Patch Manager Plus is an automated patch management software that provides enterprises with a single interface for all patch management tasks. The vendor claims it works across platforms, helping users patch Windows, Mac, Linux & 300+ third-party applications. With Automated Patch Deployments, users can automate the entire process of patch management:…
$245
50 endpoints
Symantec Client Management Suite
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
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.
If you are managing a very large number of computers, I would say 1000+, the standard patching tools provided by Microsoft will fail to do their job properly. This is where you will benefit from ManageEngine PATCH MANAGER Plus, being agent-based it is fast, easy to manage, and reliable. If you require functionality more than just patching, like security auditing, you have to look elsewhere.
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.
Very easy to use once you get used to it. It can be a little overwhelming at first since there is so many thing you can do. But as soon as you get use to it, it works like a charm.
The support team at Patch Manager Plus has been awesome. Very responsive and knowledgeable. There are times when there is confusion between different tickets but there is still good service.
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 previously used Microsoft Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). The reporting was extremely limited and all remediation had to be done manually, you can't initiate a reboot or a manual install like you can from ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus. Creation of Automated Patching groups is easy and we no longer have to mess around with group policies like we did with WSUS.
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
