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.

Anything that can basically reduce the amount of time that the guys spend working on a specific problem or task.

There is always room for improvement that can be in terms of functionality, cost of market, ease of use, training of the product and so on.

If it brings functionality into the solution, that would be good. I'll leave it at that because there's so much that they can offer, it's unreal.

It's rock solid and good. There are no problems. Something breaks when we break it. Apart from that, it really works, so I can't complain.

In regards to scalabilty, we haven't put that to the test. It does what it does for us. I assume when we will grow, it will grow with us.

I haven't personally used technical support but the guys in my team probably have.

I wasn't using any other solution. Someone brought it to me and had a good business case. I sat down, reviewed it and then agreed to do it.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

You should definitely put it in the mix and do the benchmarking against other products. Find out what you want from the app. Don’t go for it, if it doesn't tick your boxes but if it does, then use it.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor are openness, integrity and reliability.

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.

We think asset management can be improved. We have 1 dedicated person in the company for this part; it's not me. He needs additional features in order to manage assets more efficiently and receive it automatically when our server starts.

We deployed Service Anywhere in April 2014.

The solution is now quite stable. At the beginning of the deployment process, we had some difficulties, especially in regards to performance. Now, the performance is better and the quality of release has also improved in regards to lesser regression with each residue; it's quite good now.

It is going to meet our company's needs moving forward. In fact, we recently attended a conference to develop and deploy additional features on Service Anywhere and to take full power of the tool. It's fully scalable.

The technical support could be better. The ticket tracking process is sometimes not done properly. It requires you to open a defect and then you get feedback that it is not produced. You discover that the defect is resolved when you read the release notes but you didn't receive any answer from the support team. However, the support will close the defect after the question is already delivered officially.

The setup of the solution is quite easy. There is no need to have high development skills in order to set up this solution. All you need is some logic and then you can apply it directly.

Today, we're looking for a solution that is not too complex. We already have a strategy to go into cloud so we're searching for a cloud solution that will allow us to deploy directly out-of-the-box. We don't want to customize the solution or stay very close to the initial solution.

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.

I would like to see better release management. In other words, when you get to that point when you want to put it into production, I would like to see more automated processes around that. I mean it's quite good, make no mistake, but I think they can do more work in that space, in terms of automating the release management process. There's some manual work that you need to do which is time-consuming. It's got a good mobile app, but I think that they can do some more work on it. There are some other things they can do to tweak the platform. I have spoken to them about it

It's a very stable platform. This is a cloud solution, and cloud is not utilized with implemented competitor solutions. What I like about this is that it provides the customer with direction. It's not an open platform that you can do anything with. You can only go for a specific purpose. A lot of the competitor’s solutions that we work with allow customers to do whatever they want which is a problem. That kind of solution induces instability.

It's a cloud solution so it can scale.

Technical support is okay. They have a large customer base so the technical support is not quite the same as the on-premises solution. On-premises is a lot more established. The cloud-based solution which HPE offers has a long way to go.

I was using a competitive solution, ServiceNow, but it was too expensive. The price was good for this solution and there was good structuring around the license model. We had very little time to implement, and we didn't have any training. We needed something that could accommodate that, and this solution was perfect for all of that.

I was involved in the installation and it was very straightforward.

We looked at some open source stuff and Cherwell. We had an HPE partner as well and it's really important for us to use what we sell. So that we can speak from a place of experience and drink our own champagne, so to speak.

If ITIL adoption is important, then this would be the product. It is cloud based, quick, cost-effective, and easy to implement.

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.

Like any new(ish) product there is always room for improvement. Most of the changes I would like to see will be in the next version. One area that needs improvement is the means of moving code from the development to production environment.

I've been using it for over two years.

As normal with any new system there will be issues. Some of ours were caused by not spending sufficient time mapping out how we wanted the processes to work.

We were one of the first adopters and so experienced some issues which were quickly addressed. As a new product it lacked some functionality which is being addressed with each new release.

We had direct access to the development teams while the support structures were being put in place. There is still on going work being done on the support structures.

We previously used a product which was supplied as part of outsourced service.

We were working with very tight timelines. We kept the setup as straightforward as possible, and have since added the required complexity.

We did the implementation in-house. The best advice I can give is understand your processes before going near the product.

We evaluated a number of products which were dismissed for cost and implementation reasons. We chose Service Anywhere because it provides a cost effective pricing model, was quick to implement, and provided a good end user experience.

You need to understand what you want to do before going near the 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.

Nothing major, particularly now LDAP integration is available built in. The rapid release cycle has meant most of the features we've been looking to see added have appeared since, and continue to do so.

We fully implemented it in April 2016.

We previously had two systems from a merger, BMC Service Desk Express, and a custom SharePoint site. We switched because we needed to move to a single solution, and neither of the existing systems were fit for purpose.

We implemented in house.

Look at the concurrent agent licensing, which has saved us a lot of money.

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.

We are looking forward to the mobile application. However, this application won't be enough for us. We need additional features in the mobile application to be able to get ourselves the survey like we had on the web application. Additional capabilities in the instructions we have done on our offerings.

