Are you ready to upgrade to Altiris 7.0?
 
An important question to ask when considering upgrading, we don’t need to just rush into installation.  Too often, want to upgrade to the next best thing before all pieces have been put together, but should we even upgrade then?  Things to consider:

• Is my environment ready?
• SQL 2005 is required, do you have the licensing to upgrade or will that be an additional purchase?
• Do I have current maintenance on my Altiris products where I will be able to upgrade?
• Technical Knowledge?
• Do I have the technical knowledge to troubleshoot if something breaks or will I constantly have to call support?
• Maybe a professional technician who has experience with this install would be better
• Do you have custom reports or code which could be broke which is business critical?
• SQL Experience is a plus when migrating the database to...

 Finally (look at the modified date on the file and you'll understand what I mean :D) R12 is out of the door and available on SolutionSam:

http://www.solutionsam.com/solutions/6_0/altiris_ns_6_0_sp3_kb46763.exe

The Release notes are on the AKB [here's the link] but here are some information that can be gleamed from SolutionSam itself:

• File size is 13,140 KB
• Modified Date is 22/10/2009

Additionally there are a few fixes that I reported for my customer or that I know will fix some outstanding issues:

• The Inventory forwarding data verification schedule now functions correctly. Previously, it did not work with large data sets [that's a strange issue we found with my customer back in R6 time frame when the first 20,000 entries would be verified and no more!]...

For those of you who are security minded (in this day in age, it should be a hat we all wear, in my opinion) one of the best "knowledge aggregators" in the IT security field is SANS.org
I subscribe to several of their digest emails, and when I was reading through the various topics in the Consensus Security (Vulnerability Alert Vol 8. No. 35)
today, I came across this important update (as it relates to Altiris Deployment Server):

SYM09-011 - Posted by Symantec on August 26th.

The four issues identified and addressed by installation of Deployment Server 6.9 Service Pack 3 (which incidentally was just released) are:

1) The DBManager authentication can potentially be bypassed. The DBManager is...

I love the 1st time setup screen - with the remembered "checkbox" - As we do rarely install & activate all 1 shot, this checklist is really nice.
[Home > Notification Server Management > First Time Setup]
There are some missings, and probably some primary "must do" & secondary "nice to do" should be done.

It is just a pitty this screens keep a bug regarding the "inventory" & "Windows patch" parts, they are not able to keep the "checks" :-(

So don't loose time to check "Inventory", "Patch Management": it will never remember them...

Oh, also...