Symantec Client Management Suite has helped us succeed
December 03, 2015
Symantec Client Management Suite has helped us succeed
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Symantec
I currently use Symantec Management Platform Client Management Suite. I utilize it for Windows and Mac workstations for: Inventory, Software Delivery, Patch Management, Imaging. Using these components of CMS, we are able to maintain our environment and accurately know what workstations have what software or patch levels. We are also able to identify older hardware and where it may be in the environment in order to provide reports for life cycle replacement.
- Patch Management: We are able to easily deploy patches to all our workstations and accurately report on compliance.
- Software Delivery: We do a lot of software deployments to our end users and with CMS we can quickly create policies or tasks to perform these deliveries and get quick results on our success or failures.
- Inventory: Ease of use to get reports of what workstations have what software installed, patch levels, or hardware specifications.
- Reporting: I have been using CMS/Altiris since the 6.x version, and while most things have improved in 7.5 that we use today there were some reports that were easier to find or create. While there is an easy way to tell at a quick glance software delivery results, I would like to see a report that more accurately shows success/failure, vs compliance. In the compliance report a non-compliance doesn't really mean it failed, it just means it checked compliance and may or may not have tried to run it and failed.
- Imaging: The way it does imaging tasks, could be a lot easier to perform. If you have one common image and application set among your organization then no problem, but if you are more complex and have say 40 different application sets as we do it can be very complex to manage and configure.
- Reporting was something we never had before, it has enabled us to "know what we have" in our environment. Also when being audited for software license compliance we can easily generate a report and provide the vendor vs having them have to install software on our devices.
- Software delivery has been able to be pushed down to lower support levels allowing higher levels to focus on things that are not as trivial anymore
We used to use Novel Zenworks which paled in comparison. Also I have used SCCM and while it gets the job done, I believe CMS is a much more robust tool and can manage more than just Windows machines.