CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 6.8 out of 10

Score

6.8 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

Customers have found that this product offers a convenient self-service option for logging their own tickets and referencing existing problems. This has reduced the volume of calls to the call center, as tickets can be automatically routed based on location and product. Additionally, customers appreciate that the web-based solution eliminates the need for them to install special software or for technicians to carry a PC. The knowledge module within the product is highly valued, as it contains a library of documents for both customers and technicians to reference known problems and their solutions or workarounds. The tracking feature for the use of knowledge also allows incidents to be linked and provides visibility into recurring issues. With its ITIL-driven approach, this product is used throughout the whole company. Employees are able to submit requests to the help desk using this system, while the service desk utilizes it as a ticket management tool. The ability to upload and access knowledge articles directly in the system streamlines workflows for help desk analysts when processing requests. Not only is it used for reporting purposes to track logged calls and emails, but it is also utilized for service automation across various departments within the organization. As an enterprise help desk system, it provides categories and workgroups tailored to different departments' needs. This product is relied upon to log and track tickets and changes within the company, offering a comprehensive paper trail. Overall, this product plays a crucial role in incident, request, problem, change, configuration, and knowledge tracking for the entire IT organization. Its robust capabilities increase productivity for consumers, IT teams, and management by enabling faster service restoration and providing a clearer understanding of support's business value. Moreover, it minimizes service disruptions and reduces business risks associated with changes.

Reviews

12 Reviews

CA Service Desk Manager- solid and scaleable solution, less all the unnecessary expense to maintain!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 29, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The entire IT organization (720 associates) use the Service Desk Manager tool. It is used for incident, request, problem, change, configuration, and knowledge tracking. Our teams have developed scalable processes that scan 15+ hospitals, supporting 30,000 end users, leveraging this tool as the enterprise-wide solution. We have upwards of 250,000 records created annually, have defined slo's and quality metrics, and have very specific kpi's we measure consistently for quality measurement as well as effectiveness of our support. Currently we have an integrated solution that includes Ivanti Xtraction (for dash boarding) and CA Catalog as the user interface. We are working towards integrating SCCM to the CMDB for population of Assets (not CI's) and have mapped upwards of 250 full services in our CMDB. CA Service Desk Manager is our true enterprise solution for service management and it has served us rather well.

Pros

Integrated solution for incident, request and problem and change management tickets
Simple but resourceful knowledge component
Effective survey feature for interface with end users
Integration to Service Catalog as well as a native self-service interface

Cons

Reporting is a challenge for all ticketing systems and we've had to use an external dashboard tool (and previously Crystal/Boxi) for this purpose.
Gui for end users is clunky, forcing to have to use a catalog tool for this purpose.
Notification engine is not very customizable, causing an over or under notification to customers and specifically IT users.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.)

Verified User

Vice-President in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

CA SERVICE DESK REVIEW

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

November 17, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used throughout the whole company. Employees use it to submit requests to the help desk, and the service desk uses it as a ticket management tool for processing requests and incidents. All knowledge articles are uploaded to CA and accessed by a help desk analyst when processing requests. It is also used for reporting to track calls and emails that were logged.

Pros

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.

Cons

The right-click feature is disabled in this application and users are unable to copy and paste with mouse or touchpad.
The application also freezes quite a bit and a user will have to quite often close and reopen browser to get it functioning properly.

Likelihood to Recommend

We manage calls and emails for over 15000+ employees, and I think this application is a terrific tool for managing huge loads of requests, incidents, etc. It is user-friendly and great for training purposes to explain any company's process. It is also a great tool for managers and supervisors to pull reports from.

Jamedith Pewu

Service Desk Specialist in Information Technology at HighPoint Global (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

CA Service Desk Manager Agile as always

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

November 14, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

<p>We are using CA Service Management Suite of CA which CA Service Desk Manger is one of the components of that suite. We have branded the name of CA Service Management as KhidmahTech (Arabic Name) which means your service. We have made CA as a single point of contact for all IT Related Services, and all ITIL process has been configured in CA. KhidmahTech is used as a service management tools for two divisions in my company, i.e. IT & HR.</p><p>The biggest business problem it has addressed is the Service Automation

of all service of IT and HR.</p>

Pros

Agility is the biggest strength of CA Service Desk Manager as it can be easily customized based on the process.
CA Process Automation along with CA service desk manger can be a lethal combination for automation of any process across the Board.
Easy to upgrade and Installation is very useful along with good documentation and support.

Cons

Mobile App cab be improved.
Constantly innovate based on the competition from other ITSM Vendors.
Reporting can be improved.

Likelihood to Recommend

Scenario 1:

We got a task for Automation of Business Automation Document (BRD) which has many complex scenarios and approvals, we have achieved this with the help of CA. Also IT Downtime Notification automation is also achieved with the help of process automation and ca service desk manager.

Scenario 2:

Integration with the third party tools required lot of customization as there is no available connector for that.

Farooq Hussain

Sr.System Engineer in Information Technology at Borouge (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

View profile

tech100

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 23, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

CA Service Desk Manager is being used to document all calls and work orders that come to the Queens College help desk. When a staff or faculty member has an issue or a request with his or her computer, we write an incident or request on CA Service Desk Manager. This request or incident is assigned to a staff member who will address the issue. Both the person who wrote the ticket and the person who will fix the problem log into CA Service Desk Manager. The end user receives emails for any changes that are made to the ticket. We also use it to document each phone call that we take because we are resolving issues over the phone for faculty, staff and students.

