From a biased oppinion of a consultant whose living will be made on Altiris 7 implementations I hope there will be a shift to NS7.

When 7 was released there was a lot of bugs that have been fixed since the release.  A lot has been fixed to make things run better and faster.  Part of the problem is getting back to feature parity that existed in NS 6 world, which has been mostly made up.  More is comming.
Service pack 1 of the Suites (Client Management and Server Management) were what a lot of people were waiting for.

Also when Asset releases it will help a lot of companies switch

Hello,

I agree completely, it seems that until now there have been far to many issues with compatibility and parity between the two systems, as far as I understand now that CMS7 SP1 is coming out things are improving.

I have found lot's of interest in NS7 but clients are hesitating due to lack of functionality that exsited and performance issues with the console that still exist, still waiting to see the flood that has not happened yet.

Even Symantec Consulting and sales are not yet fully pushing this as they waiting for the SP to resolve major issues.

Asset Management will def push this forward as lot's of clients have this integrated with NS and CMS.

Regards,

David

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Even Symantec Consulting and sales are not yet fully pushing this as they waiting for the SP to resolve major issues
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well everytime I call for support I keep on getting told that if I went to NS7 it just works way better...

I am tired of hearing that....

The only real thing stopping us from going to NS7 is the fact that ESS still works in NS6 (we have 2k licenses) but we have 2400 machines...
and SEP includes antivirus and the ability to manage usb/burners... the licensing for it was too much for what we wanted to spend.
However since our maintenance is paid up until January (and we are going to renew) we are most likely going to renew and add SEP as we just found out we will need to renew our current AV software next month which we just dont want to go with them anymore....

so will see... I see SEP getting added to NS6 but the move to NS7 will not happen till 3rd quarter next year minimum...

I understand your feelings and it does seem that the word ALTIRIS is slowly disappearing over time. Our company specialized in Altiris before Symantec acquired them.  But it's important to remember that one of the reasons stated for the acquisition was the platform it could provide for all their solutions in the future.

For all practical purposes, the Altiris Notification Server 7 is the Symantec Management Platform and you can do more with it than just the Alitirs solution sets.

To answer your question, everyone is heading to 7 eventually. But each customer has to carefully review this move to determine "how" and "when". For example, if you just use Client Management Suite now you can probably go to 7 now......but if you used Helpdesk (ServiceDesk) also you were usually best off waiting until just recently when ServiceDesk 7 came out earlier this month..........if you are using Asset you might  be best served to keep waiting until the rest of it is released hopefully later in the year.

So, its not " if  " ....the question is " how " and " when ". Since all components of 7 aren't out yet, those questions quite literally have to be answered on a customer by customer basis in consultantation with their Symantec/Altiris account team and any professional services organization they work with . There isn't one answer to fit every situation yet. Everyone's heading to 7 but taking different routes and different speeds to get there right now.

Hello,

I would disagree to the statement that this is a case of "when" and not "if", I would be carefull in saying that by default anybody on version 6.5 will be upgrading to version 7.
I will explain why:

Altiris notification server is a great product and at the time in the market when it was released it was perfectly fitted for the client/server configuration of desktops and servers and this was the success of Altiris, functionality was good but performance of consoles and reports could have been much better. Symantec management platform which is replacing Notification Server is still being developed and released and there is still a way to go until clients buy into it....

From what I have seen from Altiris/Symantec customers there is a feeling of "It's time to evaluate other products that can also provide solutions that we require", not all customers use all Altiris features and may think about Microsoft or Citrix or a number of other vendors to provide the Enteprise management of clients and Servers.

Symantec should not assume that all clients will migrate but will need to prove to clients that it's still a better solution that the others, I have been working with NS7 for a while now and there are elements that I am dissapointed with that can easliy be done with Citrix and Microsoft.

I am all for client upgrades to NS7 but the proof is in the pudding!

Just a thought!

Regards,

D