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Solid Concepts, just fell short on delivery in the end
June 27, 2014

Solid Concepts, just fell short on delivery in the end

Curt Melancon, CBAP, ITIL, CSSGB | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Incident, Change, Knowledge, Request

Overall Satisfaction with CA Service Desk Manager

We used it as an enterprise help desk system. We setup categories and workgroups for HR, Facilities, Accounting, IT, Revenue Recovery and Procurement
  • Conceptually ties EITM together well, although lacks tactical ease of that concept
  • Ticket categorization and routing
  • CMDB categorization
  • Knowledge alignment with incident/problem areas
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Symantec
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.
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.