Microsoft System Center Suite is a family of IT management software for network monitoring, updating and patching, endpoint protection with anti-malware, data protection and backup, ITIL- structured IT service management, remote administration and more.
It is available in two editions: standard and datacenter. Datacenter provides unlimited virtualization for high density private clouds, while standard is for lightly or non-virtualized private cloud workloads.
$1,323
per month
OpenText Service Manager
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
OpenText™ Service Manager (formerly from Micro Focus) is scalable service desk software powered by machine learning, analytics, and automation. It provides an ITSM platform for standardizing service delivery and support across the enterprise.
We used a product before that was designed to prevent users making changes and saving files to the desktop computer. This required a renewal of the license. By using SCCM in our environment we were able to discontinue using that product because SCCM allows us to completely restore a machine back to the original configuration. We have taught our users to save their individual work on either a network drive or a cloud drive. By doing this, if we do a re-image of their machine they have lost no data, and it makes for a faster resolution. In some instances having a computer in our SCCM environment it can become cumbersome when creating new users for very specific purposes. It can be done by creating new organizational units and applying new policies but when in a pinch it can be frustrating. For the most part we have tried to make "new" purpose images and groups to at least accommodate a quick install.
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.
Provides our users the ability to deploy and manage our own datacenter based on defined software with understandable solutions for storage, compute, networking and security.
We are able to update at once all the computers from all departments without having to install the OS on every computer.
It allows us to have everything in one place for database management and datacenter inspection as well.
Needs web based storefront for requesting new software
Needs ability to manage the packaging work flow better
Sometimes is slow to download and there is no indication the entire catalog is being loaded, resulting in confused users not being able to find common software in the available list.
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.
It is not user-friendly for the most part. With IT infrastructure, sometimes it cannot handle excess requests. Every few months, you will need an upgrade in terms of server resources to keep up with incoming alerts and requests. This does not happen all of the time, but it does happen when there are too many requests.
If I had to dislike something about the system it would be how much it changes once you upgrade. This could be more of a problem of mine since I get used to one way and don't like it when it changes so much. I am enjoying the newest update, but it is a mess when you are actually going through the upgrades.
We previously used a mix of FOG and Clonezilla to image machines. The biggest issues with these products is that changing one piece of the image required you to rebuild the entire image itself. These pieces of software also did not allow you to manage applications and Windows Updates, causing IT to have to constantly touch machines after they were imaged and update or manage them with a much more hands on approach.
We have been able to automate our patch management, firmware and other security concerns.
We have a standardized "image" ensuring our setup is consistent across the enterprise. This alone has saved us in time to support and time to understand how to use our desktops.
