Client Management Suite

We have a LOT of users who rarely connect to our intranet, therefore are difficult to manage.
Can Altiris help us do this or is it limited to intranet clients.
Thx in advaance

You can configure the Altiris Agent on the managed clients to connect either to an NS server (by locating it in a DMZ, by opening ports through your firewall, or by requiring the events to occur through VPN).  You can set network bandwidth throttle settings so that the Altiris server will not overburden your clients' internet connections by sending patches or software packages over their slow wireless, home, WAN, or VPN connections.

Or you can configure it normally (as though your users don't travel), and then just let Altiris update them when they come back to your intranet.

Does that answer your question?

Does the NS server then communicate with the internal NS server?
We know they can use VPN or be updated when they return, but these people work at customer sites and cannot connect to our intranet.
We want to maanage them entirely outside of the intranet.

Other vendors have certificate based systems that have scared us away because of their complexity and ongoing maintenance.
I wanted to get a feel for how Altiris accomplished this.

Thx

The problem I am seeing is we want these clients to be able to be managed when internal and external. Your response indicates that we have to configure them one way or the other.

No, it works for both.  Sorry for the confusion.

How many total nodes to you have?  About what % are often external?  Often internal?  What are critical features for you?

It sounds like you'll need to put your NS in the DMZ and have both the internal and external clients connect to it.  This does pose some challenges, but NS can work completely over HTTP(s) so it shouldn't be too big of a deal.  mclemson is right on target.  There are some other threads here that discuss this; just search for DMZ in the above "Search discussions" box.