OpenText Dimensions CM vs. Snow Atlas

Serena CM is well suited to highly controlled, audited, and process driven environments. It will allow strict segregation of duties, and change traceability. If implemented correctly it will help you quickly build trusts with your auditors. It is also well suited to environments that require constant branching and merging. Due to the complexity of the product and learning curve for your development and operations team it may be overkill in a small shop with loose rules

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Assessing Compliance Assessing Renewal requirements

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• Code Promotion: Dimensions CM allows supervisors to control changes to code, in that they delegate requests to developers, and act as a gatekeeper prior to promoting to the next environment. This functionality is configurable so you can set up a workflow that best fits the structure and requirements of your own company.
• Code Repository for changes and versioning: Code can be checked out by item or by synchronizing folders. Code revisions can be compared against other revisions or work files. Item histories show which developers made which modifications, and which supervisor and operations personnel were involved in assigning the request and promoting the code to each environment. Additionally a pedigree will show a stream diagram which graphically displays branches and merges.
• Deployment: Serena Change Management offers help automating deployment including integrations with SVN and Jenkins. Its newer versions also have a powerful graphical deployment automation tool (Serena Deployment Automation- SDA). It comes with a certain amount of licenses built-in. If you have a many nodes to deploy to there will be separate licensing costs for that.

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• Visibility of traditional desktop and web based applications
• Reminders when agreements and annual renewals are coming up in the next 90, 60, 30 days
• Helps us identify similar application types, where they are being used, so we can better understand the capabilities they provide businesses
• Provide usage trends over time to inform renewals and compliance
• Reclaim software that is note in active use

• The only major negative that I have encountered with Serena CM product is that the very power and flexibility of the tool means there is a risk that you will make a mess of things. In other words it gives you plenty of rope to tangle yourself with. I recommend careful, well thought out deployments implementing the built in roles and workflows that can be turned on and configured, using a consistent methodology.
• My experience with the Serena help desk support has not been impressive. Though reasonably polite and diligent, the technicians were well trained, and often gave bad advise and terrible scripts. On several occasions I had to rewrite scripts they have me; if I had run them as provided they would have caused even more difficulties than the problem I was trying to solve. I speak of the support in the past tense because I conditioned myself not to call them, it was usually just easier to solve nay problems my self. They do have a good account management team though, and for any major issues you can go thru them.

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• SaaS connectors are not always kept up to date usually when Publishers make changes to their Portal API's. Appears to be little active monitoring on Flexera/Snow Atlas' side unless a customer reports an issue with the data being returned. Fixes are normally implemented as as quickly as possible, depending on whether it is considered a Bug Fix or a Feature Enhancement.
• Users - Snow on SAM - No ability to add or bulk import manually. Completely reliant on AD Discovery or Entra ID Discovery
• Users - SaaS module - No ability for bulk update of Users for things line 'Online only' or 'Qualified' user accounts. This is an issue in larger companies where you have thousands of SaaS Users being reported through connectors like Microsoft E365.
• SaaS module Dashboard does not allow for filtering of insights to a specific Publisher.
• Not all Back end SMACC functionality form Snow License Manager have been exposed to the front-end access, as Snow Atlas does not allow customer Administrators access to the back end or SQL databases.
• If you are migrating from on-prem Snow License Manager to Atlas, migration tools have not been created by Snow and will require a Project to handle your migration. Without Migration tools, we had to use a Managed Service Partner who had to manually create a lot of their own scripts to retrieve data that cannot be downloaded via reports and imported into Atlas. Any attachments documentation on Agreement or License Records has to be manually re-attached/uploaded to the relevant Agreement/License records in Atlas as the migration was performed.

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Provides the much needed visibility to contain spend and rationalise software

Atlas is easy to navigate, it looks reasonably similar to the on prem version we were using previously

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Front line support staff done always understand the issue you are explaining or the need to escalate to back end/higher up areas for resolutions and can often require use of the Escalate function or emailing to your Account/Customer Success Manager. That said, once an issue properly is understood, it is handled well.

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We should have spun up a Project to manage the implementation. Snow indicated to us the ease in which Snow Atlas could be implemented, however this did not factor in that we were migrating from their on-prem product Snow License Manager hosted through a Managed Servicer Partner. For a clean installation, your implementation can be quick and likely not require a Project. If you are migrating from another products or are a company that can have lots of stakeholders, fingers in the pie, hurdles/business processes that need to be adhered to, definitely use a Project to perform your implementation.

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Serena CM is superior to Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) in overall functionality, but does not have very good native integration with Microsoft. Therefore in a Microsoft centric shop with no audit needs ,TFS would be better. Otherwise I would choose Serena CM

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This is my 1st software license tool that I've used.

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• Serena has facilitated our annual completion of various audit and technology control certifications. These certifications make a huge difference to our company's reputation and bottom line.
• There has been no negative impact on our company.

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• Made it a lot easier to determine annual Microsoft renewal numbers and only renew what we needed reducing costs
• Helps us identify potential software that can be rationalised reducing costs
• Helps us identify unapproved software and people aware of the the risks