Service Desk review
September 15, 2015
Service Desk review
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
12.9
Overall Satisfaction with CA Service Desk Manager
Service Desk is being used by the whole organization (and recently some external users) and is used to track and escalate problems and occurrences between organizations and corporate. Currently Incident Management and Change Management are being used with plans to incorporate other areas of Service Desk that would provide value.
- A large community where, if help is needed, is usually very helpful and quick to respond.
- Various sites with good information on various issues. If you have a problem, there's a good chance some else already had it and documented it.
- Fairly easy installation of the product if recommendations are followed and prep-work is done.
- Certain functions can be easily forgotten and easily overlooked and sometimes hard to find. The many different levels involved with security (Access Types, Roles, Data Partitions, Functional Access, etc.) can be confused with one another and results in doing changes in one of the levels that may not be the best choice. For example: Functional Access changes done within Roles can also be achieved by the Data Partitions.
- Simple tasks, such as sending a notification for a certain action, is difficult and confusing to accomplish. You need to create conditions that you apply to Macros (that you create) which you then apply to Events (that you create). They do have a default list out-of-box but even they are named in such a way that you're not sure if the one you are looking at is the correct one for your need until you look at the condition/macro/event to be certail.
- Properties (attached to Request/Incident/Problem Areas) provide very basic functionality to request additional information of the user. Would like to see more options available in this area as well as the ability to trigger actions based on End User answers to the properties.
- Administration can quickly become confusing as researching areas allows clicking certain pieces of information that open window after window for each piece of info quickly resulting in several windows being open. Closing any of the windows prior to the last open one results in all the windows closing that were open from it.
- Because of the difficulty in creating various functions and workflows, it has had a negative impact over time to where the 'knee-jerk' reaction to any new options requested or desired is to customize it which has resulted in mimicking out of box functions through the customizations.
- Examples of the use of certain areas and options is lacking. This has resulted in the misuse of various fields. For example: Multi-tenancy we do not have turned on and was never pursued because we we're told it "wouldn't work for us". This has resulted in previous administrators creating many new roles (which in turn has created just as many access types and data partitions) which has created a large amount of overhead. It's now difficult to turn on multi-tenancy until this overhead can be reconstructed/removed and the bringing personnel up to speed on the changes.
- On the initial install (which I wasn't with the company at that time) CA had provided us with custom scripts to execute certain functions (without considering if Service Desk could actually do that function out of box) and applied it. After a few upgrades to the product, these scripts are still being used and have caused underlying issues since their application. CA has denied support on these scripts because they are customizations even though we are looking to remove them.
iSupport and ServiceNow have much simpler interfaces and more easy-to-use customization tools built in. I was not available when the selection to use Service Desk was made.