalable. You can do a lot of stuff with it.

We have used technical support through the HPE partner, the guys we use to implement the solution; and, in some cases, through HPE itself.

Previously, we were using Siebel HelpDesk. It was not suitable for our purposes. We needed something that was ITIL based; so HPE Service Manager fit what we wanted. It is easy to use, cost effective, and ITIL based.

The installation was straightforward. Having previously used a service management tool, I’d say that usage was not so bad. Adoption is where the challenge was. Users were used to calling in with incidents, but now they need to raise tickets. That was a challenge, but it's been sorted out.

It's a good product.

I would advise colleagues to get the latest release because I’ve been told the reporting has been sorted out in this new release. I am interested in upgrading to get that. If what I'm told is true, then that's a good product.

The most valuable feature is the whole compact thing. The ticketing tool has everything in it that we need.

There are some ups and downs. On the upside, we don't need to create any very complicated integrations because it's quite compatible with all the other HPE tools which we need for our end-to-end business. On the downside, it cannot really operate in the cloud; but other than that, everything is good.

It has improved our communication between teams. The distribution of issue solutions, for example, is integrated in one application. I know there are also the databases for the solutions, the known error databases and so on, which all improve the behavior of the company because everybody knows how to solve problems.

I’m not sure what I can suggest to improve. We also got such questions from our customers; and we provided them with our contact in HPE. Not all of those requests are possible to get into the product; so we sometimes end up customizing it. For the moment, I cannot think of anything specific that I would change; but I'm sure there are multiple things that could be upgraded.

It is stable now. We are quite special. In the past, integrations were kind of complicated. We had some ups and more downs. Now that we've switched to the Windows service, it is really reliable. The application's performance reached a completely different level; so it's quite fast. Users are happy about it.

The availability of the application is not comparable to what we had in the past. We had downtime maybe once or twice a month. At the moment, we do not experience anything like that.

Over the last five years, we had a huge project which involved everybody in the company switching over from Peregrine Service Center to HPE Service Manager. That was quite a huge achievement. In the past, we were not very satisfied with it; but after we upgraded the system, everything was okay.

The quality of the support depends on the type of support. We have multiple kinds of support. Either our customers contact our operations teams via service manager to provide support for the storage service, or we have a centralized and localized support directly for the application itself. I fall into the latter type of support.

In general, we are using multiple tools from HPE. Compliance and compatibility between those tools is better if you use the same vendor.

From my point of view, the most important criterion in picking a vendor is the quality of the support. We are in a position of the customer. We have the premium support for cases when something is not functioning and we cannot make it work.

I wasn’t really involved with the initial setup. We started with the Service Manager 7.0, the version that was there 5-6 years ago. Then we had the huge upgrade to Service Manager 9.0. It was not that huge because at that time, it was only a small number of people working with it. That was the preparation for the rollout to the whole company.

The upgrade was kind of a complex process. Everything is complex. We are using our own customizations. We are not using the out-of-box stuff. Therefore, each upgrade involves something unexpected.

I was not in the company when the decision was made to choose HPE Service Manager. We have a management committee that makes those decisions.

The best solution depends on your needs. You should consider different solutions and decide which best fits your needs. Ask yourself whether HPE Service Manager can provide you what it provides us.

It's a complete service management suite; a complete management product used by the company worldwide for us. It's good. It's a full suite of processes under one tool, fully integrated with all the other HPE software products.

From an IT perspective, it improves the way my company functions because it supports all our ITIL processes, all the service management processes; best-in-class processes across the whole IT organization, which is good and important; and all components being connected under the same umbrella.

There are features that are missing and that can be improved in upcoming releases, and HPE is well aware of those. They're working on those. For example, they need to build a new portal for the end users to access, which is a kind of interface between our end users and IT. They're working on that. They need to have a portal that will be mobile friendly and all that stuff. That's coming up with a new version. It would still need improvement, but they're moving in a good direction.

We have used it for many years. With a previous version, more than five years ago, we showed some instability issues, but I know HPE put a lot of investment in the quality of the new products and the latest versions. Now, for the last 2-3 years, we haven’t had any stability issues.

It is highly scalable. We already use it on a kind of cloud architecture with several servers. We have what they call "horizontal scaling" with many servers. When we need to increase the bandwidth, we just need to provision some new VMs. It is easy to add to the cluster; so, extremely easy and scalable.

We rarely use technical support. We used it a few years ago, when we migrated from another HP product called OpenView Service Desk, which was phased out by HP, to a new one, because we had to get used to working with the new product.

For the last couple of years, we have opened very, very few support tickets. It's working fine.

As I mentioned, we were using another HP product (at that time, it was not yet HPE). It was HP OpenView Service Desk. That was their previous service management suite. When HP acquired Peregrine, with Service Center that became Service Manager, actually, they phased out Service Desk. We moved from Service Desk to Service Manager simply because of an HP – at the time, HP – decision.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Service Manager is not a simple product. It's not the kind of stuff where you download the bits, run setup and that's it. There is a lot of tuning and configuration. It's always the same: This product has a lot of configuration and customization capabilities. It's highly flexible, but on the other hand, what you have in flexibility, is also what you find in complexity.

For us, it's not an issue that it's somehow not friendly or easy, as you might imagine, but on the other hand, we can do whatever we want. That's the most important thing.

There wasn’t really a shortlist of vendors because, again, HP came to us proactively, announced the fact that Service Desk will be phased out, and indicated that all our licences, all the features, and even more would be available to us at no cost; that is, except the implementation cost, but we did that in house, so it was kind of an indirect cost. There was no cost in terms of new licences or professional services.

In general, when we’re looking at a vendor like HPE, Dell or IBM, the main criteria is integration. We’re using a lot of HPE products, and because we're using a lot of their products, we expect that we won't have to manage product A talking to product B and to product C. That is their stuff, and they need to manage that for us.

First of all, compare, for sure. We use an HPE product; we still look at other vendors and competitors. We have a long history with HP/HPE. Now, what I would also say is, wait, because in my shop, we know we are a pure customer of this software product. We know it's moving away from HPE going to another company. They say nothing will change. We'll see. I think it brings uncertainty, and they're well aware of that.

If I had a colleague or a friend of mine say to me, "I need a service management solution.", I would say, “We have a nice, wonderful solution.” Now, what it will look like in a couple of years is less clear than what I would have said last year. So, we'll see. Normally, nothing will change, but we just know the name of the new company. We don't know what the leaders will choose, even if right now, the HPE people we see say, "Nothing will change." I think that will be the case for one year, but they can't speak for 2-3 years.

No vendor is perfect. There's always improvement possible, so nobody deserves a perfect rating. Why not a lower rating? I think they're doing a good job, and they listen to customers.

It has features such as integration with Skype for Business, smart analytics, and smart ticketing. It integrates with our current proprietary system. It's provides end users with a single interface for multiple types of communication. This is how it is helping.

As a whole, it helps us to improve and automate workflows to make sure they provide the minimum guaranteed level of service, quality of service, and so on.

It's not the best trouble ticket system. We would like to have Skype for Business integration fail-over with our cluster-based solution. There are other enhancements we are waiting for and we are in touch with HPE support regarding them.

We are looking for a tool that is certified with Gartner. HPE is not the best tool for this. ServiceNow is better. We want to have more features, cloud-based solutions, and more enhancements regarding the digital service system.

Although we have never seen ServiceNow, it's been certified by Gartner, the certifying authority, so they have something that HPE doesn’t. HPE is now the third or fourth choice. It used to be second choice. So they need to be more competitive with the others and come up with better features.

We have not seen much improvement in the analytics reports interface, so that would be welcome.

Stability is quite good.

The solution is widely scalable.

Technical support is average. It takes too much time to resolve issues in relation to the competency of the technical support engineers. Every issue is elevated to the lab level. Maybe we are more competent than the HPE support or they lack knowledge. We do everything we can to identify issues and we pass them to the HPE support engineers. They ask the basic questions and then it takes 2-3 weeks for him to understand the issue. Then they escalate it to the lab and he will say that he is waiting for the lab. This is bad support.

We started 13 years ago with the original HPE Service Desk. Now, it's not an original HPE solution; HPE took over Peregrine Systems. So that’s what we use, for better or worse. But, it's quite customizable.

It's not like we just choose a solution. We follow the HPE roadmap. Whatever they deliver, we end up with it and implement it. There are times when we keep asking for some advanced features and it's a matter of time waiting for new releases. They are not that very agile incorporating the changes. They take a long time.

The setup process is very well documented. It is straightforward.

HPE also has a cloud-based solution called Service Anywhere, but we are not sure how it works. Is the functionality the same and just the platform changed, or is the functionality different in the cloud-based solution? They are also looking at the road map for Remedy. But we would rather they improve HPE Service Manager.

The product is completely integrated for our company, so it simplifies a lot. Also valuable is the ability to customize the tools, and learn to follow our process.

It is not so simple for the company. Basically, we are obliged to have an organization in order to do some development. We have a stronger requirement for our business to follow their process and the other very complex extra processes. For example, for change management, we have a very complex process, also due to all the regulators.

For me, it's a lot to follow. Previously, it was a lot to simplify the IT system. Before implementing HP service management, we had more than 10 different tools. One of the benefits was to simplify our architecture and significantly reduce the cost.

