BigFix, now supported by HCL Technologies since the acquisition of BigFix from IBM in 2018, is an endpoint management solution providing endpoint visibility and IT asset discovery, automated endpoint patching (BigFix Lifecycle and BigFix Patch) policy enforcement (BigFix Compliance), and software asset discovery for licensed and unlicensed software (BigFix Inventory).
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Symantec Client Management Suite
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Symantec Client Management Suite is designed to automate time-consuming and redundant tasks for deploying, managing, patching, and securing desktops and laptops so organizations can reduce the cost and effort of managing Windows, Mac, Linux, and virtual desktop environments.
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Pricing
HCL BigFix
Symantec Client Management Suite
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BigFix
Symantec Client Management Suite
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HCL BigFix
Symantec Client Management Suite
Considered Both Products
BigFix
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Symantec Client Management Suite
Verified User
Analyst
Chose Symantec Client Management Suite
I honestly cannot give an unbiased evaluation against other products since my knowledge and use is very limited. I can say that I often peruse the SCCM forums and get ideas and scripts to convert in to the Symantec Environment. This product can feel heavy handed at times but …
Patch Management for Diverse Devices: HCL BigFix is ideal for organizations with a diverse range of devices, including laptops, desktops, cloud, virtual machines, and mobile devices. Its endpoint management functionality enables seamless patching across various operating systems such as Windows, MacOS, ChromeOS, and Linux.
Comprehensive Patch Management: With HCL BigFix, organizations can achieve comprehensive patch management across their IT infrastructures. It ensures that all endpoints, regardless of the operating system, receive timely and secure patches, reducing vulnerabilities and enhancing overall security.
Troubleshooting and Monitoring: HCL BigFix excels in providing a dashboard that effectively displays problematic and functional machines. This feature allows IT teams to quickly identify and address issues, improving overall troubleshooting efficiency. However, there are some scenarios where HCL BigFix may be less appropriate or areas for improvement: 1. Coverage Expansion: It is important for HCL BigFix to continue expanding its coverage to include all possible resources installed within the IT infrastructure. Ensuring comprehensive coverage can enhance its effectiveness. 2.On-Site and OS Upgrades: Optimizing the process of on-site and operating system upgrades can help streamline the deployment process further. Improvements in this area would contribute to a smoother and more efficient upgrade experience. 3.Communication Speed: Enhancing the speed of communication between the HCL BigFix agent and the server can help improve the overall responsiveness and efficiency of the solution.
Pricing Optimization: Adjusting the pricing of HCL BigFix to be more cost-effective would make it more accessible and attractive to organizations of different sizes and budgets.
Whenever you have computers that aren't easily accessible or you have a big site to cover (or multi location), Symantec Client Management Suite (CMS) is really great to manage all your computers, if it's for installation, software, licenses or even status. Setting up all you need from CMS can take some time, especially when you're in a multi-location site. We had to ask the Symantec engineers to help us a couple of times and set things up because even if we followed the documentation, it wasn't an easy task. But at least, the Symantec engineers are people that know what they do and they're really efficient at it.
Patch Management: We are able to easily deploy patches to all our workstations and accurately report on compliance.
Software Delivery: We do a lot of software deployments to our end users and with CMS we can quickly create policies or tasks to perform these deliveries and get quick results on our success or failures.
Inventory: Ease of use to get reports of what workstations have what software installed, patch levels, or hardware specifications.
More transparency with the roadmap would be a welcome change. New and upcoming features are usually a surprise until a major Symantec Event takes place but little is heard about those features before and even after, in some cases, leading up to a release.
Documentation for some items is poor. Especially around the Workflow product. It was intended that the documentation for the elements in a workflow would be crowd-sourced, which is a good idea, but in order for that to happen, more people need to be using it and taking the time to draw up the documents.
Cost. Its always a big topic, especially in higher-ed, but Symantec could do more to lower its costs for some product lines in order to gain more acceptance and support. If that was done and more institutions could get their student workers to use the product, once they leave college and go into the "real-world" there is a possibility that they would start recommending Symantec products because of their use in College.
Support at Symantec isn't that great. Client Management Suite isn't even listed on the Support Portal when trying to open a ticket. Your best bet for support is actually the user groups that Symantec hosts. The members of the groups are usually very responsive. With Broadcom buying Symantec, I've seen a huge jump in personnel leaving Symantec, so I'm assuming the support is just going to get worse. Recently for a simple question, I reached out to 5 people just to find out 4 of the 5 had left the company.
We have significantly enhanced our ability to patch desktops, including laptops, desktop, cloud, virtual machines and other mobile devices used by end-users. BigFix's endpoint management functionality allows us to seamlessly patch a wide range of operating systems, such as Windows, MacOS, ChromeOS, and Linux systems, ensuring comprehensive patch management across IT infrastructures. We have established a track record of delivering secure and hassle-free patching solutions to our clients
Although there are other tools that can be utilized I don't believe those tools are as robust as Symantec Management Platform. The Symantec Management Platform was chosen because of the value it returns internally and for our customers. You can pull just about any data element from an endpoint and provide detailed reports or great graphs for the C-Level
