Concentrated Technologies, a recognized industry source, found the Goverlan Remote Administration Suite v7 to be an “excellent candidate” as a supplemental remote support and control solution for SCCM.
“SCCM environments can benefit from a supplemental remote support and control solution that offers better immediacy and support for ad-hoc operations. With regard to Goverlan Remote Administration Suite, we feel it would be an excellent candidate for such a solution in any SCCM environment.”
About Concentrated Technology
Founded by industry experts Don Jones and Greg Shields, Concentrated Tech is a boutique technology analysis and education firm that focuses on bridging technology and business by offering strategic consulting, timely education, and expert analysis.
Scope/Methodology
In their study, Concentrated Technologies interviewed 11 customers using SCCM 2012 in their environments and conducted two focus groups of IT support professionals who actively manage nodes daily and IT managers who rely on SCCM in their environments.
Findings
For software deployment, the study found that Goverlan was much quicker to deploy tools to remote computers than SCCM, with little or no user impact. Customers who had a supplemental remote support solution “could deploy permitted ad-hoc tools to an affected client in under 3 minutes, with no impact to, or visibility by, the end user. Customers without a supplemental solution needed to interrupt the end user by remotely controlling the client computer, and typically needed 15-20 minutes to deploy the ad-hoc tool.” Furthermore, “Organizations are also extremely unlikely to open up the SCCM infrastructure so that support technicians can create package deployments – the opportunity for costly, impactful error is simply too high . . . There is an argument that SCCM is a less-appropriate solution for the deployment of ad-hoc tools, and that a real-time supplemental solution like Goverlan, combined with an effective management process provides better capability with less overhead.”
For software and hardware inventory, SCCM’s asynchronous operation can be a problem for IT teams, who need ad-hoc, immediate inventory information, especially during break/fix scenarios. “Goverlan simply queries less information at once (only what is requested), and it does so immediately from a single computer or a group of computers. It can produce reports based on that information, but again does so immediately. Because the Goverlan tool has no connection to the SCCM infrastructure, and because it is more purpose-designed for support technicians, organizations are more likely to feel comfortable deploying the solution to those technicians.”
The study asserted that both SCCM’s configuration auditing feature and Group Policy are made for creating and deploying standardized configuration policies and neither is intended for real-time configuration fixes on a per-machine basis. Goverlan, however, is designed for these types of configuration fixes. “Both of our focus groups saw immediate value in using this aspect of the Goverlan Remote Administration Suite feature set. Our management-based focus group felt that the remote reconfiguration features would help reduce IT’s impact on end users while accomplishing needed work in less time; they also felt there was an opportunity to reduce the number of snap-ins and tools that needed to be deployed to technicians’ workstations.”
Finally, the study found Goverlan’s remote control feature to be “superior to SCCM’s in almost every way”. Some of Goverlan’s “superior” features noted in the study included: in-session text chat, file transfers between computers via a simple drag-and-drop mechanism, creating “dashboards” showing remote control sessions to multiple computers at once, capturing screen shots and video snippets of remote control sessions, and allowing multiple administrators to collaborate in the same remote control session.
Conclusion
The study participants saw SCCM as a means to manage “long-term, lifecycle-based issues such as the overall software library of the organization, auditing key configuration settings related to security and compliance, monitoring inventory over the long term”. Supplemental solutions like the Goverlan Remote Administration Suite could be used to support “lower-level, more-granular, real-time issues like fixing configuration problems, quickly resolving operational issues, and helping educate users on specific issues.” The terms manage versus support, “reinforce our belief that SCCM and Goverlan Remote Administration Suite play complementary roles within an organization”, concluded Concentrated Technologies.
For the complete ProductScope analysis by Concentrated Technologies, click here.
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