Are you waiting for a compelling reason to switch to Symantec Altiris IT Management Suite or Client Management Suite?
One of the best wins for us was ‘Compliance’. The way to set rules within the CMS tool that let it know when policies applied to computers are required or not depending on whether the computer is in a state of compliance.
For example: the other day we started rolling out Internet Explorer 11 to a subset of our estate. The detection rule for compliance checking we used was:
Is this reg value data:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\svcVersion
… set to:
Version >= 11.0.0.0 (greater than or equal to).
This compliance rule means that even if any future version of IE is installed, then providing it updates that registry value, the computer will remain compliant.
Once we are sure the policy to deliver IE 11 is never required, we will be disabling it though. Good compliancy detection rules can’t completely make up for poor housekeeping!
Here is a screenshot from the Symantec Management Console for ITMS. This partial view shows our policy compliance position for a bunch of our policies.
The policy in this list means it’s on, green means computer received policy and is compliant. Red means policy received and not yet compliant, and the grey line part means the computer is yet to check in and receive the policy. And as a bonus when you click on the green, red or grey part of the compliance indicator, then an ad-hoc filter is created with the list of computer names & IPs in a right-hand window pane.
Compliance: an excellent reason to look at Managed Software Delivery using ITMS / CMS.