Independent Evaluations of Networking Products and Tools

Desktop Management Products — Selection Criteria

 

 

Client Management collectively denotes the tasks you or an administrator perform to keep desktop, notebook or other non-server computing devices running smoothly. These tasks are the steps taken to ensure the client computer or device is optimally ready to run whatever applications it needs to in order to get work done for its user.

These tasks include:

· Asset auditing and inventory management

· Operating system deployment and configuration

· Virtual machine management

· Software license monitoring

· Software distribution and patch management

· Remote control

· Mobile device management

· Network access control

· Desktop vulnerability threat analysis

· Host-based intrusion detection

· Virus detection and removal, or management ties to a third-party AV product

· Spyware detection, removal and blocking, or management ties to a third-party anti-spyware product

· USB device management

· Client backup and recovery

· Physical maintenance and cleaning

 

All these tasks except the last are good candidates for automation. While one person might manually manage many of these tasks for a single computer/device, organizations often use batch command files to manage a small number of machines. For ten to fifty computers, some combination of batch file commands, shareware and creative computer calendaring might be appropriate. For more than about fifty computers, a desktop management product, in software or in appliance form, is often used. A number of desktop management vendors offer products to help with some or all these tasks.

 

Best Practices

Propagating the installation of a desktop management product across a network entails some basic and some not-so-basic steps. For example of the latter, how do you know you haven’t inadvertently skipped including a desktop PC under the desktop manager’s umbrella? This sort of problem rarely crops up when you’re deploying server-oriented tools. In a large company, thousands of desktop PCs can form a seemingly impenetrable jungle. The answer to the dilemma is this: Use the desktop manager’s discovery feature to find all the desktop units. Then examine its reports to verify you’ve included every desktop.

You can see that, especially for large networks, a methodical and systematic approach is necessary.

Here are some more tips you can use to make sure your desktop manager deployment goes smoothly and without a hitch. These tips form the beginning of some “best practices” guidelines intended to make your desktop manager tool useful and nigh indispensable.

1. Before deploying a desktop manager throughout the network (even with a vendor’s help), first try out the software in a controlled, small environment to better understand how it installs, how it performs and what it does in specific situations you force it to handle. Become familiar with how the desktop manager behaves and know how to use it to enforce licensing as well as OS and software versioning. Get comfortable with the product’s remote control feature, and run some practice drills to understand how the tool distributes software, software updates and OS patches.

2. Use Windows policies, directory and file permissions and desktop controls to keep users from altering corporate-approved PC configurations – keep in mind that the corporation owns each desktop screen, not the employee. Other employees will from time to time need to use the PC that the employee thinks of as “his” or “hers.”

3. For the sake of simplicity and consistency, avoid mixing and matching different desktop management products across the network. Centering on one tool will yield better control over desktop PCs and other computing devices. It’ll reduce the variety of backup devices and backup formats you have to manage. Using a single tool will give you consistent, consolidated reports on the number, types and configurations of your desktop units. And it’ll make life a lot easier for network administrators and troubleshooters.

4. Take the time and spend the effort to document the client computing environment in your organization. Keep the documentation up-to-date. The documentation will help you the next time you need to do a major upgrade. It’ll be a useful resource for capacity planners. And it can even be your justification to the IRS for the depreciation expenses your company claims at tax time.

5. Assume, despite your best efforts to prevent it, that spyware, a virus or some other malady will damage your desktop management configuration. Establish procedures to restore the desktop configuration(s), and run firedrills to make sure your procedures work. Use similar goals for your desktop and other computing devices that you use for your servers – you want to maximize uptime and availability for the users who rely on the desktop machines to get their work done.

 

 

Five Buying Tips

Broach your prospective desktop management vendors with these five questions – in addition, of course, to whatever other considerations you decide are important to your company.

 

Does the desktop manager recognize and handle all the different desktop platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, MAC OS X, etc.) and kinds of desktop computing devices (PCs, notebooks, PDAs, etc.) in the company?

Rationale for the question: If the desktop manager is going to leave some computing devices out in the cold, unmanaged, you want to know this before the sale, not afterwards.

 

What’s the vendor’s history with respect to supporting new platforms? As new desktop computing tools emerge, will the vendor support them and in what timeframe will this realistically happen?

Rationale for the question: Nothing stands still, and PCs are in some ways ancient technology. New devices and paradigms are on the horizon. Can the vendor keep up with the pace of upcoming and perhaps imminent changes in IT?

 

What type of data repository does the desktop manager use? Is it relational? Is it a brand of database you already have in house, or is it new? How much attention and care will the desktop manager’s data repository require? What about backing up the database?

Rationale for the question: Database administration can involve some non-trivial expenditures of time and effort. If the desktop management repository is a database your administrators are unfamiliar with, additional training time and effort will be required.

 

Suppose the network adapter in the desktop management central console machine fails late on a Friday night. How easy is the re-installation of the desktop management tool, especially in light of license key issues and whether a license key is tied to a specific MAC address?

Rationale for the question: Many software products license keys have a direct relationship to a central console’s IP address or MAC address. Recovering from a network adapter failure on a Friday night can turn into a nightmare of all-weekend work for your company’s network troubleshooter or tech support person if a vendor’s support people aren’t available or responsive.

 

Can the desktop management tool interface (perhaps via SNMP) with a network manager such as OpenView or Tivoli? Can it interface with a help desk tool such as Remedy?

Rationale for the question: You may very well want problems and issues identified by the desktop manager to flow into a network management system for the sake of producing useful and comprehensive reports and summaries that include desktop computing device activities. Similarly, the desktop manager’s interface with a help desk tool can save you the time, effort and transposed digits of having to key the data into Remedy or some other product.

 

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