Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued) vs. CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager

Agiloft is a fully GUI based system that requires very little or no coding. That allows for a very quick deployment of a new install and for adding new features. Therefore, it works great for companies that don't want to write a new system from the ground up.

It is a suitable tool for a large organization with extensive user needs. It is not for a small shop as it may be over-engineered for smaller organizations that don't have teams that can manage a solution of this size. It does have some significant hardware and configuration needs, but that should not deter customers from deploying it in-house. I've seen it deployed in the cloud as well as in-house; the downside to deploying it as a hosted solution is you're forever at the mercy of the vendor for customizations, and they cost an arm and a leg. The simplest things take a long time and cost much more money than necessary, so you can't truly get a custom solution and end up with mostly vanilla services (unless you have very deep pockets.)

Incentivized

• Agiloft's performance has been excellent. This includes 1) Scalability, 2) System response, and 3) Reliability. We have not had a reported issue with the system for at least 2 years.
• Professional Services. When we had an issue interfacing with an external data mart we brought in Agiloft's Professional Services and got a quick, cost-effective solution.
• Strategic Planning. As we look to the future we are hoping to move to the ITIL model. We love Agiloft's solution and have embraced it as our future direction.
• Flexibility. This includes 1) Custom form design, 2) Routing based on just about any criteria, 3) Addition of attributes, 4) Search capabilities for end users.

• This application is very easy to use. It is the best when it comes to training since the application is easy to understand and employees are able to easily catch up on work process.
• It is a great reporting tool because users can look up work they've done over a period of time.
• The auto populate feature is very helpful since at the service desk users do have several tickets to create for a single requester.

Incentivized

• They could build a slicker look to the graphical charts output for the reports. These look a bit dated, and I would like the ability to customize them more.
• I find that some features of the tool are difficult to find, and aren't necessarily in the most common sense of places. This definitely eases with experience with the tool, but initially it will take some time just to figure out the setup of the tool and where things are located. For example, permissions can be set on many different levels, which is great, but logically finding where to find the differing permission levels is difficult at first. I would suggest attending their admin training session to initiate yourself with the tool at first, so you're not as reliant on Agiloft initially to guide you in building the tool, which can get expensive.

• Linking into other ITSM Tools for automatic event/alert generation could be a good feature to use. Not sure if this has been addressed in later versions of the product.
• Effective integration into communication tools such as pagers, text messages would be a great plus. Again this may have been addressed in later versions.

We have invested a lot of effort in tailoring the solution to our needs. Our users (both internal and external) are comfortable with it and we have aligned it with our workflow. We have also integrated it into our implementation processes and are working to connect it to our SDLC.

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.

Incentivized

For the most part, it is an easy and intuitive system to use. There are many small things that could be improved to make the system work even easier. However, overall it is very easy to use if you have a good grasp on computer programs and using them to build things. I do not have any computer science or programming background, and I am able to use this system with few problems.

We often hear back very quickly with answers to our questions. They also support their answers at times with screenshots and videos to help further explain their advice and suggestions. The only reason it isn't a 10 is because sometimes using only the online support system, sometimes things aren't communicated as well as they would be over the phone. However, we know if there is a major issue going on, we can call Agiloft for support.

Agiloft's singular advantage is its ease of customization that allows you to capture automation requirements right at the point of use. We knew our company would always be developing new requirements for its customer-facing processes and any tool that made customization difficult was an inferior choice for us. Other vendors offered similar levels of customization, but when we dug deeper, Agiloft was the only one that delivered it. Our management team came from the IT and development side of NetSuite and we have used it to manage our business almost since inception. However, its support, marketing, and sales functionality was too difficult to modify and built to meet too broad a set of requirements, so we could never get full adoption or utilization, and it stood in the way of delivering the service levels we needed to provide our customers. We still use NetSuite for back-of-the-house financial functions which don't need that level of customization, but for everything else, the way forward has led us to choose Agiloft.

We are too integrated with CA Service Desk Manager to disassociate anytime soon. We found the more we used the product the more we needed to customize it in order to better integrate with our business processes. There are other alternatives that have many built-in features that had we have foreseen our future requirements... would have chosen ServiceNow or Remedy as our "go-to" ticketing product.

Incentivized

• Helps us organize tasks and projects and the data associated with each project
• Helps us organize our resources to meet the demand of issues and events
• This has helped us keep moving forward during times we otherwise would have pulled back.
• Completely revolutionized our way of work life. Upwards of approx 300 percent productivity and complexity..

• 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.

Incentivized