OpenText Service Manager vs. ServiceNow IT Service Management

HP Service Manager (HPSM) is well suited for a big company and it does the job that it's intended to do but it's not perfect. It has a fairly large learning curve for searching Knowledge Management (KMs) and it takes time to learn how to be fast at creating/resolving tickets while on calls. I have been using HPSM for about 2 years now and we recently moved from the desk client to the web client and we are seeing a lot more issues than we did with the desk client. They keep coming out with updates for it so eventually most of our issues will hopefully be resolved. Overall the web experience is better as it looks more modern than what we used in the past.

Incentivized

In our organization, we are using ServiceNow extensively. Change Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Time tracking are few modules which we use extensively. This sort of model will work for any product or service based companies as the product is built on ITIL framework. So this product will be suited for small or large scale companies to better organize and add controls and track SLA's for technology or business process.

• Capacity management like maintaining CI's and their relations is good.
• Approvals with HPSM is a cake walk and quite logical.
• There is no wait for troubleshooting or help, HPSM tech help is always there.

Incentivized

• When I have a number of requests to make, for example a request to add a dozen or so user accounts to more than one group account in Active Directory , I can put all the needed information into the initial form, add it to my "shopping cart" and all of that information remains on the screen for the next item for which I only need to edit a few items (like the AD group name in this example), and keep adding them to the shopping cart until I have them all. When I "Check Out" each of those items is generated as a separate task under the one request. It simplifies and expedites the creation and tracking of these kinds of requests.
• I can easily and quickly see what tickets are currently assigned to me in order to prioritize them and remain aware of my workload.
• Numerous fields for CIs can be used when trying to find the entry for a particular item. For example, IP Address, server name, raw text, classification, and so on.
• To help with making sense out of related tasks, when a task is assigned to me and I need to open another task for a different team to work in order to complete my task, I can open a sub-task from my ticket so that the relationship between the two can be pulled up later into reports. For example, I may have a task to build a new vm, and need to open tasks for networking, security accounts, software installation and so on. By opening sub-tasks from my assignment, the time spent by all parties concerned is tied together for more meaningful cost accounting.

Incentivized

• When you search Knowledge Articles, it is not like Google, and you need to learn how to search for what you need.
• It takes a very long time to close tickets in HPSM. Here are the steps to close a ticket. 1. Add notes. 2. Add KM 3. Click Resolve 4.Click Save 5.Click Close 6.Click Okay to Message (ticket has recently been modified) 7. Click Close.
• It's slow and sometimes crashes/freezes and you lose all the information you may have entered. I usually use notepad++ to gather all my notes and paste them into HPSM.
• When searching previous tickets the preview pane does not allow for sorting by date to have the most recent at the very top every time you pull up previous tickets. Sometimes there are pages and pages of previous tickets and you have to click and scroll to get what you need.
• I click on search KMs and it takes me to a blank page and I have to click the back button which then brings me to the search KM page.

Incentivized

• It is hard to find areas for improvement, the tool is very powerful. That said, building the CMDB still involves some manual interaction which was not how it was presented in demos.
• The CMDB data is almost too deep and detailed. When you build the relationship map it can be so large that it is overwhelming. You can limit this, but the default maps are massive if you are discovering lots of device classes.
• The product is expensive. Since they are the leader in the industry and the product has tons of features, they definitely charge for it!

Incentivized

To be completely honest setting up a new ticketing system can be a pain in the ass. Once you have it setup and customized the way you want it, you don't want to switch unless you're unhappy with the product. Unless future releases and updates really muck the system up, I wouldn't change.

The dashboard is so confusing, [there are] many clicks to open a task and search by a ticket. The Enterprise customisation [we did] has finished to kill the software and creates a really bad experience on a daily basis. [It is] So slow, and so many clicks to process a ticket. Works only on IE so, that [should] make you realize that [it] is a bad idea.

We have never had any issues with ServiceNow's availability that I am aware of in the two years I have been using it.

Incentivized

For a massive system, page loads are reasonably quick, including searches.

Incentivized

I would give it this rating because we have had no major issues with the support for ServiceNow after we implemented it at our organization. They seem to respond promptly and efficiently if we ever do need to open a support case with them about an issue we are having.

Incentivized

To type in what should be a text box, you have to click an empty cell, a tiny text box pop up opens with a check box and an X. You the. Type in the text box and have to click the check mark. If you have a bunch of fields to fill out, doing this is very annoying. Absolutely know thought went in to this. I'm sure somebody in marketing thought it was a good idea. It wasn't.

Without exception, every client I have worked with has been very happy with their resulting product. While this is partly due to my work, I must point out that the platform is the winning decision, not the implementer.

Incentivized

[We selected HP Service Manager because] HPSM is reliable.

Incentivized

We used to use Jira to handle service tickets but it's way too robust for something this straightforward. Due to the nature of Jira, you needed to already have a lot of documentation and knowledge about who should be assigned the ticket, so the lift of creating a ticket was time consuming.

Incentivized

ServiceNow works as an enterprise solution.

Incentivized

• We take anywhere from between 850-1400 calls a day and overall the whole opening tickets to close process goes pretty smoothly.

Incentivized

• Overall ServiceNow has a positive impact on getting the SLA of tickets down in supporting our customers.
• One negative impact has been the amount of time to get the product to produce an ROI, it's almost too big to fail and too big to replace. You almost become committed to the product. Good or bad.
• Another negative impact would be if you track metrics of employees and time tracking, there is a lot of scenarios where engineers will track time on tickets but not get credit for closing them as the assignee function of tickets can only be tied to one user and credits only the engineer who closes the ticket.
• Another positive impact would be the level of security for permissions and scaling the workloads is robust and you will get out of the system what your team is willing to put in.

Incentivized