Microsoft System Center Service Manager vs. Oracle IT Service Management Suite (discontinued)

We use Microsoft System Center Service Manager in the education sector. We believe this is the only real way to manage our IT systems and ensure compliance for not only today but tomorrow as well (what ever that brings!) Our IT management team significantly streamlined our working practices to mold a slick IT support service which serves our end users efficiently. Microsoft System Center Service Manager brought added automation and clarity for all major stakeholders in our organization through detailed reporting and scheduling, ensuring a complete realtime picture of the IT estate.

Incentivized

It is helpful when someone wants to reassign issues and delegate tasks to other co-workers. However, it is not a good place for documentation because it is difficult to navigate older issue tickets. This is my personal experience with RightNow, an Oracle application used to manage our incident reports and project tracking documents

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• It kept a log of all our issue tickets going back many years.
• Oracle made it easy to collaborate on issue tickets and work with my team members.
• It offered a number of features for formatting and inserting images and links, to make our issue tickets resemble an email.
• Oracle helped our department to delegate issue tickets and monitor each other's projects.

Incentivized

• The software requires a lot of memory to run smoothly, otherwise it will be slow.
• It takes some time to learn, and training prices are a bit high.
• The price is a bit high; System Center is not a cheap solution.

Incentivized

• The search function was very poor, which made it difficult to find our issue tickets in RightNow.
• The Reply feature was kind of messy at times, it was difficult to find out who originally sent in tickets and reply all to people.
• It could have looked a bit sleeker, it looked somewhat outdated in the RightNow function.

Incentivized

As with all software, Microsoft System Center Service Manager has its quirks but it has more than made up for them with the sheer amount of functions the system brings to the table. Being based on the ITIL framework really shows with its design/terminology and, generally, we have found it 'just clicks' with our ITIL trained staff which makes operating our system straightforward and enables us to report to end users and all stakeholders consistently with ease.

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

I can't really compare them as we haven't used an "all in one" tool like SCCM. There are other patch management software, other remote control applications, and to be honest, I find those work better when compared to SCCM. However, there hasn't been an application yet that does it all, so I feel it's unfair to compare. All of these tools that SCCM offers could/should be fine-tuned and made to be a bit more user-friendly.

Incentivized

• The tool has saved money in a transition from another 3rd party tool
• It simplifies the ease of use for users. This is similar to other Microsoft tools
• We are able to provide reports of system performance when questions arise about availability.

Incentivized

• It was helpful because it was our only system for organizing incident reports, and it was where I worked 70% of the time to correspond with our customers.
• The interface was sometimes time-consuming to use, and I wondered if there would have been a more streamlined program to use. It made our work seem slow at times.
• This program did provide us with a back-log of all of our issues, so it was important for us to use to in order to find repeated incident reports.

Incentivized