Managing information technology (IT) assets throughout their lifecycles can often be a daunting task. However, this painful process can be simplified with the award-winning Client Management Suite from Altiris.
John Thomas, Altiris general manager at independent IT solutions provider, First Technology, which represents Altiris in South Africa, says Altiris IT lifecycle management solutions not only address the challenges of IT deployment and migration, including software delivery and operations management, but they also reduce the total cost of owning IT.
"We believe that the comprehensive functionality of the Altiris product line, combined with its ease of use, allows an organisation to lower its total cost of IT ownership. Altiris has built up a global reputation for the easy management of IT assets. The products have been designed for use by organisations of all sizes to manage the efficiency and ensure the reliability and availability of complex and distributed IT environments," he says.
The Altiris Client Management Suite is an easy-to-use systems management solution that helps simplify the management and ownership of desktops, notebooks and handheld devices. Developed for IT professionals who manage numerous computing devices on a regular basis, the suite provides `one-stop` systems management functionality that enables administrators to deploy, manage and troubleshoot systems from virtually anywhere.
According to IDC, Altiris can now claim to provide all five functions for desktop management support: software distribution, IT asset management, remote control, PC backup, and settings and configuration management. IDC further states that Altiris is one of only a few vendors that offers a comprehensive client management suite solution.
Altiris`s suites comprise multiple components that integrate flawlessly with one another. These include inventory, metering, remote-control, software-deployment, contract management, asset control, helpdesk software, TCO (total cost of ownership) management, WISE package studio, OS migration and disk imaging.
"Altiris Client Management Suite is the only product on the market that lets the user create collections or groupings of computers for each of its components. It allows the creation of one collection specifically for metering, another for remote control and a third for software deployment. It is also possible to set up additional groupings of collections within each component, which creates a large number of collections and still keeps them manageable. Each component collection may be used across the entire suite, so your remote-control collections can be referenced in software distribution.
"In terms of maintaining security, Altiris goes the extra mile with its vulnerability reports. These reports blow the whistle on SQL and IIS vulnerabilities, such as exposed passwords, blank SQL passwords, or if the IIS lockdown tool has not been run; blank system passwords; bad file permissions; improper IE settings; and non-expiring passwords," Thomas adds.
He points out that Network Computing gave Altiris top marks for its Web-based user interface and liked how individual components, such as inventory and software distribution, have separate collections, policies and alerts.
"The drill-down capabilities were rated especially good. For example, instead of being presented with a static list of clients that had 256MB of RAM, the user is presented with a list of details for each machine. This additional information beats the more limited approach taken by many other products, which present lists of data and no way to gather details.
"Using the Altiris separate Web report section it is possible to create individual Web sites containing a selected subset of the available reports. For instance, the user may create reports only on hardware made available to a person or group responsible for physical assets, as they wouldn`t need to know about software configurations. Access to these individual sites is controlled by IIS permissions," he explains.
The contract module allows for extensive tracking and reporting of software licenses. This ensures that organisations have access to data on maintenance and renewal costs, start and end licence dates, which machines are authorised to use the software, purchase-order information, scanned images of the proof of purchase, payment history and asset tracking.
"Altiris also had the best remote-control software. Aside from standard screen sharing, we were able to simultaneously instant message, voice conference, transfer files and share clipboards," he concludes.
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First Technology is one of SA`s largest, independent IT solutions providers, offering customers solutions and services that maximise business productivity, reduce the risk associated with deploying new technologies and minimise the total cost of Information Technology (IT) ownership. The company has fully-fledged branches in every major business node across South Africa and maintains one of the largest teams of highly skilled technical personnel in the country.
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