Pros

You can log in anywhere.
It is a good way to document all work that is being done by each tech.
It is a great way to see a staff member's history or if he may have a repeating problem.

Cons

When you are opening and closing too many tickets back to back, the system lags and save turns into accept which does not save anything, and basically all you have done on this ticket has been lost.

Likelihood to Recommend

Alyssa Figueroa

Help Desk Technician in Information Technology at Queens College (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

Service Desk... great for beginner organizations... only

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

September 21, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our enterprise utilizes CA Service Desk Manager as a tracking mechanism for requests, incidents, problems, changes and integrates these areas of focus with CIs... specifically the CMDB. This solution allows us to to hold others accountable, [mirror] workflow abilities, and [obtain] historical analysis with regards to outage resolution. This level of use is within all departments and all levels of hierarchy. On the technical side, we utilize our own SLA reporting by querying the database directly for statistical analysis.

Pros

The database is very clean and easily to manipulate with regards to querying available data and needing to find the right table.
The UI interface allows for new form/template creation out of the box. In particular it is a very 'what you see is what you get' interface.
The API has been around for a considerable period of time that third party services already integrate with CA Service Desk Manager for automated ticket creation, etc.

Cons

The product requires major investment in customizations as the out-of-the-box experience is very limiting feature wise.
The product utilizes a proprietary language, this requires a specialist in CA products rather than a general programmer.
Vendor support is very limited in that the response times are exceedingly increasing to the point of waiting 24-hours for initial response.

Likelihood to Recommend

Basic support tracking is the only time I would recommend CA Service Desk. Anything that relies on work-flow management would be better suited with another third party product.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Service Desk review

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

September 15, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Other products I have experience with approach customizations with the end user in mind. They try to make it easy to follow and user friendly. They attempt to keep it versatile and open without compromising their product where the user may actually cause damage. Service Desk does have a fairly robust tool (Web Screen Painter) for customizations but it is difficult for a beginner or average user to use. It displays the source code of the forms allowing it to be manipulated. They also allow references to their existing tables for customizations within the schema which can easily cause confusion as to the original function of said table. Once customizations are applied, they are difficult to remove as there is not a 'clean' way to remove them. It usually involves editing some obscure file manually which leaves room for human error. Service Desk is probably best used out of box but that might not be best suited for organizations that do not prefer the Service Desk approach.

Verified User

Administrator in Corporate (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

CA SD--best suited for HelpDesk Management

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

August 28, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

CA Service Desk Manager was primarily used to manage customer requests and for workflow management of these requests/incidents. The product was used as a workflow tool across multiple departments for fulfilment.

Pros

Excellent workflow management
Resource task management
Knowledge management

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

CA Service Desk Manager is a very good fit for workflow management for support staff. It has length wise coverage of ITSM, however it could use better depth or deeper integration techniques into the processes for, e.g., better and broader Event/Incident Management and linkages to knowledge management and other pieces.

Vandana Karthikeya

Product Manager in Information Technology at Cognizant Technology Solutions (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

CA SDM review

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 11, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

<ul><li>Increased productivity of consumers, IT teams and management</li><li>Reduced number of Service Desk tickets</li><li>Faster service restoration</li><li>Clearer understanding of support’s business value</li><li>Less business risk associated with changes</li><li>Fewer service disruptions</li></ul>

Pros

Streamlines support
Unified, collaborative self-service and mobility
Broad CA Service Management solution

Cons

Would like to see functionality of seeing tickets in a map view for a specific location .Eg. In a Retail space, Would like to see tickets related to each store, when mouse is hovered over a particular store on a Map

Likelihood to Recommend

<ul><li>Better consumer empowerment and satisfaction: Self-service and social media give the user a consumer experience.</li><li>Reduced number of Service Desk tickets: Fewer tickets coming to your Service Desk can help your IT team focus on bigger issues. </li></ul>

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

11 years of experience

There's nothing like a service desk party!!!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 8, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

CA Service Desk is being used across the whole organization as the service desk system for all issues or inquiries. Specific departments also use CA Service Desk to keep track of daily requests related to coding and applications.

Pros

Tracking - For large projects across multiple departments, we are able to keep track of progression in one central location
Accountability - If someone alters a document or information, everyone is able to review the original documentation

Cons

Communication - While it is great to add notes and comments, there should be better interaction with CA Service Desk and Outlook email

Likelihood to Recommend

This is well suited for companies who need to formalize communication between IT/application specialists and less technical employees.

DeChandra Hendry, CCS

Charge Description Master Analyst II in Finance and Accounting at Catholic Health East (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Solid Concepts, just fell short on delivery in the end

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

June 27, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used it as an enterprise help desk system. We setup categories and workgroups for HR, Facilities, Accounting, IT, Revenue Recovery and Procurement

Pros

Conceptually ties EITM together well, although lacks tactical ease of that concept
Ticket categorization and routing
CMDB categorization
Knowledge alignment with incident/problem areas

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Curt Melancon, CBAP, ITIL, CSSGB

Business Process Engineer in Information Technology at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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Reviews and Ratings

Service Desk review

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

September 15, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Administrator in Corporate (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience