CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager vs. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

It is a suitable tool for a large organization with extensive user needs. It is not for a small shop as it may be over-engineered for smaller organizations that don't have teams that can manage a solution of this size. It does have some significant hardware and configuration needs, but that should not deter customers from deploying it in-house. I've seen it deployed in the cloud as well as in-house; the downside to deploying it as a hosted solution is you're forever at the mercy of the vendor for customizations, and they cost an arm and a leg. The simplest things take a long time and cost much more money than necessary, so you can't truly get a custom solution and end up with mostly vanilla services (unless you have very deep pockets.)

Incentivized

The cost for what you get is very good.

The amount of additional functionality is great too - we originally went in expecting to use it for just a helpdesk but eventually it evolved into change management and asset tracking.

We also started using the invoicing addon which helped massively and allowed us to track items from point of purchase to decommission.

Incentivized

• This application is very easy to use. It is the best when it comes to training since the application is easy to understand and employees are able to easily catch up on work process.
• It is a great reporting tool because users can look up work they've done over a period of time.
• The auto populate feature is very helpful since at the service desk users do have several tickets to create for a single requester.

Incentivized

• It's very simple to submit and handle ticket for both user and Engineer.
• Set some customize template for intent replay or job done reply.
• SLA management is the good option to maintain workflow.
• There is solution option where user can resolve their common issues.

Incentivized

• Linking into other ITSM Tools for automatic event/alert generation could be a good feature to use. Not sure if this has been addressed in later versions of the product.
• Effective integration into communication tools such as pagers, text messages would be a great plus. Again this may have been addressed in later versions.

• When trying to select the top row ticket, you have to be careful not to select all tickets. Happened to us twice and we assigned all open tickets to one technician. Took a few minutes to correct.
• Site is sometimes a bit sluggish to respond. Don't know if that is an issue with our network infrastructure or the program itself, though.
• When users send emails to the help desk, we sometimes experience delays until the tickets appear on the site for the technicians.

Incentivized

While the concepts of Service Desk and EITM were solid. The user interface, tool capabilities, and integrations fell behind the rest of the industry. Too often it seemed like CA bought and rebranded products without fully integrated them with their other products. It was a coat of paint, without the parts under the hood being updated. The overhead for administration was too high and the reporting capabilities were absolutely amongst the worst I've seen.

Incentivized

we are looking at other tools like Zendesk which may replace ServiceDesk. We are currently evaluating both tools to see which one would serve our needs better

Incentivized

It is still very cumbersome, lots of data entry on the back end to build how we want it but it is still not completely user friendly. Many functions still dont work and contacting someone for help isnt always easy or we get told solutions for issues we have just arent built yet.

Incentivized

Our network administrator usually gets a good response when contacting ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus customer service. They are quick to respond and so far have been able to eliminate most of our issues. We have been through several upgrades of the software over the years and have no issues to report in regards to customer service.

Incentivized

We are too integrated with CA Service Desk Manager to disassociate anytime soon. We found the more we used the product the more we needed to customize it in order to better integrate with our business processes. There are other alternatives that have many built-in features that had we have foreseen our future requirements... would have chosen ServiceNow or Remedy as our "go-to" ticketing product.

Incentivized

No contest. Remedyforce required a full time investment to understand the use of cryptically named variables, so all changes needed to be made by a specially trained administrator. Remedy had terrible problem handing capability. ServiceDesk Plus is a polar opposite - most customization is done using plain English and simple screens.

Incentivized

• Because of the difficulty in creating various functions and workflows, it has had a negative impact over time to where the 'knee-jerk' reaction to any new options requested or desired is to customize it which has resulted in mimicking out of box functions through the customizations.
• Examples of the use of certain areas and options is lacking. This has resulted in the misuse of various fields. For example: Multi-tenancy we do not have turned on and was never pursued because we we're told it "wouldn't work for us". This has resulted in previous administrators creating many new roles (which in turn has created just as many access types and data partitions) which has created a large amount of overhead. It's now difficult to turn on multi-tenancy until this overhead can be reconstructed/removed and the bringing personnel up to speed on the changes.
• On the initial install (which I wasn't with the company at that time) CA had provided us with custom scripts to execute certain functions (without considering if Service Desk could actually do that function out of box) and applied it. After a few upgrades to the product, these scripts are still being used and have caused underlying issues since their application. CA has denied support on these scripts because they are customizations even though we are looking to remove them.

Incentivized

• It has provided better visibility to upper management in terms of the scale of the workload of the IT department
• It has allowed licensed software to be tracked more efficiently, allowing redundant license to be reclaimed, rather than additional ones being purchased
• It has fulfilled the requirements for multiple audits, including Microsoft audits, as it allows the assets and their software to be tracked

Incentivized