I do not think I can recommend Appcelerator at this point due to the issues with Appcelerator studio, lack of good debugging support, lack of thorough documentation and forums and the additional cost overhead of licenses. The pros are just that it allows for cross-platform development. However, Cordova does a much better job of it and excels at places where Appcelerator currently struggles
ITSM is straight forward creation of Incidents and Requests. It can get more confusing as you layer more modules on top of it with event management, risk, project, etc. It also becomes more costly as everything is a different license. Integration between other external applications is very easy to do with their API. You can easily create endpoints for external apps to talk to or create REST messages for the platform to reach out directly.
It is very hard to debug your code. Breakpoints never worked for us even with the latest Appcelerator Studio and we had to rely on log statements to debug.
There is a need to purchase licenses from Appcelerator to run the code on a device or for creating iOS distribution builds. This is an additional cost when you have already paid for Apple developer program for precisely these things.
If things are broken due to lack to support between Appcelerator and a new iOS version, you pretty much have to rely on a new version release from Appcelerator for the issue to be fixed.
It is difficult to create enterprise distribution builds where the distribution certificate is owned by your organization's team and you only have a development certificate for the same.
The forums on developer.appcelerator.com are seldom helpful. It is hard to find solutions for issues even on other forums like stack overflow.
Providing admins/devs with easier mechanisms for providing businss stakeholders with self-service admin capabilities across the platform
Tutorials on how to be the best at reporting in servicenow
Guided tour functionaltiy is a bit rigid and could use more workflow capabilities
Making it easier to push form variables to the user so there is more context when providing an approval. The out of box approval UI/form is terrible in my opinion.
While we are very likely to renew, we are also assessing if we should renew all of what we currently subscribe to as we try to reduce costs. Some parts of the business feel there may be a better tool out there to fit their process requirements. We are currently working with them to identify what those requirements are to see if it makes sense while also pointing out a reduced cost of tooling is not always the best fit if we have an increased cost of customization and maintenance between tools.
It provides a lot of modification options which is wonderful for certain team usage but becomes too much of a job when it comes to the Service Desk. Also on the app support side, since too much information can be carried, it affects the GUI and makes it complex.
The platform is provided as a SaaS solution and support from the vendor has been good. There are regular software releases with bug fixes, new features and enhancements, and furthermore we are given the opportunity to fully test these before rolling these new releases out into the production environment to minimise the risk of business disruption
We went through a re-implementation last year with a partner and were very pleased with the outcome. We looked at several partners and chose one that was able to provide an entire scope and cost upfront of what would be required to complete our requirements. We worked very closely with the dedicated team assigned to our project throughout the process and they fully delivered on all of our requirements that we presented in the initial scope.
Appcelerator makes you write a structured code whereas Cordova just packages your code and you are free to structure it. Appcelerator bridges your javascript code with native code and that would make it run faster than javascript code in Cordova apps. However, with recent mobile browsers, you would hardly notice any performance deterioration with Cordova apps. Appcelerator struggles with issues related to its IDE, debugging, documentation and forums and additional costs. Cordova makes it much more simpler to develop cross-platform apps with better developer support, debugging support, documentation and forums minus the additional costs.
ServiceNow is by far a better tool over Remedy. Its ability to integrate so seamlessly to so many tools allows for plenty of opportunity to streamline and improve processes. Servicenow has intuitive flows that allow you to quickly pivot if process change. Its adaptiveness is what makes it far better solution over Remedy
Our base managed service MSA is very clear and focused on our use of ITSM (ITIL role license). Other parts of the platform use some sort of transaction count licensing. This type of pricing does not work for an implementation of our scale.
Very easy to use. Capture more data from the Incident and problem management. Easier to escalate and following the change management process to resole the issues.
We were able to build and deploy a mobile app with Appcelerator. However, the platform still has issues and does not cover our needs as much as some of its competitor like cordova does.
Ensuring good service support internally and externally has triggered opportunities to sustain good links with everyone and opened the door to more sales and successful business and ServiceNow has been key in all this, so the investment came back to us faster than expected.
