Microsoft SCCM may not be the ROI you are looking for, but the product helps your admins
June 19, 2019

Microsoft SCCM may not be the ROI you are looking for, but the product helps your admins

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager is used for imaging our computers, but it is also used to deploy policies and software packages to specific users or groups.

By utilizing Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, the IT admins spend less time manually installing applications for our end users. It allows us to centrally manage what is being deployed to the computers in our environment and run reports on the computers and what is installed on them.
  • Centrally managing applications, configuration settings and policies makes it easier to deploy. So when someone requests an application or is missing the application, I can jump on the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager console and add them to the software deployment and generally within the hour, the application is installed on their computer. It can be manually forced to pull the change as well if you don't want to wait up to an hour.
  • Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager does take a lot of time to learn and manage. There are a lot of bits and pieces to keep up to date (software packages, drivers, OS builds, computer model packages). It is not something that you can easily pickup and start configuring. And with automation, making a mistake can cause the scripts to take days instead of hours.
  • There are frequently update failures. I understand many of these are configuration problems on our end or that the state of the computer is such that the updates cannot be pushed to it. But I feel like it happens a bit much.
  • I think it isn't as cost-effective as we originally thought, but it does save time when running properly. And being an admin, it is nice to have.
Sometimes it takes a really long time to image a computer or push software out.
Sometimes the console takes a long time to start.
It integrates OK
I think it works well enough and helps a lot for a number of scenarios in IT. However, make sure you understand the task ahead and how many hours it will take to maintain. The trade off might not be as good as you think.