I am looking for people that use al

[mcsereed]

I am looking for people that use altiris and like/dislike it. I am looking for the pro's and con's. Why they decided to use this instead of SMS or other applications. Any input is appreciated. We are looking to send a standard image to machines that come in, fix blue screens by people playing with there machine by setting them back to there original settings, do administrative tasks, push updates and applications out to clients, and be able to simply push the clients out to any PC.


JOE....I saw your response to this.

Derek Reedman,
MCSE

 

[xpactest]

I did not have choice to use Altiris or SMS. When I started in my company they had already purchased Altiris. We reimage 650 lab systems on a 1 to 2 month bases. The images are created, syspreped and then deployed. What I have discovered with Altiris and sysprep is that I could assign a unique name for all of the 650 system. Also could puth them is a pacific OU in Active Directory when every I reimaged them. I did the hard work and setup all the scripts. Now I just send a command to the systems and verify that they start from the server.

We didn't need SMS at our campus. So far Altiris does everything we have wanted it to do.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

We use Altiris - and I've become a great fan. For co-ordinating hundreds of servers and thousands of desktops, it simply can't be beaten - as long as all of the machines have PXE compliant NICs, of course.

However, you'd need to implement a policy whereby people don't save valuable data locally...

We partially solved that by running all applications through Citrix MetaFrame.

Before we got Altiris, we used Ghost. No-one in our department even wanted to try SMS - I think we were all going through a bit of an "Anti-M$" phase - but I'm sure it works very well,

Hope this helps CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[campyracr]

Used Altiris in Large, Medium & Small environments. Works best in Large or Medium w/frequent change. It's tough to justify the cost to a small organization. Further, it was a bit kloogy getting setup, but then again none of the three companies I used it was cookie cutter.

That being said. I love Altiris. Kicks Ghost booty.
The power of the console, the simplicity of the reports engine. The support is great. I've had the top-level support down to relying on the user BB for support, in all cases including one that almost kicked Altiris out, they came through with a solution that blew me away.

SMS was never a consideration in the medium & Small companies. The large had SMS, not fully deployed, not fully operational, and no on-staff expertise.

 

[iseriesfella]

Try PC-Duo Enterprise - it beat Altiris in a side by side comparison in PC-Magazine.

http://www.vector-networks.com

Good Luck!