Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDesk Management Suite) supports enterprises with mobile security and device management (UEM), featuring remote control and problem resolution, monitoring and alerting, inventory discovery, license management, and more.
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Symantec Ghost Solution Suite
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Symantec's Ghost Solution Suite is an imaging and deployment solution.
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.
Symantec Ghost Solution Suite is well suited to standard images of company approved software and standard configurations for all users. When every user has the same computer configuration, it is easily managed with a standard image across the board. It is less effective if you need to have multiple configurations for different groups. It becomes cumbersome to manage all the various images. When you add to the complexity by having to address the different drivers for the different hardware model computers, this only adds to the overall number of images you will have to manage, create and keep updated. I find Ghost most helpful with standard hardware model computers and one or two images company wide.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A positive impact of Ghost would be time. To deploy computers form scratch is very time consuming and labor intensive for the IT Department. Ghost clearly saves the time of the IT departments staff to quickly get a new computer out to user so they can spend their time on addressing other issues and being more productive.
Time is money. If the IT department is spending hours preparing computers and employees are out of a computer for an extended period of time waiting for one to be loaded, this is money lost to the company in paying employees to sit around and wait for a computer to be configured.
