Micro Focus Service Anywhere [EOL] Reviews

For me, it saves time. It is accurate, secure and reduces overhead cost. Since for me, time is important and this product saves me time, it is good in my books.

We weren't doing it beforehand, so it has brought a lot of new things to the table and works quite well. For us it goes back to time and cost benefits; putting in less effort is a good thing. Things are easier to manage.

The most valuable features are the support management for all requests and change incidents that we can refer to our customers, and the tracking of all action done on support activity.

It helps to capitalize everything in our company and also to leverage the activity between the teams.

It is very easy to implement and there is great customer experience. When I say "easy to implement", I mean it’s very quick. In terms of time to value, we're talking about a month to do an implementation for the customer.

In our terms, we talk of ITIL Version 3 compliance. This is a tool that, if you implement it, you will be compliant. It's one-stop shopping. It's really, really quick. It's got big data which is a big thing around here, so there is a lot of intelligence brought into the tool. It's got things like smart analytics, which I think for users in South Africa especially, that you know there's quite a low maturity in terms of its ITIL compliance. It helps customers really quickly get on top of the operation, what's going on inside the IT organization. It allows them to respond quicker. We use it as well as sell it.

It is a central place where customers as well as employees can put requests into our support organization, service requests, and support requests. They can use their mobile phones to log requests and to see the status of their requests. There's a very easy to configure self-service portal, so which is a self-service page that our customers as well as our employees reach out to. The internal customer can access services very easily, or request services very easily.

Incident, Change and Asset management.

Our service desk operates more efficiently and now has access to data that was not available with our previous product.

The user experience is the most valuable element of Service Anywhere - it's modern and intuitive out of the box, and it looks and feels like the websites our users are used to and expect from a modern website. Our users love to use the self service portal, and our agents can easily and quickly deal with requests through features such as Live Support that make it very easy to have all knowledge and previous requests at our fingertips.

Hot topic analytics gives us great insight into what our users are searching for to greater target future knowledge articles and offerings. They also allow us to see what problem areas are developing across requests.

Our users have traditionally been slow to adopt new systems, and in the past have not raised requests in our previous ITSM systems. When we launched Service Anywhere to our staff we found they instantly adopted it, and the number of requests handled through the system has almost completely replaced other methods, allowing us to shutdown several email addresses, and have our staff use one single point of contact in Service Anywhere.

Our agents are spending less time on the administrative side of handling requests, and more time helping our users, and our users report that they feel better informed and in more control over the requests they raise.

From an administrative point of view of maintaining Service Anywhere, a key element to any solution we picked was not to create additional burden on us as a department both in terms of the initial implementation and ongoing improvements. We found the excellent onboarding support from HPE during the implementation, and ease of administration after that have been extremely helpful in reducing the staff time spent on these tasks.

The most valuable feature that I can see in Service Anywhere is the link to the ETL process. The way that you can manage requests and incidents then link it to a problem it recognizes, and then be able to integrate change in the full process. Also the capitalization with the knowledge, which is really important for the process.

The benefits for the company is the ability to reuse the knowledge that you can capitalize on the entire process and be able to share the same process worldwide for all of our countries.

When HPE upgrades the tool we get the new functionalities automatically, and that's very interesting for us.

The self-service portal is good. The dashboards are good. It's an improvement over what we had before. We just rolled it out, so we haven't been able to leverage all of the advantages. It's a little early to tell any more than that.

We're just barely getting any reports out of it. We hope to be able to roll self-service out to the rest of our company, and reduce the time for our tier one support team to resolve issues. Hopefully we'll get better reporting, improved reporting out of it so we'd be able to manage work a little bit closer.

The product has enterprise capabilities and it comes with out of the box capability. Within the target domain, I think Service Anywhere is a good product with a good feature set.

With our customers, the improvement to the organization is limited. I think the value proposition for a certain type of customer is strong. It's what HP says itself, the product itself: the fact that it's easy to upgrade, easy to control, it doesn't offer much variation. The environment will only allow pre-scripted modifications, and style-sheet driven visual changes.Therefore, it's a pretty stable product. Those are good things. Typically in the customers that we work with it's not a product that offers enough flexibility to support their needs. I don't consider it an enterprise-level product.

In the Enterprise domain, because of the diversity of such an environment, it is typically not feasible to implement a rigid, "one way" system. There will always be requirements that aren't readily available in the OOB system, or are add-ons to support a specific way a process was implemented, or the way a process needs to support the way an organization does its business.

SAW doesn't support these kinds of tweaks to processes, but only allows changes to the process composition (number of steps, order of steps).