Network Asset Management Software

[NickPCCC]

To whom it may concern,


We are trying to identify software the meets the following requirements.

We need to track:

1 - windows updates - Is the machine up to date

2 - antivirus version - Is it running the latest Symantec Endpoint Protection

3 - antivirus definition - is the machine running the latest Symantec Endpoint Protection definitions

4 - The program must work with managed (i.e. on the domain) and unmanaged PCs (i.e. in the field and not on the domain)

5 - The program ideally should have a SIMPLE report that gives a list of machines and their status on the above 1 through 3 stats. I do not want to have a tech spending 10 minutes researching if there is an issue and have to drill-down, etc. Perhaps the ability to extra data and write reports is enough.

If any of you have suggestions on software that can provided this sort of functionality out of the box with little configuration it would be very helpful.

Thanks,

Nick

 

[SimonDavies]

Ideally you need to have a mix of products, these would be the likes of WSUS\Config Manager 2007 and NAP (Microsoft Network Access Protection). As far as your unmanaged pcs are concerned, unless you bring them into the fold you aren't going to have much luck.

To give you an idea, with Config Manager 2007 running in Native mode you can have NAP running on these machines and they would be placed into a DMZ until they are remediated. Another feature of Native mode is the use of Internet based clients, so they don't need to come into the office to get their updates, just as long as they are on the internet they will get windows updates, software deployed etc.

You would also use DCM (Desired Configuration Manager) which gives you a baseline of where a machine should be (for instance it has an AV product installed etc), if it didn't have AV installed it would automatically install it.

As far as reporting goes, that's another great function of Config Manager, it has all the reporting you would want (and then more, just create the reports you want).

If I were tasked with this, I would be looking at WSUS and NAP to start with, moving on to SCCM and NAP as the better solution.

Simon

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