Item: CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager
Rating: 4
Author: Curt Melancon, CBAP, ITIL, CSSGB

Overall Satisfaction with CA Service Desk Manager

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used it as an enterprise help desk system. We setup categories and workgroups for HR, Facilities, Accounting, IT, Revenue Recovery and Procurement

Pros and Cons

Pros

Conceptually ties EITM together well, although lacks tactical ease of that concept
Ticket categorization and routing
CMDB categorization
Knowledge alignment with incident/problem areas

Cons

GUI- slow, clunky
Integrations within the CA umbrella and with other vended solutions
Reporting/BI
The security partitions capabilities and multi tenant capabilities seems good, although we had minimal use for them.

Return on Investment

enabling a single point of entry (SPOE) for all back office support functions to interface was extremely valuable in streamlining processes
the dynamic routing capabilities reduced loss time in manual ticket triage for routing purposes.

We used the old version of Symantec which was altriris. We chose Service Desk because CA had the best grasp of EITM at the time (2009). The integrations for ticket creation and cmdb with Spectrum and event monitoring tools was very attractive.

Likelihood to Renew

While the concepts of Service Desk and EITM were solid. The user interface, tool capabilities, and integrations fell behind the rest of the industry. Too often it seemed like CA bought and rebranded products without fully integrated them with their other products. It was a coat of paint, without the parts under the hood being updated. The overhead for administration was too high and the reporting capabilities were absolutely amongst the worst I've seen.

Likelihood to Recommend

Comments

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Solid Concepts, just fell short on delivery in the end

Modules Used