ITSM 7 Highs & Lows

Yesterday was my first real day implementing an ITSM 7 app (Change Management if you must know). So far I've set up the Foundation Data, Change and Task Templates, Approvals, and even delved into a little customization. Then I ran through the application as a user to see how it worked. Here is a list of my ups & downs.

Thumbs Up!

• The Process Accelerator makes it much easier to progress through the much more complex processes of Change Initiation, Approval, Scheduling and Implementation.
• The Change Approvals have many more options than they used to. In 6.x and before, you could only set up approvals based on CTI. Now you have many options.
• Notifications - you can turn each individual notification type off or on by user, or by application.
• The multiple types of categorization (product categorization and service categorization) really opens up a company's options for categorization and allows for many permutations. It's a real improvement though it seems complex at first.
• Change Templates are very cool and Task Templates have been beefed up significantly.

Thumbs Down!

• No more Asset Tracking. The CMDB is bare-bones with a very user-UNfriendly interface. It's confusing, figuring out how you're supposed to access the CIs, or link them with people.
• Configuring users requires a PH.D to figure out the permissions needed.
• Every time you add a Change Template, you need to configure every single group that can see it. If you want a change template to be accessible to all groups, this will be very time-consuming.
• All the forms have changed their names. Everything has a new naming scheme. If you were an expert in any application, no more. We are all starting from scratch. And Remedy doesn't have any more documentation of their code than they ever did.