Centralized Computer Management

If your managing 10 or 10,000 computers on your network you will most likely need to find a way to centralized that management. Or spend your days with sub par security and systems that have to be visited regularly for maintenance. We started using WSUS from Microsoft, which works well for managing updates of Microsoft products. WSUS is easy to setup via Active Directory using an object to change the configuration of the clients to get updates from your WSUS server. Did I mention WSUS is free. I will not cover WSUS setup here, as there are many articles online covering that issue. I do suggest starting with WSUS Wiki.

We were looking to manage product updates for other applications outside of the MS realm. We also wanted to connect remotely, get inventory reports, run custom scripts on clients, disk management, install programs, remotely shutdown and use wake on lan to turn systems back on. We knew we could do this with many free tools and the active directory, but the management of those management tools would be cumbersome and likely fall out of favor quickly.

We started googlizing “desktop management”. We decided there were three products we were interested in enough to demo. ScriptLogic’s Desktop Authority, Kaseya, and ManageEngine’s Desktop Central. With contact from all three sales representatives we found that Desktop Central was going to be the least expensive. With that the other products were going to need to deliver compelling features and ease of use to validate the additional expenditure. We found that Desktop Authority and Kaseya had features we didn’t see a need in our environment. We also thought the organization of the features were difficult for us to get a feel for.  Desktop Authority and Kaseya, had a wealth of features, the case studies and testimonials of these products were very good. For us the cost could not be validated.

We choose ManageEngine’s Desktop Central. While the number of features were far less than the other two products, it met our needs. We found the layout to be easier to learn (probably due to less features) and the installation to be quick and fairly pain free. We did have several support issues as we began to stage our roll out and those where handled by the Desktop Central support team. We found the support to be responsive (there is a great time difference, we are on CST and the support team seemed to be 11hrs off of our time, probably based in India or somewhere in that region), and professional. We held several remote sessions, that allowed the support team to look our our configuration and logs to sort out our issues.

Since we have fully rolled out the product there has been several updates to the product. Some are bug fixes and others are additional features. The one feature that has become central to support costs savings is Desktop Centrals ability to now patch and update non Microsoft products, including Adobe Flash, Shockwave and Reader, also Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

If your an organization looking to centralized the management of your client PCs, I would suggest evaluating all three products. If your a very small organization I would suggest Deskop Central, its free for 25 or less computers.

January 25, 2010  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: General Tips, Server Setups, Uncategorized

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