RE: Is it wise to upgrade to SCCM ?
- From: RobM <RobM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2008 07:43:02 -0800
My ten cents worth ... based in your pro\con (requirements) list i'd suggest
sticking it out with SMS2003. It's a solid product, isn't going anywhere (end
of life), and does what you want it to do. And there are things you could
still grow in too, such as DCM, OSDFP, DMFP along with lots of bolt-ons from
third party companies.
There are some benefits to upgrading to ConfigMgr, if you are a bog-standard
SMS2003 user. But, in your instance it'd just be a massive upheaval (in
business terms, staff impact, training et al) just to get things working the
same as they are now.
My experience is that just because Product X has XYZ features, not all
companies implement XYZ, instead X, Y or maybe Z ;-) One rather large company
(that should know better!) that I visited recently doesn't use SMS2003 for
OSD, or Patching or even patch up to the latest SP release. They use it just
for SoftDist and Reporting (barely). General wisdom does say that if you are
paying $$$ for a product then use ALL of it's features, but that as I say
doesn't reflect reality.
BTW OSDFP for SMS2003 is quite a good product, but if you don't want to use
it then fair enough :<
--
Rob - Windows Management User Group
www.wmug.co.uk
"net1994" wrote:
We are considering upgrading to SCCM though I am not so sure. We currently.
have a SMS 2003 infrastructure with 8 sites and about 2,500 domestic machines
managed. Pretty small by most standards. All site DB’s use SQL2005 with out
any load balancing/failover etc. We use SMS2003 for 75% software deployment
and 25% or so for reporting. We do not use OSD, nor would we if we do
upgrade. I rarely use the web interface reports, preferring to do most of it
by custom queries. We have about 35 packages we use regularly.
Perceived pluses:
-Consolidated DP management. This actually sounds interesting, but not
critical.
-NAP. Would not utilize due to existing security
- Wake-On-LAN (WOL). Would not use.
-Enhanced Admin tools/console. This is nice, but not sure this one major
area of improvement is worth the ~$20k investment it would take to upgrade
our infrastructure.
Perceived minus:
-End user, how do they benefit. If they receive the same package install,
how does this change?
-Cost. Buying new licenses; hiring consultants; time to upgrade hierarchy.
-Little added value from SCCM new features compared to our existing SMS
structure. There is a new Admin console and a few backend imprvments, but
the core functionality in SCCM can be done in SMS 2003 fine.
It seems that most of the benefits are for the Admin side and not so much
the end user/client PC? Given all of the above factors, what new feature is
in SCCM that makes it worth it to move over?
Any tips/suggestions/case studies are welcome.
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