OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

A valuable feature for us is that we have an ordered way to handle all the cases that we can handle with the infrastructure.

We benefit as we can keep control of everything in the technical infrastructure that we are delivering to the business side of the organization.

It needs to be easier to use for the end users because one problem we had was that we are handling different kinds of cases. We use it person to person by phone. It's not so user friendly. If there was more ease of use, then people would use it more regularly.

We have recently built up a new data center. We are seeing a lot of actual technology and we are trying to implement the universal discovery and everything around the NCMDB in this new infrastructure that we have built. We had quite a lot of issues with stability and the quality of the product so far.

We are around 12,000 end users. Scalability is quite good. It's scalable enough. We have no problem with the scalability so far.

We have used the technical support and we have quite a lot of HPA people in place on site trying to help us solve different issues. It has been good after we have been in discussion a lot. Overall the technical support is good.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. I came in after they started the setup.

We are using ServiceNow for some facility management. It was easier to have a user-friendly interface from the beginning, but now when we use the service portal, it's catching up. It's close to the same usability as Service Now. As it stands, it's better than mediocre.

I don't use it as a technical person, but just as a regular user. It helps to register things, to see the changing parts, and to correlate incidents. I'm talking about Operations Bridge with automation. We also achieve a lot, such as deploying infrastructure, automating our daily routine tasks, and things like that.

I would like to see more connection to DevOps, but not in terms of deploying the suites, deploying the tool itself. Rather, I'm talking about DevOps and self-service for our customers so they can, as users, do something in our tool without getting too many rights or using the wrong options.

There should be some front desk provided or some options to let our users serve themselves, because we have about 5000 servers and 400 applications. Those applications are developing continuously with DevOps and that means that they release everything, every day. They need extra monitoring, extra automation, or some corrections.

Our service time-to-market is very long. We need to free them and let them do things by themselves in our tools.

Previously, I was an HPE consultant, so I was not only using these tools, but also developing and integrating them. If I start from developing, it has been around 10 years.

Stability is getting better. I’ll put it this way.

It's enterprise level, so it’s scalable. We do have some questions about deploying server automation globally, because we have integration with another part of our organization. It should be possible.

When support is dedicated, it works well.

I know that that at our site, almost every two years we go to events like Gartners to ask for additional advice. Choosing a vendor actually comes down to the ability to integrate and scale and be enterprise level. There are a lot of small tools. They are good at some point features, but when it comes to the global picture, then you need to have quite a lot. For instance, to contain the rights. We are not there yet.

Life cycle management is a drama. For almost every tool we have, it's a project for a couple of months to upgrade something to the next level. It's not next, next, finished. No way.

Most of the time it's the value it can provide, as long as you've got it properly mapped out. So the most important factor is being able to gather all the data into one place and then you can distribute that information across to other areas, and they can then benefit from it.

It's strong, there's no doubt about it. I wouldn't want to go replacing it with any of the other tools. There are enough other companies that have got similar tools. But once you've gone down the road of using the HP software, you would like to make sure you carry it on, even though there are certain things they still need to improve upon.

I think one area which is the most painful from my point of view is if you need to integrate a lot of the tools, and being able to make that a lot more seamless.

For instance your workflow could be - that's the name of the server, that's the IP address, go and communicate, sort it out, pass the data in between. Having to sit there and spend sometimes weeks, trying to get them integrated and properly operational is annoying.

We have been using the solution probably since about 2010.

It is pretty much stable. I mean, it's been long enough now to the point that there are still issues here and there, but the main product itself is strong enough, and it's decent enough to be able to make use of.

I think the hardest part sometimes is when you try to integrate with a lot of the other HP software tools. That's where the containment, being able to move to the new sort of ITS main model, will most probably help. But the initial thing is if you've got to get these different tools integrated, it can be a bit difficult.

You have to have an idea of what the size of your organization is to begin with. So if you think, "we're only small," and then you actually realize you're discovering an awful lot of continuous integrations, then you may need to expand it.

So in the main, you've got to have a decent understanding about your organization in the first place, then make sure you scale it properly. Then from there on it's pretty scalable.

