Microsoft System Center vs. Parallels Device Management

For companies with more than 10 Windows devices and needing to standardize the OS, AV, access, share resources, and install software. SCCM is the way to go. This software is unnecessary if the business is all remote users and not in an office-type setting. There are cloud offerings or none to accomplish what a business needs.

Incentivized

We had a medium size fleet of macbook pros that we had deployed and had parallels already installed on them. We looked into a way to standardize and track these devices and started looking into Parallels as a solution to help us with this. Parallels was a good fit due to the fact that most of these machines already had the base system already installed

Incentivized

• Allows the grouping of devices by user.
• Allows controlling updates being deployed to user devices.
• Allows for the repurposing of machines by being able to load new or updated software on machines that already are in the system.
• Allows us the ability to wipe a machine clean and restore it back to the configuration that was assigned the machine.

Incentivized

• Central location for management via Webv
• Existing ecosystem for our mac users
• Trust and transparent set up from normal operations

Incentivized

• Needs web based storefront for requesting new software
• Needs ability to manage the packaging work flow better
• Sometimes is slow to download and there is no indication the entire catalog is being loaded, resulting in confused users not being able to find common software in the available list.

Incentivized

• It can be a bit difficult with a large fleet of computers
• Can be a bit hard to troubleshoot if there are issues
• There are other tools that are cheaper that do the same thing albeit not as well

Incentivized

It is not user-friendly for the most part. With IT infrastructure, sometimes it cannot handle excess requests. Every few months, you will need an upgrade in terms of server resources to keep up with incoming alerts and requests. This does not happen all of the time, but it does happen when there are too many requests.

Incentivized

If I had to dislike something about the system it would be how much it changes once you upgrade. This could be more of a problem of mine since I get used to one way and don't like it when it changes so much. I am enjoying the newest update, but it is a mess when you are actually going through the upgrades.

Incentivized

We previously used a mix of FOG and Clonezilla to image machines. The biggest issues with these products is that changing one piece of the image required you to rebuild the entire image itself. These pieces of software also did not allow you to manage applications and Windows Updates, causing IT to have to constantly touch machines after they were imaged and update or manage them with a much more hands on approach.

Incentivized

We looked at a product called virtual box to do something similar to what we saw from Parallels but it was much more manual for us to deploy out the tool and we would have had to do a lot more work to manage all the systems we have in the fleet

Incentivized

• We have been able to automate our patch management, firmware and other security concerns.
• We have a standardized "image" ensuring our setup is consistent across the enterprise. This alone has saved us in time to support and time to understand how to use our desktops.

Incentivized

• Easy to deploy out to our fleet
• quick turn around time to provision with parallels
• ease of use from end user perspective

Incentivized