CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager vs. Microsoft System Center Service Manager

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

I think any organization that runs windows on their computers that is size over 50 workstations and looking for a complete package to manage their windows machines must have Microsoft System Center Service Manager, especially if they have Windows servers and VMs. The capability of managing multiple devices at ones can save a lot of time for the IT jobs.

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

• This tool is used to track support requests among our IT staff.
• We use this tool to automate some more routine tasks.

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

• Kind of clunky.
• Takes a lot a lot a lot of configuration.
• There is a lot of jargon to learn to be able to use it to its full ability.

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

The customer support service is excellent. They help from start/deployment through to any time later on. They responded quickly and resolved our issues professionally and in no time.

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

We selected MCSM because it is a solid product that we could use very quickly, compared to other tools there is a lot more effort for integration into the infrastructure, costing time and money. We implemented the tool very quickly and since it integrates with other Microsoft products, it was very easy to get up and running.

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

• Save a world of time when imaging
• Save a world of time with patch management
• Provides decent reports to get a snapshot quickly

Incentivized