Desktop Managment Software

bigk

bigk

2[H]4U
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Oct 16, 2007
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I've been looking around for some vendors to automate most of what we do at the Help Desk, and have come with Altiris, LANDesk, and Microsoft SCCM.

Any recommendations for you folks?
 
We have Altiris, it's expensive but it does pretty much everything and has great community support.
 
I'm not sure what exactly you're looking to achieve, but where I worked last used Altiris and LANDesk. I spent more time working with LANDesk which was pretty good, it had some weird quirks, but over all it was a nice remote desktop application.
 
I guess to clarify what I'm looking for, its mainly software deployment, patch management, and inventory tracking.

Remote desktop is also a plus, but not necessary.
 
we use LANDesk.
Very nice application, really.

the ability to push patches and software through LANDesk is very nice, also. Although I haven't gotten the chance to play with that yet. But we have had Office 2007 installations done by pushing installations via LANDesk with minimal issues.

it also inventories a lot of data, and the remote assistance works well.
 
I manage around 700 machines with SCCM it has been a great experience, though it does get a bit technical with scripting and SQL getting used alot for some of the more advanced features.

I would suggest trying out a few of these solutions to see which one best meets your needs. As they all have their pros and cons when compared to the others.
 
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How large is your environment? I assume you are a AD shop, but if you are using Novell, you can't go wrong with ZenWorks. We use it and its a decent product.
 
KarFai said:
How large is your environment? I assume you are a AD shop, but if you are using Novell, you can't go wrong with ZenWorks. We use it and its a decent product.
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If yoru using novell you already went wrong somewhere :D

Another vote for SCCM> And if your not very large you can get the system center essencials
 
KarFai said:
How large is your environment? I assume you are a AD shop, but if you are using Novell, you can't go wrong with ZenWorks. We use it and its a decent product.
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What version? Because 7, while it has it's good points, fucking sucks.
 
oakfan52 said:
If yoru using novell you already went wrong somewhere :D
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LOL!

We use Altiris and haven't touched the others mentioned here. I can say that we have invested a lot of time and money in Altiris. Carbon Copy, which is the remote desktop tool, doesn't support multi-monitors or copy and paste between hosts. Other than that, it's not to bad.
 
We are currently on 7.... yea I know it has issues. We plan to move to 10 at some point. Overall its not bad. Personally though if I was in an AD place I would not use any Novell products, but that is just a personal choice, and I'm more familiar with the MS products.
 
Leaning towards Altiris seeing that we use SEP as our AV solution, which gets us both a nice discount and also good integration.
 
KarFai said:
We are currently on 7.... yea I know it has issues. We plan to move to 10 at some point. Overall its not bad. Personally though if I was in an AD place I would not use any Novell products, but that is just a personal choice, and I'm more familiar with the MS products.
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Using both here. I much prefer AD stuff than zenworks, even though AD doesn't cover zenwork's functionality.
 
bigk said:
Leaning towards Altiris seeing that we use SEP as our AV solution, which gets us both a nice discount and also good integration.
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They'll pimp you Altiris 7, which I believe is required (or highly recommended) to use SEP integration with. Altiris 7 is a beast from a resource perspective. That and the deployment solution 7 is lacking PXE which is a HUGE inconvenience if you're going to do any imaging of machines with the tool.
 
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