Symantec ITMS Review
October 09, 2015
Symantec ITMS Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Various
Modules Used
- Client Management Suite, Asset Management Suite, Patch Management, Deployment Solution, Client Management Suite, Endpoint Protection
Overall Satisfaction with Symantec
We utilize several solutions from Symantec, mostly around the desktop or client endpoint including the IT Management Suite, Deployment Solution, Patch Management, Asset Management as well as Symantec Endpoint Protection. It is used in various ways by various people but mostly by the service technicians to deploy and support hundreds of computers and to maintain up-to-date and secure systems for all of our clients. The Symantec products we use allow us to quickly create, deploy, pathc, update, maintain and finally retire all of our IT desktop assets quickly and by fewer staff. We have 7 staff that support and use the products daily to support more than 3000 endpoints and maintain more than 20,000 pieces of inventory and 1,000 varying software package versions and executables.
- Support has improved a lot in the past several years. We're able to call in a problem and several levels of technicians and engineers will work to try to solve the issue, if needed.
- They provide community resources which allows users like myself to become a member of (at no cost) to ask and answer questions to problems that support isn't designed to answer. A lot of Symantec staff are also on the forums offering advice and assistance.
- Over the past couple of years Symantec has worked to increase its Mac presence (great for colleges and universities with large Mac populations) and work to release updates almost as fast as the major software vendors release operating systems in order to provide continued functionality.
- 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.
- Better efficiency through image creation, deployment and EOL as single Hardware Independent Images can be created for a large number of devices and then all managed on the same pane of glass.
- Customer service is better because we can provide software across campus almost as fast as requested for one user or hundreds of users, all by a single technician without ever having to leave an office.
Similar to ITMS but is limited in its abilities to manage OS X, Linux and a large variety of devices as well as manage asset inventory all in a single place. Although SCCM would have been less expensive for us, the ability to manage more with less is a huge seller.