Well, it depends on the phases. We were an early adopter and at the beginning it was rather complicated. Now things are getting better. However, there are still some improvements needed, but things are getting better.

It's been able to scale.

We are working very closely with the R&D team. We are talking about lots of features, about architecture, about response time and new functionalities. We usually ask them and raise issues or new wishes for the coming improvements and the future release.

The implementation itself was quite easy, and in the beginning there were only a few functionalities. The complexity came later when we had the big upgrades with new functionalities, and at such times we faced some issues.

In the beginning, we studied the different solutions that were available on the market. In fact, the strategy of the company was to use a SaaS solution. Also, we wanted to be very close to the standard solution because previously we had an on-premise solution, with which we made so many customizations that we could not upgrade anymore. It was a kind of big project due to the number of specifics that we made on the tool. Another reason was the detail solution, it was very close to the process we wanted. Finally, it was the pricing, as we felt it was much more valuable to go with this solution rather than another one.

HPE was one vendor like the others, but we had the opportunity as the solution was not very old, it was quite a young solution, so we could work very closely with the R&D team, and it was very important for us. We could have an impact on the roadmap and the new functionalities. HPE priorities were the same as ours, so that was quite good. They had some very good new solutions, such as big data, Vertica and so on, which were very interesting for us as well.

This is a good solution for us. It still has things to improve, but it's a good solution.

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.

Reporting is a challenge. We're working out how we can effectively report on what's going on. The other thing is that Service Anywhere seemed to have, or HP when they designed this, seemed to come up with this idea and they deviated a little from standard service management terminology and practice. They have a thing called a "support request," which is almost like a mini incident. It's not really a true incident. So my team is kind of struggling to understand what that's all about. It seems to be baked into the tool. It's just how the designers designed it. So that's been a bit of a challenge, dealing with support requests.

We've been using it for a few months.

There's been a couple things. One is around changes to the system. We're not always necessarily in the loop on that, and the other is just performance issues. We've had a few days, a couple days go by with quite a bit of lag in performance.

We've had good performance. We notice the difference as all of a sudden, something's going on and we're working through those. I don't exactly know what the root cause has been.

We're not that big. If we go to full self-service, we only have 550 employees. Right now, we've probably got about less than a hundred on it. Scalability, I guess, will need to be there, but I don't think it's a big concern. It's not like we're going to have thousands or tens of thousands of people using it.

We contact tech support, but it wasn't me directly involved in that because I've got a bit of a project team that's still handling that, so I can't say.

We previously used LANDesk. We already had a relationship with HP for our data center, so it was an obvious potential choice. The other thing was, as we looked at some other products, it appeared to be, and still proves to be, more of a future-thinking application, where it's supposed to have some good analytics and almost heuristic-based type analytics. With all the different modules, powerful search, and a powerful knowledge base, it provides tools to allow users to resolve issues themselves if there are articles and things like that. So that's the future. We're not there yet. But if that comes to fruition, we'll be real happy.

Initial setup was pretty quick, so they did it fairly quickly. Whether it was complex or not, I don't know. The team seemed to be able to pull it together. We tried to simplify it the best we could. We didn't customize it in any way. However the tool is meant to be used, let's try it and minimize our configuration. The approach we took meant we could do a rapid deployment, and we did it fairly quickly, so it worked OK. It just involves a project of managing expectations with the users.

Even if you're going to do a quick implementation like we did, make sure you have a good amount of time with the users and make sure they understand the expectations, how it's going to impact them. Minimize customizations and configuration. Go with whatever the vanilla product delivers and see if you can make it work. Make sure you've defined upfront some consistencies and standards because if you don't, within the first couple months, people will be using the tool differently and then the reporting that you were hoping to get out of it is going to be meaningless.

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).

The proposition for Service Anywhere for our customers typically is limited because we service larger customers in the go-to market and in the usability. It doesn't have the flexibility that we seem to be needing for our customers in terms of modification. It's difficult to make because the product itself doesn't really support individual modifications so anything you do to it needs to be good for the entire community.

The only thing I've experienced with this is at the PoC level, not actually doing live implementation.

The application is stable; it's more where environmental changes impact what you do and how you look at it. Increasing the reach of the application adds additional work.

It's fully cloud, so there's really no scalability issue, not in capability and also not in deployment. If you have certain modifications, a lot of customers want certain enhancements to fit their process or the way they do work, and there is a limited capability within the product, which is inherent to the way the product's been designed. It's not a surprise but it is what it is.

I don't have any support experience with them for Service Anywhere.

If you're willing to compromise, it's a good value for what you implement and it keeps you straight as well.

Depending on how they go, there's probably two or three vendors that work in the same domain. Depending on how rigid they want to be, there are some alternatives.

I think the challenge with anything that's process driven, which is what the old Service Management domain is, you need to be willing to compromise between your organization and your tool set if you want to go with Service Anywhere, which by itself is not a bad thing because it saves in terms of implementation cost and maintenance cost. For any larger service management application, you're spending serious resources, in terms of keeping the application up to date and making modifications. That all goes away if you use Service Anywhere because you don't have that much maintenance.

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

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

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

I've used it for nine months.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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