By Justin Potter, Desktop Consultant, MCDST, CCNA
In the second quarter of 2007, Microsoft released a management tool with the Small to Midsized IT Business Model in mind. System Center Essentials (SCE) is a hybrid of two enterprise management applications, System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), using a local install of SQL express for Reporting Services. SCE 2007 offers a plethora of desktop management tools considering its moderate foot print including the unified console, monitoring of computer systems, update management and automating software installation.
Keeping your users up and running, making sure system patches are up-to-date, and tracking hardware / software assets can be quite a chore for your IT staff. Simpler Webb jumped at the opportunity to deploy this tool in-house to manage our inventory of 50+ desktops and laptops and have seen numerous benefits. Additionally, we’re now offering a Managed Desktop product utilizing SCE to bring remote management to our clients. Here are a few of SCE’s main features.
Keeping IT Infrastructure Up and Running
Proactively solving desktop problems before an outage occurs can be a daunting task for any IT staff without the proper tools. System Center Essentials addresses this need with several built-in management tasks such as Remote Desktop, Ping, Remote Management Console, Remote Assistance, and Windows Services Monitoring all accessible from a Unified Console. Access to a variety of useful “Views” and SQL reports are also available, allowing you a drilldown functionality to get to the source of alerts on your systems for quick repair. You can even schedule daily emailed reports detailing the latest status of your desktops from newly applied security patches to whether or not hard drives have enough free space. These tools provide the information we need to proactively address issues, which leads to fewer failures. If outages do occur, we will have the historical data to efficiently determine the cause of the problem, provide remote support if necessary and significantly decrease downtime.
Keeping Systems Secure and Up-to-Date
Knowing that your Microsoft operating systems and applications are kept updated with the latest security patches 24x7 is imperative in today’s market. SCE provides SQL native reporting services listing which updates are installed, installing, or needed leaving little to guesswork. You may discover a new Microsoft vulnerability is being exploited while you are trying to complete a project at the end of the day. Instead of diverting your focus to plan for and deploy a fix, SCE automatically downloads the fix from Microsoft and applies the patch to workstations as they come online the next morning. Having confidence in the security of your desktops and laptops, no matter the time of day or vulnerabilities out there, is priceless.
Keeping Track of Hardware / Software Assets
As your company grows, so does the burden of managing your inventory of hardware and software. You need to keep track of a large volume of information such as model numbers and service tags, RAM and hard drive space needs, and which users require specific software licenses (such as QuickBooks for the accounting team or Adobe Creative Suite for a graphic designer). Many organizations we work with keep this information stored in a spreadsheet. When they purchase new laptops, they spend a significant amount of time combing the spreadsheet to locate the model number and service tag of the old laptop hoping to find well-documented system needs to transfer to the new laptops. In System Center Essentials 2007, this process is simplified by running the Hardware or Software Summary Reports. The System Center Essentials 2007 agent natively collects over 300 data points each day dynamically. If there is a change to the computers being tracked, the systems inventory database will be updated dynamically within 24 hours. With a simple search, you can pull the full list of hardware and software licenses attached to each computer. Whether you need to know the number of workstations with less than 1 Gigabyte of RAM or those that are still using Pentium 3 processors, pulling inventory reports is quick and easy. For our Managed Desktop customers, we also use this historical data to help our clients make the best hardware and software investments as part of their Systems Lifecycle or Technology Refresh plan.
Within our environment, we’ve seen numerous benefits from utilizing SCE, but here are my top three:
1. Unified Experience: SCE provides a unified solution with a single console for managing your servers, clients, hardware, software, and IT services
2. Proactive Management:You’re always on top of desktop monitoring, troubleshooting and asset tracking to keep your IT environment standardized, secure and up-to-date
3. Increased Efficiency: Simple execution of complex management tasks like troubleshooting user issues, monitoring, and client software deployment.
If you’re interested in a SCE implementation in your organization or our Managed Desktop product, I’d be happy to discuss either with you in more detail. Contact us at (800) 808-3083 or by emailing info@swinc.com. Also, register for our webinar(
REGISTER HERE) on March 17th, 2009.