OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

The configuration management tools are great. We're using the CMS and it's very valuable. 

The change management and service management are the most valuable modules that we use here in our company.

The solution is simple to set up.

The solution offers good stability.

Technical support is helpful.

The pricing is okay.

They also offer a mobile version, which is quite helpful.

I don't see anything lacking. They have a very complete solution. They have all modules needed, including portfolio, procurement, financial, and purchasing modules.  

We have been using Service Manager since 2009.

It's a very stable solution. You can customize it or do anything to resolve any problem - including security vulnerabilities - which are immediately resolved in Micro Focus. They have good support if you do run into any stability issues. 

We are a telecom company. 80% of our staff are technical staff. All employees use it for tasks or for complaints, et cetera. We have about 2,800 people using the product right now.

Support has been very helpful and responsive. We are satisfied with the level of attention on offer. 

Positive

It is very easy to use and set up. When it comes to deployment, there are two kinds of deployment. They improved it by having a cordless version with Service Manager 9.5 and 9.6. SMAX is also a cordless platform, so it's not a problem to deploy Service Manager.

They have a very flexible license system. We don't have a problem with it.

On a scale from one to five, with five being expensive, I would rate it at a two. It's pretty reasonable in terms of price.

Before we did our renewal agreement last year, we did a lot of comparison shopping with other solutions and looked at prices. We are very happy with Micro Focus Service Manager. In fact, other professional solutions cost two or three times for the same license.

We started with version 9.3, and now we're on 9.6 with the full solution, including the CMS.

They have lots of options. They propose a full solution for technology and IT service management. We are a telecom company. We are a leader in the market, and therefore, we need to have all details about our own environment and assets. So far, Micro Focus answers all our needs.

I'd advise new users to go directly to the SMAX solution, the last, last version of Service Manager. If they are a technical company or information technology company with engineers and developers, they can use it on-premise. If they don't have such competence in the company, they can ask for the solution on the cloud. It is easily available on Microsoft, Amazon, or Google clouds. 

I'd rate the product nine out of ten.

We generally use the solution for ticketing. 

We are using all of the models of the processes generally, however, it's ticketing that's the main purpose of the solution.

It's the point of control for managing issues and offers control in the implementation of the changes. It's had a positive impact in general in our organization.

Most of the processes are implemented in place. It's flexible for development. 

It is easy to implement. 

The product has been stable and reliable. 

It's easy to scale. 

It is customizable. 

The interface could be better. It's hard to integrate as there's no interface in place for the solutions to interface with each other. It's a bit of a bottleneck. 

There are other options on the market that make it easier to integrate with other products and get data to flow between them. 

The customization process is not easy.

Customer support often lacks experience. 

We've used the solution for eight years. 

It is a stable product. There are no bugs or glitches. The performance is good. 

The solution can scale quite well. 

We have a few thousand people using the solution right now. It is used pretty intensely in our company.

Technical support varies. Sometimes you might not get someone who is too knowledgeable. We tend to focus on the documentation for assistance. That's the first step - to link to the documentation. However, if an answer is unavailable, we must go further and rely on support. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial setup is not difficult. However, adjusting to the business requirements generally depends on the version, of course. If you have the product process designer, maybe it is very much easier, however, in an earlier version, it was rather difficult to develop since you had the object control and it was old-fashioned in terms of style. If you have a process designer, of course, when you start with a process designer, it's much easier.

I'd rate the ease of deployment at a four out of five. 

If you are doing it out of the box, it generally only takes one day to set everything up.

It was implemented generally in the high availability solution. Each component is running separately, so we focused on the high availability during the setup.

We have a few people that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks. They are admins. 

Our team set up the solution in-house. 

I can't speak to the exact cost of the solution. We do have a permanent license. 

We are a partner. 

We are on the latest version of the product. 

New users should know their business requirements and how to adopt and justify the product. An out-of-the-box solution may not be ideal. You will likely need to customize it.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Service Manager is for incidents and service requests.

Service Manager does what it should, but it's quite outdated.

Service Manager is at the end of its life. The architecture, performance, and look are all way behind.

I've been using Micro Focus Service Manager for almost a decade. 

Service Manager works for our size, but it has limits, like search and attachments. It has some architectural disadvantages, like an inability to search attachment contents and stuff like that. We have tens of thousands of users. 

Micro Focus support is fine. I work in internal support, so I don't go deep enough into Service Manager to say much about vendor support.

