What is our primary use case?
Generally, the top three uses are operating system deployments, software updates and patching, and software deployments to endpoints.
How has it helped my organization?
If you're a small shop, a two-person organization, yet you have many endpoints, five to 10,000, you can easily manage them. You can manage the masses with one person part-time and it's a good automation tool that takes away the need for multiple folks to do a lot of things in the environment like software deployments or patch management. It's very good at automating those functions.
What is most valuable?
The reporting aspect is very nice. It's got about 450 canned reports in it. They're easily customizable. You can get really good granular reports for inventory, patch management, status, and everything. It's very good at reporting.
It's not hard to set up. It's easy to manage.
Third-party patching and other solutions integrate with Endpoint Manager. From that perspective, there's no deficiency.
The UI is good. You can filter things out so that you'll only see things that are pertinent to your function.
What needs improvement?
It's really matured and improved over the years by assimilating competing products. There are a lot of things that used to be better than Endpoint Manager or not available in Endpoint Manager that were absorbed or purchased and placed into this product. From a deficiency perspective, I can't recall coming across anything substantial. I'm trying to think of a weakness. I compared it to Ivanti. From a new user's perspective, it may be a little overwhelming because there are quite a few things to look at in the console, however, once you are sort of acclimated and are familiar with your core functions, it's fairly simple and straightforward.
You can modernize the UI a little bit, however, change for a sake of change isn't always a good thing.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for 25 years. It used to be called SCCM.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is great.
The largest user base I've ever supported, for example, was a headquarters and they had 220,000 endpoints. In contrast, small colleges and educations may only have 500 users, so they can get by with a single server hosting everything. SQL and everything can be one server.
For us, the solution is extensively used.
How are customer service and support?
If you're looking forward to deficiency, I'd say that the Endpoint Manager support at the lower levels is poor. As you go higher and you get like a more engineering level, then you're fine, however, the early stages of support are not the best.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I've worked with Ivanti and LANdesk and other tools.
I've used Endpoint Manager every day. I'm currently using it. I've been using it for 25 years. However, there are other ones like BigFix, which I've rarely used. I've used LANdesk a few times. And people would try to use LANdesk to avoid the expensive Endpoint Manager, however, at the end of the day, it costs them more in time to use the LANdesk solution. Ivanti is a competitor, however, they're cobbled together with Shavlik, for patch management they've got Altiris. They bought Altiris and Altiris has been passed around like a cheap hoe from Symantec to Intel, to everybody.
Altiris was actually developed to support Endpoint Manager and provide asset management. At the time, Endpoint Manager didn't have good asset management, so they actually worked with Altiris, only to find out that Altiris was actively taking Microsoft customers. Microsoft booted them to the curb and they haven't done well since. That was back probably in the late nineties that they did that. Endpoint Manager has been around the longest, it's survived, it's matured and it's the top dog in general.
How was the initial setup?
Complexity-wise, it's not hard to set up. It's just a lot of small steps, such as making sure the firewall ports are open and certain things are in place, and all the perquisites are taken care of, as the wizard, the installation wizard for Endpoint Manager, is pretty straightforward. As long as you have SQL and some other features turned on to support the different functions of Endpoint Manager, you're fine. You'll need WSS or you'll need WSS for patching and you'll need SQL reporting services for the reporting portion of it. All those small things. The more lights you turn on, the more configuration you have to do.
The deployment itself took me four hours end to end, to put all the prerequisites in, however, understanding, of course, may take a while for someone new. I've done this now for over 25 years. For me, it's pretty straightforward and I have, a lot of these things PowerShell scripted so it works very well. You can create a PowerShell script and set the whole thing up from Powershell, which is what I've done.
Maintenance requirements are low. Since it lives on SQL, if you put a SQL maintenance plan in place, it's pretty much, it's very healthy, it's very stable.
What was our ROI?
We've seen an ROI. It enables you to pair down the resources necessary for configuration management. You don't need a large shop to maintain your environment. If you want to develop it, if you want to create new images all the time and that sort of thing, then you're going to need to staff yourself accordingly, however, not necessarily to support Endpoint Manager, just to develop those and payloads that it delivers.
What other advice do I have?
I'm a partner. I'm using the most up-to-date version of the solution.
While the solution was on-prem initially, now it's converted to more of a hybrid. They have co-management so you can manage on-prem and cloud together.
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner