Clarity SM Reviews

Our primary use case for Clarity is to manage portfolios and projects, and to manage the software. 

The most valuable feature are the time sheets, it's a very powerful tool.

The report solutions are a little short and that could be improved. It's possible that part of the issue is the customization because we had the tool customized for our clients. Clarity is also quite an expensive solution and it would be helpful if the cost was reduced. 

I've been using this solution for eight years. 

The initial setup was complex, it's possible that the integrations between this tool and other tools like Quality Center, ALM may have made the setup more difficult. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We are a solution provider and this is one of the systems that we implement for our clients.

This solution covers most of the IT lifecycle. The emphasis is mainly on incident management, change management, program management, and request fulfillment. We also have the System Management patch for network monitoring. 

As of late, I really like the BI functions. 

The CA products integrate well together but I would like to see better integration with third-party solutions. An example of this is with AIOps, where I prefer Splunk over CASDM, so I would have like to see it opened up so that the integration is straightforward. We like the customer to be able to choose.

I find that there are many modules that offer similar functionality and I would like to see these consolidated. Perhaps it is because CA was acquired by Broadcom and they are still developing, with the intention to bring everything together but as it is now, the vendor has many products that do the same thing.

I have been using CA Service Desk Manager since version 5.5, starting about 15 years ago.

Speaking of stability, there was one version, 12.5, that gave us a lot of pain. However, I think that it was due to our architecture. Out of the box, I think that this is a stable solution.

If properly deployed, I think that the CA Service Desk Manager is scalable. We had our own lessons to learn from the way we did things in the previous versions but with our latest deployment, it has been quite well and scalable.

Two of our enterprise clients have between 900 and 1,000 users.

In my company, we have both CASDM and BMC Helix ITSM, and I have worked with both of them. I find the BMC solution easier to deploy than CASDM. Some of my colleagues regularly support BMC and it seems that their deployment is much quicker.

Our BMC solution is much smaller and it does not cover all of the areas, especially in the systems management space, the AIOps, reporting, and aggregation. BMC does have this functionality but we didn't acquire everything. I expect that eventually, all of our clients will be using CASDM. 

Because there are so many different modules, the initial setup is not that straightforward. There are a lot of things that you need to do to get things to work together, although I'm used to that sort of iterative process. Sometimes, when I look at how other solutions such as BMC are deployed, I find them much easier.

CASDM can take months to deploy, especially if you have data that you've got to take from your previous versions. You may have a lot to do.

We are currently two versions behind but we are in a project to upgrade to the latest version, 17.2. It is appealing to me because I will have access to the AIOps modules. I am also interested in moving to the cloud-based solution because it is easier to deploy. There are better technologies available in the cloud, it is easier to manage, and there is a high availability aspect. I think that it would be much better but we are often restricted by the customer, who cannot always have data on the cloud. For example, two of our customers are state-owned enterprises and their data cannot be on the cloud for any reason.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to use the cloud-based deployment, rather than host it on-premises.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are primarily using this solution for incident requests. We track our CI CMDB change requests. We are using Service Desk Manager in a wide scope that is not in a single location but across Europe.

The most valuable features are the requests and incident tracking.

When I am reviewing an incident, sometimes there is too much information on the same screen and it is difficult to discern what is of value. The agents generate information that is not important for me and it means that I have to scroll down to the bottom of the issue in order to find what I am looking for. In this regard, the interface is not always clear.

I would like to see charts and more graphical information available in the reporting. As it is now, we have incident data that is put into Power BI so that we can visualize it. We do this because it is easier to read graphical information. It would be nice if this solution had a simple wizard that could generate visualizations based on the data. As it is now, there are lots of reports, but from my perspective, the reporting is a little bit too complex.

I have been working with CA Service Desk Manager for three or four years.

I am not aware of any issues in terms of stability, so I would say that there are no large or obvious bugs.

From my perspective, it is no problem to add on to this solution. I would say that it is very scalable. We have about 1,600 people who actively use it.

I have not had contact with technical support.

We are also using ServiceNow and our developers are using JIRA.

In my opinion, JIRA Service Desk is more oriented to developing software and it covers the topics surrounding that job.

Our setup was performed quite some time ago by a third-party.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to be patient. It is going to take effort and time to properly deploy.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for incident and change management.

The newest customer portal is an improvement on the old one. However, we don't have the possibility to use it as we're on an older version.

The new portal for analysts is supposed to be very good as well.

The in-service catalog is quite useful.

The lack of parameters is limited. It's not possible to customize the solution.

We have issues with adding attachments and screenshots. Copy and paste is not possible on the solution.

Although there are some good features on the latest version, my company decided in the past month to switch solutions and we're moving over to Jira.

The cost of this solution is too high, which is why we're leaving.

I've been working with the solution for ten years, or maybe longer.

The solution is highly stable. We're using the high availability product for our application server and the program server is enough for our organization. We are using the application in over 70 countries because we have many branches abroad. It works well for us.

We have more than 10,000 users using the system across 70 countries. It's quite scalable.

We have a partner in Poland, so we've never contacted technical support directly. If we have issues, we contact the partner, not CA.

We have experience with Jira and have decided to move over to Jira in the coming months.

About 15 years ago, I also worked with an HP product called HP Service Desk. At the time, CA was more flexible and we could create customizations ourselves. On HP this was not possible without external support.

The initial installation was not complicated. It was pretty easy because I had previous experience. Occasionally, however, we did have problems with the environment and the application server would be on standby for a long time. I didn't find this too be too much of an issue though.

The pricing is quite expensive. It's so cost-prohibitive we've decided to move away from it.

We're using an older version of the solution. It's my understanding that in the 17.2 version there is a completely different customer portal.

I would recommend the solution, even though we are leaving it behind. I know another big company in Poland, which is an insurance company. They use this product and they've upgraded to the latest version. They have good knowledge and good experience with this product and they are using also the CMDB and the knowledge database, which is more of the product than we use. They are quite satisfied with the results they get from it.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We use this solution to improve user experience. With the new xFlow and Service Point features, we are able to bring users even further to our side. This is a huge gain when we look at a heterogeneous environment in terms of culture and variety of systems in operation. Demonstrating ease of use and interaction for end users along the same line of usability for support analysts was a key factor in the success of the deployment.

Visible integration between ITIL Processes makes service management easier by providing a broad view of the health of the organization's technology infrastructure, cost savings, and future investments.

Another relevant point is the ease of customizations and integrations that are inevitable in midsize and large companies.

XFlow (Temperature) and Service Point together provided an extremely user-friendly and collaborative experience to the point of making it easy for all users of the product, whether end-users or analysts.

In these resources, knowledge management gains strength and favors the dynamics of use and service, ensuring agility in operations.

The part of notification methods and satisfaction surveys remain almost unchanged. Perhaps greater attention to these two simple and native features could give the set a greater force. It is as if such modules have not evolved with the rest.

Diversifying notification methods with pop-ups or ready-made WhatsApp or Skype integration packages would be welcome.

Making the Satisfaction Survey more interactive would also be interesting.

This has the best possible stability.

The scalability is the best possible.

This solution has satisfactory service and support, even after the Broadcom acquisition.

We did use another solution previously but there was a need for evolution.

This initial setup of this solution was complex, considering external access for Mobile use.

The implementation was performed by the vendor and our internal staff, both with equivalent knowledge and expertise.

Our ROI is satisfactory.

My advice is to try to test the product a lot, including its procedural dependencies.

Advice from some end-users would be very interesting, as it would evaluate the ease of integrations and customizations.

We did not evaluate other options as we were already satisfied with the product and would incur a high cost.

Try to focus on Knowledge Management and CMDB. Use CA Productivity Accelerator to learn and automate CMDB integration as much as possible.

We use this solution for request and incident management, as well as configuration.

Initially, CA Service Desk Manager was used by two divisions within the organization. In the past two years was rolled out to two more divisions.

The most valuable features of this solution are reporting, configuration monitoring, and the Request and Incidents workflow.

The monitoring tool is in need of improvement.

The main purpose is for service desk use. It is a repository of information.

It helps when you have an incident or performing a problem change management process. You can view what all the relationships are between the CI that you are changing or using. It helps the engineers to better understand what they are facing.

It has all our configurations. All our infrastructure configurations are on a single pane of glass to view, allowing for one single point of information.

• We would like more information about all the configurations that we have on our infrastructure side.
• The interface for the users is a bit old-fashioned and not user-friendly.
• We would like the CMDB to be populated automatically. At the moment, everything is manually created.

It's very stable. I don't have any problems regarding to it. 

There are no issues with the scalability. It is fully supported.

All support for CA products is quite good. It is not the best support, but all our problems have been solved.

I was not involved. It was already implemented when I joined the company. It was migrated from another company, and I understand the migration process was not difficult nor complex. 

It is quite a good product, and it's stable. They have a lot of features that you can customize to your organization. 

Everything should be automated, because if you are trusting on users to create their information, it will be not the truth on the moment. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Stability of the vendor
• Support
• How the vendor is positioned in the market.

Our primary use case is managing incidents and requests from customers.

It performs very well.

For us it's indispensable to have all the cases in one place. It's the main tool for managing cases, day to day.

We can search open cases and closed cases to find what we have done in other incidents. We use the cases as a knowledge base to find what we did last time this incident occurred.

Also, prioritization is valuable and managing work queues.

Dashboards. Custom dashboards are really important because without that it takes too long to view some information. In the new version, xFlow is better.

It's pretty stable. The last versions are very stable.

Our installation is very small but the customer's experience is good.

Tech support is "so-so." Sometimes it takes too long for support people to understand what is happening. They always ask the same things, and start over with installations and with configurations and all that kind of stuff. And then, after all that, they start to ask what is happening. It takes way too long to start solving the problem.

Easy. In the latest versions it is straightforward.

When our company is investing in a new vendor, what is important to us is 

• support
• world-class software.

Overall, I would give it an eight out of 10 because it's a good product. I think it can improve some things but it's stable and it's useful.

Install it. I think it is easy to use. It's a good tool.

I help my clients make best use of the tool in their service management environment.

It performs pretty well.

It helps organizations manage their services in a way that treats them as services, and not as, "Oh, this is what I do," in isolation.

Being able to specify event rules and SLAs that can help to automate some of the processes that people are doing manually is valuable.

I could pick a dozen and say, "That's useful, and that's useful, and that's useful." The fact that it aligns very well with ITIL. I think that's probably one of my favorite things about it, because it's following up a general best practice for service management. That's important.

I think some of the work they're doing with the xFlow interface and the more collaborative tools. I think that's helping because this new generation of people like the social-media style of collaboration.

I would also like to see a simpler reporting tool. They went from one fairly robust, very complex, reporting tool - it was great - and then they went to another one that was also fairly complex and robust. That's a great tool for people who are report writers, but for the average person who just wants to get a quick little report, it's like handing somebody a chainsaw because they have to break some toothpicks in half.

It's been there for a long time. It's very stable. No issues whatsoever.

I've seen it scale to very large organizations and do it well. They've made improvements to help with that scalability.

I think they're a great team. I actually did some work for them for a few months, a couple of years back. Knowledgeable, friendly, helpful, and very professional.

I've been involved in initial setup many times. It can be complex, depending on the requirements of the customer, primarily, whenever the customer wants to deviate from the out-of-the-box, in a large way; if they want to over-customize because they think it should look that way. It's better to accept the way it looks rather than try to force it, because then when you come around to upgrading later, those customizations may or may not be appropriate.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria would be 

• stability
• reputation within the industry in general

• their following of general best practices, like ITIL.

I would rate it bordering on nine out of 10. It is an older based tool, it's been around for more than 25 years. They've made improvement, but it still carries with it some of its old roots.

Make sure that you are recognizing what your real needs are and not just going go with whatever hype is being presented to you.

We use it for the collection of tickets, to help our end-users, make sure they're taken care of in a timely manner. We Utilize various aspects of it to provide best customer service for them, to get their problems resolved.

Sending an email, that's the old way of doing things. This system is still relatively new. People still use email, but using the ticket system verifies that no one gets left behind. We're in a world of electronic mail. Some nice people can slip through the cracks. It's kind of how it is. But the ticket system makes sure that everyone gets taken care of, and that makes for a better customer experience. It's something we enjoy and they especially enjoy. We want to make sure that the new IT is not synonymous with, "Eh, don't wanna work with it."

It allows IT to handle users on a personal basis. It allows IT to have a name and a face, and we interact with the end-users, and the ticket system helps us to get them the help they need right away.

The ability to keep track. The work is tracked.

Provides ease of customer interaction. Gives the customer a general sense that they're being helped. Email works, telephone calls work too. But having something that's tracked in this way just makes things easier.

It also allows us to assign different areas, maybe it's a multifaceted problem. Whether it's a problem we have to work on, or another part that needs to be worked on with infrastructure; sometimes they're meshed together. This really lets the IT group and our group shine.

The interface is pretty straightforward, but I think for some end-users a little more simplified user interface would help, perhaps. It's gotten better though. It's a little more streamlined, which we like. But every little bit helps with the end-user for them to get assistance.

We recently upgraded from the older version, 12.1, we went to 14.1, and it has gotten a lot better.

We have a lot of assistance from CA support now. We have some consistent support options with them. They get around to us really quickly. That's the great benefit with this new system, we really like it very much.

We use them many times. If there are some internal problems with the system, it's usually on the server base, server side of it. They've been very helpful in helping us get things resolved, especially since we have the newer version that's within the support frame. We were out of support for a few years, but they still helped the best way they could, gave us a few options. But now they've been quite good in helping us out.

Our servers were upgraded and over time we were noticing that there might be some issues with it because the older system had a few bugs and it but support options were limited. It was decided that we should get a newer, upgraded system to make sure we had the support from CA. Even though they did help us a lot with our older system, they were limited in what they could do. They still helped out. And the new system, now we create tickets, now things are resolved quite well. So any little issues, whether it is tickets not going to a user's email, things like that, are resolved.

I think we are comfortable with CA. We had heard of other options. My colleagues and I have used other ticketing systems as well before, in previous jobs. CA just seems to work for us overall, so that's why we stuck with it.

I was involved in the upgrade. We just recently did that this year. I was working the project management aspect of it to make sure it got implemented. I had a lot of help from other departments, so it was a very big team effort to get things done.

It went quite smoothly actually. We understand that now, with 17.1, it's even easier to upgrade, but the process didn't take that long. Considering the fact we'd been out of support on the older version and went to 14.1, it worked out quite well. And this is on a worldwide scale, it's used worldwide at Novus International, everyone uses it.

We especially like the look of xFlow. That looks very personal, so they can keep track of how things are going with their ticket, if it has been worked on, what the status of it is. It seems to be a little more user friendly. The user can see more from a distance right away.

I do recommend CA. Even though it can be complex, there are a lot of aspects to it that are fairly easy. There's a lot of material, CA has a lot of documentation to assist. Personally, I never knew of CA Service Desk at all, or even the name, before I came to this company five years ago. I adopted the system to help with any problems with it. The previous users who utilized and helped set it up, they weren't there anymore. It became my little project. I was able to get assistance from our group and from CA as well, to make it work out well.

So I would recommend it. From a newbie of that system I was able to help out, and CA was able to help out a lot, so it wasn't a huge learning curve.

We drive all of our operations for our enterprise solutions through Service Desk Manager. It has performed really well.

The flexibility and being able to connect to multiple products. It allows to use it the way we want to use it versus the way it came out of the box.

It has given us the ability to automate a lot of tasks, things we couldn't do before.

The flexibility. It allows us to do things, expand it, and integrate with our other solutions. Also, it's pretty easy to use.

• Simplification in the user interface
• Being more expandable
• Better documentation

The user interface is fairly cluttered, and we can update it the way we need to, but it just seems dated, a lot of the things for the full functionality.

Stability is pretty good. We've made strides in making it more available. Switching to the High Availability model helped with that. We had some "growing" issues, upgrades, and the like.

Scalability has been good. We've been able to add new servers when we need to and it's been performing well.

We use tech support a lot. We do things in a lot of non-standard ways, and we end up finding a decent amount of bugs or corner-case kind of things.

I'd like to see things move a little bit faster with it. Sometimes we've had tickets open for a long time, but overall they provide a good service.

Although I wasn't involved in the initial setup I have been involved with upgrades. They have been fairly complex. We've had some issues with upgrades where we had to roll back and get some things fixed. Some things that we ended up tracking back to not following directions right, but then other things we've run into issues.

When selecting a vendor, support is the big one. Also, the capabilities; the fact that it can do what we want it to do. And then expandability, being able to customize it the way we need to.

I think the best advice I'd have is to really use the automation features and expandability to be able to make it do things the way you want it to do them. Simplify the way a user has to interact with things by using a lot of automation.

For the analyst, the user experience is better. Also, for the demo, it is a good experience for them, because they want to look at a fancy application and forms, and know that it is to easy to use them and create easy tickets.

The value for the clients is that you can save information in the application and get reports with that information.

We are also installing xFlow in our QA environment at the moment.

More user experience in the look and feel of the application. 

The stability is great.

We are working on installing in the production environment.

In some cases, I receive late information. In general, it is good.

It was not simple or complex to set up. It was medium with CA's support.

Its implementation was a little complex. I needed support with the service department of CA to work together to implement the version of the product.

In my work, we only use CA products.

I would recommend this version of the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: the customer service and the quality of the product.

There are different products for different purpose. The Service Desk is to take account of incidents and minor requests from the different area of the bank. The PPM is to organize projects. I know that the organization is using Spectrum, but it is out of my scope.

The Service Desk has performed very well. I chose it. It was my selection. I managed the implementation of the product. It is a very good product.

We have a very good relationship with all the users. When users have a problem, they report using Service Desk and it is very useful for this. All the interactions and orchestrations of every problem, we can analyze what happens in the organization and which kind of incident we have. It is a very good tool.

It is simple for me. Simple, and it is robust. It works very well.

We need a mobile solution. We are not using any mobile functionality for the product, but we think that this necessary. This should be provided in the next release.

The product needs to have a better user experience in the interface and mobile functionality.

It is very stable. We have been using it since 2010. We have the usual problems, but no major problems.

Scalability is very good. We have scaled to more users and more functionality. 

The technical support answers your questions and partners with you. They have very good knowledge.

We were using Remedy previously. It was such a complex solution. It was very hard to maintain it. That was its main problem.

The initial setup was straightforward.

CA helped us with the installation.

We work with a lot of vendors, but they did not have this product.

Choose this product. I recommend this product for different companies. CA presents a case with our implementation.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We can trust him and that he will work to help us.

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.

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.

• We have our AT side, which we use for our service desk. 
• We use it for our software development lifecycle. 
• We use it for our CIS Admin change, so any kind of changes that are happening. 
• We also have a CRM system that was built a hundred years ago. 
• It is used to manage our resorts, and our resort operations, and then also our call centers.

The database. The front-end is a little dated. They are working on it, but it is a little dated. So, the database and the power that is driven behind the database.

It has made us a lot more organized, and a lot more aware of what needs to happen. Just now, some of our teams are really adopting the managed change, such as using the product instead of emails back and forth. 

The UI needs to be upgraded.

It is pretty stable. I have had a few problems with stability, but I do not think it is actually the fault of the product as much as it was the vendor that installed it for us.

I can do whatever I want on it. I have it customized.

Technical support is sketchy at best. I have an open ticket right now that has been open for a few weeks. They are a challenge to work with. It took three weeks to get it escalated up to where it probably needed to be in the first place. I do not call support unless something is really broken and I don't know how to fix it.

I was involved in the upgrades. From the old database to the new database, I did that upgrade, and actually a fresh install, which was very straightforward. That was version 11 though. The newer versions have become a little bit more complicated to do a fresh install on, rather than doing an upgrade. They are a little bit easier to upgrade versus doing a fresh install.

A vendor team.

Give it a shot, but go through a partner.

It does what it is supposed to do. I can make it do more than it is supposed to do. I can customize it as I want. Most of the time the customizations will upgrade, but if they do not, I can reach out to people and find a different solution. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Whether or not they are going to help me.

I function inside of CMDB, Chain Configuration Management Data Base. I use it to work with our change management process, or configuration management process. To reduce down time, mean time to repair, audit functionality. Pretty much everything within CMDB, which is a subset of Service Desk.

It's a part of of a tool that other people use, and the big part of the problem with CMDB is getting a high rate of adoption. CMDB is not something that people see as a necessity, especially technical people. They don't want to deal with auditing, they don't want to deal with a lot of that stuff. So the fact that it's something they're already familiar with is a big deal. For a lot of companies, it's not built into their service desk, to my understanding. So that's a good thing about it. 

It's fairly easy to use, from a UI standpoint. Those are the main things that I would say are good about it.

It helps us have a clearer understanding of our environment, that's the big part of it that I use. As far as the ticketing part of that, it integrates within our email. If you're an end user, just a person, you don't need to go the website at all, you can do almost everything through email, so that is nice. 

I would like to see the API cleaned up. Right now, because of the way CA works, they combine a lot of applications. That's just the nature of it, they can't fix that probably. But the API is a mess, it's hard to navigate, hard to figure out. The documentation is okay, but from a back-end standpoint it's kind of difficult to work.

At our company, I think it's pretty stable. We have a good set of people working on it. I don't typically have any problems, with the front-facing part of it. There are not any really issues of stability from what I can see.

I would say we're a small to middle-sized company, and we haven't had any issues with anything like that. I wouldn't say it's a problem for us at all.

They've been good. My biggest problems have been working through the API for Service Desk, it's kind of a mess, that would be a nice way to put it.

They've been able to help me to get through, to where I need to go. Without that it's difficult, to say the least.

My company has been using CA for a long time.

I've been a part of PoCs at our company. When looking to invest in a vendor, the criteria include

• cost -  obviously a big concern
• functionality - if it's going to work within the tools that we have now. 

We're really big into automation, so integrating with other tools that we have is important. And CA - since we use so many of their products, between the mainframe, Service Desk - we really do use quite a bit of what they have. So they have a leg up as far as that goes.

I've worked with quite a few different products, from ServiceNow to Remedy, a lot of ticketing systems and the like. This is my first CMDB, as my main function. I would rate Service Desk lower than some of those other ones that I've used, because it seems like it's a little bit behind with innovative type of stuff. I like the UI, it's good. I would say, stand-alone, if I wasn't comparing it to anything else, it really does do what I need it to do, so I would give it a seven or an eight out of 10. Comparing it to other things, it would be about a six, because I think other software is better.

In terms of advice to a colleague looking at similar solutions, it would really depend on what they need. If they were looking for CMDB functionality, I think it really does do a good job of that. I think if you have other CA products, it does a good job of integrating with a lot of that. But I would encourage them to look at other products as well. I don't think it's an "industry leader." I think it's right up there with other tools, but depending on what you're doing and your environment, I think it's on-par with everything else.

Working problem tickets and change orders.

It has a lot of information, the way we have it set up, that you can use. We can attach documents and do screen prints.

Keeps track of any issues that we're having, as well as any changes that take place. 

As an end user I don't probably use it the way that other people would use it, but maybe automatic opening of tickets for other products would be helpful.

I think that we would like to see tickets opened and closed automatically. We would also like to see different functions for employees versus administrators versus managers; people being able to lock down certain features once they are there. That could be available now and we just don't have it turned on.

I have a feeling that the newer release has a lot of things in there that are useful for us, I've just haven't seen it because we don't have the newest release in.

It's stable. We're running an old version of it, it's a few years old.

I don't know because it's the same as when I started using it a few years ago.

I've used technical support, but not for this product, only for the products that I support. But, in general, my experience with technical support from CA has been good. There have been no surprises in my recent interactions with CA, they've been good.

No, we had an earlier release of Service Desk Manager. 

When selecting a vendor our most important criteria are support, stability, and availability of the product in the future.

Just make sure it has all the features that you're looking for in your particular environment. 

Some of workflows became centralised and the complexity of approval cycles decreased via this tool. In general, it has helped us to implement some ITIL practices easily. 

• Logging every action in Service Desk Manager (SDM).
• Unique ticket number for every case (incident, request, problem, change, etc.) and tracking cases with ticket numbers.
• Out-of-the-box functions
• ITIL compatibility

• Reporting side 
• Workflow engine 
• Knowledge base 
• SLA calculation and customisation

The SDM administration and customisation need deep information about architecture and vendor support continuously. Therefore, the quality of support service is very key.

For PAM and BO, it is very hard to create and manage reports, dashboards, or workflows. These topics cause difficulties on application usage for analysts and end users. 

Some processes stop from time-to-time and require a restart. Also, sometimesexporting lists (incident, request, change, etc.) to Excel does not work and requires a restart.

No issues.

Based on what we have gotten from our local technical partner and vendor, I would rate them as a three (from 10). It can be said that the most important thing is selection of your vendor. CA tools can be very useful when you have the right vendors on board, otherwise it becomes a disaster for your organisation.

We have been using this product for eight years and nobody remembers the reason for the switch, however we are going to switch this product due to lack of technical support and legacy structure for the version which we were using. 

Initial setup was complex, because components (SDM, BO, and PAM) were on different servers and a lot of configuration was needed during the setup. 

The product has several licensing models. In our corporation, we are using a concurrent licensing model and there is no cap for the license due to licensing model being ethical. I think pricing of this model is suitable for growing corporations.

Not applicable.

Find a local partner, one that has full competence on this product, or take extensive training for your technical crew about the product from global vendor. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of product and evaluate these with your needs. If it needs more customisation, think twice. 

However, there is a huge difference between the reviewed version and the recent version of this product. The newer version is far better than the reviewed version. Do not forget that this review has been given for version 12.9. (This review has been shared while version 14.x has been in market.)

The most important part is the user experience. CA Service Desk Manager provides a great and helpful experience. It's a tool with constant updates and always thinking about and looking out for the user.

It's a powerful tool that is able to do everything. Anything you need, CA SDM can help.

CA Technologies have been improving the customer experience when we're talking about UI, probally it's comming soon a great UI about usability.

It's comming with v17 a great functionality about upgrade - it's easier than ever.

I've been implementing the solution for more than a decade, in different companies of different sizes and in different industries. It's adaptability is incredible; you can codify and change almost everything. Therefore, the solution is working for our needs.

The solution could include in your own license other products to help your own customers embrace more disciplines to their needs.

With a small licensing of these products, it's possible to present all the power of the power of suite.

I have used it for more than a decade.

Usually everything's OK.

I have never encountered any stability issues.

I encountered a scalability issue with an older version. Nowadays, it is better.

Customer service is really good.

CA Support is improving its work. The support workers have a lot of experience, and they think fast to solve our problems.

I previously used other solutions, but they were not as powerful. I'm working as a single MSP and work with different solutions.

It's as easy as a Windows install. You can check on CA Communities.

Using CA Service Desk, the companies grow up.

I do not know. I never can compare these numbers.

No comment. Ask me privately.

I can help you to check and evaluate options; compare the solutions. Therefore, the first step is: Compare the same thing with the same thing, apples to apples, but I cannot tell you which is the better choice of fruit.

The new xFlow interface that was introduced for Level 1 analysts really helps the them to achieve the best and fastest result for their users/customers.

First, based on certain ticket attributes, the heat of tickets is calculated and the list is sorted so the analyst can always continue to work on the ticket with the highest priority.

Then, ticket data is analyzed by the system to give analysts hints on experts or similar tickets/solutions.

Last but not least, the research tool is great to search the internet for solutions and get information back to the ticket.

The intelligence introduced into the product keeps getting better the longer you use it. Unified Self Service gives our end users an interface that attracts people and which they want to use, as it looks great and the offerings we provide makes their work life easier.

The methodology introduced for Level 1 analysts needs to be taken to Change Management Process. It would be useful to be able to look in Change Management and see the current status of the process. For example, it could show that this change has five steps and the analyst is performing step three. Also, end users would benefit from this step view.

Change Management is the most complex ITIL Process. Here a clear guidance for the person in action or all actors are important. Currently, there is room for improvement.The change process has a variable amount of steps to complete, depending on several attributes. If you look into a change, you should directly see that you are on step three out of seven, so you have a clear idea of how many steps have to be completed and how many are already completed. It gives you a good understanding of where you are in the process.

We have been using the solution now for eight years. It has given us a huge benefit in our daily work.

We have not had any problems with stability. We run the system for multiple customers and as a SaaS offering with very good stability.

The solution scales very well. A greatly improved version was introduced 3 years ago and since then, we have not had any issues with scalability or stability.

the SLAs provided are real life proven, we faced some priority 1 issues and got quick solutions and it works throughout their support centers.

We have experienced very good technical support. When you prepare for a go-live, you can engage with a dedicated technical support engineer in advance to get priority support in case issues occur during, or shortly after, an upgrade.

We used in-house solutions and it did not give us the coverage over all the ITIL processes to provide professional service/support.

Setup and integration went smooth. After installation, we were able to import ITIL content to get started modifying the processes to our needs.

we did a in house implementation only for difficult integrations/customizations we involved the vendor. They have professionals that know the software very well.

Pricing is simple, as it’s per concurrent analysts.

We looked into other vendors too, such as Cherwell. But this is already 7 years ago. Since then, we observe the market and review our decision every two years to make sure that our decision is still right.

It provides great possibilities. To get the most value out of the solution, make sure to get your people in service management and administrators trained.

This product has so many adjustment possibilities for many different clients.

One of the features of this product is to elevate the customer experience. Due to the constantly increasing needs of the customers experience, we always have to make changes in the way we are working to provide satisfaction to our clients. Thus, this application has many thousands of ways to do that.

• We certainly increased the quality of our work.

• The system is more robust. We can elaborate on a better and complex service. At one time, we had a lot of processes.

• The application has the possibility to integrate with other systems. This, in turn, transformed the information to be more solid.

• Due to the integration with Business Intelligence (BI), we had possibilities to create reports. In these reports, we can see, in-depth, about where and when exactly we need to modify our processes. Therefore, there was a decrease in the count of open and duplicate tickets.

One area that this product can improve is in the mobile user aspect. We need to get more solutions to our client's mobile, so they will have the same mobile experience that they have on their computer.

I have been using it for about five years. I started to use this system as a customer and after a short time, i.e., within a three month period, I specialized in it. Now I am working as an administrator.

I didn't particularly have any issues with the stability.

None of my clients have reported any scalability issues. I didn't find any such issues either.

The technical support is the best support that I've seen. They are very fast and provide security, in terms of responding to my tickets. Even if they don't know the answer immediately, I don't need to wait so long to receive their response back. They are always positive.

I have used a different solution before, but it wasn’t what my clients really needed. The other systems don't have a variety of services that CA SDM has included under only one system. If CA SDM doesn't have a particular feature, then CA has facility integration with its other systems.

The setup was straightforward, once you have almost all the things planned.

It is a bit expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. It is worth it!

Plan every step you need for implementation. Always look forward to every step that your client would need in order to get there.

We use it for incident, problem, release, change, knowledge, and configuration management.

With its scalability and ability to connect with various systems, we have been able to exchange data with several systems automatically.

The UI is old school with a lot of windows opening and slowing down the process of ticket creation by the end users. The reporting ability of the tool needs to improve drastically. Currently, the solution is provided with Business Objects (BO) and is too slow to use for every day reporting.

I have used this solution for 18 years.

Once in a while, the processes crash and we are yet to find a root cause for it. The product is very sensitive to small network outages (even for 1-2 seconds).

There were no scalability issues.

The technical support is provided, but it is often too slow. Hence, it requires us to implement a workaround, since the fix has a long way to travel. It often depends on the person who picks up the issue on the other end.

The initial setup is tricky. There are a lot of things to keep in mind, especially when everything is moving to the cloud or is virtual. Scalability becomes a challenge if we use the wrong resources.

There is always a challenge with the cloud solutions, such as ServiceNow. But the level of customization that we can do with the tool is normally not possible with the other tools in the market. The UI should be more intuitive.

The needs an improvement with its UI which looks old school. The product also is quite complex to implement. However the framework it uses is quite scalable and the product can be customized a lot.

• The remote connection part (Support Automation): CA Service Desk has a Support Automation feature which primarily does remote connection. This is an important customer support tool used in connecting to a user’s/customer’s device or machine to help them resolve whatever problems they have. The remote connection also has a chat functionality that you can also use.
• Robust knowledge search via its knowledge base: For knowledge search, CA Service Desk has a robust knowledge base tool where documentation, articles and notes around known incidents and problems are documented for users/administrators or analysts to use. They basically act as a self-service tool where users can go to, search for documents and resolve problems themselves instead of having to always call the IT people. This way the IT people have time to do other productive tasks.
• The simplicity of the tool

All business processes have been built around the service. SLAs are measured promptly and tickets are owned/resolved faster, thereby improving user/customer satisfaction.

The Reporting part (Reports Tab) needs to be more robust and made less complex. CA Service Desk makes use of a BusinessObjects XI tool for reports, which is owned by SAP. This is actually a third-party tool and a bit complex in terms of reliability on the network, mostly. If these reports were in-built, without having to integrate or connect to any third-party tool, then this would be better.

I have been using the product for seven years.

I encountered stability issues in rare cases but stability was good.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Good

Support from CA Technical Support has been brilliant, as far as your SLA is renewed promptly.

It was the same CA solution. The customer started with CA Service Desk 11.2 and they have upgraded to 12.6, 12.9 and 14.1.

I am part of a team that does pre-sales, support, deployments/implementations of CA solutions.

Pricing and licensing is usually a problem. CA solutions are very expensive; hence, only big organizations can afford them.

The customer looked at ManageEngine, HPE Service Manager and others.

CA Service Desk is built around the ITIL methodology and would help to improve all organizational processes starting from incidents/problems/request, knowledge management, CMDB, etc.

1. Ease of customization

2. Modules of integrated ITIL managers

3. Integrated remote access to tickets

The product update process has been improved, and I like that they have included advanced high availability. Also, the process of adding new customers using multi-tenant is relatively simple.

They need to improve the High Availability, and the native integration between CA Service Desk Manager, CA Process Automation, CA Service Catalog and CA Unified Self-Service.

We have been using it for nine years, and currently have two customers with older versions of SDM. The products have been installed on site without multi-tenant.

The implementation of solutions using secure protocol is always complicated. It is not simple to set up, as it requires changes to specific files. It could be simpler.

There were no issues with stability.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

High. Collaborates with gains in maturity.

It's excellent. All there agents are willing to help, even involving other teams in more complex cases.

No.

It's simple, as we used the manufacturer's documentation (Green Book).

My advice is to define the scope of use and only then plan how best architecture. The secure protocol issues, high availability, and the use or not of a homologation environment generate operating and financial costs.

The ROI was satisfactory, but I would advise you to review the scope, as several solutions for simple things can have a high cost, for example, why use CA Infrastructure Management (Spectrum, eHealth, NetQoS) when Nagios could serve your customer demands well.

Plan a Homologation Environment and possible uses for other areas of the organization other than IT. These points are extremely important and can impact the management and maintenance of the product.

We also evaluated ServiceNow to reduce infrastructure costs, but some CA Service Desk Manager features do not exist in ServiceNow, even though it is a more expensive solution.

My advice is to get to know the product very well in relation to ITIL processes. A lot of customization only exists because we do not know the product at that level. The manufacturer's documentation "Content Pack for ITIL" is required reading even if the company is not a service provider.

I am enthusiastic about ITSM solutions. In addition to CA products, I know of LANDesk Service Desk, OTRS, Octopus, Zendesk, Microsoft System Center Service Manager, Axios Assyst and BMC Remedy. All of these solutions are excellent and have lots of documentation with the best implementation practices, both the system and the ITIL processes. I always recommend studying these documents before any customization.

Ease of integration with CA Service Desk Manager Account setup

New usage approach for end users

Access to services

I have used it for two years.

Low customer maturity in ITIL processes

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is excellent.

Technical support is excellent.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was complex, but normal. We use test and homologation environments.

A provider team implemented it, the CA Technologies team itself. They were expert in the subject.

The best ROI possible

Make the investment; return guaranteed.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options.

Make an extra investment in communication. Inform end users clearly and objectively of changes in how to request services. Demonstrate the benefits of the solution.

It brings a maturity of collaboration and support, facilitating the work of analysts, and benefits end users in service.

It provided greater agility in service and a more agile management vision.

We would like to see improvements mainly without the Service Desk. This was where we saw the greatest gain in unpaid performance and collaboration.

We have been using this solution for ten years.

There were no issues with deployment, because the wizard of this version has been greatly improved.

So far, there were no identified stability problems.

So far, there were no identified scalability problems.

Customer service is excellent, because it leaves a reality of collaboration more evident.

Technical support is excellent, because it provides and demonstrates collaboration, which speeds up the service.

We did not use a different solution previously. We just upgraded.

The initial setup was direct and easy with the settings that occurred in the wizard. We used to make it version 14.1.

We implement the solution with the support of the manufacturer. They had a maximum skill level.

As a financial institution, we cannot provide such information.

ROI is closely linked to its current maturity. Aim to know exactly where you are, where you are going, and map the necessary actions and adjustments before deployment.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We were already satisfied with the benefits of the previous version of this product.

The training of analysts and a campaign to demonstrate end user benefits and functionality is very important.

The following modules are the most valuable:

• Incident
• Request
• Knowledge
• Change Order

Quick capture of ticket info lends itself to easy resolution and/or assignment to other groups.

Reporting and integration to SCCM need improvement.

Service Desk Manager doesn’t integrate to SCCM out of the box. If you’re looking to use SCCM as your source of truth for servers or desktops and to populate a federated CMDB (using Service Desk manager), you’re looking at building a connector manually or buying another tool to do that. In our organization, we’re customizing code to do this in batch mode. Not ideal, but what we have to do. CA had recommended integrating with other tools of theirs that we have but the technology teams are centralized on SCCM. So that’s that one.

Reporting, we’ve had to buy Ivanti Xtraction to do all our dashboard and reporting. Boxi reports really fall short and we don’t use any reports out of the box. Be that as it may, we’re heavily metrics focused, so we’ve had to take that on separately to work with outside tools. Not ideal, but reality.

I have used this solution for thirteen years.

Service Desk Manager doesn’t integrate to SCCM out of the box. If you’re looking to use SCCM as your source of truth for servers or desktops and to populate a federated CMDB (using Service Desk manager), you’re looking at building a connector manually or buying another tool to do that. In our organization, we’re customizing code to do this in batch mode. Not ideal, but what we have to do. CA had recommended integrating with other tools of theirs that we have but the technology teams are centralized on SCCM. So that’s that one.

Reporting, we’ve had to buy Ivanti Xtraction to do all our dashboard and reporting. Boxi reports really fall short and we don’t use any reports out of the box. Be that as it may, we’re heavily metrics focused, so we’ve had to take that on separately to work with outside tools. Not ideal, but reality.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Technical support is moderate.

Remedy was the previous solution at my current organization. It was not easy to support or migrate to new versions and was cost prohibitive.

Minimal training is required to get everyone up to speed and using the system.

Negotiate with the vendor.

We evaluated ServiceNow. It costs a fortune and required too much management.

Develop a process first, then apply the tool and minimize customizations.

From our perspective, and taking into account that we have a lot of CA products for IT service delivery, the most valuable feature is interconnectivity with other products such as CA Clarity, CA IT Asset Manager, CA Spectrum, CA UIM, CA APM, etc.

• All incidents, requirements, changes and problems are documented in one database.
• It is easy to follow, control and generate reports.
• There is a synergy with other products for incident management, monitoring (infrastructure and applications), asset inventory, etc.

Taking into account the new version 17.0 that CA Technologies has released, issues in terms of the flexibility, ease-of-use, service catalogue improvements, etc. were resolved.

I have used CA Service Desk Manager for three and a half years. Previously, we used the IBM Tivoli Service Desk suite for five years.

No major issues that affect the stability were faced. In the beginning, the issues used to be in the first stages.

We had no scalability issues.

The support provided is very good to excellent.

We were using the IBM Tivoli Service Desk suite solution for many years.

The setup was of the intermediate level in complexity, but there is no need to worry about that.

We experienced no major delays in terms of the migration, configuration and setup tasks.

Taking into account of the strong relation that we have with CA Technologies, and so many others products that we have implemented, price was not an issue.

We looked at IBM and BMC solutions.

It is important to have all the procedures well-documented, have a sponsor for this project and have good relations with CA and a partner. They will help you to define and implement this solution.

SDM provides out-of-the-box integration with other CA Service Management modules. For example, it integrated with CA CMDB, CA Business Intelligence (for reporting and dashboard), CA Service Catalog and CA Unified Self Service.

• We are better able to manage and keep track of SLAs with end users.
• Analysts work more efficiently based on the ticket priority.
• We can better manage IT assets and contract license through CMDB.
• Reporting and dashboard: it is easy to produce a report with drag and drop functions.

Customization and configuration of CA Unified Self-Service needs improvement. CA needs to provide similar tools like Web Screen Painter (a customization tool for Service Desk) for CA Unified Self Service.

I have used this for 10 years; since CA Service Desk r11.

We have not had stability issues.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I’ll give technical support an 8.

We didn’t have anything before this.

Initial setup is straightforward.

They offer a concurrent analyst license that covers all the CA Service Desk modules: Incident, Request, Change, Service Level Management, CMDB, and Reporting.

There is NO license for the end user. In my opinion, it is a good licensing structure because some of other service desk products in the market sell separate licenses for each module.

We did’t look at alternatives.

• The product aligns to the ITIL process.
• All modules are integrated: Incident, Request, Problem, Change Order, and CMDB.
• The Service Catalog makes it easy for the end user to log a ticket.
• It is role based: easily manage the analyst based on their role; e.g., level 1 analyst, level 2 analyst.
• Unified administrator task.

We use everything in service desk and each one of them are adding benefit to the company and users. We really benefit from all of the features but if I have to single some features out, it will be:

Major incident tracking: We are able to differentiate between a normal and a major incident and do comprehensive reporting on this to key stakeholders.

SLA management: Each category has it’s own unique SLA linked and this gives us the ability to manage the expectations of end users more effectively.

Provides quicker resolution of all tickets with SLA management; reporting is quick and easy; tickets can be tracked and escalations can be handled by the correct teams.

The old employee interface available in CA had certain features and functions that were not brought over to Unified Self Service. One of the features that we use extensively in our environment is the properties or also known as additional information. This gives us the ability to ask the end user certain questions upfront to assist the back office teams to resolve the ticket faster and more effectively.

We had to do some in-house development to get this functionality working and I am glad to say that we have successfully been able to get this implemented. USS is a huge improvement in terms of the look and feel from an end user point of view but letting out a key functionality like the properties resulted in a longer implementation period.

We have been using CA Service Desk since about 2006 when it was still called CA Unicentre.

When we were still on an Oracle database, we had some stability issues but we have been running on SQL without any major stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Support is a problem area for us. They take too long to respond to tickets logged.

We didn't have anything before this.

I can’t comment on the initial setup.

We don’t have any issues with regards to the licensing module or pricing.

I can’t comment.

Ensure you do an out-of-the-box implementation. We have learned from upgrades that customizations cause a lot of issues during upgrades.

Change Management, Incident Management, and CMDB are the most valuable features.

• Automated our manual business processes

IT PAM Workflow could be improved.

I have used it for 10 years. We use CA Service Desk 12.9 and IT PAM 4.3.

There were some stability issues.

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support was fair.

I am not interested in sharing this information.

Pricing is good compared to other similar applications.

The core SDM component (the ticketing system) is the most valuable to me. It is reliable and covers the basic ITSM process stack very well (I,R,P,C). I am an IT consultant specializing in ITSM tools. The CA system has proven to be reliable and trustworthy. It can be scaled to meet the ITSM needs of the largest global enterprises. The change module is particularly robust. It provides controls, visualization, and auditability.

The system becomes a centralized place for ITSM data and process automation for the enterprise. For example, a monitoring system generates an alert on a production server (the SDM system will integrate with any monitoring tool on the planet). The alert can generate a ticket in SDM. The server is listed as a CI in SDM, so the resolvers know where the trouble is. The Change Impact Analyzer will highlight how that server interacts with and impacts other systems in the environment) so you can see if this will cause a downstream problem. The Asset Portfolio Manager component of the system will have the purchase, warranty and service agreements for that specific server. The knowledge base can have articles describing how to deal with that particular alert, or possible specific steps that should be taken on the system in question. If this has happened often with this server lately, a problem ticket can be opened. The incidents related to that CI can be attached to the problem record, so the problem manager can get a full view of what has been going on, etc. And on down the merry ITIL path.

I’ve implemented, configured and managed this system for hundreds of clients. I trust it. CA is not perfect, but this system is one of their most reliable products.

The suite has grown too large, and has been pulled together from a series of acquisitions. For example, the Service Catalog, the process automation engine (IT PAM), and the Asset Portfolio Manager are all separate systems attached through integration. The good news is CA does not charge a la carte, so you get all of this stuff included in the concurrent user license. The bad news is this can be a delicate web of integration, which can be finicky.

The CA Service Management Suite is comprised of several components. All of them were acquired individually by CA over the past 20 years and integrated into the original system. The core of the suite is CA Service Desk Manager (“SDM”), which is a ticketing system that is excellent and scalable for Request Management, Incident Management, Change Management and Problem Management. This is the bread-and-butter of the CA Service Management suite. It is heavily used around the world and very reliable. A+ ☺

CA typically does a great job of incorporating acquisitions into their existing products over time. For example, the Knowledge base and CMDB used to be separate products, connected to the core Service Desk through an integration. However, today they have been fully incorporated into core SDM. Logging into SDM, you would never know that the KB and CMDB were once completely separate products. This adds KB and CMDB to the list of excellent, scalable and reliable functions of the CA Service Management Suite. A+ ☺

However, the industry is driving us all rapidly forward.

The Service Catalog, IT Process Automation Manager, Unified Self Service, Xflow and CA Business Intelligence are all separate applications connected to SDM via integration. Even though you are purchasing this as one suite under a per-concurrent user model, it is actually a bunch of applications integrated together. C-.

This adds complexity to the system and creates an urban sprawl of servers. This sprawl, in turn, creates challenges with patching, upgrades and daily operations. You’ve got to be smart about virtualizing it, SSO, etc. C-.

Consequently, my point is that CA has room for improvement here.

I hope this helps. I am a big fan of CA Service Management and highly recommend it. However, like the rest of us in life, we all have room to improve.

I have been using CA Service Management for 20 years (since 1997).

Stability issues are a function of changes in the CA system. If you heavily modify it, and do not pay close attention to the internal integration between components (SDM, SC, APM, IT PAM), there can be issues. The system also prefers some head room on resources. So you need to give it more HDD, CPU and memory than your IT team will think is necessary (not a horrible amount, but this is not something you can run successfully with the minimum resource requirement).

We have not had scalability issues. This system is capable of scaling to the largest enterprises. Conversely, it is overkill for small companies.

Support is good. The CA support team could be larger, but overall the support is responsive and effective.

I have consulted with many systems (Remedy, HEAT, Service Center, Tivoli, ServiceNow, Assyst, etc.). Each has their strengths and weaknesses.

The initial setup can be complex, especially if you want to track and notify on a variety of granular controls. The system is cool, in that it can do this stuff. However, the vendor oversells how easy it is and the training from CA is terrible.

Licensing from CA is straightforward. The system is licensed by concurrent user. The rule of thumb for named users to concurrent users is 3/1. When you buy this system new, the licensing is amazingly simple. No add-ons. Just one license and you get everything. The challenge with CA licensing occurs over the long term. CA routinely changes the suite components every 5 years (or so), forcing existing customers to pay a license upgrade fee for access to the new components.

I have consulted with many systems (Remedy, HEAT, Service Center, Tivoli, ServiceNow, Assyst, etc.). Each has their strengths and weaknesses.

If you are going to DIY this implementation, I recommend thorough planning with your IT team. Be sure you have the right engineers, and that they have at least attended the CA SM Admin course (4- or 5-day class). I mentioned earlier that CA training is not the best; however, this course is a necessity if you are going to self-implement. This is not a weekend project. Take it seriously; plan 8-2 weeks for yourself from the moment you build the VMs to the go-live date.

• Functions related to the ITIL process sets for change management
• Request fulfillment
• Incident management
• Knowledge management database

These elements are the most valuable to the organization because they are the areas that have at least rudimentary corresponding business processes and accountable business owners.

The features that are most valuable to me as an SDM administrator are:

• Extensibility of the interface to allow for schema changes
• Form-level modifications to support the aforementioned business processes

Utilization of change management features allowed us to effectively implement both group- and department-level change advisory boards and coordinate the interaction between the disparate management levels.

All areas of every product have room for improvement.

That being said, this product would benefit by allowing individual users more customization, notably around notifications.

On a per-user basis, the individual user should have the ability to determine what notification types they want to subscribe to and how they want to be notified.

On an individual basis, users should be able to modify their interface to change things like the attributes returned from search results or have the ability to show/hide fields on ticket creation screens to support their own or a team’s workflow.

It would be handy to have an option in the interface to disable large chunks of functionality. For example, we do not utilize the application for problem management.

If there were an option to yank Problems out of menus, screens, this would expedite deployments and limit the need for the creation and maintenance of custom test scripts.

The organization has been utilizing this product line for around 17 years. I’ve been using this product line for 15 years. This specific version of SDM has been in use in our environment for a year.

We periodically run into issues with the stability of the application. It rarely necessitates any action on our part.

We opted to deploy on Microsoft Windows and SQL, and occasionally run into issues based on those decisions. I am not sure if they can be attributed to the application, however.

There have not been any scalability issues.

There are basically two buckets: those that are really competent and those that are lacking.

In my experience, 75% fall into the really competent category, which is much higher than other companies I’ve worked with.

CA, given its size, surprisingly does not have 24/7 US-based technical support. As all of our deployments naturally occur outside of regular US business hours, this means that whenever I’m really having an issue, I’m invariably working with someone in India, France, or elsewhere.

I would like to reiterate that these people are usually very proficient in what they do, but because of language barriers, things do not usually go as smooth as I would prefer.

Our organization has utilized CA ticketing solutions AHD, USD, SDM, and Service Desk since I’ve been here.

The installation was GUI-based, and was pretty standard and straightforward.

I had no input nor purview into pricing or licensing.

The solution was already selected.

Ensure that your organization has robust business processes in place for the feature sets that you would like to implement. Organizations that expect the tool to define the business process can expect a very difficult deployment.

Ticket management and the knowledge base are the most valuable features of this solution.

Our managers are able to properly monitor their team activities with CA Service Desk. With knowledge base, the end users are able to fix simple issues.

It could improve in maintainability and customization of features with a better and simpler GUI.

I have used this solution for a year and a half.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

We were using an intranet website, initially. It was very rudimentary and we couldn’t customize it without relying on outsourcing. We switched over to CA Service Desk Manager.

Do not over-customize it, given the fact that it could directly impact the tool's stability and data reliability.

Advanced Availability architecture is hands down the key feature. We can make sweeping changes, to the application or database, with a minimal impact on our user base. Most of the time, the users see no downtime at all.

CA SDM has organized the work for our internal groups to run the IT infrastructure in our company. When you add the workflow engine to the mix, the productivity and process adherence both get greatly enhanced.

There are some functions I have seen from its competitors that I would want CA SDM to have. I also find some of the items to be tedious from an admin point of view.

The pdm_publish process, that adds tables and columns to the database, is an unforgiving key stroke of errors.

A “publish” can run to completion, but if a mistake was made, then the system will stay down, until you figure out what mistake was made and correct it.

I would like to see the process just throw away the mistake and continue cleanly. After which time, it could post a report upon completion that you have to redo the offensive work.

Personally, I have been using this product for eight years. However, the company has been using it for about 12 years. We started out with version 11.2.

Currently, we are using version 12.9 and we will be moving to version 14.1, very shortly.

The system is very stable, but there are some instances where instability has been seen. It typically comes from the external influences or from one, turn-off network interruption, causing us to re-establish a database connection.

There were no scalability issues, thus far. We have 28,000 users in the user database within the system, and it seems to chug along fine.

The initial support was wonderful. Over the past three years, I have seen some degradation in the support, both in terms of the response time as well as the resolution time.

CA has been advised of this issue and they have met with us on this subject. So, they have acknowledged the problem and are trying to make adjustments in order to accommodate it.

This is the first tool of its type that is being used in the way that we are using it.

The initial setup was straightforward, but there are many steps involved. I don’t fault the vendor for this. There are many aspects that require attention as the system is very customizable.

Take the implementation class that CA offers. It is key to have certain aspects figured out ahead of time, as they will impact the system heavily, as time goes on.

Provides effective management of service calls and work assignments. It includes good APIs to extend functionality.

In addition to IT, we also use this product on our business side to manage lobby flow for clients and workflow for our client service staff. The product has allowed us to efficiently manage workflow, measure performance, and analyze customer service measures.

The UI is old and passé. It needs to be intuitive, efficient, and allow users to tailor it to their way of working.

I have used CA Service Desk for fifteen years.

The product is very stable.

The product does scale effectively up to a point. Beyond that, it gets a little complicated to extend it.

I would give technical support a rating of 6/10.

We used Remedy and switched to CA Service Desk for cost and ease of implementation.

The basic setup is easy and straightforward. The product is tailored around ITIL. Business processes need to account for that in order to make the most use of the product.

We think CA pricing is straightforward. They do have a tendency to re-bundle (and sometime rebrand) products and you have to be on top of that. If you build a relationship, working through these things is much easier.

This was an easy choice fifteen years ago.

Look into the SaaS offering from CA and compare. While CA Service Desk has rich functionality and is stable, its skin is old and cumbersome.

The flexible envelope provides an infinite number of ways to customize it.

I can easily say that SDM is the core of our organization. We have integrated a lot of related systems, implemented contract management logic, and some HR functions, such as vacation planning routines.

Rebuilding the visual interface in the same style using modern web technologies can extend the usability of the system for up to 10 years.

I’ve personally used CA Service Desk since 2013.

We did have some stability issues, but with some fine-tuning, supported by CA support and the CA community, we resolved them.

We did have some scalability issues, but with fine-tuning, supported by CA support and the CA community, we resolved them.

Our current version is not within the scope of technical support.

The initial setup was performed by our integrator.

The system covers all of our enterprise needs. However, in order to adapt it to your business needs, you will need to have an experienced staff. Familiarize it with your enterprise and with Service Desk's undocumented methods and routines, such as SPEL, WAND, and overall daemon logic.

Customizability. You can easily make your own tables and add fields. Each customer is different and over time, things change. This product is flexible.

It is scalable and we are a big organization.

The upgrading process needs to be improved. They need more testing with more customers before the release. We are dealing with a lot of defects that should have been caught before the product was released.

I have been using this solution for 17 years.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We didn’t have a previous solution.

This product is worth the cost.

I didn’t evaluate any other products. I worked for CA at the time when I first started using this product.

This product is ready to go as is. It can be customized, but you need a dedicated administrator to manage customizations.

• Multitenancy does not require a standalone implementation per customer.
• Reporting and Dashboards are components which allow you to measure customer contracts.

• We can use the same installation for several and independent customers (multi-tenancy).
• ITIL processes.

I would like more flexibility on KPI and SLA definition.

I have used the product for 6+ years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a score of 6/10.

The high availability setup is more complex, but nothing special.

We evaluated ServiceNow.

It is a stable and good product, with several integrations and an interesting API.

• Incidents
• Request management
• Change management
• Asset management

These are the core processes for organization, as we are more focused on them.

When we started, we did not have a proper service catalog or services, and there were many complaints from end users regarding our services.

CA Service Desk Manager has helped us publish our service and provide better service to our users. That’s why our satisfaction rate has increased over the years.

Mobility is one area: There should be improvements in terms of implementations and content.

Also, they have launched Xinterface, which is very good, but it is restricted to only to incidents and requests. It should be used for changes, as well.

I have been using CA Service Desk Manager for eight years.

We have not had any issues related to stability.

We have not had any issues related to scalability.

Pricing and licensing are affordable compared to other IT system management tools.

We evaluated BMC and HPE.

Make sure that you have your processes ready so that the implementation will be easier.

Some of the features that we really like about the solution is that certain parts of it are pretty expandable and customizable. The support that we get from CA has been pretty good. We haven't had major issues with them, and they're really responsive as well.

The tool itself is an enterprise tool. It fits our needs and we can actually expand it out to the further campus, instead of just having one area of focus or one group using it.

Honestly, we started off just using one part of the solution, just using request management, and then gradually, as they've improved the application, we've actually started to use it more and more. Now, we use it for our change management, our problem management. We started to use the mobile application and the unified self-service. We've started to expand as CA has focused more on their ITSM tool.

This solution has helped align our overall IT and organization strategy because it got rid of shadow systems. Before, because we're the central IT department, every area kind of had their own shadow system or some way of doing change management, or some way of doing request management, or incident management. Basically, we kind of unified all our processes to bring down the cost. Everybody's on the same page. Everybody knows what's going on. Our outages have dropped. Our communication between areas has increased. It's been a huge benefit for us.

Honestly, I would like to see them really change the UI for the user experience for the Service Management piece, or the Service Desk Manager piece, to match the unified self-service, so it looks more modern and more sleek.

It'd be nice if they actually improved the mobile scalability, so if somebody goes to that Service Desk Manager tool, it actually will go right to a mobile website instead of an old PDA-style website. Those are some of the bigger issues that we've been getting. The UI just looks really dated.

System architecture-wise, we changed our solution where, before, they had one type of server setup, which really had some stability issues, but we moved to their new advanced server setup and, so far, so good. We had really good luck with it. We've had some hiccups here and there, but nothing too major.

With the new architecture that we have, scalability is a lot easier. The system's more adaptable now. We could drop in more servers if we need to, pretty easily.

We've used their technical support quite a bit. Their technical support is good, depending on the tech that you get. There're some techs that, as soon as I see the tickets assigned to them, I'm kind of like, "I don't really want to deal with this person," but there's a bunch of them that are fantastic. They'll call you; they'll follow up with you.

I remember one time I was working with one of them, and we had upgraded and just installed a patch, and he walked us through the whole process. Their techs that are fantastic are fantastic, but they also have, you know, just like any organization I guess.

When we first started, we really didn't have a solution. It was kind of easy just to say, "Hey!" We put out an RFP. We had about 15 vendors, and CA was obviously one of the larger ones. We had them come in and give us a demo, and they gave us more bang for the buck. We've been working with them ever since. As I’ve mentioned, with the upgrades, we've had hiccups, but they've been really easy going about sending technical assets if we needed technical assets.

The one thing I like about CA is, they're willing to work with you. Their service is huge. I really don't want to have somebody that's a stickler; that's going to be like, "Oh, well, this is what you got; this is all we can help you with." CA will sometimes, depending again on that technician, they'll go over and beyond, and help you out. Their sales folks are really good. We haven't had any problems with them. We reach out to them if we want a ticket escalated; they'll escalate it for us. They're pretty consistent on their communication with us, so it's really good.

We've been using the tool, the CA tool, for about almost 10 years now. When we initially set it up, it was pretty straightforward because we came from nothing. We didn't really have a service management tool.

We’ve had some hiccups with the upgrades themselves. There were some growing pains. I know they're trying to do a unified installer, and they're trying to make things easier, but they're still not there.

We had one vendor – this is a long time ago – called iET and it made it to the final round. Their issue was, they didn't support Firefox; all they supported was Internet Explorer. They kept on telling us, "Oh, it's on our roadmap, it's on our roadmap." We waited. We delayed for six months until their "roadmap" was supposed to come out. They never did Firefox, so it was pointless; why are we going to only use Internet Explorer?

We had Remedy. BMC Remedy was one of them. They were a little pricey. One of the departments that joined with us had a bad experience with them.

FrontRange was also evaluated. FrontRange was pretty small at that time. They weren't really this big player as they are right now.

Go in with an open mind. CA sometimes has a negative connotation just because it's a big company. Go in with an open mind and work with the sales person. Get one of their technical assets onboard so he can take a look and see what the system can do, because there's a lot more that it can do than what they actually try to sell you. Just go in with an open mind.

If I would have rated it a year or two ago, I would have rated it lower, because I felt like CA just totally gave up on ITSM service management portion. They kind of said, "Oh, well. You know, it's out there and that's it." Honestly, for the last year, they've been really doing a good job. I think they've become more agile. They've been doing a really good job of keeping things up to date, getting the customers more involved. They have a new customer form, where they allow you to vote on features and such.
They still have a way to go for them to catch up to other companies that are out there for their service management tools but I think they're in the right direction.

The most valuable feature is the ability to integrate many processes – like change management, incident management, problem management, CMDB, all of them – in the same tool.

The benefits that we are seeing from the service management is since you can integrate the products, you can make correlations of which changes cause incidents, or which configuration updates have changes or have many incidents over a certain period, and from that, gather more data to work with it.

From the implementation side, it's a tool that you can customize a lot. This customization sometimes, on upgrades and so on, it gives you a really hard time, so I would suggest trying to build a solution that you can operate with the customizations that the product allows you to do.

I would like to see a new UI, and stuff that will keep customizations going on so you don't have to do all of the reworking all over again to keep up with the next product version.

The stability just depends. In small shops, it's very stable, but once you go into big shops, such as banking infrastructure, that have many policies, sometimes there are some challenges there.

It gives the opportunity for growth. If you have more services and more users, you just keep growing and scaling the hardware and the software, and you still get the same response.

The initial setup just depends whether you have training or not. Usually, you just need the first training. After that, you can just follow up with the guidelines that CA has given to you and you can pretty much go through them.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like CA is just the recognition; the support provided for it. I want to have support from a company and CA just delivers that.

My rating is basically based mostly on the integration; to try out a new solution, and we chose service management; the process integration. How many solutions can give you that process integration together in just one tool? Most of the tools are just for tickets, incidents, or problems, but they don't give you the whole package together.

• SLA escalations: The SLA escalation feature is accurate and helps the service management team to manage the services delivered, as well as to monitor the performance of the analysts working on the tickets.
• Multitenancy: This feature allowed multiple logically separated entities to work on the same ticketing system. There was complete data isolation.
• Ease of editing code: The code behind the UI and the functionality is quite easy to edit and does not require much learning time.

Multitenancy has helped to use a single solution for multiple departments. This way, there was a single ticketing system for many departments, which saved a lot of cost and helped the departments with organizing their requests.

There are later versions available that we are not using yet. Many desired improvements have already been included in those versions.

Nonetheless, here are a couple of ways they could improve the product:
- Better reporting: Data specifying which ticket spent how much time in which status should be easily available/stored somewhere.
- Readily available plugins: Plugins should be made available for integration with third-party tools that are commonly used (e.g., Nagios). Such integration needs to be developed externally. This improvement can make the tool really popular.

I have been using it for four years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

No issues with stability. This depends on the level of customization done.

Technical support is 8/10.

I did not previously use a different solution. We have been using this product from the beginning. It was chosen because of the features available at the given cost.

Initial setup was straightforward.

One-time setup was done by a vendor team and later, other implementations were done in-house. The documentation is sufficient to help with the implementation and scalability should be kept in mind when implementing.

For organizations that are beyond the startup phase but are still not very huge, this is the ticketing system to choose.

The most valuable features of this product are security, scalability and the possibilities for customization.

We can’t compete with the price against small local vendors. Demanding customers are our market.

We have mainly made money by selling our consultant services around it.

Some the features that can be improved are:

• Usability: xFlow is a great step forward, but further steps are needed. Public bids in Finland often require HTML5 UI. xFlow fulfills that requirement.

• Public bids in Finland often do not permit browser plugins: Java or Adobe Flash Player. In such cases, we just have to offer other solutions since Visualizer requires Flash. Thus, there is a need to get rid of Flash.

• Internalization: Check out language plugin in ServiceNow. CA is quite far behind in this area.

I have used this solution since the year 2009.

Some bugs have been found during the years, but they have been resolved.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

It’s okay. We have had issues while getting fixes for a few older releases.

We had tried a local competing solution in the years 2014-2015. Their UI is much more suitable for sales presentations. However, they have too many issues with stability and their technical support is at a very poor level.

ITSM deployment projects are always quite difficult.

CA is competitive, i.e., if there are a lot of end users compared to number of analysts. However, that is not always the case.

We considered both global and local vendors.

A customer comment after our sales presentation (CA Service Desk Manager + CA Control Minder): "We have finally found a vendor who is serious about security."

The most valuable features are the service catalog and process automation; in deployment, the ICT automation and self-service.

• Self-consumption of services by end-users
• Standardization
• Automation with increased effectiveness

I would like to see integration between the service management products and consolidated application of patches.

We have used this solution for five years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I encountered issues with scalability. The solution is 32-bit.

I would give technical support a rating of 9 out of 10.

The initial installation was simple. The initial configuration and integration between products was complex.

Make sure you have a strong official CA support presence.

With CA SDM, my entire service management business is ITIL aligned with better productivity across all IT processes. From incident management to release management, CA SDM empowers and energizes ABS and their clients.

We are ITIL compliant and we have a lot of experience implementing IT services. We offer these facilities to our clients and customers. SDM has many automatic functions that allow us to offer value when implementing business rules in a short time and without code, just by configuring the tool.

We are an enterprise that sells IT services and all our areas involved in IT processes use the tool.

I think each tool suffers difficulties when a customer has requirements completely outside the standard, which is very common.

Technical support is good, once scaled to a second level. But usually, there are difficulties in the first approach.

CA develops and acquires enough tools and adds them to its solutions, but does not necessarily fully integrate them before releasing them. That also makes initial implementation difficult.

And finally, CA currently has problems delivering the tool in the cloud. CA tried to insert a new tool in the cloud but failed. Today, only MSPs can deliver the service, but not CA directly.

We have been using CA Service Desk Manager for 12 years.

In 12 years, we had only a pair of important isolated stability issues.

We have not really had any scalability issues. Rather, the companies are the ones that often do not have clear information about when they have to make the jump to a next level.

We have a lot of experience and do not have much need of manufacturer support. But, like most large companies, it is an area of opportunity.

We looked at open-source solutions and other branches like IBM or Remedy. SDM, at the time, offered critical differentiators that made us change and stay until now.

SDM comes preloaded and preconfigured. We have started a service desk in a week, but without a doubt, the difficulty comes from the customer environment; the volume, the processes to be assembled, their level of maturity, etc.

It is not the most expensive nor the cheapest solution. It depends on the negotiation with CA, but in general I think it is a fair price.

We evaluated BMC Remedy and ServiceNow.

I would recommend evaluating the tool with companies that have already implemented it. It is very important that you can find references that can be consulted.

You want to know about their time of experience in the market, whether they are certification tested with the manufacturer with an expert level, and are a reliable business partner for implementation.

The completeness of information on each ticket is one of the most valuable feature of this solution. We are able to gather information either directly from the product interface or from data extraction. Any reports that our analyst users request are available in some fashion.

It is often the center point of reference on discussions of either outages in other applications or planned modifications in hardware or software.

There is nothing major in this product that needs improvement; maybe more documentation is needed for database relationships.

Although, the documentation in the Administration references, is very detailed and complete with respect to the internal/external table names, field definitions and relationships, it is difficult to determine database table inter-relationships, without examining and tracing paths. A person needs to start with a major table, and follow each reference field to the next table.

It would be beneficial, if there were diagrams with basic table interconnections within the major areas, such as Contacts, tables relating to Change Orders and the same for Incidents/Problems. This way, it would be much easier for the support specialists, who are just learning the system, to know where to find ancillary information related to the main tables.

I have used this solution for five years; probably even longer on the previous version, before my time.

I have hardly ever encountered any stability issues. There are very few instances of unplanned outages – at the most 1-2 per year.

We have not had the need for scaling it. This product was configured in a way that we could use it for many years.

CA technical support is outstanding. They are very responsive and always have an answer.

Previously, we used an older version of the CA product that was no longer officially supported.

Since we were not upgrading but installing a new instance, the setup was very complex. We had to define all the configuration items and establish user update routines specific to our installation. However, there were CA support individuals on-site who were very instrumental in a successful installation.

Personally, we did not evaluate any other solutions. We were upgrading an existing product.

You need to plan ahead and talk with the CA installation support in order to define as many of the user areas as possible, prior to beginning the setup. This can help you have an easier method in setting up areas such as ticket categories and workflow steps. Otherwise, there could be a delay in installation while these are defined.

One of the features of this product is to elevate the customer experience. Due to the constant needs of the experienced customers, we always have to make changes with the way we are working so as to achieve satisfaction for our clients; this application has many ways to do that.

We have certainly increased our quality level.

First of all, the system is more robust. In this way, we can elaborate on more complex services. At one time, we had a lot of processes.

