Desktop management tool time
Reducing the cost of doing business is the name of the game in this ever-tightening economic climate. One pressing question many IS professionals ask is how to reduce the cost of managing thousands of desktop machines without adversely impacting company productivity.
It's all in the numbers. Effective desktop management takes place when the right information is available to guide strategic decisions. For example, the only way to determine the true cost of migrating to Windows 2000 is to get an accurate hardware inventory that shows how many machines have enough CPU speed, memory and disk space to accommodate the new operating system. Another example is how a good software-monitoring tool will provide the information necessary to determine how many Office 2000 licenses you need across your network.
We recently tested seven desktop management products to see which offers the best overall tool kit for deploying and controlling desktop systems in an enterprise network. The suites we tested were Altiris' eXpress 5, Intel's LANDesk 6.4 Management Suite, Microsoft's Systems Management Server 2.0 Service Pack 3 and Novell's ZENworks 3.0. We also tested combined-product entries from three companies, including Cognet's Cognet 3.5 and myITware 4.0, Tally Systems' TS.Census 1.2 and TS.Ready 4.0, and Vector Networks' LANUtil32 and PC-Duo.
We deemed LANDesk to be, once again, the best overall choice and the Network World Blue Ribbon winner (DocFinder: 3561). LANDesk includes things not found in its competitors' offerings, such as Norton Antivirus and support for Linux machines. ZENworks for Desktops is not far behind the leader in all categories we assessed and represents the best solution for current Novell shops.
If you want to take a best-of-breed approach to building your toolbox, you may wind up with a set of tools that don't work well together. While TS.Census is without question the best inventory product we tested, it falls short in areas such as software metering, which it does not support.
If you're looking for a tool to help roll out new desktops or have a need to frequently restore an original copy of your operating system, you'll want to take a serious look at Altiris' eXpress. It offers the best-integrated disk-image management features of the group. In terms of functionality, Microsoft's SMS remains about the same as the last time we looked at it. Even though the latest service pack, SP3, fixes a number of bugs, it doesn't really offer any significant new capabilities.
Vector Networks LANUtil32 is a well-rounded product that covers all of our test areas with the excception of software license metering. The two products from Cognet suffer from poor integration at this point, but perform well in their own right and offer some features -- such as the software application profiling -- not found in any of the other products we tested.
Desktop configuration, ongoing mgmt. utilities
One challenge for desktop managers is maintaining control over the physical machines on their networks. That includes things such as preventing registry corruption, addressing deleted system files and maintaining a standard configuration across the
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