I started a new job a few weeks back. I have left the consultancy scene and moved back into a corporate environment. So where does that leave this Vista Blogg? Well no Vista here and not very likely in the near future, depending on how MS decides to treat corporate XP customers of the coming months. However, the good news is that I have been tasked to look into and recommend a systems management tool or tools.

Coming from a largely Altiris background this has been fun. Having worked with Altiris for the last 3 years, how does it stack up against the opposition? Well frankly, it has priced itself out of the game.

The contenders at this time, are: LANDesk, ManageSoft, MS SCCM/SCOM and Kace Kbox. The KBox is new to Australia (only since Jan this year), and is a neat little package. It is appliance based and I like that because it takes away the battles that you can have with vendors over if the problem is caused by Windows or a Windows patch, or whatever. With the appliance, there is only one person to go to if something does not work.

LANDesk and Managesoft appear to be solid products, and of MS is really in the mix because we are pretty confident they will cut their proverbial nuts off to a volume customer and pretty much give it away, which makes for a pretty good value proposition.

Results should be out within a couple of weeks. Stay tuned.