Technical support is pretty good. I mean, whenever you've got an issue you can at least always raise an incident and then with that someone's always going to have a look at your support case, get back to you, and then be able to sort of work the problem out.

There are times where you don't always get a fix, and it's mainly because of the version that you're running, so you need to upgrade. Being able to upgrade every five minutes is not something which is an option. So you can get to that point where they say, "we've fixed it - it's in the latest release." Great, what do I do now?

Those challenges are the ones which are sometimes the biggest problem. It's not that you don't know it's not getting fixed, but it doesn't mean the fix will always necessarily come to you to actually be able to use.

Regarding setup, it depends on which tool.

UCMBD has become a lot more easy to set up and put in place. So perhaps for instance in the case of a Chinese Asset Manager, that would still be a little bit complex, trying to get it operational. Especially when you're trying to feed data between UCMBD and the Asset Manager. So it depends on what you're trying to do.

If you then need to connect it and whatever else, then you have to sit there and really work out the actual data models that sit between both and then be able to patch it all through.

So, I think it should try and sort that side of things out and make it a little bit more seamless, so that from a user point of view all I need to do is just this, this, this and this, and then it works. That would be a lot nicer.

There are a number of things to consider. One, you want to know that the reliability is. You need to know the software is going to do the job that you want it to do. You need to know that it's going to be fairly easy, painless to set up.

But at the same time, if you have any issues, you've got a good customer focus. That they're interested in making sure that they're going to basically get the best for the customer. So it's not just about - "we've sold you a load of products, so we'll respond to you now."

You need to spend a lot of time getting it developed. Make sure you go over areas brought into it so you can then show the value of what it can do. Once you've then got it, then you can prove to the business that this is how important it is, being able to understand your IT. What makes up your IT. Then of course, if you're trying to pass that information into other areas, like asset management or software license management, it's all feeding from the same place. So you can then at least get something which is meaningful at the end.

We can have all our requests and incidents registered in one system. We have about 250 employees in the IT department and we have one system. We don't have to email each other and we are sitting in a geographically large company, in many departments and in many hospitals. So it's great that we just have one system and we don't have to call or drive to each other. That's the most important thing.

Some years ago we were three departments and now we're just one department for the whole region. And we have different systems, so we can't communicate. With one system you have to write emails and stuff. When I make a request it's immediately reaches our technicians, so it's great.

The greatest issue for us is to understand the roadmap. We want to know whether we should upgrade now or should we wait three months. Which version should we install? It's not the project, but it's the plan for the project. So we went to a recent conference to find out because we want to know which way we should go.

After we upgraded stability is good. But with our last version it was not very good. We had lags and it was performing slowly. We tried different solutions, upgrade servers, and databases, but the performance was not very good. Then we upgraded and we haven't had those problems since. Also, previously we had the client/server system, but now we only have web clients. That also may be an explanation of the improvement in stability and performance.

We are a big company, but we also have small departments in the hospitals who have this system as well. So it is scalable.

We have a partner to HPE helping us and we also have Premium support technicians that we work with all the time and we use them a lot. The support is good. We can have help any time, so it's good.

I was in the project from the beginning. Some of the problems are from our company because they don't always decide what way we want to go. Our company wants to go one direction, and when we start they sometimes change the direction and it will complicate the solution. Sometimes, it's our own fault.
But, for the product itself, the setup is straightforward, with some issues. Sometimes the logical database structure and tables is not very easy to understand. So we need to have some help with that. It seems like it's old tradition from the old versions, going up the system. It's hard to see the logical structure of the tables.

We looked at Service Now two years ago. We stayed with HPE over Service Now because we have a suite of HPE products. We think it's easier to make the integrations into one.

We heard some other customers in Denmark have the back end as Service Manager and the front end as Service Now, as a portal to Service Manager. I don't know if it's easier to deploy in Service Manager, so I don't know. But I know some Danish companies have done it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have used it for four years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It helped us conform with ITIL service management requirements.

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

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

I think the scalability is good.

It was great to work with technical support.

HPE did the initial setup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The product is quite stable. It is quite good.

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

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

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

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

It's a good product.

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