For me, we need integration with big data. I think it will be with the new version. We have to see it to be able to analyze more. In fact, we are able to look at data; but, in the end, we are currently not able to manage it. I think the new version will be much better when we have the view of big data.

It's not so easy to move to the next version. It's not quick to upgrade. It's a significant project for us.

It is becoming more and more stable. We are currently in version 9.43.

It has met our scalability requirements.

Technical support is absolutely very good.

I wasn’t involved at the very beginning of the project, but I was there just after the whole effect. It's not a technical project. It's much more of an enterprise project.

We looked into some competitors, including ServiceNow. One branch of our company bought ServiceNow. We are in an internal competition.

We chose HPE because it's a large company. We are also a business with other lines of business. It was very helpful to know that it was not only useful for that one project.

Keep it simple. Do not do a lot of customization. Keep the implementation of the tool simple.

It is a rich content solution. We use automation services on HPE.

We can use it very quickly. It's a good and complete solution, along with a lot of functionality.

The support and functionality of the portal could be improved. There was an old portal and they stopped it in the last version. Though there is a new portal, it's not really clear. It's a problem.

Stability has been fine.

We are a company of 3000 employees and we have been able to use it effectively in our company.

We had to take premium support. The standard support is not enough. Premium support is good but you have to pay more.

The integration is a little bit complex.

The user experience was great. The whole project was integration between the old version to a new version. It was better for the users and they agreed to upgrade to the new version.

We looked at ServiceNow and BMC. The reason we chose this tool was because we could not be on SaaS due to security issues. We were already using an HPE solution so it was easier for us to stay consistent.

Another reason was that ServiceNow is SaaS based and Service Manager is not.

We also looked at Service Anywhere but we could not go into a SaaS solution.
Maybe in the future, our next step would be to move to Service Anywhere within HPE.

The most valuable feature of the solution is usability. We use the tool to keep track of our incidents, technical changes and problems. It enables us to address the root cause of incidents. Also, the service request management is also valuable. It addresses all those areas for us and is pretty key for us.

Before we had Service Manager, we had a number of products from other vendors. When we implemented Service Manager, it gave us a standardized, centralized tool which we were able to leverage globally.

The things that I'm waiting for are things like better email integration, mobile-type connectivity, and an improved portal for users. The end-user experience is very key for me. At the moment, that's an area that the product's perhaps a bit weak. In terms of functionality, it does already what I need it to, generally. There are some new areas coming along that are quite exciting. Things like big-data analysis, automation. These are all things that are going to be strong, for the tool in the future. In terms of what I want right now, is a tool that's slick and usable for the end-users. All these extra things are bonus add-ons for me.

I think making it a lot easier for the user to pick up and just go with it. We want something that's more akin to the standard internet experience that users would expect today when they're looking at things like Google and Amazon.com. It's that kind of experience that we want them to move the product towards. We've got some additional add-ons that would be of interest, but they're secondary to getting the user experience right.

The product is quite stable. We're having some issues with performance, but I think it's down to the way we've implemented it rather than something specifically within the tool. It just doesn't respond as quickly as we might expect. It's not that it's terribly slow; it's just that it's not as quick as you'd want it to be. I think that some things are more to do with our implementation, because it's an on-site, on-premise install we have.

It certainly scales. We work with some very large vendors and they use the same software. So it's quite clear that organizations that are larger than us don't have any problems using it.

I personally haven't used the technical support. The team that I work with in conjunction for delivery of the tool use it. It seems to be okay for them.

We were using lots of different solutions. We were using an old, heavily customized BMC Remedy workflow-based tool, which we were quite happy with at the time. But our company was acquired by our parent company and there were other tools that were in use by that company. Plus there were other companies that were acquired. Through acquisition you end up with an array of products that are in the same space, so what we did when we put HPE Service Manager in place, is we consolidated all of our tool sets into one, and we picked HPE. We didn't have one, most important criteria to satisfy. I think we had a lot of criteria.

Initial setup can be quite complex. One of lessons that we learned is that we configured the tool to make it fit with our processes and the way we wanted to run the processes. I think it's too much work. It's a lesson to be learned that you basically need to adapt your processes to fit with how the tool works, rather than the other way around. We ended up with an overly complex configuration, which causes us pain every time we do an upgrade. We're working now to simplify that environment by removing the customizations and go back to a more out-of-the-box standard tool.

Before choosing HPE Service Manager, we were BMC Remedy customers. We were quite happy with that. Remedy would have been on our short list.

My main advice is to work with the tool the way it is and don't customize it. I guess that’s one of things we picked up that's very key, to be honest. I guess just determine where your priorities are and start working with whichever module covers them.