Item: Symantec Client Management Suite
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Symantec Client Management Suite

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize the Symantec Client Management Suite to facilitate all the gold image builds, software delivery tasks, patch management, and asset management to over 35K endpoints. The global-software team handles the day to day operations and maintenance of the product so the service desk personnel can do their job on a daily basis. The web based mechanism allows all our service desk in a region to use it with same end user experience.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Inventory of both hardware and software.
Policy based software installations utilizing SQL based filtering mechanisms.
Allows delivery in near real-time all the way to slow throttling and time based executions.

Cons

General UI speed can be improved.
Move away from using Silverlight and Java in order to use HTML 5.
Security role assignments can be too granular and hard to set up.

Return on Investment

Allows the Service Desk to use one consisten interface across all global regions.
With its distributed model, it allows a faster roll out of software and patches to endpoints in a reliable fasion.
Support costs can be pricey but if the team has a good proficiency in application design theory and SQL, they can get by in correcting issues themselves.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, LANDESK IT Asset Management Suite and IBM Endpoint Manager

I honestly cannot give an unbiased evaluation against other products since my knowledge and use is very limited. I can say that I often peruse the SCCM forums and get ideas and scripts to convert in to the Symantec Environment. This product can feel heavy handed at times but performs well without much hassle.

Other Software Used

Microsoft SQL Server, Symantec Endpoint Protection, Microsoft IIS, Check Point Endpoint Security, Symantec Ghost Solution Suite

Likelihood to Recommend

For a small business with few clients this would be overkill. For a large enterprise, when architected correctly it can allow the administration of multiple thousands of endpoints across a global scale. Would be ideal if the networking team has QOS or COS setup to allow the traffic generated by the Symantec environment to be classified below all business critical applications, if not this product can easily kill the entire network infrastructure if used improperly.

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Quick Review of the Symantec Client Management Suite