Cherwell Service Management

Pros

Cherwell as a ticket management tool gives some good features like groupings, report generations and even timely email sending options which works well for day to day tasks.

Cons

We noticed sometimes the tool crashes but it gets up fast when contacted with respective people who maintain it.

Pros

This product allows us to customize it in a way that makes it so we can bring all departments within the same system (finally!).

Cons

Implementation and additional integrations can be difficult (as with any product).

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Cherwell Service Management

Pros

Help desk tickets are tracked
Released changes are tracked

Cons

User experience
Look and feel of the software
Search functionality
Notification process
Inactivity timeout

Pros

It is reliable to manage your tickets, the SLAs, the escalation plans, everything works perfectly right. Therefore, the option to use the asset management is pretty interesting as well and you can access it from anywhere without you have an infrastructure, it is totally on cloud. Another plus about the software, is the possibility to customize it, according to your company, if you have an development team.

Cons

Some features, like the agent to inventory the assets, needs to be bought apart from the software, it is something that would be really useful if it came together with the bundle.

Pros

The company has expanded its ITOM capabilities and supports a wide range of third-party integrations and extensions. For instance, the example of such a platform can be Exchange Mergeable Application. In a few words, this application gives various opportunities for third-party developers to host their applications. In general, the vendor pleases us with the new program’s opportunities and abilities rolling out pretty frequently. We have given our preference to Cherwell Service Management because of its great visualization capabilities, user-friendliness of the program’s interface, powerful reporting, etc. With its help, our team has automatized numerous processes and tasks. The platform pleases with its accurate dashboards and incredible search abilities.

Cons

The company has a tendency to reassign account people. Maybe, the reason for that is the high speed of their self-development, who knows. But still, it may cause little difficulties. Where we see problems with Cherwell Service Management is that this program requires a lot of computer memory to run correctly. In addition, the program will be a real pain without a strong infrastructure from your side. What’s more, this solution does not have any web version.

Pros

Customization of searches; use of an SQ-like search format to build queries that can then be saved and reused

Cons

Requires some level of training in order to increase personal customization. Occasionally have multiple people working on the same tickets, so some tickets get resolved with ineffective solutions while others are working on them. Reporting requires some effort to access.

Pros

Users can create a case via emails and can be updated on the progress of the case via emails. Ability to re-assign ownership to tasks when necessary. A dashboard, while not terribly elegant looking, does provide insights into open cases within a users area. Ability to send the ticket to Salesforce, which is a far superior case management system. "Incident actions" allow users to nominate a case for a knowledge base article though we've not used this feature yet.

Cons

The interface is clunky at best and unusable at worst. It feels and looks like a piece of software built in the 80's. Once a user clicks into the case they've been assigned, it becomes very difficult to get a complete view of the thread and what has been worked on. There is simply too much going on within the cases screen itself. New users will surely be overwhelmed as they use the system for the first several months. They will likely find themselves gravitating towards the email and subsequent threads that started the case.

Pros

Very customizable, and no coding!! Easy to use

Cons

It's a bit buggy and there are some quirks that require adjustments

Pros

Cherwell is easy to use and set up. Creating multiple threads for multiple projects is a plus. Its easy with adding or removing participants to the threads.

Cons

Cherwell has no real cons in its software or platform. I have had no issues that I can report. Its just a great software and I enjoy using it.

Pros

Ease of administration and support when issues arise

Cons

Many options. Difficult to decide where to go next

Pros

Everything! It is customizable to fit my organization's needs. I happen to be a programmer, but I don't need to be to develop and configure Cherwell. It implements robust and customizable frameworks that allow you to use it as you need to. Cherwell doesn't dictate ITSSM, it's your partner in it.

Cons

The customizability allows unwary or naive implementors, developers, or Cherwell Admins to make changes that ultimately reduce the awesomeness of the product. The biggest area of this is in implementing business processes. Before making changes, consider whether you business process is as effective as it should be, rather than making the product implement a poor-performing process.

Pros

Cherwell gives you the ability to do almost anything you want/need to do. It's built in workflow (One-Step) feature is great for automating repeatable tasks. The extensibility and integration options are also huge benefits. Being able to link into pretty much any other application with a SQL back-end is huge.

Cons

There are quite a few bugs especially when it comes to the browser side of things. Customizing the Customer Portal lacks a functioning WYSIWYG interface and if you're a hosted customer, you have to open a ticket to have support restart IIS services before some of your changes go into effect. This makes creating/modifying a Customer Portal very painful. The Browser Client for technicians is also quite buggy. With the amount of "out of the box" features the software comes with, be very careful.. As some of these features are misconfigured out of the box and require either scouring the whole system or relying on a third party vendor who knows where the bugs are and can fix them. If you ask me, this is just a way to force you to use a consultant for implementation.

