OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

I mainly use Service Manager to log tickets, receive calls from end-users, and monitor our daily operations. I also use it to record all incident requests and for our self-service catalog.

Service Manager's best features are flexibility and customizability. For example, we can customize reports and dashboards and integrate with third-party systems. 

Service Manager would be improved with access to automation.

I've been using Service Manager for twenty-two years. 

Service Manager is very stable.

Service Manager is scalable.

Micro Focus's technical support is the best - once we send in a request or revision, we get an immediate response and are informed of any delay.

I previously used Remedy.

The initial setup was complex, and installation took two months.

We used a vendor team, as their expertise is required to complete the implementation correctly.

I pay for Service Manager on a yearly basis, and the price is reasonable - I would rate it five out of ten.

I would recommend Service Manager to other users, and I'd rate it seven out of ten.

We implement some modules of this solution for our clients, mostly we did the integrations with the MF PPM. They are a medium-size development that focuses on a particular functionality.

It's flexible in terms of configuration and making changes. It can adapt to any process in the organization. It can be customized.

It's a new version with a fresh interface and incident management. The SMAX is the most recent that I remember and behind that is the smart service, it's a smart search when entering the system, it automatically recognizes an incident, takes a screenshot and opens a ticket. It's nice progress made to the user interface and incident management.

The codeless configuration is more simplified. Most of the customer's requirements can be done without coding, it's simple and very quick.

It has nice charts.

The reporting is not very strong. it can be improved. Customers need to combine different data from different sources to the same report, but it's quite difficult to do. You have to do it with many different versions.

With the new version moving toward the codeless configuration is good, but it's losing flexibility. There should be a larger selection of configuration tools made available to allow some parts of coding to be codeless and others allowing you to make some coding for business rules and workflow. You need some coding ability and functionality. It is difficult to find a customer who doesn't want to make any kind of customizations. It comes with many limits making it very difficult especially with on-premises customers.

I like the support but they could improve.

In the next release, I would like to see improvements made to reporting and the dashboard. Also, I would like to see the configuration simplified without losing flexibility. The best model that I have seen was with PPM where you can provide some coding with flexibility allowing you to configure to the customer's requirements but having limitations at the same time, but they are meaningful limitations that are easy to negotiate with the customer explaining that it is to prevent it from being a completely customized tool that will be very difficult to maintain, upgrade and update the versions. I would like to see a balance between the two. Flexibility plus simplifying the configuration.

I have been familiar with this solution since 2013. We work with this solution based on the customer's needs. It was periodically job and experiance until 2018.

There are always some amount of known issues in any tool, but I can conclude that the solution is stable, as long as all hardware and software recommendations and requirements are met. There were between one to two hundred employees in operating.

I have contacted the technical support team. We had open tickets with them, especially with the last year.

The technical support is ok, we have dealt with them for many years.

I would rate them a seven out of ten.

It's quite straightforward.

It only took one day to deploy for our testing purposes, but for customers, it can take anywhere from one to three days to ensure that all of the technical requirements are met. 

We implemented it ourselves.

I would recommend this solution. It's a classic with an operating system that can easily adapt and be implemented.

70 to 80% of the time with different cases the customer's requirements can be met.

The customer can start to implement the incident management with just one post. if you feel that you want to add more, you can add the change management, it can be implemented step by step.

There is always a place for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using this solution for 10 years.

Its stability is quite good.

Micro Focus Service Manager's scalability is quite good.

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

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

The initial setup was not complex at all.

I would recommend Micro Focus Service Manager.

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

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

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

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

• Pure cloud-based native functionality is lacking.

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

It's pretty well-structured in modules.

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

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

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

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

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

It's stable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using this solution since 2011.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It deploys without issue.

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

It scales for our needs.

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

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