Software distribution and execution: You'll likely want to distribute software after hours, when network use is reduced, and then install in the morning when users log in. All products tested support that capability, and all except Microsoft also support Wake-on-LAN. Only CA's product has an application-rollback feature, so that if an installation fails as you deploy it, you can specify to stop, continue or roll everyone back to the old version. Altiris can do rollbacks via machine snapshots and its disk-imaging suite. None of the products, however, offers good calendaring. We wanted a way to say: "Deploy this application to collection X on Monday, Y on Tuesday, Z on Wednesday." This would be useful for applications or files that you deploy regularly. It also would help with distributing new applications, either to a preproduction test group or to do a phased rollout. We didn't like having to create multiple deployments to handle each step in a rollout.
Assert Yourself
As for usability, though only the products from CA and Novell provide granular access control, we found their interfaces poorly designed and hard to use. CA's product had us jumping from window to window, while Novell's requires knowledge of eDirectory. Marimba's UI was no walk in the park either.
Access control for most products was based on roles: An admin can perform only specified functions across the entire network. CA and Novell were on the top end of this scale; we were able to limit which administrators could access which computers, thus letting us delegate responsibility for specific collections. On the other end of the spectrum, Altiris' product is severely lacking in access-control capabilities, though the company promises this will be remedied in the next release. We could set up access controls for the Web reports via IIS permissions.
Despite this shortcoming, Altiris Client Management Suite is our Editor's Choice, thanks to its excellent reporting, license monitoring, patch management and usability. We were also impressed with LANDesk's suite, which would have finished neck and neck with Altiris if it offered patch management. LANDesk says this feature will be in its next release.
The Altiris Client Management Suite comprises multiple components that integrate flawlessly with one another. We tested only the inventory, metering, remote-control, software-deployment and contract-managment sections, but the suite also has modules for asset control, contract management, helpdesk software, TCO (total cost of ownership) management, WISE package studio, OS migration and disk imaging. The imaging portion, Deployment Solution, was the Editor's Choice in our previous review of disk-imaging software. A full-featured, 10-node demo license is available on Altiris' Web site.
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