Symantec Client Management Suite is designed to automate time-consuming and redundant tasks for deploying, managing, patching, and securing desktops and laptops so organizations can reduce the cost and effort of managing Windows, Mac, Linux, and virtual desktop environments.
Kace is very fast to set-up and it's good for a lot of companies if patch and software deployment is all you care about but I don't think that it is as strong as SCCM or Symantec CMS. SCCM is a strong competitor to Symantec Client Management Suite and they both share a lot of …
Another system similar to Symantec Client Management Suite is HEAT (formerly known as "Patchlink) which allows you to do some of the same similar policies for testing, deploying patches on the network.
Currently, I can't take a position [on how Symantec compares] because when I took position at my job, Symantec Client Management Suite (CMS) was already implanted. We're currently looking to try Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager to see if it'd be a contender for …
Although there are other tools that can be utilized I don't believe those tools are as robust as Symantec Management Platform. The Symantec Management Platform was chosen because of the value it returns internally and for our customers. You can pull just about any data element …
Principal System Support Specialist / Service Owner
Chose Symantec Client Management Suite
The main competitor is Microsoft Configuration Manager which I haven't used but from what I've read about it requires a greater technical skills which might be more expensive when building a team that would operate it.
We were considering couple more products, but POC has proven that it is better to stay with CMS. (I cannot provide details, since that information is internal and confidential.)
We used to use Novel Zenworks which paled in comparison. Also I have used SCCM and while it gets the job done, I believe CMS is a much more robust tool and can manage more than just Windows machines.
Verified User
Analyst
Chose Symantec Client Management Suite
I honestly cannot give an unbiased evaluation against other products since my knowledge and use is very limited. I can say that I often peruse the SCCM forums and get ideas and scripts to convert in to the Symantec Environment. This product can feel heavy handed at times but …
The costs involved with getting the Symantec Management Suite, versus Microsoft System Center 2012, was much cheaper and allowed us to be able to pull more raw data when trying to work with management. Also, the Symantec support structure is very nice! The support group works …
Similar to ITMS but is limited in its abilities to manage OS X, Linux and a large variety of devices as well as manage asset inventory all in a single place. Although SCCM would have been less expensive for us, the ability to manage more with less is a huge seller.
Whenever you have computers that aren't easily accessible or you have a big site to cover (or multi location), Symantec Client Management Suite (CMS) is really great to manage all your computers, if it's for installation, software, licenses or even status. Setting up all you need from CMS can take some time, especially when you're in a multi-location site. We had to ask the Symantec engineers to help us a couple of times and set things up because even if we followed the documentation, it wasn't an easy task. But at least, the Symantec engineers are people that know what they do and they're really efficient at it.
Patch Management: We are able to easily deploy patches to all our workstations and accurately report on compliance.
Software Delivery: We do a lot of software deployments to our end users and with CMS we can quickly create policies or tasks to perform these deliveries and get quick results on our success or failures.
Inventory: Ease of use to get reports of what workstations have what software installed, patch levels, or hardware specifications.
More transparency with the roadmap would be a welcome change. New and upcoming features are usually a surprise until a major Symantec Event takes place but little is heard about those features before and even after, in some cases, leading up to a release.
Documentation for some items is poor. Especially around the Workflow product. It was intended that the documentation for the elements in a workflow would be crowd-sourced, which is a good idea, but in order for that to happen, more people need to be using it and taking the time to draw up the documents.
Cost. Its always a big topic, especially in higher-ed, but Symantec could do more to lower its costs for some product lines in order to gain more acceptance and support. If that was done and more institutions could get their student workers to use the product, once they leave college and go into the "real-world" there is a possibility that they would start recommending Symantec products because of their use in College.
Support at Symantec isn't that great. Client Management Suite isn't even listed on the Support Portal when trying to open a ticket. Your best bet for support is actually the user groups that Symantec hosts. The members of the groups are usually very responsive. With Broadcom buying Symantec, I've seen a huge jump in personnel leaving Symantec, so I'm assuming the support is just going to get worse. Recently for a simple question, I reached out to 5 people just to find out 4 of the 5 had left the company.
Although there are other tools that can be utilized I don't believe those tools are as robust as Symantec Management Platform. The Symantec Management Platform was chosen because of the value it returns internally and for our customers. You can pull just about any data element from an endpoint and provide detailed reports or great graphs for the C-Level