Pros

I like this program has a customizable interface that shows our team a consistent track of our progress. And, I like that we are able to search all tickets that have been created anywhere on our team for easy reference.

Cons

I dislike that, at times, certain tickets really require me to fill out a specific piece of information before saving the ticket. While it depends on the major service that I select, it can slow down the entire team by making us manually fill out this at a certain time.

Pros

I really like how the company makes its customers feel special and makes us a priority, and how it is a software company that is proud of providing a code-less software product, that always seeks to be innovative and the best.

Cons

There are some quirks in the product that cannot be explained that exist in different places in the software that make troubleshooting a challenge at times. I have a One-Step, for example, that changes perspective after the 4th or 5th step, for some reason, and I had to build a work-around for it.

Pros

Easy of use and intuitive nature.

Cons

Some current challenges with multiple developers working simultaneously. The DEV leadership at Cherwell is currently working to resolve this challenge.

Pros

User community, ability to modify to meet our needs, variety of hosting options, a vendor who is as interested in making the best possible tool as we are.

Cons

The webclient isn't quite up to par with the installed client yet. This is my only real gripe.

Pros

That it is fairly easy to configure. The administration course contained a lot of information but once you start to play with it and build things out its sort of like riding a bike for the first time, well maybe more like flying a plane for the first time.

Cons

The overall look of the ticking window, very busy, a bit confusing for new users to figure out exactly what to fill in and where to go next on the page. Different sections, different font sizes, the colors, etc. make a bit difficult to navigate around. Again, you learn it over time, but if it's your first time using it, or with our IT staff some people rarely use it, this can make it difficult to know where to navigate. We are still in the testing/learning phase and about to go live, it will be interesting to see if our system administrators continue to develop and enhance the system over time, which the should do because in the week long administration class we saw first hand how powerful this tool can be, or will they just leave it as is which is a rather simplistic go-live model.

Pros

Ability to make changes to forms is very easy. We can also created and adjust workflow pertaining to incident/problem tickets as well as change tickets, which can all be done without having to recycle services during the off-hours. Such changes to the code are captured in snapshots which can then be easily restored if we discovered something we changed isn't working correctly. ITIL is also built into the tool and yet it can be tweaked to meet our needs. Likewise, dynamic reporting capabilities without having to go to an 3rd party bolt-on vendor. I'll also add that configuration item comes with the product, something we have desired for a long time in order to increase productivity and reduce outages related to our weekly Change Meetings.

Cons

Not too much I don't like. I guess learning the administration portion was a bit overwhelming at first, a lot a material to try to grasp and then apply when those situations arise that require us to dig thru the old memory banks on how to go about accomplishing what is needed. HOWEVER, I'm sure all Service Mgmt. tools are like this, in fact the tool we left was so overwhelming that most of our work had to be contracted out which made it hard to support later down the road.

Pros

The flexibility it provides, excellent customer service, ability to share mApps with others.

Cons

Takes some time using the software to become proficient at making modifications.

Pros

Easy to use and customize.

Cons

Sometimes not as powerful as you'd like.

Pros

System was easy to implement. Give the ability to track tickets and record when things are going wrong. Shows clearly what was already attempted and allows use to see the time spent per person on a single issue.

Cons

Locking the Description down so after initial creation, it cannot be changed
We like this idea, and will take some time/thought to get it right We are concerned that doing this could result in automation processes to stop working correctly, or other onesteps from functioning. Other concerns are auto-populate options for fields potentially breaking. Additionally we're concerned this might pigeon hole us a bit.

Pros

The dashboards are pretty neat looking. When it works it can be very smooth and doesn't appear to be "hard" on the machine.

Cons

I wanted to like this product, but unfortunately there are simply much better products out there.
- Static windows means you are constantly adjusting your screen when you open tickets (what is this - '98?)
- Not as user friendly as you'd expect
- "Cherwell Writer" for creating custom reports (metrics, etc) is extremely complex

Pros

This product contains the same features as many ITSM tools on the market but at a fraction of the cost. Their concurrent licensing model makes it easy to afford a solution that includes complete ITIL-aligned workflows and templates (out-of-the-box), a self-service portal and the ability to run Powershell commands within custom workflows. Available in both SaaS and On-prem flavors, this tool will meet anyone's needs without breaking the bank.

Cons

The UI is somewhat dated but still functional. Their web-based console (for technicians) has about 90% the functionality of the thick client.

Pros

Dashboard Management

Cons

Admin tool, could be easier to use. But may also simply be lack of training on my end.

Pros

It seems like this ticketing software has the ability to become very powerful analytics tool. It also provides basic functionality.

Cons

Your mileage may very depending on how much time and resources you want to use to make this extremely useful. The options are there it just takes research and time with product.