Just my opinion, but based on your requirements, SCCM is still the leading candidate - and I have experience with all of them. KACE may come close, IF the number of end-points is closer to 700 than 2000.
One of the HUGE factors that you need to also consider is the amount of support you will get. SCCM is the only one that has an entire community built around it so that you can get help 24x7. And, it's real help - not a place where you get slammed for being a newbie. MMS 2011 is coming up and is the qualified best source for training on the product (http://www.mms-2011.com). You can spend thousands on training classes, apps, and books and still not get as much out of them as you would by utilizing free community resources and MMS. From: Jonathan [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, February 04, 2011 1:43 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Patch management, revisited Ok, guys & gals, I've sifted through the threads for the past year searching on patch management and SCCM, and not found exactly what I'm looking for... In my new gig, the team gets to choose what we will use to handle patches and updates, as there is nothing set in stone right now. Two options have been mentioned by the team: SCCM and Big Fix. I don't know anything about Big Fix, except hat they were just recently gobbled up by IBM and are now part of Tivoli. What I've heard about SCCM is that it is a bear to learn and manage. Right now we've got between 700 and 1,000 nodes (including servers, both virtual and physical), and potentially slated for continued growth. Some of the engineers have laptops that are NOT members of AD, and they run as local Admins. That is probably NOT going to change. Also, we may or may not be looking at needing to handle 3rd party updates as well. I've run WSUS, but only for a few hundred nodes, and really only for windows OS updates and nothing else. Finally, we need decent reporting tools that can provide us with compliance reports on where we stand with patch management. I've seen Shavlik, Kace/K-Box, WSUS, SCCM, & GFI LANGuard all mentioned here... 1. Am I missing anything any products that I should be looking into? 2. Are any of these apps not well suited for the numbers of nodes I'm talking about (either over or under-powered for 700-2000 nodes)? 3. What's going to be the easiest learning curve/least administrative overhead? Thanks, -- Jonathan, A+, MCSA, MCSE ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
