Microsoft System Center vs. OpenText Service Manager

For companies with more than 10 Windows devices and needing to standardize the OS, AV, access, share resources, and install software. SCCM is the way to go. This software is unnecessary if the business is all remote users and not in an office-type setting. There are cloud offerings or none to accomplish what a business needs.

Incentivized

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

• Allows the grouping of devices by user.
• Allows controlling updates being deployed to user devices.
• Allows for the repurposing of machines by being able to load new or updated software on machines that already are in the system.
• Allows us the ability to wipe a machine clean and restore it back to the configuration that was assigned the machine.

Incentivized

• 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

• 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.

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 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized