Asset Management Software

[kingsc]

So I'm looking at several products:

* LanDESK

* ZenWorks from Novell

* Altiris from Symantec

* ESmart from Dell

All of these have varying prices of course, and they all seem to roughly do the same thing. So I'm going strictly by price, which ZenWorks seems to be the cheapest.

Does anyone have 'real' experience with Asset Management and can give a new guy to the field some insight? What asset management software do you use? Do you like it? Do you wish you had went with something else?

Any input would be appreciated.

[IcemanND]

We had/have a homegrown system in place, that is now only use by a small portion of our group (15%). The rest have all switched and use SMS. So we also have all the other features of SMS to go along with it. So far the only complaints have been the delay between when the machine was built and the client installed to when it starts to get it's assigned apps or does the inventory if you don't force it.

[Tripredacus]

IMO, Altiris is the most powerful, but it depends on the scale of your operation.

[rendrag]

we use Spiceworks here

Unfortunately I don't have direct access to the interface so I can't comment much, but the guys who do use it like it very much.

Edited May 13, 2009 by rendrag

[Stoj]

We use LANDesk to manage our assets. There are alot of tools built into the management suite such as reporting, os deployment, software license monitoring, patch management, provisioning, etc. I wouldn't know what to do without the software. This is just my experience.

[kingsc]

Thanks for all of the input.

Well I can tell you I'm trying to use SpiceWorks and it's -ok- but I have over 200 assets, that's just workstations/laptops spread over a domain of 15 remote offices and a central HQ in San Diego. SpiceWorks I'm finding out either I don't know how to use it properly or it's not really meant to handle that much data.

All I really personally care about is software asset management. I need to know who has what microsoft products installed, and how often they use them.

LANDesk looks cool, but the price tag is horrendous.

With SpiceWorks, I'm currently getting a list of all microsoft products installed which I then export to an excel file and subtotal it. Problem I've noticed recently is that I'll get an alert that 1 computer has "uninstalled 37 programs" which definitely isn't the case. That's just a few of the false alerts I get. SpiceWorks seems to get combobulated with the AD and I constantly have to delete assets and re-scan because they will be identified incorrectly(I figure this out by the IP address and associated host name).

In a smaller organization SpiceWorks may be the way to go since it's free... but I'm in a team of 4 and I handle ALOT. I don't have time to be toying around all day. I need an effective solution.

[kingsc]

As an update, I decided to test Dell's eSmart system. If you would like I'll update this post with my findings.