Azure DevOps vs. Azure DevOps Server vs. Ivanti Endpoint Manager

Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.

Incentivized

Azure DevOps is good to use if you are all-in on the Microsoft Azure stack. It's fully integrated across Azure so it is a point-and-click for most of what you will need to achieve. If you are new to Azure make sure you get some outside experience to help you otherwise it is very easy to overcomplicate things and go down the wrong track, or for you to manually create things that come out of the box.

Incentivized

There is no direct replacement for the on-prem Ivanti [Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDESK Management Suite)] solution. Ivanti has a companion product called Neurons, but that is in additional cost, and requires configuration with your on-prem [Unified Endpoint Manager] instance to perform basic functions. If cloud-based is a requirement for your organization, this is likely a dealbreaker. You can implement [Unified Endpoint Manager] in a cloud instance such as AWS, but the support for this appears limited. If on-prem is not an issue for you, this is a great tool for device management. It has robust features, impressive inventory, massive customization options, and excellent vendor support. If Patch Management is a problem in your company right now, this is the first product I would evaluate.

• Utilize Git as a repository to share work between multiple users
• Ability to configure Pipelines to build containers to run virtual deployments and testing scripts.
• Split individual tasks and relate to master documents for quick navigation and ability to see overall picture of project.
• Track status of each task
• Integrate with Git to utilize branches, merging, approvals, history, etc.

Incentivized

• Reporting Integration- Azure boards provides Kanban and other dashboard, their templates for easy management of project.
• Project Pipeline- easy integration and development of CI/CD pipelines, helped in testing, releasing project artifacts.
• Version Control- Integration with Git and code IDE made it easy to share, review our code, fix bugs and do testing.

Incentivized

• Patch(Security) is done really well. You can use roll out projects or built-in automation as well as the use of groups and scopes to design pilot and other use cases.
• It takes a solid inventory of what you have of your endpoints and can do an agentless scan as well if you need to collect data that way as well.
• Provisioning is rather simple and even allows you to use other products' software for the image or the built-in if you wish to do so.
• Software distribution works well and has a lot flexibility built into the module.

• I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
• The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
• It could improve the search slightly better.

• Can add more build templates for specific technology requirements
• Can have more features in dashboards which can help dev teams stream line their tasks and priorities
• Can have raise alarm feature in case of any sort of failure in devops pipeline execution

Incentivized

• Setup - Boy it is a pain to configure everything correctly. Be aware that you'll probably be giving an AD service account some God rights to get everything working....and security just loves that....
• Cost - Boy you have to pay for everything. I suppose it lets you buy into just what you want but having repeated items go through procurement is a pain if your procurement branch is a pain.

Incentivized

I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.

Incentivized

Because we are a Microsoft Gold Partner we utilize most of their software and we have so much invested in Team Foundation Server now it would take a catastrophic amount of time and resources to switch to a different product.

Incentivized

We are happy with the product but the support and development process is far superior to any other company we have worked with. Having a good support structure is very important in today's marketplace of products that do so many things and have so many robust options and capabilities. We are very satisfied with our contract, pricing, support and product execution.

It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).

Incentivized

For standard users the interface is friendly. but if you are a manager some tools are a little confusing to use, like the query system that you always need to create from scratch. Templates should be more helpful for queries and for standard procedures that you need to duplicate PBIs over time. The search history of Work Items is a little painful to use.

Incentivized

Items are logically laid out and most are easy to find. The more advanced stuff can be trickier, but it is still not hard to find. There are a lot of options though, so remembering where some settings are, especially if you do not alter them often, can take a minute, but you will get to them fairly qiickly.

When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.

Incentivized

I have not had to use the support for Azure DevOps Server. There have never been any issues where I was not able to figure it out or quickly resolve. Our Scrum Master has used support before though, and the service has always been prompt and clear with a customer-focus

Incentivized

TRM\TAM support has been generally very good. Getting reported bug fixes, design changes, UX problems resolved has been a pain. It is often difficult to get problems escalated beyond the TRM\TAM level. Support is fantastic when you can get it, getting it can often require more work than it should, and that is probably our biggest issue.

Was not part of the process.

Incentivized

Do research beforehand and, if possible, do a trial run before implementing into production environment.

Incentivized

Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.

Incentivized

In my opinion, DevOps covers the development process end to end way better than Jira or GitHub. Both competitors are nice in their specific fields but DevOps provides a more comprehensive package in my opinion. It is still crazy to see that the whole suite can be used for free. The productivity increase we realized with DevOps is worth real money!

Incentivized

It's been many years since I did a full evaluation of other products but at the time we purchased it, the main competitors were Microsoft's SMS and Alteris. SMS just looked horribly ugly and complicated (which fit in very well with Microsoft's other server tools) and Alteris looked okay but had a piecemeal approach where even a basic deployment meant purchasing a half dozen or more components. LANDesk had one bundle for all the tools we were looking for and had a great interface for presenting the data.

Incentivized

• We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
• We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
• We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.

Incentivized

• It has streamlined the pipeline and project management for our agile effort.
• It has helped our agile team get organized since that is a new methodology being leveraged within the Enterprise.
• The calendar has improved visibility into different OOOs across the project team since we all come from different departments across the larger organization.

Incentivized

• In a college environment, the remote control access is very helpful in resolving issues w/o running around campus.
• Very nice to push software to multiple devices at once.
• Software portal is useful in allowing users to get what they need without the need for a tech.

Incentivized