Cherwell Service Management (discontinued) vs. Microsoft System Center

Cherwell [Service Management] is the perfect tool for any organization big or small that needs a solution to handle inter-departmental and customer facing business processes and services. Cherwell offers a complete suite of tools that allow you to maintain a robust service catalog, publicize those services through a web portal, and gives your end users a way to engage with self-help and self-service. In addition, Cherwell's low code architecture makes configuration and customization a breeze without a concern of rendering the system unusable and un-upgradeable. Cherwell is designed for change and we find that we are able to easily manage ever changing workflows with ease. If you are a small organization, you can set up and maintain Cherwell with minimal staff. If you are a large organization with complex business needs, you can leverage Cherwell to solve a wide variety of business problems rapidly.

We used a product before that was designed to prevent users making changes and saving files to the desktop computer. This required a renewal of the license. By using SCCM in our environment we were able to discontinue using that product because SCCM allows us to completely restore a machine back to the original configuration. We have taught our users to save their individual work on either a network drive or a cloud drive. By doing this, if we do a re-image of their machine they have lost no data, and it makes for a faster resolution. In some instances having a computer in our SCCM environment it can become cumbersome when creating new users for very specific purposes. It can be done by creating new organizational units and applying new policies but when in a pinch it can be frustrating. For the most part we have tried to make "new" purpose images and groups to at least accommodate a quick install.

Incentivized

• After proper training on setting up the views and servers, Cherwell did a good job separating various department ownership of tickets. Our work views weren't cluttered with irrelevant information.
• There is a lot of information that can be embedded into tickets. Such as sub-task assignments that could contain almost the same information as a ticket itself. Lot of customization options.
• Custom personal dashboards were nice, once I figured out how to do it. Not everyone wants to see things the same way as other people, and being able to move touch points where you want is always a plus.

Incentivized

• Provides our users the ability to deploy and manage our own datacenter based on defined software with understandable solutions for storage, compute, networking and security.
• We are able to update at once all the computers from all departments without having to install the OS on every computer.
• It allows us to have everything in one place for database management and datacenter inspection as well.

Incentivized

• Sometimes comments made on a ticket do not generate emails to the technician who owns it, and they will not know there is an update from the customer without checking it
• Sometimes I will see an error pop up when copying text but it can easily be closed
• Sometimes the time-out window for staying logged in does not appear on top of other applications so I will not know it's logging me out

Incentivized

• Needs web based storefront for requesting new software
• Needs ability to manage the packaging work flow better
• Sometimes is slow to download and there is no indication the entire catalog is being loaded, resulting in confused users not being able to find common software in the available list.

Incentivized

There has been little experience of downtime. It is well received by end users. The ability to customise it to integrate into existing systems is good. The organisation is realising cost savings through the information it provides. There is continued investment to develop the product by our own staff. In most instances there is not a requirement for client software to run it as a simple web browser will do.

Incentivized

I enjoy the layout and configuration of our Cherwell Service Management instance. It did take me a bit to get used to, as with any new ticketing system, but now that I understand the system more, I thoroughly enjoy it! There are just so many options and the UI is very intuitive.

Incentivized

No matter our issues with the software, its ability to centrally manage systems, patch, image, and remote help users has far exceeded our timeliness to help staff. Its ability to keep current, enable us to keep the network secure, and standardize our end-user experience has saved us many hours, dollars, and time every day.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We generally have a good time with Cherwell support, however, there are the few niche cases where I have to explain how Cherwell works to the customer support agent on the other end. A little more product education for tier 1 support could go a long way in helping expedite support requests from SaaS customers.

If I had to dislike something about the system it would be how much it changes once you upgrade. This could be more of a problem of mine since I get used to one way and don't like it when it changes so much. I am enjoying the newest update, but it is a mess when you are actually going through the upgrades.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The training was great! We got together to review the system, its UI, and how to perform basic functions. Then there was plenty of time to ask questions and test out the system while there was someone available to assist.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

ServiceNow was administrative heavy and required more than one admin. Also expensive for smaller customers. Remedy was scaled more for enterprise customers where we are small to mid-sized. FootPrints - we replaced FootPrints with Cherwell due to a lack of BMC putting any further development into the product. It was an aging platform with no real future growth.

Incentivized

None. We are a Microsoft business, and this is THE tool for imaging, packaging, remote support, and antivirus management. Microsoft's tool is the best for managing its software, systems, and antivirus clients. I will say that Microsoft Intune, the cloud platform, can be used for those with heavy 365 usage, but for us, that does not meet our current company needs.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Cherwell is more expensive (of course) compared to the home-grown ITSM solution that we previously used, so it has cost us more in capital outlay and it will continue to do so. But it has drastically reduced the number of end-user issues that have "fallen through the cracks". It makes assistance triage easy because you can customize the prioritizing of tickets by both urgency and priority of your tickets as well as by VIP status of the user.
• Our internal end-user satisfaction with the IT department has drastically improved since implementation of CSM. Our technicians don't forget to finish up a task with many tiny details and that's because Cherwell's workflows provide the technician with a list of the steps needed to finish up the task. We've become a much more popular IT department and leadership has noticed. I can't put an ROI number on that but it's priceless to me.
• Technician errors in user onboarding and offboarding have virtually disappeared, saving us hours and hours of technician time. Again, I haven't calculated the ROI but it's probably a good 20% or more of our tier 1 technicians' time that has been saved. Higher-tier technicians are obviously not as affected since they weren't usually the ones who were neglecting the details, but even they have enjoyed more efficiency and better prioritization of their time.

Incentivized

• We have been able to automate our patch management, firmware and other security concerns.
• We have a standardized "image" ensuring our setup is consistent across the enterprise. This alone has saved us in time to support and time to understand how to use our desktops.

Incentivized