Why we love Symantec Altiris Client Management Suite
December 10, 2015

Why we love Symantec Altiris Client Management Suite

Darren Collins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Symantec Client Management Suite

Altiris CMS 7.x is used by many departments in Oxford University. My department uses it mainly for managed software delivery across 3500 nodes, but it's also used for inventory information and 2nd / 3rd line support for incident remediation.

The main business problem it addresses is security compliance, particularly third party plug-ins like Flash Player, Shockwave, JRE, QuickTime etc.
  • I doubt that any other technology we could implement would be able to do so much with so little administrative overhead. With a short process that we developed we can quickly get a software package (e.g. IE 11) out to thousands of computers with on-next-reboot remediation and the user is not even aware that anything has happened.
  • No other solution makes it so easy to create our own tools to plug-in to the CMS toolset. For example our custom scripts can interrogate and manipulate the database to create great bolt-on automated functionality.
  • Real-time management built in means our second line techs can interrogate problematic computers, and because this is handled via the agent, we do not need the local PC firewall's opened up to half the organisation for WMI.
  • CMS is quite clunky sometimes and the Silverlight interface is acceptable at best. Many improvements have been made in this area, particularly with performance, but the interface still needs a lot of work. When it becomes 100% HTML5 with proper compliance browser support I'll be happy!
  • Massively increased employee efficiency - we can do increasingly more with the same number of staff we had years ago.
Most well suited to Windows enterprise management (it can also manage Mac & Linux in some ways but I have no exposure to this) including OS deployment, managed software deployment and security compliance. We have combined it with GSS 3.0 (formerly DS 6.9) to ensure that we have a full 360 degree solution.