Dell Client Manager, a Great Opening Act

I recently worked on a project at a large public university with approximately 15,000 students. The computers are a mix of desktops and laptops, with a mix of Windows XP and Windows Vista installed. The university had no previous experience with Altiris products and looked at Dell Client Manager as a great way to solve several business problems and also get an introduction to Altiris.

Problems to be Solved

College environments often seem to face different issues than most corporations. The environment is constantly changing as is the staff as student employees are typically around for short periods of time. Because of that, the IT department did not have an accurate inventory of the hardware that had been deployed. As they are in the beginning stages of a Vista rollout, hardware inventory reporting is quite crucial. Thus hardware inventory was the main focus of our engagement.

In addition to that though, there were several other key components that they wanted to look into. One of their manual tasks each summer was to go through the labs and manually updating the BIOS on each machine. Lastly, one of the other issues they were facing was a lack of notification. They only found out when hard drives were full after the fact and then had to try and solve the issue, rather than being proactive about it. They only found out RAM was missing from boxes when a box either wouldn't boot or there were complaints of slowness.

Solutions we Implemented

As suggested by the title and the category this article is posted under, we implemented Dell Client Manager (DCM). It is a great free solution that offered the university several key solutions they were looking for while also letting them get a glimpse of what Altiris is and what it can offer.

So lets walk through the process a bit and cover what we implemented and how it met their business goals.

DCM is a free solution that plugs into the base Notification Server from Altiris. For just the basic agent rollout and basic inventory, Notification Server is also free to license. Since there is a great document supplied by Altiris on how to install DCM (http://www.altiris.com/Support/Documentation.aspx and click on the Reference Guide under the Dell Client Manager heading), I won't go into the details on the install other than to say it went easily and we had the NS and DCM solution up and running in under an hour.

Once the core is installed, the first step is to run a network discovery. In doing so, we discovered that their Active Directory structure was in need of a computer account cleaning, but that's another project. Once the discovery ran, we were able to begin pushing out Altiris Agents to selected computers, in this case, a lab selected for testing. From there, we were able to push out the DCM agent to compatible Dell clients, enable the BIOS and hardware inventory policies, and begin looking at reports.

Already we were well on our way of our main business goal, gathering reporting of what hardware was deployed in the environment.

The other business goals were just about as simple. We were able to upload a BIOS upgrade file and push it out to an automatically created collection by model type, thus saving the IT department from manually installing those BIOS updates. Also with the BIOS, we could modify the boot order, change the BIOS password, and make other configuration changes to entire collections of computers at once.

Lastly, we began to look into the notification policies that are included in DCM. It was child's play to enable several policies to notify administrators of limited hard drive space and to e-mail when the amount of RAM changes (either negatively or positively).

Return on Investment

All in all, a lot was accomplished in just one day worth of work. We now knew what was deployed, could centrally manage several aspects of their environment, and could now be more proactive in fixing several types of hardware issues.

For a freely licensed product, Dell Client Manager really delivers a heck of a bang. That said, it really is a great intro to the Altiris solutions. Not only does it allow an IT dept. to become familiar with NS and its navigation, it's naturally enticing in that it gives you just a taste of what's possible with the full Altiris suite. For those of you in sales or consulting, I would greatly encourage you to give it a look as it's a great way to lead into larger Altiris solutions.