Microsoft System Center vs. Oracle IT Service Management Suite

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.

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

• 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.

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

• 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

• 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

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 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

• 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