CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager vs. Hornbill Supportworks ITSM

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 concept of the solution is a good one and in theory, Hornbill Supportworks ITSM is good for incoming inquiries/tickets management. The inquiries can be automatically captured by a user submitting a request, and an email notification is sent to both the Helpdesk team and the customer. The inquiries are then tracked, alerting the team when the SLA is about to be/has been breached. Once the inquiry has been resolved, it notifies all relevant parties, as well as time-stamps the action.

Incentivized

• A large community where, if help is needed, is usually very helpful and quick to respond.
• Various sites with good information on various issues. If you have a problem, there's a good chance some else already had it and documented it.
• Fairly easy installation of the product if recommendations are followed and prep-work is done.

Incentivized

• Manages a large amount of data without slowdown or issues.
• Reliable platform for incident and problem management.
• API usage for linking to other systems is basic but useable.

Incentivized

• The right-click feature is disabled in this application and users are unable to copy and paste with mouse or touchpad.
• The application also freezes quite a bit and a user will have to quite often close and reopen browser to get it functioning properly.

Incentivized

• The interface is quite hard work, not very visually friendly
• It all just feels a bit old fashioned and needs a reboot
• This may be an internal process, but not everyone has access, so quite frequently I have to pick requests up and then take them out of the Supportworks system.

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 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

• Having CA Service Desk Manager within the company has increased the satisfaction of customer service from 68% to 95%. Teams are getting better customer survey scores and making better efforts to meet their SLAs.
• CA Mobile app has provided agility and collaboration among IT Users and Customers.

Incentivized

• The system 'does what it says on the tin' - it captures and helps manage incoming inquiries - so the positive impact is there.
• However, this is not done in the most intuitive or user-friendly manner. This causes frustration at times.
• Overall, a single centralized system for managing customer inquiries and requests is paramount for any mid-size business, particularly if this business is service-based

Incentivized