Client Management Suite

For those of you who has been using Altiris Solutions for quite some time, in my opinion remote control has never been it's strong side. (Carbon Copy and the built in remote tool in Deployment Solution)

So when Symantec bought Altiris a couple of years ago I finally thought that would change with Pc-Anywhere...

But that seems not to be the case, ever since Pc-Anywhere was integrated into the CMS/SMS and ITMS there has been a load of problems.

The problems have been in all the steps, upgradeing, installing, configuration, usage and so on. On top of that, it has its own authentication, it is not integrated into to the SMP security infrastructure.

When it sometimes work it feels like bloatware. It is slow and has a ton of features no one ever uses. Part of the problem is also that you don't have the possibilty to turn off any features or change the bandwith and so on.

So I am wondering:

Am I the only one who has these observations and thoughts ???

Speak up, and hopefully Symantec will do something about it.

I second the issues you note.  I want to point out this update as it makes a big performance inprovment in some environments, especially in a wan environment.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH174261

As you noted you can't control the default features in pcA and it seems slow and bloated.   This can really be seen if you are going across a wan that is encrypted.  pcA quick connect was by default encrypting the data and then the network was also encrypting the data on either the vpned clients or from office to office the perfomance was takeing a huge hit.   By putting the updated quick connect component on the machines that are launching the remote it was a big improvment to performance. 

The other issues are still there but at least it feels usable now when it is up and going.

Cheers,

I agree we went from using VNC (yuck) but it worked all the time.  It is just so insecure.

When getting altiris we decided to go to pcanywhere and since doing this yes it is more secure but man do we have problems all the time.

I'm upgrading to 7.1 been testing sp1 and installing sp2 today.  Will check out this article for sure and also looking for suggestions.