We also use ServiceNow and Service Manager, but they occupy different lanes in the company. One is the classic IT service management and the other is for managing non-IT services.

I rate Micro Focus Service Manager four out of 10. I wouldn't recommend it. I would suggest ServiceNow. There may be solutions better suited for smaller companies. There are always alternatives because the architecture isn't terribly complex. 

The architecture is the same across solutions, and everything is linked. There are no modules to be bought from some other company in the past and integrated. ServiceNow also its disadvantages, but if you compare it to Service Manager, I can safely say ServiceNow is the future and Service Manager is the past.

Sometimes, customization is simple. The version we are using now has a nice interface.

Customization can be difficult at times because scripting is often required.

I've been using this solution for ten years.

Generally, it's stable, but sometimes we see behavior that we cannot understand.

It's scalable, but the scalability depends on the performance of the service. For example, if we need to extend the solution, we would need to review the configuration and performance of the platform before extending the solution.

It is easy to set up. Deployment can be done in a week or two weeks at most.

The license is not cheap.

Micro Focus Service Manager is a good platform, but ServiceNow is better because it's more flexible and easier, and it provides a lot of features and functions out of the box, ready to use.

I would rate Micro Focus Service Manager at seven on a scale from one to ten.

I think this solution is for complex needs and where there is a need for automation and high integration to other systems. As far as I know, they try to address not only the IT needs, but the service desk needs for companies also outside IT. If you have customers signing up for different professional services a company would provide, then there needs to be a service desk solution as well. I think they are addressing a wider audience than only IT. In those cases, I think that would be a very good solution, compared to others on the market that are a bit more niche or specialized in their domains.

We actually don't have Service Manager installed for our own purpose or for providing services to customers. We are more in a resale mode of the technology, rather than using it ourselves. We haven't made any actual sales now for some time with this particular product. We have a partner that's been buying directly from Micro Focus, and I don't remember if they've done any sales recently, but for our sales, we haven't sold Service Manager yet. It's been part of the portfolio, and we've been talking about it and there's been some interest.

I think you can install this on-prem. We have partners who have been managing this, or providing this as a managed service to their clients, but then it's been the partners that have been providing the cloud service. In my mind, it's more of an on-prem or private cloud installation, but I'm not 100% sure.

In our role, we work with resellers in the Nordic region to Micro Focus. We are a partner to Micro Focus. We're a distributor. We work with the partners and resellers in the region, but we are a partner too.

For our amount of customers, we have somewhere between 50 to a 100 in the Nordics. So in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark, we have around 50 to a 100 employees.

The solution will streamline productivity and also improve automation. That would bring efficiency as well the ability to handle a big number of enterprise-wide service needs. Productivity and collaborative capabilities are some of the key benefits. I think that goes in general for service management, but for this tool in particular, I think those are the benefits that customers would be looking into.

I think the best recommendation to Micro Focus would be to increase awareness and the marketing for this product. I'm not really sure how intensely they are developing this solution during the last year, but I'm assuming that this is still a strategic offering for Micro Focus. Therefore, I think they should be focusing on creating awareness and increasing marketing knowledge for this product. I think the technology is more than capable, but I think many customers don't know or are not considering it. That's my gut feeling.

Something that could be improved is simplifying the area and providing a best practice insulation. Having a modern interface is always important.

We've been working with Micro Focus since 2009. I think this product was acquired from HP three or four years ago, so I guess the actual answer would be since then because the ITSM solution that HP software had was acquired by Micro Focus in 2018.

This is a product that's been around for many years. It's very robust, especially when you get it up and running and get integrations done, et cetera. I don't have personal experience on that, but that's what I hear and that's what I've taken from the collective input I have received.

Scalability is a big plus for this platform, not only within IT, but if you have a complex IT environment, I think this is one of the solutions for you to consider.

I have not personally worked with technical support, but I hear that there's no problem there.

I've heard that it's been fairly complex, but I haven't done it myself. I'm more on the business side, so I haven't done it myself. But there are so many capabilities. Like with SAP, it's very capable, but it becomes complex when you have lots of capabilities. I'm not sure if they've simplified things over the last 12 to 18 months. When I was evaluating this, I heard even from some of the skilled partners that this was considered to be fairly complex, capable, but complex.

I think that if the right partner is involved, installation could be pretty fast. You could have this up and running if you buy this as a managed service within a very short time, maybe within days, because that's what we talked about with our partner. This could be deployed pretty quickly if you're working with the right resources around you.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10. 

This is really a capable solution. It works for all kinds of needs and dimensions you might have in a project.

My advice is to find a partner who can advise you, but also has experience from installing these types of projects. Normally, technology is not super different, in terms of user interface. It's important to have someone who understands you, and can implement this and support you as you get the processes and the way of working going. I think that's important. 

Work closely with the vendors of course, when you're assessing what the issue is, but also find a partner that has the experience and the hands-on experience on how to not only install the solution, but how to get the value out of these projects by implementing in a way where you get the organizations adopted and customers.

For ServiceNow, but especially for Micro Focus, there are some partners who could be helping out and guiding you a lot.

We predominantly use it for incident management, change management, and knowledge management.

Incident management is the most valuable because we're using it to manage tickets for an accounting system.

With the reports that are available, it allows us to track and identify trends at the type and item level. It also helps us in managing the workload better than what we had in Remedy, which is what we were using before 2013.

We aren't able to take emails that come in and turn them into tickets, especially when it comes to attachments. When an email has an attachment, like a screenshot, it is a very cumbersome process, and it does not work very well. I shouldn't have been paying technicians to cut and paste attachments from an email into the ticketing system. It should do that automatically. Other solutions are able to do that. This is something that needs to be improved.

Test manager and knowledge management areas are probably amongst the worst parts of this solution. We try to use this solution for knowledge management, but it is not user-friendly. Therefore, it has limited ROI as you need to spend time to try and fully capitalize on the knowledge management system.

I have been using Micro Focus Service Manager since 2013.

If you are talking about the performance from a software perspective, then we have had no issues with that.

Scalability is probably fairly good if you are willing to pay for it. It can be very pricey.

We have a worldwide system, but only about 120 people are inputting, tracking, or managing through Micro Focus Service Manager. From an ITIL perspective, we have people from all three levels using it, that is, level one, level two, and level three. We have administrators who can go in and back out and create types, items, systems, and things like that. Everybody else is pretty much just a regular user. They don't have a whole lot of roles within Micro Focus Service Manager.

When we started, the support was great because we were paying for it. Once we stopped paying for their subject matter experts, it was not stellar by any stretch. At the moment, I would probably rate them a four out of ten.

We were using Remedy, and it wasn't robust enough in our opinion. We wanted an integrated system not only for incident management but also for change management and testing. Remedy didn't provide that at the time, and Micro Focus did.

It was complex, but that was not all Micro Focus' fault. It was the fault of too many users trying to have their little niche specifically programmed into Micro Focus Service Manager.

I would say that identify your requirements and pay for the support to implement and test those requirements, and then hope that you did a good job because the cost of their service is fairly expensive.

I would rate Micro Focus Service Manager a five out of ten because it does what it needs to do. It is not bad from that perspective, but it clearly has room for improvement.

We use the product for infrastructure, profile, and incident management.

The product's technical support services need improvement. 

We have been using HP Service Manager for almost ten years.

The product has good stability compared to other solutions like Remedy.

We have 900 to 1,000 HP Service Manager users in our organization. I rate its scalability a ten out of ten.

The technical support team’s response time could be faster.

Positive

The initial setup is easy; I have been working with the product for ten years.

HP Service Manager has moderate pricing. It depends on the negotiation and use cases.

We evaluated BMC.

I rate HP Service Manager an eight out of ten.

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.

Micro Focus Service Manager is fine. It's a good solution for small accounts with minimal reporting. Micro Focus is a good option because you don't have to worry about the budget.

Micro Focus Service Manager is not very great. It would be better if it had more features. When it comes to features, BMC tops the chart. When it comes to usage, people use BMC more. 

I have been using Micro Focus Service Manager for a few years.

Micro Focus Service Manager is a stable solution.

Micro Focus Service Manager is scalable up to a certain point.

Technical support is okay.

The initial setup is straightforward, and it took us about two to three months to implement this solution.

Micro Focus Service Manager is a little cheaper than other options. You have to pay a monthly subscription fee.

Compared to BMC, Micro Focus Service Manager is coming out a little cheaper.

I don't think I will recommend  Micro Focus Service Manager to potential users. But if the customer wants it and it fits the requirement, then it's okay to go ahead with it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Micro Focus Service Manager an eight.

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.