Cherwell Service Management

Ticket Management

SLA Tracking

Interaction with users.

UI Interface

More detailed timelines can be defined

Further integration of Apps for interaction with users

Logging Tickets.

Creating Dashboards.

Knowledge Database.

Analytical Reports.

Reporting Charts can be better.

Web portal has issues in seeing journals which is better in Cherwell client.

Web portal and Client should have same features.

Support ticket

Change ticket for deployment

The UI screens can be enhanced for the tool to be more user friendly

IT Service Management

IT Change Management

Facilities Management

Constant Enviroment Updates

Bug Fixes

Admin Training

Workflow Management

Automation

Integrations

No-code/low-code content development

Flexibility to use on multiple operating systems

Updated web UI/UX

Standardized form creation

Improved machine learning

Built-in AI chat bot

Low code solution development for business processes

Fantastic customer support and customer community

Exceptional value for the price

Highly usable out of the box for traditional ITIL processes

Cherwell lacks modern UI capabilities such as responsive forms and CSS styling for web portals.

Built-in reporting engine is hard to use and resource intensive to run.

No patching model for small platform fixes, must upgrade to receive platform code changes.

Consistent, timely notifications of status changes with a request or ticket.

Logical workflows can be be customized to guide the user through a specific request or ticket submission.

Fairly modern UI (though not entirely consistent throughout the product).

Difficult to find the right category of request or ticket type (possibly more of an internal or setup issue than with the platform itself).

Lack of a clear menu structure (Again, possibly a setup issue).

Customizable.

No code.

Powerful

Software is buggy.

It's quirky.

Hard to predict if something you think should work, will work.

It has a lot of flexibility in terms of dashboard customization.

You can customize ticket workflows to send them to particular teams in order.

Effective use of metrics to make sure you are hitting your deadlines.

It isn't the best looking application overall.

It can be finicky when it comes to customization. You have to spend some time to get the results you are looking for.

Some of the navigation can be a bit confusing, using search function can sometimes be more difficult due to the level of granularity they want.

Service requests.

Incident management.

Process scheduling is fiddly.

Word wrapping during text entry sometimes does not happen properly. You need to pop out the text box to see it properly.

IT Change Management

Facilities Management

IT Incident and Service Fulfillment

Better Enterprise Service Management (ESM) Support

Better Bug Reporting Processes

Better Security

Manages all issues and changes in one place..

Great job of tracking and time management to resolution.

Allows managers to quickly and easily see what is assigned to all members of their team and who's responsible for what.

The user interface could definitely use some improvement.

Lacks areas for descriptions of what teams handle which problems.

Automated workflows are done very well. There is a broad and configurable set of automations available, which allow for effective incident routing.

Reporting is very flexible with all the options available, dashboards and graphing in an automated manner can be an effective delivery or ITIL reports.

Web based clients allow for some good basic functionality, which are good for customers, or end users.

Within our deployment model of Cherwell, there are core functional pieces that have to be configured at the top level, rather than the sub levels, which make some areas difficult to manage. For example, if one agency wants to use feature x in one way, but another agency wants to configure the same feature in a different way, then consensus has to be gained first. Its not as fully flexible in the base configuration space as would be ideal.

Automated email processes, especially in the volumes that the State of Wisconsin goes through require some tweaking to allow them to fire in an effective way. We sometimes see problems with backlogs of these.

Licensing based on concurrency and usage is a very modern approach, however, it leads to challenges in how customers use it. For example, we have automated log-off's in place for the local clients in order to manage our own usage, to maintain reasonable costs.

After proper training on setting up the views and servers, Cherwell did a good job separating various department ownership of tickets. Our work views weren't cluttered with irrelevant information.

There is a lot of information that can be embedded into tickets. Such as sub-task assignments that could contain almost the same information as a ticket itself. Lot of customization options.

Custom personal dashboards were nice, once I figured out how to do it. Not everyone wants to see things the same way as other people, and being able to move touch points where you want is always a plus.

While I understand that a lot of customization can be up to an organization, the platform was always a huge pain when going beyond the installed client. The web client and mobile app were very problematic and clunky, locked up frequently.

My university was 50% Windows/50% Apple, and there's no Apple client.

The built in remote control capabilities on tickets for client machines didn't play well with our active directory. We always just used a different program.

Error handling could have been much better. Accidentally assigning ticket items to "non-existent" resources could crash the client. Such as if the resource was removed before a worker's view was refreshed.

Tickets can go into limbo very easily, and seemed to require more development than it should to protect us from doing that. This is because there's a lot of different ways to do the same thing. Too many touch points all over the place in the UI.

Too many ticket priority options. Clients could be assigned personal higher priorities through VIP status, tickets could be given their own priorities that conflict with client status, and SLA deadlines could assign other conflicting priorities. There were more but these were the most problematic if you're using Cherwell in a situation where you have limited developer time to nail down all the inconsistencies every day.

There was an arbitrary time tracking feature on tickets that attempted to gather data on how long certain resources took, but because the UI was very cumbersome this was more of a pain to do and was very inaccurate of the actual work it takes to do certain things.

Customer service

Pricing for resellers

System delivery

Support term acknowledgment

Accounting calculations for [record keeping]

Invoicing

We are able to help parents at home thru the remote help feature.

Ticket creation is simple.

It can be a complicated interface for the technician.

Updating and logged information can be done in a number of places so training is important.

Tracking hours

Tracking multiple tasks on an engagement

Dashboard function

Screen displays

Easy to navigate.

All-in-one console.

Multiple sequences.

Connectivity issues on the back end system (for on-prem installations).

Allows users to submit structured and clear service request or incident report tickets.

Easy to see all updates and track work done on the ticket.

Slow overall performance.

Not all search parameters available in dashboard creation option.

Incident Management.

Change Management.

Integrating with other systems.

Web front end.

Unified client.

Support for web technologies.

Standard Change Templates - importing existing templates is quite easy, and nominating new Normal changes into a template is a great easy process as well.

Saved searches - When the reports don't quite give you what you need, searches are wonderful! Using the search function also gives a better depth of knowledge into what fields belong to which places in the database.

Support requests - this has been a great way for our IT guys to resolve "customer" issues quickly and in some semblance of order.

Back-end workflows need to speed up. Some of them seem very slow.

Aesthetics - viewing on some of the dashboards cuts the words off, which makes it difficult to use those graphs for reporting purposes.

I don't really have a third option - I haven't used the software quite that long yet.

Customization: Cherwell allows us to create custom solutions that address the specific challenges we face. From a very simple "feedback" form with a single text field to a more complex process with approvals allowing users to update information about their Configuration Items.

Integration: We pull data into the Cherwell system through various sources and different methods. We might use API calls to a web application to retrieve data, or directly connect to a database.

Cherwell currently has a sort of split system with an "Application" on one side and "Content" on the other. This is one of the greatest strengths because it enables deep customization to the "Content" while allowing new features and upgrades to the "Application" without causing disruption. Over the years, Cherwell has added great improvements to the Out-of-the-Box "Content" and the "Application" and while you can easily upgrade the "Application" side to gain the new features it provides, upgrading the "Content" is a much bigger challenge. Cherwell is very aware of this challenge, and is working to solve it, but the more you customize your "Content" the more difficult it is to pull in new features.

Capturing all of the activities involved in managing incidents in an easy to navigate way.

The ability to link incidents, problem and change requests to configuration items in the CMDB.

On steps to automate various business processes to eliminate manual processes.

Ease of upgrades and content.

Report writing.

Dashboard creation.

Ease of development.

High level of customization.

Great training platform.

Ease of implementation.

Some system performance and stability issues need to be addressed.

Cherwell's email handling automation works flawlessly. The only time that I have ever needed to reset the automation service that drives it is when my own server that houses the small connecting agent has some kind of problem and disconnects us from our hosted Cherwell instance. It just works. Emails to a certain address always result in a new ticket or update to an existing ticket.

Cherwell is literally 100% customization in so many ways that it would be pointless to try to enumerate them. There is a very sizable list of already-created customizations (called "mApps") that you can download and apply to your instance. If you don't like them you can roll them back in seconds. But you can add and configure entire modules using one of these pre-defined, completely free, add-on packages. It's so easy to add features this way that I check the list of available mApps every month or so just to see what functionality I can add.

Cherwell's sales staff could use some improvement in the "paying attention to the little guy" area. It's true that sales people are focused on their larger potential commissions, and that is understandable, but as a small business, we were treated less than well by our Cherwell salesman. I would go so far as to say that he neglected us after we made the purchase and had a very serious complaint about what he sold us. We were sold a product without any implementation plan or package. I found out that we were probably the only customer that had this happen, but I wanted to mention t because it was huge headache to implement the product without any implementation help from the vendor.

I think Cherwell could do a better job of keeping their USA-based hosted server farm in better working order. Their infrastructure maintenance is improving and it doesn't affect Cherwell customers that host their own on-prem Cherwell servers, but for a long while they had a lot of failures at their on-demand server farm in Denver where they host instance for the US market. We would show up in the morning and our help desk technicians couldn't login for a couple of hours. They got these issues resolved quickly enough I suppose, within a few hours. And they did upgrade their Denver datacenter about a year ago and done better at maintaining it. But we literally can't do our jobs without Cherwell working as it s our primary help desk and end-user management tool.