Ivanti Endpoint Manager vs. SmartDeploy

You need to push O365 or some product out to your institution. If you need to build out a reboot before and after and maybe something else, [Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDESK Management Suite)] can easily do that for you. It then can also use a query to determine who needs that product in your environment and then continue using that query to watch for the machines you targeted to show up once your push succeeded. If you need to, you can use the task scheduler and schedule your software distribution for a specific not in normal business hours or on a weekend.

It works really well as an image maintenance and roll-out platform, allowing maintenance of a single "Gold" image. New features allow the deployment of some software packages as part of image deployment. It does not work very well as a maintenance platform in any use for us, but especially not well-suited for Windows 7 to Windows 10 migrations over WAN.

Incentivized

• Software distribution - the ability to sit and provide software when a machine calls home works phenomenally well. You may also target based on certain conditions, ranging from LDAP queries down to hardware revisions of individual components.
• Operating system provisioning - the range of choice in sequential execution is second to none. We migrated from MDT to Ivanti's providing with relative ease.
• Patching and compliance - you're able to get extremely granular, and the rollout project templates make rolling it a particular patch from QA to Production an automated breeze

Incentivized

• It allows us to maintain only one image. Much less effort required than storing and maintaining multiple images.
• LAN deployment works very well with few issues.

Incentivized

• Mac support - While it's the best I've seen with cross platform support, that doesn't mean they don't have a long way to go to catch up with the functionality of other tools that focus on one specific platform.
• Product coherence - Their core product, the management suite, is great but with every new acquisition the company makes, it seems like there's another product that gets shoehorned into the picture. Making all those disparate pieces work smoothly together is something they're still working on.
• Documentation - They come out with a lot of great features but some are so complicated I couldn't begin to understand the various facets of it all. I realize the days of published manual are long gone but even a PDF covering the major components in detail would be better than having to bump around in the dark until you have to call support for help.
• Software Licensing Management - Every major release seems to completely rewrite this tool but they keep seeming to miss the mark. Lately it's a Microsoft Silverlight program that's very slow and has way too much data to be useful.
• Web Console - The web console is all but unusable. The only way to really work on administration is to use the 32bit console which is great if you're running Windows but a fully featured web console would be much preferred.

Incentivized

• Remote monitoring is useful but has some lagging and functionalities are not upfront to use , making it complicated for new users to be aware just by using the application
• Windows migration was quite difficult in terms of updates of softwares to be migrated to new system
• Integration with client systems can be tough as major usage of other softwares is done in most of client systems causing us difficulties to integrate with smart deploy on the same platform

Incentivized

As Microsoft evolves Intune, SCCM, MECM and combines their features into the MS EULA, Ivanti seems to be going the opposite where they are stripping out core products in favor of an EULA + A la cart pricing model that simply is more expensive than Microsoft's pricing. A few years ago, the gap was large enough to justify the extra cost of Ivanti, today the gap has closed significantly enough that the value add just isn't there for us.

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.

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.

SmartDeploy customer support has been very good. Although we do not always get a super-fast response (though always within the time stated). The tech support folks at SmartDeploy always go the extra mile to see that our immediate issues are taken care of in as timely a manner as possible. They have always been attentive to our needs and frustrations.

Incentivized

Better in most all categories. On-prem was not an issue for my organization. MS SCCM was lacking features. Airwatch required increasing tiers of service in order to match [Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDESK Management Suite)] features, and lacked the robust inventory data we needed. Meraki was very simple to use, but did not meet our needs. I would say that most Airwatch customers aren't using all the features they are paying for, and could save lots of money by using Meraki instead.

SmartDeploy has a fantastic deployment process management with detailed and configurable aspects. Even though it has detailed configuration it still somehow makes it easy to understand and implement compared to other services which need special learning and courses to understand them completelya and use them efficiently. This is one quality highly appreciated and stacks up against any other services I have used for deployment

Incentivized

• Centralized IT - all in one solution that is better in some areas than traditional niche software applications. You'll probably still spend the same amount of time with users on the HD line, but you'll be able to reduce the amount of time it takes for auxiliary Help Desk tasks (ticketing, reporting, background deployment, etc.)
• Cost - This is a negative of course ;) But at some point you can save some money if you ditch SCCM or your other CRM

Incentivized

• New application created was deployed by SmartDeploy and saved us 20% of our deployment time on whole project providing us major time to build new functionalities and release product earlier
• Computer imaging was quite elaborate and yet simple, making it helpful for our client system creation activity. Which helped us bag us new activities of system creation for more projects.
• Driver management was causing lots of time consumption for system management team. Which in-turn reduced their focus on actual system issues. With SmartDeploy it helped in improving efficiency of 30% for system management team

Incentivized