Cherwell - a true enterprise service management solution!

Cherwell is a well-rounded product that can really be utilized as far as one's imagination can stretch. I've used the product in both a corporate and medical environment, where the tool was used for vastly different reasons (i.e., ITSM, business & retail functions, vs hospital orderlies & medical equipment tracking in a CMDB, etc.). Cherwell is so versatile that you can really use it to develop any workflow or process that is unique to your line of business - there are more than enough functions and tools available within Cherwell to effectively manage any enterprise solution your organization needs. The major drawback of flexibility is supportability. Given that you can essentially develop anything you want (content-wise) in Cherwell, it can quickly become highly complex and difficult to support by anyone other than the original developer. Documentation is key (F-spec & T-spec especially!) when developing larger solutions in Cherwell.

Cherwell is still the best tool for the job in the market. Even though Ivanti bought them and are trying to convince everyone to move over to Neurons for ITSM, they have stated Cherwell will remain supported indefinitely and have a roadmap for future Cherwell development. Unfortunately, ISM is not as flexible as Cherwell (and the UX is atrocious), hence why many people are sticking with Cherwell (and why many Cherwell customers never purchased ISM originally).

Implementation is a breeze. Each time I've implemented it, we had an outsourced vendor overseeing it & assisting where needed. However, Cherwell OOTB is ready to go, and configuring it for LDAP/SAML, etc. for authentication and user-imports is really straight forward. The infrastructure needed for Cherwell is extremely simple too - and installing the server & database takes no more than 20 mins.

We had a 'train-the-trainer' session from Cherwell to some of our users who were unfamiliar with the product, and we had an individual who 'championed' training internally and provided several training classes over the period of a few weeks for new Cherwell users. We also had a team who traveled to remote sites to conduct in-person training there too.

Highly configurable, anything you can imagine you can build!

Support is generally very lackluster unfortunately. Both before & after Cherwell was acquired by Ivanti, support has remained fairly consistently poor. As a hosted customer, you have to rely on support for day-to-day requests such as access to view logs, restarting services (although this is automated, it can fail a lot); and the room for error when relying on support for these tasks is high. Not to mention the turnaround time for tickets to be addressed (I've had some tickets open for over a year before a DR was created). Suffice to say that the product sells itself, the support nor the organization who own Cherwell benefit consumers much at all.

I love how easy it is to design and develop solutions in Cherwell. There is yet to be anything I've come across that I can't do in the tool - the question usually becomes, 'we can do it, but should we?'. Most of the features in Cherwell are intuitive, and the development can be as simple or compelx as you wish.

We have never had any major show-stopper issues with Cherwell itself - more so with the infrastructure it sits on. Moving from in-house cloud (on Cherwell's side), to AWS then to Azure has caused multiple problems over the years (some still on-going), however the product has remained fairly stable.

Almost always available, with exception for a handful of outages due to infrastructure related issues.

The browser client is mostly acceptable in terms of performance, but still lacks parity with the rich client. The rich client is not very performant at all. It's built on old architecture and relies heavily on a fast internet connection, good caching and database indexing. There are several unwritten rules with form design (and form arrangement) which most users are not aware of, but can severely impact performance in the rich client. This is where the flexibility of Cherwell can come back to bite you if you step outside the boundaries of these unwritten rules...

We've integrated with several systems, and using REST API calls in One-Steps is really straight forward and easy to do.

I was not involved in this process.

Mostly it was fine. The project management on their end was not great, but the solutions engineers we worked with have always been fantastic.

As mentioned, they were always great to work with (minus the project management side). My only feedback would be to push back on requirements that don't make sense.

We have had great contracts with Cherwell and love the concurrent licensing model.