Secondly, the application has the possibility to integrate with other systems and transforms more solid information.

Lastly, owing to the integration with BI, we now have various possibilities to create reports in which we can see where and when we need to modify our processes. Therefore, there was a decrease in the number of open and duplicate tickets.

One area of this product that needs improvement is the user mobile experience. We need to get more solutions on the mobile devices of our clients so that they have the same mobile experience as they have on the computer.

I have been using it for about four years.

Particularly, I didn't have any issues with stability.

None of my clients have reported any scalability issues, neither have I experienced any issues.

CA technical support is one of the best that I've seen.

I have used a different solution before but it wasn’t what my clients really needed; thus I moved over to this product.

The setup was straightforward, i.e., once you have almost everything planned, it is quite straightforward.

It is a bit expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. The product is worth it.

We had evaluated and looked at the second product in the market.

Plan every step that you need to implement and always look ahead to what your client would need in order to get there.

The process automation component is incredibly valuable. It cuts down on the workload of teams, organizational and clerical work, and allows employees to be more efficient.

I would like to see not having such strict compatibility requirements when working with other applications. This is just limited to certain parts of the application, though, such as email and how it interacts with certain servers.

This solution doesn’t always work in the real world with company and security requirements.

To clarify further, there are some parts of the application that have some inflexible settings, i.e., for the Maileater feature, you can only specify certain ports, encryptions and 1 certificate. This doesn’t always play nice with the email servers. For example, what happens if the settings that CA SDM send, are not the recommended settings that the email server is expecting? Maileater is the biggest issue we’ve had recently, and I’d provide another example, if I could. It is an issue to keep Java up to the latest security level, as it makes working with CA SDM also a little slow, but that seems to be a universal issue with many applications.

The company has had the product for a while. I have only been using it for a year.

They have two setup options. I can only comment about the advanced availability setting, which is stable.

There have been no issues with scalability.

The support staff is amazing and if they weren’t, I would have given this solution a lower rating.

I was only involved in performing a reinstall on our development environment. The setup was easy. The documentation could have been better for a couple steps, but support was able to help.

The product works very well when using all the recommended apps with it. I suggest using the recommended or preferred hardware and OS for the product so your life will be a lot easier.

The most valuable feature is the usability of the search when you want to find other tickets that relate to the incident you're working on.

We have all of our different ticket types in one area. There are incidents, requests, and change requests all tied into one application, so you don't need to go to different tools. It makes it easier to find all the data in one spot.

I don't know. There's really nothing that I can think of. Everything always can be improved.

It's really stable. We haven't had much downtime, so it's been a very solid product.

I haven't used technical support personally. My boss uses CA technical support. He handles all the issues.

Our old solution was not meeting our needs. It was very hard to use. It was causing a lot of people issues, so we needed to find something new.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup, but I heard that it was pretty straightforward. They didn't really have very many issues. The CA people were able to help out with any problems we had.

I don’t think we looked at other vendors before choosing CA.

Have resources available and people who are dedicated to the product.

When we select a vendor, we look for a company that's a leader in their industry, or somebody who has the backing to support the product that they sell.

It allows us to integrate all our processes into one. It allowed us to retire several disjointed custom-built solutions. It helps us to fulfill requests and change orders.

Our key requests are being implemented in the next release. There is a knowledge management portion. It is very cumbersome to create a knowledge management document. That’s one area that could be improved.

The Knowledge Management module in Service Desk Manager is cumbersome and hard to use. It’s not so bad for browsing and viewing knowledge documents, but to create content is extremely time consuming.

The main problem we have is, you can’t simply paste screenshots into the knowledge editor, they first have to be uploaded and then, attached to the document. We would love to have the ability to copy/paste screenshots into the knowledge editor, similar to how you can add images to an email.

The only time we ever have stability problems is when our environment is not stable, so it's a perfectly stable product.

It is very scalable.

They typically get back to you quickly regarding the less complicated requests. For more complicated ones, they obviously take longer; but they're always excellent.

I only got involved a few months after it was implemented.

Try not to bite off more than you can chew. Try not to piecemeal.

We emphasize a partnership with the vendor and their ability to understand our business. The more they understand about our business and our goals, the better aligned we are. It is not always just about the technology or whatever the functionality is.

We have integrated Service Desk Manager fully from servicing the customer, right down to the network configuration. It's fully integrated. That provides many customer benefits, and enhances our customer experience as well.

Service Desk Manager keeps our customers updated regularly regarding any network outage and aware when we will respond to his request and when it will be repaired. Our customers receive better service and we also have a better experience serving them. The CA tool is actually helping us and we can see drastic improvement from it.

The view we now have of our customer base, and how they link to the network is more of a bottom-up approach. I would like to see it from a top-down approach. We want more visibility into how the network layers are linked. That's the next stage that we are working toward.

I also want to see how we can bring DevOps automation and lifecycle development into the equation, and evaluate how that helps us to mature much faster.

We have been at this more than a year. It's quite performance stable. We're doing more enhancements to our setup. The initial implementation covered 70% of our network. So now, at full capacity, we're adding additional features and have implemented more enhancements. There is deeper integration with our business systems and operating systems that give a fully integrated view regarding how CA Service Desk fits into the bigger service offering.

Currently, we are busy migrating customers to use to Service Desk. We are going to scale up to about 4 to 5 million subscribers. This will allow us to further extend our look at network integration as well. It's going to extend far.

We've got onsite technical support from CA. My impression is that they have improved drastically since we started.

We had a request to scan the market. CA was the best product at that time. They needed to make sure that our service catalog was communicated regularly within our business, so that everybody is briefed on what is new and how CA has evolved.

We needed a product that would integrate with our architecture. This is important, because we were looking for a specific piece, and it fit the puzzle nicely. There were certain features we were also looking for; a set of business requirements that we had to fulfill. That was basically our criteria.

I was involved in the initial setup. The first one was quite complex because we had to integrate into legacy systems. We had to integrate into new solutions with other suppliers and integrate into the integration bus, so it was quite complex.

There were other suppliers that we also looked at and compared. We looked at the Asian companies.

What helped us is that at the beginning is that we had a lot of offshore support. The best is to get CA onshore support. Then they understand the culture of the company. It's not only from a documentation point-of-view. They understand how to interact with different people. I recommend this even if you are based abroad. A local presence for us meant a lot.

Creating tickets is a frequent part of our job. The scoreboard allows me to check for high-priority tickets, check status of tickets I created and search for tickets with keyword searches among other plusses.

We lean on it quite a bit in creating incidences, tracking them historically and following up open tickets created by a number of sources. It also serves as a cross-reference for other tracking tools we use in our daily work.

It’s always bothered me how you need two steps to close a ticket (solution then update status) to do essentially one task. I’d love to see that merged into one easy step. I also have issues with Configuration Items but I think that it's our issue, not a CA issue.

I started using this program when I was hired in August, 2013 and there was a major upgrade roughly a year ago. I can’t quote version numbers to you, however.

We have major problems keeping SDM up and running with issues popping up once or twice a week affecting service. I do not know if it is the software, the server or the lack of a backup to fail over service to. I would think more resources should be devoted to it.

We always contact our technicians first and they contact CA if necessary. Often, the issue is resolved with a 20-minute reboot of the server. From my end user prospective, I’d say 7/10.

Incident Management module: Tracking events or incidents is one of the most challenging work phenomena in the workplace. Convincing your clients to report issues is another different isolated task that, when done right, tremendously improves TAT.

The IT team becomes more effective and efficient because there is workload sharing. Where a Service Desk administrator would have had to log a call, Users can now do it themselves to get a service.

Automated email logging: The tradition in the workplace for communication will always be email. If emails can be used to automatically trigger calls, that is the best thing that can ever happen in the incident management or service desk process. This would save a lot of time, plainly speaking.

There should be a way for emails sent to a particular address to trigger an alert to create an incident or request, similar to SIEM automation mechanisms. If this is already available, my apologies, but I currently don’t have it.

I have used it for over three years.

The product is quite stable and highly scalable. No issues yet.

Technical support is 7/10.

I’ve used SCSM (System Center Service Manager), quite a good product from Microsoft. The difference is in scalability; there was a need to use a web application compared to an in-house product solution.

I wasn’t directly involved in the initial setup of the product.

Solution was implemented through a vendor. It is a good product to implement; quite feasible.

It really has a good cost-benefit analysis for any business with a large employee base.

It is a good solution for service desks.

Incident management

Adoption of ITIL incident management for business process re-engineering was very easy to fit into the CA Service Desk Manager Incident Management module. It allowed IT operation support to easily identify, track and monitor incidents with data in 45 days that was analyzed. Within the first calendar year of deploy, the incident manager was able to strategically set and meet the field support goal of responding and resolving 25% of incidents remotely.

Ticket event and notification creation/management is cumbersome and has not improved over the many versions I've worked with. Workflow design and management requires knowledgeable administrators with programming experience.

I have used it for 9+ years.

I have encountered stability issues, although the tool is relatively stable in smaller to mid-sized environments and has gotten better with newer versions. Complex client environments can severely impact stability. When there are network hiccups, the system does not recover easily without manual interaction.

The tool can be load balanced and clustered, which makes it very scalable. The architecture can be designed to segment the Service Desk support team and the regular users. This is helpful as the Service Desk can continue to work efficiently when other users are experiencing performance degradation.

Vendor support meets customer SLAs. First-level technical support is very good at escalating as appropriate.

I have used many different solutions. My role is a consultant that helps design and enhance service management solutions. The customers mainly switch as they adopt the ITIL framework and move away from non-ITIL products that cannot be (easily) modified/adapted to fit the new IT operations strategic model.

Installation is straight forward for conventional configuration following CA-recommended specifications. Advanced Availability configuration is more complex and requires good planning.

As a technical consultant, I'm usually brought in after tool selection is decided on.

The tool supports several of the ITIL processes. Plan the implementation such that when other functions/processes (inter-related as well as non-interrelated such as ITAM, CMDB) are to be brought online, the initial implementation solution does not need to be re-engineered.