Other pages in the review
CA Unicenter Service Desk
Circumstances didn’t allow us to work with this product for as long as the others submitted however, as it was the last product to be assessed we were able to proceed a little
more efficiently. This a well laid out web-based set of applications serving both phone and web enquiries. ITIL compliance is thoroughly covered by this product which includes: Incident, Service Request, Problem, Change, Release and Configuration Management with other Unicenter applications being available for broader IT management potential.
When a customer logs into the self-service web interface access to all information sources is readily apparent. Knowledgebase, enquiry history and new incident logging are laid out neatly in summary form. The user is only a hyperlink away from details of any item or the initiation of a new task. The screen is perhaps a little busy but it is a small price to pay for the product’s excellent accessibility—knowledgebase items are well laid out according to problem, cause and solution.
Incident processing by staff is clear cut with guidance occurring behind the scenes without cluttering the screen with indications of what tasks are coming up. Screen clutter is reduced by keeping various types of data under separate tabs and instead of presenting drop-down boxes for categories and sub categories we find hyperlinks to additional screens where details can be composed without distraction. The left-hand panel indicates what tasks are coming up and what needs more immediate attention.
As expected problems can be logged from scratch or built from existing incidents. Incidents are readily linked to the problem and visual tools allow managers to quickly assess the full extent of a problem and its implications to the company. The problem-logging screen is basically the same in appearance as the incident screen; such uniformity assists overall product usability—this is a feature common to these software suites. Service staff can quickly develop and deploy knowledgebase items based on existing problems or if necessary they can be built from scratch.
Adding a new customer or staff member is no problem with this software. By preference, data is imported from LDAP (or similar sources of personnel data) which uses system authentication. It is, however, possible to employ application-based authentication. Again the screen layout is very clear with subsidiary screens facilitating the gathering of standard or other pre-stored data.
Escalations or other business rules can be built up quickly from a library of triggers and responses. Where greater flexibility is required the underlying code can be directly edited—this is fairly easy work with and most people should be able to adapt existing rules to suit new needs without much trouble.
Charts and tables detailing service provision are available through a well laid out multi-tab dashboard, which is actually an add-on module that can be set to show individual user or group information. Each tab shows a different aspect of the work in hand such as incidents by status or priority.
We were particularly pleased with the helpfiles provided with this package. When carrying out a search most help systems return a simple list of topics or test fragments. CA goes one better by returning a summary of each item under the relevant title, ensuring the user does not need to click on several articles before correctly identifying the page required.
As with the Altiris product, font and field sizes are set which means that the appearance of the interface can suffer depending on screen resolution.
CA offers three short training courses depending on the user’s responsibilities, with service offered all day everyday. Unicenter has a functional and reasonably intuitive user interface with integration to a large range of CA and third-party products. Tailoring to a business means that CA is unable to provide us with any pricing for this product but we assume there will be fair degree of variation for different implementations if CA cannot at least offer a ball-park figure!