Great single-pane-of-glass solution for mid to large scale desktop management
July 20, 2016
Great single-pane-of-glass solution for mid to large scale desktop management
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with LANDesk Management Suite
We use LANDesk for inventory collection, software distribution, remote control, and patching across the entire company. It's managed by the desktop support team but various other groups including help desk and various support groups use limited pieces of the suite in their work. We also leverage the Cloud Services Appliance to deal with machines off the internal network.
- Cross platform support - Trying to use the same tool for all platforms can be a challenge but LANDesk does the best I've seen.
- Effective use of inventory data - I was sold on the product the first time I saw the device list in a demo. Tons of information presented right up front that required far too much digging in other tools.
- Great support - From the sales reps to the tech support, I've never really had a bad experience with anyone from the company. Not only are they eager to do whatever they can to make the product effective in your environment, they're always looking for ways to improve as well.
- 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.
- No hard numbers here because the alternative of having to manually manage each workstation simply wouldn't even be possible. In that respect, LANDesk makes it possible in the first place to manage large numbers of machines. Sure, other tools may be in the same market but I haven't seen anything that compares to LANDesk.
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.