Client Management Suite

ok so first off I know Altiris is a "Pay for What you Want to Use" solution.

We have CMS and pay for it, however we have another department that supports another world at my company and while I was in the Altiris Administration class last week, the instructor reminded me that Altiris was free. I forgot to ask him more information on it.

So does anyone have any links that would point me in the direction for the other department? I dont know what they could do with the free version?

Deploy agent and just inventory? utilize tasks? im just not sure... 

Thx for the advice on such a novice question...  

[:-P>

Hi TeleFragger.

Few things in Altiris are free and other things you have to pay a license to use.

What is free in Altiris?

The Altiris Platform (aka. Symantec Management Platform (SMP)) is free to use. You can deploy agents in your computers and execute some tasks such as Run Scripts, Power Control, Get IP configuration, desfragment computers, etc.

Altiris Workflow is also free to use. You can create your own projects and integrate with your SMP.

What you have to pay to use?

Altiris Solutions such as Inventory, Software, Patch Management, Deployment, Monitoring and Real Time System Manager. All of these solutions depends on a license to use. What consumes licenses in Altiris are the solutions, not the agent. If you install a inventory plugin in the agent, will be consumed one inventory license.

Conclusion

You can install a SMP and execute some tasks on your machines without any problem. Of course, you can create an script to install a software, restart a service, etc, but this can be quite harder to do that than use a pre-ready task if you buy the solution. The real Altiris power are on the solutions. To use the solutions, you have to pay for that. To colect a machine inventory, software and image deployment, user migration, install updates from Windows and other solutions, etc.

I'm attaching a link talking about Altiris licensing.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO1201

Best Regards,

Thanks!

yes we have licenses but our other area does not. I tried breaking the silo down but seems that wall exists... so I thought i would bring this up to them to spin up a virtual environment to test out.

Side question... Reading through that link above (as googling has got me no where...)

there is a demo license that gets applied. I just simply let that laps so they all expire then start using the product?

from what I just read is inventory, software and patch ONLY state a license is needed if those plugins are installed...  so I get that.. just take the base machine agent and configure Altiris up and deploy a few agents to test. Just dont apply any sub agents and see what that gets me in reporting...

???

thanks

There are demo licenses but once they lapse there's a danger that parts of the console might not work properly. I'd install it without any licensable soutions.

Didnt know you could install it without any licensable solutions. When you got to the one screen it had Asset, CMS, Server , etc.. thought you must choose 1.. so i did in a test and was going to wait for the licenses to expire...

I think that's the Symantec Install Manager screen where you have drop down boxes at the top that you can use to change what is shown.

In the early days of 7.0 IIRC it was recommended to install the Symantec Management Platform first then the solutions afterwards.